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C REATV TY
LIFE'S POSTURES
by
K. Kanapathipilai ba, F.R.Gs.
* The die is cast the book
is written, to be read either now or by posterity - I care not which.'" - Kepler.
B A T T | C A L O A
SRI LANKA
1984

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PREFACE
"There is not a moment of any day of our lives when Nature is not producing scene after scene, picture after picture, glory after glory, and working still upon such exquisite and constant principles of the most perfect beauty, that it is quite certa n it is all done for us and intended for our perpetual pleasure.” (John Ruskir. - Modern Painters) As we think so we create ourselves, and every object is no other than the end of a thought. And man is a thing of Nature. His thoughts are his creations, and they are the products of a thing of Nature And thoughts and products of his fantasies are products of a thing of Nature. They are distinct from the things of Nature. All our ideas are “things-for-ourselves' and are distinct from “things-inthemselves'.
Taste' for instance is a form of creation. It is the subjective awareness. It is an inward sensing. It is criticism. It is the translation of an objective reality into subjective experience. And cognition - seeing, being aware - is the transformation of the “thing-in-itself into the "thingfor-oneself".
Let me instance. We cognize sweetness in sugar. It has a meaning for us; and the 'sweetness' is the recognition of that meaning It is that one aspect of sugar which has an immediate meaning for us.
'Sweetness-of-sugar" is, in a sense, our creation. Our correlative existence with sugar, i.e. our coming into a meaningful direct contact with sugar has created for us the taste of sugar, viz. 'sweetness'. And all Vedic ris his including Spinoza and Plotinus have figured out the supreme fact of existence as the ONB- the incomparable: “Thadh
Eham.”
And every human being has willy nilly to be
involved in the supreme task of discovering the "ONE all by his or her own self-designed, unconditioned exercise. No belief, no faith can ever come to one's aid : only neverending search can be of some avail. Here is an attempt made to understand the “creative aspect' in Nature. See, he must; and see clearly.
52, Nalliah Road, O ಙ್ಗh K೦೩ K. Kanapathipilai
SRI LANKA.

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CREATIVITY
“The universe is being made continually' - H. Bergson.
THE FUNDAMENTAL principle of existence is creativity. And creativity is that principle of the mind that ultimately leads to a supreme urge to seek, to find, to test, understand: in brief to earn an “anubhava'. In every aspect of existence, this principle, this urge to be, this fundamental craving to become, to taste, to be new-born inheres to such an extent that it is impossible to think of any form of existence unattended by this urge to be and to become. It is an act in progress, not a thing'-Bergson. In becoming there is a procs'ss : an unceasing continuity : a one-ness : an interminable single whole. From zygote to man there is becoming. It is so from man to superman.
It is the self-propelling, self-guiding, self-promoting,
minding trend that resides in each and every activity of Nature. But for this principle it will not be possible to think of,
to predicate, to imagine, to configure any kind of existence
however insignificant it might be. The minutest bacteriophage, the smallest particle of nonliving thing, say for instance, even a speck of dust, has inherent in it this self-creating, self-sustaining, self-propelling, inward minding trend.
he Perfecting of a form,
The atom, as conceived by the modern physicist, has in it an inward, an urge to be, to create itself, to evolve into the structure that it has been designed to be. It is the inherent urge to create itself that has designed it, given it a form, a unity, a mea ningfulness and a name : an activity, all its own : a craving to perfect itself under the circumambient circumstances amidst which it happens to be placed.

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“Unchanging laws
One first nature all, Indued with various forms, various degrees Of substance, and, in things that live, of life'
- John Milton.
Creativity is a changing phenomenon governed, as it were, by unchanging laws.
Both in the living and the non-living, in the animate and the inanimate, this urge to be, this endeavour to forge itself into a form, this overtone, this targe to cling on to life, to get an “anubhava' - experience - a taste of life, is an ever-present, inherent trend. It is a form of "nothingness' which the principle of self-motification, the WILL, the primal urge to be, has rendered existent.
5Catter - 9ts inherent 2lrge.
From the condition of "nothingness' to that of “existence' is a far cry. Yet these two states have to be mortised and tenoned. They are only the obverse and reverse of the same coin. Matter, inert matter-prakrti maya'-was asleep. Then it awoke with, the trumpet-call of the inner urge to be "someting more' - something with an awakening sense of greater awareness. Matter was bound; matter was in shackles; matter was in chains, matter was a slumbering passionate giant (Muyalakan) who had attempted, and is still attempting to burst out of his chains. And MAN is an expression of the resplendent lust of Nature: her will to be free of the bonds of matter : an effort--a supreme endeavour made to be bond less and boundless and unenthralled : to distil a thought-lucid and luminous : a prehension of the being, of the process of minding, (sith). But caught in the artifice of law and religious order, tradition and political power and a craving for pelf and pettyfo ging, man has been bound hand and foot. His true reason has been rendered putrid and torpid. His creative urge has been plunged in a maelstrom ; immensely turbid and vastly turbulent
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It is the creative intent that has brought about all forms of existence : an urge and a will and a craving to be; to cling to time, to be bitten by it; to be awake and to be aware; to take a shape and mould a form. This fact is big with significance, and is frightfully important.
Language fails to convey the notions, and impart colour to the feelings that arise uppermost in our minds when we attempt to comprehend this mighty notion of creativity. Its magnitude, its reach, its compass, and its scope are very, very vast and ponderable. It is the most potent factor, pervading, governing and harmonizing all existence. Thus every existence is firmly grounded in its own potent of Creativity. In other words, it has designed itself, fabricated and structured itself; in short activated itself in existence. No one dare deny its state of being; and no one can fully apprehend it, know it, save the “thing-initself. It alone knows that it is. And that knowledge ("anubhava') is sufficicnt motive to have brought it into being. No external principle other than the "thing-in-itself is perfect, is capable of being aware of its total existence. Pain and pleasure are indications of the denial and the acceptance of the fact of existence. This is what we understand by saying : Everything is grounded on its own total notion of itself. This is its experience (anubhava): its minding ; its knowing itself to be. This repertory of self-knowledge, this taste of the thing-in-itself, this mighty potential, we call its "minding'. since all that we know of a thing, other than ourselves, is only pure and simple shadow; it is only a shadowy aspect - a shsdow of a shadowy world-which some philosophers have termed “maya'. It is a mere phantom of a thing that we are capable of comprehending: "a dream dreamt by an idiot'. We are all in a dream world, for we seldom or never know the truth of things - their actuality i.e. verity - that lies external to us. What we have is a mere semblance of the being; not the essence of being. It is only by an extension and expansiona throwing out of the tentacles of our being- that is by, an in-depth experience of them (empathy) that we are able to see into the life of things. Even this is an impossibility, for Nature is governed by the law of impenetrability, "'I can find no
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trace of a beginning, no prospect of an end,' said Hutton, concerning Nature's processes. Seeing Nature in her manifold forms he was non plussed.
Where extension of the being process is made possible through sheer effort (yoga), we are in a position to get a glimpse of the truth that resides in things. Science helps us in this exercise of looking into the being' of things, external to us. So man's creativity principle has enabled him to peep into the inner secret of things by the extension and expansion of his “minding process'.
(9ntent becomes lind.
The mind of man, in as much as the mind of any other form of existence, has so designed itself as to be essentially creative in its main trends. It is in a unique position to reflect, to touch them at critical points of contact and to understand the events in Nature. Man, in all probability, possesses a greater capacity to reflect and to think than any other form of existence. There is no limit to his creative capacity. He must act. He can't help but act. Act he must, and act ceaselessly. Since every action has an eternal effect he has to act through sheer necessity. The moment he ceases to act, he ceases to be. Every action leads to the whole good.
Kr' is to do; to perform; to act. 'Kriya' is to create; and “karma' - action - is the forerunner of creation. It is primal predication. And the upshot of creation is existence. Nature has thus become a hum of activity. And man, by virtue of his inherent capacity to reflect and to think, to have an intent and entertain a resolve, has become, as it were, the master craftsman, the master designer and the master builder. He can build; he can also demolish; not the essence, but only the form. His hand acts. Thus contemplates Charles Darwin : “The hand supplies all instruments, and by its correspondence with the intellect gives him universal dominion.'
And bipedal man with his delicate and sensitive palms and fingers, his powers of prehension has become a
4.

greater creator than the other animals. His skull is more capacious; his intellectual powers extraordinary. He has put his hand to diversified uses. His victories in different directions have been astounding.
These are the three phases of his creativity: devolution, evolution and dissolution. H. Bergs in says: “To movement then everything will be restored, and into movement everything will be resolved.'" As noted by the rishis (seers) of old there are three aspects observable in man's faculty of creativity. They are the “rajasvic, the 'sat vic' and the tamasic' aspects - the passion or violence producing mode, the purity or goodness producing mode, and the darkness or ignorance producing mode. The last mode includes sluggishness, arrogance, lust and other forms of depravity. Man's reflective pendulum ever keeps on swinging from one phase of creativity to the other: from the constructive to the disruptive: from darkness to light, from ignorance to knowledge.
It shuttlecocks between two extremes: the form and the formless. We are so much attached to, and so closely bonded with life, that we tend to abhor the notion of being shunted to the siding of negation. We would not be annihilated; and this intent is inborn in all nature's patterns of existence. The very idea of negation is something hateful to us. We don't wish to be nothing although we hail, as it were, from nothing'. "We fear death as children fear to go into the dark'. We want always to embroider 'something' on the canvass of “nothing'. Although life would persist to be in a state of 'something' there appears to be a conflict in this urge to persist to be : to feel, to perceive and to conceive. It is the opposite of the state of torpor: an urge to go into a long Soporific slumber, and to rest. To be or not to be : these are the two major issues that have conditioned human existence, and for a matter of that any animal existence. They are our fundamental intuitions. They force themselves upon our being. Despite the fact we are conscious of our existence, we are all the time wanting to go into a state of stupor. “Movement and rest have both found lodgement in us. And animality and torpor, timefulness and timelessness, are the two cardinal states. The one acts and the other slumbers. In the adytum of our being these
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two primal urges prevail, and who can escape being influenced by them? Our arrested bodily and mental development has been mainly responsible for these fears and anxieties. Ours is an aborted being.
In making an effort to secure a proper understanding of these two primal urges, to contemplate them we fird self-sufficiency in life - a mental satisfaction, stability, that is amply rewarding though dimly conceived Since everything is in eternity we should accustom ourselves to be in a state of never - ending existence. We have only to strive to see eternity subsisting in every moment of our life; in each and every duration. And when we do so the absolute comes into us, and endures. It would have to be felt and prehended that time is subjective just as much as existence is. And time limits us.
Man is at one moment in a creative Brahma phase', at the next in the disruptive or “Rudra phase' at the third, he slumbers: 'yoganithra' phase; and is bitten by ennui and boredom; and that is the 'siva phase' - the mona (silent) state. His brute progenitors still slumber in his being-biological view.
Action is either destructive or constructive or indifferent; and, in a state of inaction man, for all intents and purposes, ceases to be. In other words, he perishes. Yes, with the undying spark of intent to survive.
Man's several powers of perception such as of seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting and sensing are all no other than expressions of cosmic energyflow. The creative principle finds expression with a view to enabling the “thing or the organism to realize the highest form of experience in the ambience. Experience, (anubhva) in other words, is the master - craftsman who cuts and chips, carves and moulds, and shapes, mortises and splices, scissors off, and rough - hews and barbers all forms, all configurations in Nature, to fit into the surrounding conditions, to enable them to be in harmony with the rest of creation : each one seeking its own characteristic milieu. According to the ris his of old the divinity is present in hinman experience. In other
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words there is nothing nober and diviner than human experience. A being that fails to be in harmony with its ambience is in conflict; and somehow or other the discordancv will have to cease, and the being has to be so streamlined as to come into line with its contacts and set itself in harmony with the principles of order.
6mer 6ክሰCe 0 'somethin тоте".
9 g
Despite the fact most beings. other than man, are not in a position to reflect and so fashion themselves as to be “something more' - an evolved something : an emergence - in their endeavour to adapt to circumstances, man alone appears to possess the capacity to reflect, to think and to vary his life pattern to suit the environment in which he is involved. Put him in the icy wastes of the frozen polar regions; put him in the hot wet, slushy, steamy tropical forests, or in the interminable sandy wastes of the Dead Heart of Asiahere I am reminded of the marvellous manner in which Pierre Chardin was able to raise an altar in the Central Asian desert and say Mass sans wine, sans wafer, and thus secure an expansive vision of the Divine Will - he has the ability and the capacity to approximate a way of life that fits him admirably to his surrounding environmental condi tions. He is a master planner, a master designer and a master creator. He can mould not only himself but his own milieu. He can even get the better of Nature. He ean change it, modify it, mould it, pattern and re-pattern it, "consolidating the several fragments into one vast system of complete and harmonious truth, by all sorts of mental, material and mechanical aids, and appliances.
Creative, thinking, loving and sympathizing and reflecting animal that man is, his behaviour patterns will have to bs investigated with the greatest care in order that ways and means may be discovered for enabling him to occupy himself with the supreme task of creation He, being born a creator, the cardinal trend in his behaviour should be one that should point unerringly to the supreme duty of creation. He has to pull himself out of the mile of worldly
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cravings into which he has sunk, and focus his attention on creating himself, taking himself along the path that leads. to the being state; that state of perfection that he can possibly attain to under the circumstances.
“Living entails a commerce with the living thing's surroundings, an active relationship with them, a taking in and a giving back, an interchange of energies between the living organism and its environment. . . . . Neither Physical Na'ure nor Life can be properly understood unless we fuse them together as essential factors in the composition of really real things." - A. N. Whitehead.
The outcome of creative thinking is the perfection of knowledge which, in turn, leads to perfect understanding, which is no other than perfection in wisdom-pragnana'. Such a being as has attained to the state of "pragnana' is an enlightened one -a jivan mukta'. The term "pragnanz' employed by the Gestalt school perhaps comes nearest to the connotation conveyed by the term "pragnana, for “pragnanz' according to James Drever is the tendency of every mental form or. structure towards meaningfulness, completeness and relative simplicity." (A Dictionary of Psychology - Penquin Books)
|Behaviour trends in 5tan : Se.
With this end in view let us trace the main trends in man's behaviour, and seek for a solution that would necessarily lead him to greater and surer progress. Nay to a progressive and an awakening awareness: a state of selfcontained happiness and self-sufficiency and capacity for peace and rest. The principal trends in man's behaviour are:- (From Prof. Macdougal)
1. The procreative and self-preservative or
fertility trend,
2. The aggressive and self-defence trend.
3. The accumulative or acquisitive trend,
4. The gregarious or social trend.
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The procrative or fertility trend of behaviour appears to occupy the foremost place among all human trends. Man can't afford to be snuffed out and extinguished like unto a candle flame. Man came into this world not by mere chance. He came - no one knows for certain whence he came - upon this apparently slumbering, unconscious world with a definite purpose and a definite end in view. There is patent a finalism in his existence, as for a matter of that in any existenee. His reflective “karma' - thinking- tells him that certainly he cannot afford to lose sight of that goal of human existence, namely, the continued creation of his own self: the progress of the “being process.' And human life, it has to be admitted, is one of eternal progress. It is admittedly a vision. My vision differs from yours, even if only because the one is an instant older than the other. It can never cease to be. Man is either creating himselfadding “something more,' something new - at every moment of his existence, or destroying himself He must either live or perish. Of course; live he must. How can he? And how should he That is the prime issue. And primeval man had to face it much more than civilized man.
One thing we are fully aware of, and that which forces on our attention is that like any other living thing man proliferates and procreates. In point of fact that is the fundamental motive force in his existence. He can't simply brush aside, a d ignore this biological urge. Thus, in human existence, procreative sex his been given a very prominent niche; and rightly so. If animal species are to survive the rigours of the climate, the harsh inclemency of the weather, the paucity and scarcity of food and other adverse circumstances and hazards they will have to procreate so that many may be born and a few selected; yet fewer chosen. The chosen ones may be in one respect or another the favoured ones possessing the “something more': the emergent, favoured trend. The principle of natural selection and the survival of the most precisely evolved forms, plays a very important role in selecting those members of the species that may be fit to survive and to continue the species - the surviving one always carrying with it the special "something more' : the favoured factor, the torch flame tha
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made it possible for the species to exist and to continue to exist in the midst of change, (samsara). In the process of natural selection the species is aiways making an effort to succeed in surmounting unfavourable and adverse environmental circumstances. With the aid of his reflective capacity, man the Homo sapiens, the wise homo species, has been able to behave and adapt itself in manifold ways to its intriguing, enigmatic, often bizarre, ambient circumstances.
Having left his primitive jnngle home : his wilds and caves, man has learnt to build for himself a number of cages to put them side by side, arrange them in a certain definite pattern like the cells of a beehive and form his villages and towns and cities. He has changed his ways; his mode of locomotion, his manner of obtaining food, his behaviour, his outlook towards other hinman beings and ethnic groups.
STATUS RAT RACE
Having formed his tribe, his community, his race and social group, man has evolved peculiar notions of status and rank and position. He is no more what he was in a state of nature. We shall see how he behaves in this new set-up dominated and obsessed by the notion of status that has become a kink (mental twist) in his case: his status stake. Obsessed as he is with this grotesque, intriguing, unnatural notion of STATUS man goes about seeking it, craving to possess it, like a drug adict. How does he proceed to secure a status? And how does he qualify himself for it? First he does so by marriage. by prestige imitation, by staking out his c1 aims. For this purpose hic mal, es the best use of the procreative trend-the sex instinct This intrinsic drivic is his ground; and he builds his infrastructure of status on it by endless imitation.
The basic and the most startling concern of existence,
especially in man, is sex. It is the expression of the primary fact of creativity, and it appears to, and certainly does, control almost all the behavioural patterns obtainable
ΜΟ

in man. It is perhaps the most intractable circumstance, nay encumbrance in life, especially in human life: the most puzzling and the most tantalizing. It is the most insulting trumpery and the most vexatious element in human existence. Plants can easily afford to dispense with sexual love; but the animals still cling to it, for the heat of animate existence (animality) is evolved in sex. Sex is the principle of all life, if not of all inert materiality. It is the awakening impulsion in animate matter that leads to spontaneous proliferation. In art, i.e. in inert matter, movement appeare to be congealed; but in animality it has found expression in sex. The main trend is to take a step forward, that is, to create.
Man's parental sentiment, his parental behaviour, so rich and so varied; his religious absurdites, his loves and his hates, his likes and his abhorrences, his gregarious; and acquisitive propensities, his arts and his artifice, his crafts and his artifacts, his poetry and his drama have all a sex base In short his total energy-flow is triggered and engineered by this marvellous creative leaven that vibrates, titillates, tingles and creepc in all living forms; whether they be plants or whether they be animals.
The first and foremost expression of sex, apart from the sex urge and the sex-based behaviours is the craving for status, for identity, to imitate the higher form. From the early days of tribal social bond to the present day highly civilized society affinities controlled by pelf and filthy lucre. colour, racial religious and caste ties, man has been influenced by this basic potent of sex. He has been badgered into all forms of enigmatic behaviour patterns. We have our 'super status families', our high status families' and our “low status families; our rigid high caste and our loose low caste groups-our brahmanas, our kshatriyas, our vysikars, our Sutras. Today, in spite cf all our education and scientific knowledge influencing our lives and conditioning them, we have our insignia of high and low status, our 'status stakes' determined by the monetary value and the immensity of our possessions.
We go about flaunting our status insignia such as our cars, our clothes, our jewellery, our wristlets; our
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peestigeous club membership, our eight figure bank balances, the specially turned out cant and the quoer language that we use, the high-flown topics of out casual talks, our display of our ideals, our big deals, our borrowed plumes, our class panache, our capacity to window-dress our credibility to avail ourselves of bank over-drafts, our effort to become big-timers, our credit worthiness especially in our bankers' eyes aud our satellites of business colleagues and so on and so forth, to build up our status. At the beginning the status hedges were very secure and rigid; and in consequence society was parcelled up into what are known as "varnashramas' or trade groups. This was true of India, ancient Greece and in most other countries where the vignettes of such groups have become ill-defined and blurred. In India the caste system, so odious, so abhorrent to human reasoning still persists. They are the preceptor caste, the ruler caste, the farmer caste, and the labourer caste. In anciect Greece they were the guardians, soldiers and auxillaries and the economic class : the commercial, industrial and agricultural population. The serfs were outcastes. These were rigid divisions, and no one, however much he may aspire to, can hop from a lower rung to a higher rung; and birth determined the caste rung of a person. These caste divisions India were enjoined by the "vedas' - the smirthis - social injunctions. Woe to them
In the modern world caste persists, but in a modified form. It has got diffused, its outline has become blurred, its edge frayed. The rigidity is no more tight. But instead of blood castes, we have badge-castes, and our position in society is determined by our religious persuasion, or the religious group into which we have been persuaded, and ofen compelled and impelled to enter by the pressure of self-seeking motives We have more often than not, been pressurized into by ‘super-status” groups, bylo varying circumstances, the sweep and pressure of time; and we had our symbols of status which we thoughtlessly and shamelessly displayed and flaunted. Let me instance. The presence of a cross or a "nama' on the forehead, or a swastika, or even a bihavan's medal or a rosary or “seba malika"; the possession of a rare and expensive car, the membership badge of a prestigious club, rare and outlandish jewels, very
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expensive foreign clothes; facility with which one can converse on flimsy, vulgar and prosaic subjects as cars and clothes and jewels and bak balances and loans and overdrafts, and big deals, cheap deals and small deals, raffish knowledge of the city, sports and games and prize fights; cinemas, one's station in politics and in the bureaucracy; chicanery, deception and corruption-all these and many more similar badges and dodges help to take one frem one status fold into another. In fact the craze for a status badge has completely and outrightly unhinged modern man's mental stability. It has hounded him out of his natural in-group. He has lost power to think clearly and to reflect diligently and boldly.
Man can, in the present social set-up, erase the old image, hop from one status perch to another with some effort on his part to destroy and deface his own true native personality. He just imitates. There is no dedication; no wanting to do something permal ently good. Just as apes and the other higher mammals have their dominating trends by virtue of which they are able to hold their own against less capable and submissive members of their group, so does man have his, based on this primal desire to dominate, to assert, to imitate, to come to power, and to ride roughshod over others, less fortunate and less cute than they.
What elaborate preparations do we make before we present ourselves at a club meeting, a festival or a funeral When we meet the Prime Minister or the President we don one set of clothes, and when we attend a dinner party, another set of clothes. We are on the alert to catch their eye. We deck our women, and often in our over-anxiety to give them a status face-lift we rig them up into puppets and rag dolls and convert them into what they, in reality, are not. They mince words, they lisp, they even pretend to chop logic, they affect a teeny-weeny voice with here a tic and there a twitch, a shoulder shrug and a studied leer, ever ready with a stock of flim-flam anecdotes.
They are in no way different from their closest of kin on the tree of lie, the chimps that we often don in fnll rig for some animal show. We are confirmed in
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he notion that the more we tend to drift away from our nature the more we resort to prestige imitation; the more civilized we are and the higher we have climbed the ladder of status, the more we are in a position to expose our nakedness and flaunt our borrowed plumes and insignia of caste and of rank and status. We are like that species of ape-the baboon-that the higher it climbs, the more it is, prone to expose its roseate rump. We climb the tree of status in mnch the same way impelled, as it were, by the same primal intent. In what way do we differ from the baboons in this respect of seeking for a status: an exclusive in-group position through fear that we might be shut out and compelled to stay among the under-privileged “outgroup'-the parayahs: the rugged rabble. We make all efforts to don ourselves in various ways so that we may qualify for staging an entry into the status group-the “in-group'- the circle of those who are privileged to bask in the limelight of a master's favour or an in-group's smile. It needs more than brains to climb into a privilege fold. You need to clinge, you need to sneak; you have to get yourself converted into a hypocrite and a charlatan. Is it worth doing it?
All these ignoble efforts are being made by the so-called society men and women - the true philistines. But the stereotyped worker, on the other hand, is more a machine than a rational being. He is blind to the beauty, order, and design that reside in Nature. His vision of life has been distorted and foreshortened and impaired. He is more a mole than a human being; very often frustrated self-assertive and unsocial in his ways.
HUMAN BEHAVIOUIR ANIMAL BEHAVIOUR
NOW TO HUMAN BEHAVIOUR patterns evinced in this connection. Having been put in chains by the rigid caste and class systems and superannuated customs, man adversely affected by these systems, these infarctions,
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has been making an effort to dissolve the clots to sort out the issue, and clear the obstructions. He has to break the chains and cast off the shackles. Here comes into effect the law of revulsion; that is to say of reaction.
In the East, especially in India and Ceylon, man has found that the only way to demolish this age-old system of orderly performance of the several social duties, i.e. one's “swadharma' is to change one’s “varna' or “social colour of acting. When Christian and Islamic thoughts came into and mixed with the Oriental mode of thinking-a clear-cut way of thinking with well-defined, stabilized social moresthe old image had to be erased and a new image formed. Christianity's dominant slogan was: love thy neighbour as thyself, and Islam's was: all are brothers in true fellowship. And the gateway was open for obliterating one's caste stigma and class smudge. The caste stain was, as it were, completely annulled by the invasion of the Vedantic ideal of the "harmony of religions'.
When one becams a Christian or an Islamic convert his personality loomed large in the eyes of the brothren: and the ruling class. He then occupied a privileged position e.g. a seat in the church pew This was indeed a booster device : a short cut to fame and reputation. He had found his way into a privileged super status fold; and the seal of privilege was stamped on him. He became a muchfavouved and respected member of the 'status group', In other words he rubbed shoulders with bigwigs, and having thus slithered and sneaked his way into a status group, he has secured a super-tribe insignia : his necktie, his cravat, his emblazonry, his badge, his top-boots and top-hat. The imperialistic state added many more imperial honours and insignia such as the , swallow-tailed coat, the “sherwani, turban, and the badge of honour and rank of a K. G, an M. B. E., a Muhandiram or a Mudaliyar. Suffer as they must from an inferiority feeling there are those who, belonging to an "in-group' by way of compensatory recognition or prestige imitation, expect the ordinary run of men to give prominence to them by waiting upon them, and giving them what they consider to be their due share of recognition and fanfare.
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(Prestige: an influence or glamour, attaching to an individual, profession, institution etc - James Drever) They d mand respect from the others. Their sole intention was to humble one group of people in their effort to exalt another. It was a 'game of see-saw. One went up in status by lowering the status of another. The unconscionable favoured few basking in the sunshine of church and state bestowed status prestige climbed over the shoulders of those who held independent views on man and matter. The upshot of the entire exercise was that the scales were tipped and reversed. He who could cringe and crawl and sneak in and bum-suck was exalted; and he who was free and thought free was humbled.
Over the years man has learnt, unlike the leopard,
to change his spots, to defect from one fovoured status
group and cross over into a more favoured one. Men have thus trotted from one prestigious social group into a more
prestigiotas one; from one religious tert to another; from one political camp to another; from one social mores to another.
They have denigrated their original group and defected to another. All this they have done for the sake of a paltry
status insignia.
Now, the question is : Why does man do this How can we explain his behaviour? And why should we bow our knees to these reigning superstitions? To our caste? To our V H. P. status 2 To our power niche 2 To our idols of rank and position? We have to seek for the germ of this trend in the 'self-assertive' and 'submissive impulses, in the behaviour of our next of kin in the animal kingdom, namely, the anthropoid apes. Among the cercebus monkeys we find the pair-bonding' trend for life. This we find in man too, although the modern trend is to swerve from the path of pair-bonding and stray into polygamous, polyandrous tendencies. Among the baboons the self-assertive and submissive trends are observable to a very marked degree.
The leader of the group appears to have appropriated, rather misappropriated, all the benefits and advantages of a community life. He gets himself groomed; he orders his mess of pottage for his festive board; he is awaited
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upon by all the lesser members of the group, The in-group bond is so strong among the members of a group that no one member can afford and risk to be left out; shut out of the group In turn for their services to the leader the rest of the members have earned several benefits from him, since he has the advantage of his superior knowledge of things-his anubhava. They are warned in case of impending danger; they are protected; and they are assured of the company of an orderly and easily manageable group. The protective principe that was mnch in evidenee in France in the “glorious reign of Louis xiv, had its root in the behaviour of man's precursors, the anthropoid apes. The members of a group are kept within their bounds, and not permitted to go astray. They are seldom confronted with the problem of an ever-increasing population which civilized man today faces. There is population control among them.
This group-bond trend is so dominant among humans that they are compelled still to maintain a closed in-group. There are some very pronounced and prominent community trends among some communities like the Muslim community and that of the Jews. These are tribal trends. As a community they tend towards fanaticism They seldom or never can tolerate a member from another community doing harm to any one of their community, or any one of their members gaining entrance into another group. Theirs is an exclusively closed, rigid, narrow circle. I know of an instance of an exclusively closed community of merchants who almost ostracized a member of their community for giving on rent a shop building to a person of another community through fear that his act might jeopardize their business interests. This is an instance of group behaviour functioning with a vengeance. There are also very liberalized communities like the Sinhalese and the Tamils, and very tightknit communities like the Parsis, the Sikhs and the Kurds.
The procreative and self-preservative trends have pervaded almost all the behaviour patterns of man. He behaves, he acts, he performs so that he may continue to be'; that he may continue his species; and that he may continue to contribute to the evolution of the
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larger mind group: the “collective being that Nature has designed all her existences to c ont ibute towards whose evolution. This is the omiga point of all Nature's endeavours the production of the super, collective, orderly 'cosmic mind.' Shall wa call it a' sup:r intelligence 2
It may in all probability and for all practical purposes be the distinctive 'something more'-the emergent 'ariyanization' or "ennobling mode."
Nature has very scant consideration for the pleasures that man derives from his procreative act, despite the tremendous importance man a taches to sex-based b, haviour. It would appear that such a clear thinker as Dr. Thomas Browne feels that man has got too much involved in stx. Says he : “I could be content that we might piocreate like trees without conjunction, or that there were any way to perp tuate the world without this trivial and vulgar way of union. It is the foolishest act a man commits in all his life; nor is there anything that will more deject his cooled imagination when he shall consider what an odd and unworthy piece of folly he hath committed.'
In Nature the course of events is this : once continuity of the species has been fully established and ensured-this may take from ten to fifteen years-Nature annulls all the charms that brought the man and woman together to a state of "holy wedloek'; then brings out the antagonistic trend (sport L-6)) in their behaviour that has been so giaringly brought out in the sex life of the spiders and scorpions On the altar of the procreative ritualized behaviour man has heaped and offered all his powers and all his capabilities. Among primitive peoples fertility rituals had been in vogue, in order to preserve a fast-dwindling tribe. Have not expansive empires been sacrificed at the feet of women? Has not a Caesar or a Borgia heaped his all at the feet of a Cleopatra or of an attractive, sexy courtesan Kingdoms and empires have also been quartered and shattered: all for the want of a horse-shoe nail-for want of direction and proper use of a woman's ailurements and her charms. "I am wanton and lascivious, And cannot live without a wife' exclaims Marlowe's Faustus in his
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height of passion: his carnal craving; and imagining Helen to b in his presence exclaims **Was this the face that launched a thousand ships. And burnt the topless towers uf Illium''
In these lines the poet gives its full value to the fire, the fire works and the warmth of he proc eative propensity. In the words of Schopenhauer “The sexual impulse is to be regarded as the inner life of the tree (species) upon which the life of the individual grows like a leaf that is nourished by the tree, and assists in nourishing the tree; this is why that impulse is so stror g, and springs from the depths of our nature, (the ultima tule of our being). Procreation is the highest. and after attaining to it, the life of the flirst individual quickly or slowly sinks while a new life ensures to Nature the endurance of the species and repeats the same phe omena'
The truth of the notion ean not thus have been denied that the procreative trend is at all costs a continuing of the being and bicoming process that is so glaringly and loudly patent in Nature. It nourishes, and in turn gets nourished. This is the reason why this impulse is not only the cardinal impulse, but it also tends to extend its tentacular and all-pervasive fealers into each and every aspect of the living phase of existenc it not only assures and underwrites cyntinued existence for the spacies, it also enables the several entities of living nature to endure all endurable hardships. It is these remarkable powers of endurance - NISUS: conscious effort against obstacles - that have survival value in Nature. The procreative trend helps maintain a never-ending craving activity in man that assumes a variegated mosaic of forms: talking marriage, dreaming marriage, arranging marriage, g ssiping marriage, piddling marriage, peddling it, having tall-talks on marriage, -dowry talks, status talks, caste - tie talks, personal glory. talks, proud -as-a-pea-cock talks; talks bloated like a fully inflated balloon with empty nothings, and empty vain boasts-and all these are done hunting for a girl with a fat dowry a suitab'e boy, and put suing a boy with a prestigious job for that girl. What mad hurry. what a colossal wastage of precious husm an energy, man-hours and even
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man's life's earnings And all these, planned and executed for this co summation of a sex act, followed in its wake by an end less train of worries worries worries Can this be holy wedlock 2
The procreative will, will have to be safeguarded and its resources husbanded at all costs, for on its persistence rests the survival and continuity of the species - the totality of the process of "being and becoming'.
Having conceived this noble and powerful notion in the depths of his being St. Paul has said with unerring accuracy, and sincere lament: “The flesh lusteth contrary to the spirit and the spirit contrary to the flesh and these two are one against another, so that ye cannot do things that you would do.' And in this regard St. Paul is supported by Dr. Thomas Browne. He says: “There is a depraved appetite in us that will with patience hear the learned instructions of Reason, but yet perform no farther than agrees to its own irregular humours.'
Despite the notion that the flesh and the spirit are at loggerheads in their trends, it will have to be asserted that the trends of the one provide the motive force to the other: so that it has to be admitted that the spirit cannot evolve into its supreme status independently of the flesh, for there is an acid eloquence in the sex appeal which serves as a stimulus to improvement. Both are closely and securely mortised. They are as wax and form.
Body vs 3Cind.
Says Henrich Heine in his pagan' youthful ardour: “Some day or other, when humanity shall have got quite well again, when the body and soul shall have made their peace together, the fictitious quarrel which Christianity has cooked up between them will appear hardly comprehensible. The fairer and happier generations, offspring of unfettered unions that will rise up and bloom in the atmosphere of a religion of pleasure, will smile sadly when they think of
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their poor ancestor, whose life was passed in melancholy abstinence from the joys of this beautiful earth, and who faded away into spectres from the mortal expression which they put upon the warm and glowing emotions of sense.'
This was Heine's sentiment when he was young and in the glow of youthful ardour. But he had a different tale to tell when he was old and stricken with an incurable malady “The great pot stands,' says he, “smoking before me, but I have no spoon to help myself.' Yes, in the evening of our lives we feel helpless; we have no spoon to help ourselves. The note of regret is frightfully patent, and more often than not, inevitable.
Sex energy evolves alike into the pomp of power and the light of thought. In life's enigmatic designs how marvellously has the procreative trend woven its weft into the warp of the progressive of evolutionary phase. It has spread its empire over man's feelings, his abhorrences and preferences, its feeling of remorse and maternal affection. Life is seldom at a standstill It moves; and moves always forward, and the motive force for this forward march is provided by the procreative warmth of feeling in man - the MASTER EMOTION.
BOTH THE PAR - BOND and the multi-bond behaviours have been observed in man; and the multi-bond trend, though dominant, has been kept in abeyance due to the social, especially religious conventions. Many a man and many a woman would like to have bonded with more than one partner in life; but his or her social infrastructure, except among very primitively thinking peoples, is so rigid as to approve of only one recognized partner in life. These are monogamous communities adhering to restraining marriages.
What are all our social gatherings? Our night clubs? Our ballroom dances? Our gala evenings, our religious camps, our fellowship groups, but outlets for our multibond trend where we avail ourselves of the occasions as opportunities for rubbing shoulders and lips with members of the opposite sex, and to get entangled in a touch-and-go emotional situation. Many a Lady Chatterley would have
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desired to have been - literally crushed and squeezed in the masculine grip of her virile gardener; and many a pious lad would have preferred to have fainted and collapsed in the embrace of his buxom bousemaid Can we deny the occurrence of these trends in the fibre of our being ? All this we have done provok!d by the inherent, inner urge to the attainment of a condition of multi-bonding of unfettered union. Admittedly mankind in general has more of the polygamous trends than monogamous trends. In these behaviours and behaviour trends the procreation and preservation of the species has been underscored. And our instincts have graduated into reflexes goaded on by our emotions.
Perhaps it may be possible to check the proliferating rate in man by giving due recognition to the multi-bond way of life in society. But man should be enabled to discriminate between the polygamous trend and the promiscuous trend. The one is burdened with a severe sense of responsibility, the other is completely devoid of it; and in a social order governed by the latter trend women are ill-treated and ill-used with scant attention and scant respect for their feminine dignity They are treated as one's own goods and chattels. Aristotle is of the view that woman is an unfinished man The only hitch is this: in a multi-bond social order, who is to carry the baby? To bear the family burden? The answer has to be found in the idea: the child belongs to the society not to the individual parent; and the care of the child, its education etc. are the concern of the community or nation as a whole Of course it might be argued: "everybody's child is nobody's concern, and it is a startling notion stemming from a narrowly ego-centric sentiment which tends to shower its blessings only on things that are strictly one's own, that is to say, that are strictly consanguineous. There is no denying the fact that the child, whether it be born of Hindu, or Buddhist or Moslem or Christian parents; has been at birth disestablished religionwise, and is a child of the community, may of the universe, not of any particular narrowly denominational or caste or racial group. It should therefore be so brought up as to be endowed with a catholicity of views as regards life, society and Nature and the universe, and not be
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cradled in the stupidly superstitious and pedantic notions of tradition, and tribe, caste, creed and social bonds, social ties and prophetic bunglings. Thus the 'super-tribes' in society will, in course of time, evolve into the one single undivided and undisrupted, undisputed human society with a single collective mind, thinking and working towards the evolution of the cosmic mind: the supreme and all-pervasive good that lodges in the inner depths of all existence. It is the 'rta’-what is fit, what is right and what works best to obtain the best result” (Tomlin). Of course here we trench on an eminently socialistic view of society, based on human sympathy, issuing from a capacious heart.
At the root of all behaviour is creativity. This is a notion that will have to be intensely felt and clearly and intelligibly thought out by each and every thinking being, and his life should be designed on the basis of this fnndamental fact of existence, namely, the discovery of the fundamental unity that resides in every human soul"; nay in the totality of existence.
In his endeavour to construe a meaning in the ‘creative aspect” of Nature the illustrious naturalist Charles Darwin comes to this conclusion. - There is some innate tendency towards continued development in mind and body' (Descent of Man) Hence Creativity has the designing and moulding, the being and becoming aspect of the evolutionary process as a make weight against the traditional Semitic notion of a single fiat of the godhead glibly and popularly called ereation,
Marriage whether of convenience or of love has basically the same principle governing it, namelly creativity: that is to say making "something more', something new : something great, something pure and something noble : a pefect symmetry of mind and body. The life of the married couple : that of the family has to be created and recreated and the sacred flame of the family hearth in the form of fidelity and sympathy has to be kindled and rekindled at every moment of their existence. The subject has therefore to be treated with the utmost attention and solicitude and
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seriousness that it justly deserves "The Point of Marriage is Peace to work in' - R. Brooke.
Since sex has proved to be the pivotal fact of animal existence it has to be studied, investigated, and apprehended in all its entirety of effects and functional approaches; and no less a writer on the subject of man and his behaviour than Desmond Morris has given us in all its clarity the various aspects of the sex-motivated behaviour of man as compared with the sex behaviours of the anthropoid apes. And it is more opportune that some of the conclusions find a place in this slim discourse on human behaviour patterns. In his "Human Zoo' Morris speaks of ten functional categories in sex. They are :
. Procreative Sex: “the most basic function of sexual
behaviour." It is quite natural, instinctive, and helps maintain the species;
2. Pair-formation Sex, whereby the human animal gets bonded in the order of a single male and a single female, for life;
3. Pair-maintenance Sex: In this the pair-bonded pair continue to maintain each other's relationship under pressure of social customs;
4. Physiological Sex : This entails the release of physiological tension that builds up in the human system by the indulgence in the sex act;
5. Exploratory Sex: This involves experiment with new forms of mutual stimulation as described in the ancient “Kama Sutras”
6. Self-rewarding Sex: That is to say, sex for sex's
sake; not with any other motive:
7. Occupational Sex: This involves sex as an antiboredom device by adopting which a person derives sexual stimulation and satisfaction;
8. Tranquilizing Sex: Since the nervous system cannot tolerate gross inactivity on the one hand and
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damaging and injurious over-activity on the other of self-occupational sex, some form of soothing activity is resored to like smoking a cigar or a cigarette, taking a drink or biting one's nails or munching bubble gum or chewing tobacco or betelnuts. This is a sort of displacement activity;
9. Commercial Sex: This is sex activity whereby the female body is sold in prostitution, and payment is made on the basis of "pay-as-you-lay'. Under this caption come strip-teasing, hotel-dancing, beautyqueen contests, club-girls' activity, and other forms of tempting movements and prostituting porno postures;
10. Status Sex : This takes many forms. It has very little to do with procreation. It ranges from “indecent assault' to passive participation where there is mutual consent.
In the baboon world and among the monkeys, status sex is of occurrence. But among the humans: what are all our 'sexual athletes', our exhibitionist trends, the sado-masochistic pornography, the disembodied phallus cult, the bandying of spicy and caustic swear words of abuse, tongue-showing and tongue-wagging in a state of rage, the ritual bonfire, the phallic victory symbol V, our self-provoked narcissim, our beauty contests, our fashion shows, our hote) dancing, beachcombing, hippie-hiking, our harems, sadism in the form of rape, whippings, beatings and torture; masochism, slinging sex and smutty jokes, but sex-based departures from the norm 2
Only a true parental attitude to sex entrenched in maternal love, sympathy, fidelity and secure ties-of-bloodcan cure man of some of these abnormalities. Mahatma Gandhi says : Woman is not the weaker sex, but the better half of humanity, the nobler of the two; for even today, it is the embodiment of sacrifice, silent suffering, humility, faith and knowledge. Woman's intuition, has often proved truer than man’s arrogant assumption of knowledgc !”
The aggressive, the acquisitive and self-defence and gregarious or social trends are no other than the revised
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version of the self-preservative trend. They are all of a piece Creativity is at the bottom. It is the sheet-anchor of all ia herent trends. It is noble, nay sublime by reason of the function it performs. Creativity is no other than something attempted, something done, "something-more' achieved And what has been procreated has to be preserved at any cost; and the preservatory trend surfaces in most forms of animal behaviour such as the aggressive, acquisitive maternal affection and gregarious trends. In all these trends emotion comes into play : anger and rage, parental tender emotion, love and possessiveness, and an astertion of the right to possess. Possession being power, it breeds pride, ostentatious satisfaction, and often an undue assertability and arrogance of a sort. Possessed of power aren't the majority of our leaders of men and V. I. PP puffed up like a turkey cock with vainglory and pride and conceit 2 And passing through the world, haven't they left it the poorer and drearier ?
All this is intelligible behaviour. It is only an endeavour on the part of Dame Nature to defend and see that the speeies occupies the niche that it has been designed by her to occupy. Like a brick that has gone into the structure of a noble edifice, every individual species in Nature's pattern of existence has an important place to occupy and a specific function to perform, a preconceived purpose to achieve. This is the doctrine of finalism; and it has truth. Has not the status of every individual species in Nature's pattern of existence been carefully stipulated There is no superfluity, let alone superficiality; not even mere chance in Nature's ways; no redundancy; no waif and strays; no vagrancy of any sort; no swerve; no vagabondage no straying from the much desired norm. The specificity of th: species has to be preserved, for every species occupying the special niche in the time slot assigned to it helps in the overall process of planning, designing and structuring the being process : the best that is yet to be. And the aggressive, acquisitive and gregarious, and social propensities go a great way in enabling the species to preserve its purity. Once the purity of the species has been fully established, and confirmed, and ingrained then the teleological intent encoded and inveterately under-written in the "coil
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of life'-chromosomes-in the species so genuinely characteristic of and germane to them, exerts its fullest influence on their being' and becoming'. They are built and moulded, chipped and figured; and galvanized into action; penetrated, promoted and persuaded as it were by their own intrinsic intent, their indwelling design and urge so marvellously encoded in their inner most DNA helix of life. In every individual cell this coil of life, this ancient, scroll of all past history of the animal or plant, persists and appears to cry out for expression. Like ninto the spirits locked up by the wicked witch, Sycorax, by virtue of her magical art in the trunks of trees, life's design and its purpose are ensnared, short hand-scripted in the nucleic acid And the aggressive, acquisitive and gregarious propensities help preserve the purity of the species.
8ocial listinctions,
Perhaps the cast iron varnashrama dharma' law of the ancient Hindus must have been so promulgated as to preserve certain peculiar, highly evolved trends in the gene pool' unsullied, each with its specific inherent character. It was in all probability a perfectly planned scientific system based on purely scientific principles. Says Sri Krishna in the Gita: “The fourfold caste was created by me by the different distribution of “guna” and “karma”.” And “gunas” are the characters: moods born of "prakrti' - the primal ground of existence. Of course basically a "brahman' is as much an aggressor as a "kshatriya' or a “vaisiya' or 'sutra" in his effort to preserve and hand down the torch of pure-bred gene-pool and attendant "anubhava' (experience) that was handed down to him down the generations. What efforts do we take to preserve the purity of the strains of our domestic pets and cattle : the dogs and the cats, the sheep and the goats, and the horses and domestic pigs Then, how much more should man endeavour to preserve the purity of his race, should there be any such thing? (I think there should be.) And have not the Papuans, the Dayaks of Borneo, the Tasmanians, the aborigines of Australia, the Red Indians, the Weddahs, the Kuravahs, the
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Nagas, the Polynesians, the Maoris maintained the purity of their several races, having adopted very strenuous disciplinary customs and regimen. Perhaps they are the only pure bred human species extant. With what remarkable discipline and regidity and rigorous exercise and regimen have these so-called primitive races, attempted to preserve their racial purity One should have recourse to J. G. Frazir's "Golden Bough'. For instance, no modern youth of any one of our civilized races has the courage, powers of endurance and the stamina to withstand and endure such ordeals and disciplines and exercises as are in vogue even now among the Maoris and the Polynesians and the
primitive' African tribes.
The efforts and endeavours to preserve the purity of the strain finds expression in the aggressive trend in man and in the higher mammals. Who would have thought it: in another millennium or so, in the unknown depths of the future, in the profundity of the beyond, the so-called civilized races would have wiped themselves out of the face of the earth by their modern yet stupid art of warfare; and a mutant (srort) would have evolved, survived and peopled the face of the earth with a more sensible, more virile, less emaciated, less stupid, less barbarous and less muddle-headed race of mankind who might fulfil Nature's intents, and evolve in harmony with Nature's designs.
The aggressive trend has been sublimated and has found expression in the form of an endeavour on the part of certain races of "ingroups' to preserve themselves. The Sikhs of north-west india, the Parsis of Bombay, the Brahmins of Dhakshana Pradesh, the Jews and the Kandyan Sinhalese have made superhuman efforts to preserve their racial purity adopting even aggressive methods wherever necessary, like for instance, in Rajaputana, where Guru Nanak preached a militant doctrine for the pre ervation of the Sikh community as against the alien marauders and sex maniacs of the region In consequence every male Sikh past the age of eighteen had to don a knotted tuft of hair and grow a beard, and arm himself with a short dagger and wear a black amulet pnd silver bangle as the distinguishing marks of his race, and as his ethnic insignia. Thus they
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fought tooth, and nail against the sex maniacs who attempted to kidnap their women. The Tamils in Ceylon have had the distinguishing racial insignia of having the ear-lobes of their males bored, and the Muslims of shaving their heads; - both customs are being given up. Haven't their priests, purohits' 'samans', 'Kaddadiyas', yogis, wizards and conjurors ranted out empty, turgid, ens naring choruses that are intended to instill faith in the believers in the supernatural powers. By these acts of theirs they have killed all initiative and the creative faculty in most mankind, and their tenets and doctrine's have continued to sound like revelations and very very important.
But this will have to b2 accepted: Any act, bad or good, is eternally a part of the universe. That is to say, it is the central theme of life in which man has to have implicit belief. Should he fail to hold this plausibility in his inner being he cannot lead a well-ordered life. Hell and heaven, eternal punishment and reward may be comfortably dispensed with, but not this cardinal belief.
It has been found that the gregarious and aggressive propensities are more in evidence among some races than among some others. Have not galvanized beliefs, faiths and doctrines been thrust and forced down the throats of credulous people by some fanatical religious groups? The mentors did conspire to ensnare the credulous with the firma conviction that they were preserving the purity of the tribe or race, and it is with this end in view that they were herding women in their harems. It is the preservation of the superpseudo tribe that induced them to adopt this type of aggressive behaviour pattern.
Among the females of most species the creative aspect of Nature's chosen trends has been in evidence. Among the females of the humankind maiden coyness and an aggressive mood are two prominent feature lines of the self-preservative ; nd aggressive trend. They help to preserve the race in its pristine, unsnllied, unadulterated purity and to impose an effective centrol on undue, over-proliferation, for too many mouths tend to make a heavy demand on the racial larder, aud.the tribal food store. This may be the reason why the human
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female has been so designed and rigged out with a triggerdevice endocrine system as to put a brake on the abnormally hasty prucreative trend on the part of the male of the species. Besides, the aggressive propensity serves as a suitable aid to the preservation of the purity of the species; and maiden coyness serves as an impregnable defence and a prudential restraint from early fecundation thus defying any form of hasty. inconsiderate male penetration. Every true unsullied species serves the purpose of a tightly bonded brick in the edifice that Nature has a tacit intent and a craving to fabricate; it is the process of the evolution of the 'superman, -a fit casket to incase and preserve the super-mind: the summum bonum of all man’s a nubhava - experience.
Creation vs lissolution.
It would appear that the other aspect of creation is dissolution; for in the absence of dissolution there cannot be evolution. These two aspects of existence are intimately correlated and linked up; they are the systole and diastole of growth and dissolution. In Nature's attempt to create there is evident a good deal of dissolution and disruption: a whittling down and winnowing: a pulsating train of events: a sorting out and a selecting. Perhaps the marvellous cosmic events designated as the pulsars are the cosmic expressions of the crucial aspects of existence, namely, creation and dissolution. And pulsation is in evidence in all stars wherein creative energy was and is at its height of activity.
What has once been designed, assembled and fabricated has to be dismantled and heaped up in a shambles once the "something more' has been achieved. This “something more' is an “emergence' not a creation - a something totally new. It is the process of evolution and involution followed by the process of devolution: seldom outright annihilation. All three are cycles in their movements-each phase graduating into the next in cylic order.
In our attempt to seek after the truth we have to summon all our reason and deliberation to give us the strength and fortitude to pursue the planned course of action. Since
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curiosity is ingrained in us we have to plan, to deliberate and to execute; we have to be industrious; we have to search and mediate, consult and confer with all those whom we consider to b. experts in this field of inquiring, and who are judicious and fair in their judgements, balanced and equalminded in their opinions which at a later stage mature into adequate, intelligible knowledge. so much so that when we begin to impart true knowledge we must do so with authority, and we have to set a great store by whatever we know. It must become stabilized into erudition.
Creativity is the capacity and faculty on the part of man to translate his ambience, and to seek out those qualities that have acquired a meaning for him Man goes in quest of the “thing-for-himself - the aspects of the thing that concern man, and have a meaning for him Man's translations of the phenomenal world - the things that he sees and hears, and tastes and touches and for which he has an understanding are his creations. They exist for him since he has a creative knowledge of them. They are things on this side his understanding Things on the other side his understanding, so for as he is concerned, exist not. They are mere phantom walls.
We shouldn't suffer ourselves to be bound by meddling, crafty, vexatious orthodoxy; gloomy, austere, short score tradition, and an intolerant and unconscionable priesthood. We are here not to be conciliated by any caste or creed group; by any racial, communal, credal prejudices or superstitions and myths. We have to be sceptical; we have to be free. We have to be creators rather than be destroyers. We need not be ensnared, and hoodwinked. We have to plan our lives so as to live in peace, in gusto. We have to resolve to work towards that unity, that perfection and that whole good that dwells in all existence. Aren't all things unique and perfect in themselves? This grand notion of the pervasiveness of perfection finds expression in the vedic concept of poornam'. That which is there is perfection, and that which is here too is perfection. It is an all-satisfying theme when viewed against the true back-ground This concept is in perfect agreement with the principle of precision whereby all things attain to the highest state attainable placed as they are in their ambience: in weal or in woe. ч
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We witness societies bing fabricated, and societies being dismantled. Civilization springs, rises, reaches its highest splendour, gets exalted and then collapses like a house of cards, and lies mingling in the dust and ashes of the earth. On the ashes of a decadent and dead civilization springs another, which, in no way, is less noble than, and second in grandeur to, the preceding one. The pomp and power that was ancient Rome, and the beacon of thought that was ancient Greece, the clarity of vision that was vedic India, Sumeria and Confucian China, Ancient Fgypt and Babylonia, Mohenjadharo and Harappa; the Ariyans, the Dravidians, the Incas and the Mayas, the island civilizations of Bali and Crete - these are not mere achievements of the dead pasl and faint and insipid dreams. The current of civilization has surfaced in dif erent places, among diff rent peoples, in different eras and ages with now an ebb and now a neap; now disintegrating and now integrating; with now a denigration and now a brightening: all with a view to attaining to the supreme goal of a supra-mind: the 'grand event'. In every behaviour of attrition in man there is a nucleus of the integrating element; for while it appears to wear away and erode if sows the seed for a fresh growth, a fresher blossoming and a fresher state of fruition-sympathy and empathy.
αAggressiυε 3 rend.
It is an observable fact that the aggressive trend is amply in evidence in man's political arena. His 'snarling muscles' still figure in his face. He contests an election: palliamentary, municipal or anything of that sort, enters into the fray, hazards his all, and either he wins or he loses. And all these he does just for the fun of fighting a sham duel He plays the game of the aggressor. Once he enters the fray, not having the proper attitude to fight the election in the true sportive spirit, he loses himself in it, and more often than not, he loses his all: his hard or otherwise ear, ed weath and his pelf, his moral stamina and his human dignity. If he wins he learns to place bribery and corruption before righteousness. Then, slowly but steadily, he sinks into the mire of dishonesty, rascality
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and duplicity. His words carry no meaning, his morals have become vapid; they flay and they die; they get petrified, narrow and formal; and he turns out to be an expert at dissembling and deception. He has the expertise in the art of dissolution and deception. Like the proverbial eel he has a head to show to the fish and a tail and a body to show to the snake. The aggressive and self-assertive propensities have thus the potent to sink to the lowest depths of depravity, despondency and even to death. This is, of course the most deplorable aspect of creativity. It is a condition of dissolution and regress The very same energy-flow that is intended by Nature to lead man, to take to the narrow way, to the noble status of a super mind, the accredited “wonder and glory of the Universe', can, if ill-used, lead him up the garden path; take him down to the depths of perdition and perfidy.
The self-assertive and acquisitive tendencies that are so patent in some members of the animal kingdom like for instance the squirrels and baboons and in insects such as the bees and ants and termites, have acquired a prominent niche in man's pattern of behaviour. Man collects his empires with the same gusto and avidity and unrivalled clearness and zest as that with which he acquires his wealth and even his wife. In most civilizations the 'artha sastra”- the amassing and husbanding of one's resources-has surfaced as the dominant trend. All our modern business tycoons, our "thabakais', our pullies' - millionaires - are no other than bumper editions of our ants and bees. And all those millionaires who flaunt their multifigure bank balances have inherent in them the same hoarding propensity as the bees. Our Hitlers and Mussolinis, our Alexanders, our Julius Caesars', our Napoleons, and our great empire-builders have had in them the domineering craving to acquire and the will-to-power. They have willed it that they should assert, dominate and lord it over their fellow men. And they have done it' and have perished and come to an ignoble and treacherous end; not as heroes as Nietsche would have intended them to be. After all, what have they achieved? They have planned, manoeuvred, sweated, fought, killed,
murdered and massacred and butchered and perished. That's all.
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Commenting on the misfortune that had befallen. the Hawaiians up in the Sandwich Islands, Rupert Brooke laments thus in his yourthful and just ardour:
“And now they are so... it's impossible to describe how far nearer the Kingdom of Heaven - or the Garden of Eden - these god, naked laughing people are than oneself or one's friends..... Then back to barbarism in America.”
The history of human achievements has been largely written in human blood, spilled and splashed; and smudged and washed in sweat and tears. And it will be an ignominous insipid end that the world will be striving after if these men. blindfolded as they are by tissuey, dreamy ambition, persist in going in quest of p wer and domination and material prosperity. Nations, in a sense, are worse than moles, in their attempt to dominate each other, to figure out reprisals. They fail to see beyond the tip of their nose. They have detracted from their cardinal responsibility of discovering the true mode of an awakened existence. The pall of "maya' has descended upon them all and made them purblind. "Avidya'-utter ignorance of values-turbid thinkingis the ruling passion of the tims There is an utter lack of inspiriting and kindly notions, and kindly feelings in our leaders. Having put "might' before “rta' (kindly feeling); greed before grace; carnality before purity; falsity before “satyam' (truth); cupidity before ingenuity; mankind is, in all the so-called developed countries of the world, marching and going pell-mell, swirled out in the direction of dissolution, deception and moral decay, and complete annihilation.
The creativity trend is not the same in all countries, among all peoples. While the developed countries have registered one pattern of creativity trend, the "third world developing countries' have registered another. In the heavily industrialized West the creativity trend is in the direction of scientific progress, technological advance, mechanical contraption-manufacturing, fabricating missiles and rockets for exploring outer space, and engines and contraptions for warfare. In other words man is manufacturing not only
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commoditities, engines for easy and quicker locomotion, but has of late been an explorer of outer space, and making foolish attempts to wipe out humanity from the face of the earth. Man has evolved an inveterate tenacity to seek to destroy. He has deployed destructive and dangerous missiles all over the so-called civilized West. And all these efforts he has made, for what purpose? To attain what ends? How stupid and purblind has 'civilized man' turned out to be
In the third world developing countries the creativity trend has followed an entirely different path. Man has moved along two distinct roads : One tending towards the proliferation of wealth, the other tending towards the securing of suitable and prestigious stations, by creeping and wriggling and slithering into acquaintance with persons in the so-called supra tribal group, that is to say, in the status group. The main trend is making money, and with the aid of money securirg a position through marriage bonds in the privileged and pre-eminent “in-group' - a subterfuge to fuse and blend the vulgar and the so-called aristocratic strains in social status. This kind of marriage is much in evidence these days, and is one of convenience; rarely one of love. It is a vulgar machination to climb the ladder that takes one to the super in-group.
Thus caste fusions and Creed fusions are not hard to find nowadays This appears to be a happy augury of the times, although it often stunts the spirit of free thinking. In our society that which is trifding and piddling is valued much more than that which is truly great. A swallower of a whole tavern is preferred in the matrimonial market to a person of character, for the simple reason the former flaunts a status insignia. People have lost sight of the great truth that internal power is what one should set a value on, not mere external distinction, since the source of spirituality is not from without, but from within. In the days of the British raj in Sri Lanka the carpenters, artisans, the public works departmeat overseers, the notary publics, ayurvedic physicians, apothecaries, and contractors went about making money, proliferating wealth. They were the well-to do; and if they happened to have daughters, they
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want about collecting doweries for “wooing and winning sons-in-laws with the highest status insignia obtainable; and if they were fortunate enough to have sons they sought the highest status insignia for them by putting them for schooling in the most prestigious of schools Royal or St. Thomas'. Trinity or St. Joseph's; and giving them, what they considered to be the best of education, thinking they might become the cream of society. The pattern of progress of upward cling-on to the rung of the ladder of social progress is from the grass roots status of a farmer to that of a “vernacular teacher' or a notary public, or of a pundit; and from there to that of a cletical servant or a government surveyor or apothecary; then on to that of an irrigation sub-inspector, an engineer or a doctor of medicine or a civil servant.
The present day politico is quite a distinct species. He is governed by politicai expediency. He climbs the ladder of progres, that is to say, he makes his wealth in sudden, unexpected and jerky bids. And they involve very handsome amounts. He is a peculiar creature - a true ereature of circumstances. He is bent upon making hay while the sun shines. He has two distinct codes or morals: one for his private deals, one for his public deals. To the public he is, all in all, a devoted patriot He has his love for his mother tongue though he may not flaunt it, and compose two sentences in it without making as many, if not more, syntactical errors. His love for his race, his religion and his tradition and culture is marvellous. He is prepared, so he affirms, to sacrifice his all for the upliftment of the poor, for he or his supporters and followers and agents go about saying : “he is a jolly good fellow : he is a friend of the poor, the downtrodden, the underprivileged, the have-nots the ditch dogs, destitute and the degenerate In private he is nothing short of a looter and a marauder and a parasite par excellence. He is the ugliest character, the most unscrupulous slippery, and unconscionable liar and the most abject flatterer: Would to God he had his own province of affliction Between him and the ultimate excellence of humanity-genuine good-what a far cry forget. There are also statesmen: alas so few and far between
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In this manner the interminable ladder escalates going from one status rung to another. This sort of creative-trend behaviour has been the general tenor of social events in a developing society with a developing more often dwindling economy. Love marriages are as a general rule very rare in these societies. And most men want to play around and then come home' - Hite Report.
But it will have to be pain-fully and distressingly admitted that all this is not true creativity. It is pedantry of a sort. It is a kind of tearing oneself to do, and do, and do things If is humanity caught in craving. It is only a process of involvement, of getting conditioned to newer and newer notions of status, rank and position. Man has thus been beleaguered and dominated by “Feelings which destroy the prospects of man, stifle his hopes, damp his curiosity, chill his energies, impair his judgement, and, under pretence of humbling the pride of his reason, seek to throw him back into that more than midnight darkness from which his reason alone has enabled him to emerge." (Henry Thomas Buckle). Man plunges from one state of maya-deceptive, clod-pated, befogged thinking into another; and the upshot of it all is that he has become muddleheaded; he has stultified himself by his inept inconsistensies. All this is displaced creativity. mist, mist, mist
e Anchorless . Persons,
And then, in human society there is also observable in a very large measure what may be designated as an anchorless personality; the outcome of misplaced creativity, immensely presumptuous, imperious, haughty and arrogant, governed by inadequate notions of the might of his brain and brawn, of a pretence of a divine inhering potent. Man has donned the robe of purity, put on the biretta of authority, girded on the scimitar of power and has attempted to assume the most un natural image of a saint, nay a shaman, a yogi and a holy man. From the behaviour pattern of these so-called gud-men, it would appear that they-if not all, some of them-had done all these on purpose with a view to indicating that they are above the sex urge,
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that they are to be rated holy and pure and immaculate, oftentimes divine and that no devotee need suspect their esuablished, unsullied innocence. They pretend to have acquired the power to curse those whom they considered to be renegades. Their incantations are rated powerful, and this is how they have ben worded-'We, therefore, in the name of power of our Lord by the conduct of the Holy spirit, and with authority from the Church, have cast, and do now cast and throw him out of the society of the faithful, that he may be delivered up unto Satan!' (Buckle: Civilization in England) And here is an instance of how they treated a renegade “The people inflamed by their clergy, rose against Ferrier, attacked his family, sacked and gutted his houses, and demanded with loud cries, that the traitor Judas' should be given up to them.” (Idem-Buckle) Surely divine dispensation can't be so cruel and so dreadful?
These god-men are born celibates: downright pedants perhaps eunuchs. And in this state of their saintly ardour and stainless purity, pious maidens (virgins) need not have to view them and their behaviour with any degree of suspicion. But occasions have not been hard to find when unwary maidens had fallen into the snares of these holy men and had been carried away on the crest of a wave of sex-based lewd impulse. And the outcome of this studied pattern of behaviour was that many a maiden had gone the misguided way, fallen a prey to the cardinal carnal, impulse, and had earned the opprobrium of the community to which they belonged.
A definite instance of such misplaced behaviour is that of a prurient 'yogi, who, to prove his de-sexed state permitted the exploratory investigation of his pelvic region, by the exasperated and divine intoxicated bevy of young girls who used to pay obeisance to him and were his avowed devotees and disciples. Later, to their dismay and surprise the parents of one or more of these fashion-setters in religious behaviour-teeni-boppers-were seduced into the attainment of motherhood; a circumstance that is amply illustrative of misplaced Creativity behaviour. 'Oh! where is the henna to tinge their hands? Where is the bridal chamber?" The mere touch of the god-man has turned them into brides
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And divine babies-in true flesh and blood and form-had been b gotten. Aren't these forms of behaviour to be deeply deplored? And aren't we condoning hypocrisy and lechery and debauchey in their basest form?
If man wants to be polygamous, let him, if the law permits; but let him not adopt this sort of uncanny and studied pattern of behaviour. To what depths of abject depravity can creative impulse be drawn into, is illustrated by this depraved pattern of behaviour of misplaced creativity. Even in pair-bonding the man who marries for money has of course resorted to bribery and corruption, rascality and chicanery; and she who marries just for money and status functions as a prostitute. Avocation is a secondary consideration in pair-bonding. If, on the other hand, money and status become the chief considerations in marriage, then pair-bonding has a false base and is more likely to get dissolved at some stag) or other. Permanency and consistency are not the main features of pair-bonding when it is bristling with such issues as money and status and prestige, and caste and creed and astrological affirmations, and dogmatic confirmations.
Another form of misplaced status sex activity is that of “sex for material gains' performed by strip-teasers, hip-shakers, dance hostesses, beauty queens, club girls, fashion models and film actresses. We have observed our domestic cats rubbing their ruinp against our legs. This is a form of misplaced, licentious, sex-urge action. How does the behaviour of our fashion-plates of social gatherings and night clubs differ from that of baboons and drills? It stems from the self. -same source. Among certain civilizations and traditions status harems and possession of several wives have become the insignia of power and wealth and affluence; and indecent story tellers and those who indulge in swapping sex jokes actually peddle in them, and live on the proceeds of the filthy trade Very often exchange of sex jokes ends up in a punch-up and in street brawls. How fast has creativity in man proliferated into a multitude of behaviour patterns, which, it is not the design of Nature to permit to blossom. These are side issues.
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Pair-lond “Üersus Promiscuily.
IN THE PROCESS of the expression of creativity in man pair-bonding has, more often than not, given way to promiscuity; and incontinence, permissiveness and chartered libertilism have thereby affected the family stability to a considerable extent. In such families as have been affected by the canker of promiscuity, children suffer due to confused parental sex behaviour; and the family bond, in consequence, gets dissipated and disrupted. Thus, concubinage, the outcome of concupiscence, has been the ruin of a happy family life.
Whoever can tell In years to come, a genetical change might bring about a crucial and complete reorientation in man's attitude to sex Would God, a sudden mutation in the genetic code produces a being who may be free of the attition and tyranny and the trumpery of the sex impulse. And such a race might be a generation of great thinkers, and great administrators. It may be that the most suitable gene for this purpose of bringing out the superman in man may be lur king in the human “coil of life” of some of our forgotten primitive races with pure, inherent, pristine trends and primal, intuitional traits. It is best, therefore, that the so-called primitive aborigenes are preserved with the greatest care in their ancient native purity in those areas of the globe where they are found today-their ancestral homelands. It would appear from a careful study of their ways and their behaviour patterns, that they are more closely and more tightly pair-bonded than any one of the civilized races. Primitive tribalism-the 'golden bough' that it is - has thus tended to preserve some of the genuine, ancient and useful propensities and rare traits in the human species. The cultural trends in the human species, especially those in the various religious groups, have unfortunately assumed a competitive trait. In their efforts to drive away the tribal gods, the organized, official and established religions of the world, with their cast-iron conformity and conventionalism, narrow sectarianism, their golem idols, and galvanized orthodoxy, have destroyed some of the finest strains in human development and evolution, especially the area of human thought, and in the domain of hun,
AO

imagination The mind of man has already been mutilated, and the martyrdom of man has gone on at a terrific speed so that the genuine good man-the wise homo-is, in a sense, almost extinct. The substance having been corroded and arr igned, only the shadow remains In their missionary zeal a great many groups of evangelists have gone about amorg the primitive groups of veddahs, Kuravas and Nagar and Pueblo Indians and even among other unorganized natural religious groups, and in their childish imbecility and puerile spirit have not only disturbed their mental balance, but also their outlook on life. They have burdened them with all manner of superstitic us' muddled ideas about creation, their specific brand of doctrines and dogmas. Isn't it high time that this form of misplaced, misguided and ill-judged sense of service to humanity ceases? The question poses: Who is man to guide and take brother man to heaven? What authority rests in him? The outskirts of such a man's consciousness is all mist and fog. He sees not far. He scarcely sees beyond the tip of his nose. There are more barbarians among the so-called civilized races than among the primitive peoples. Their behaviours bear ample testimony.
‘Riftoned slaughter (asle.
Why then attempt to breed a race of human beings who, instead of living under the greenwood trees and finding good in everything, have sought to live in morbid fear of attack from nuclear weapons, hu idling in concrete bunkers and air-raid shelter basements? Civilized way of thinking and behaving has taught man to specialize in the art of killing brother man; and a special class of men: the soldiers and auxiliaries, has been selected, set apart, and trained, and their mind so conditioned as to be vulgar, cruel, apathetic, grimly stern, glum and austere in the several aspects of their physiognomy for this purpose of slaughtering human kind. They are the "ribboned slaughter caste of today-the soldiers and security forces: the colonels and generals, the commanders and admirals, adjutants and sergeants, adorned with ribands and stars and crisses and burnished bass buttons and epaulettes-all but petty insignia of empty
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honoura, "hey lead a bovine existence. They crave muddledly for a vague thing called power and prestige and status and glory. In them has b en evolved a behaviour pattern that is foreign to human nature, and purposely, studiedly and artificially entrenched by man in man. Thus a craving for "destructive creativity' (sankarana) has been successfully perpetrated in man's nature He makes, he maintains, he dismantles, he destroys: all these are links in the same creative process. Creation and dissolution appear to go hand in hand, in a Nature's processes.
Nature, it would appear, never intended man; so pert, so smart, so spruce to separate, segregate and sort out mankind into groups and clans, and tribs and racis; even into nations, for all of them are artificial divisions of the human family They are all show-pieces. Our right honourable and pious lords, our knights of the garter, our dukes and duchesses, the marquises, the princes and princesses, the counts and countesses and all those who yearn after the golden fleece do belong to a society-made, conventional Punch and Judy show.
'lls' and '3shem' splinter Jrend.
We have distilled in our minds governing all our behaviour, conditioning all our thinking and all our actions, two peculiar disruptive concepts, namely, those of “us’ and them'. These concepts are foreign to our nature. They breed an estranged feeling in us, set mankind at loggerheads, and bring them into c inflict with life's situations. These concepts of "sura' (human) and “asura' (demon) trends have resulted in nartisan thinking; to wit, “us’ and they', 'our camp' and their camp', 'friend' and foe' - 15ub-g,6it 9p gaitall splinter groups And then we talk of the “Muslim, the “Sinhalese, the Tamils', the Burghers', the Malays eic. etc as if they are not human; and we live in water-tight compartments. These silly concepts have got even into our religi us way of thinking, and have contaminated all our "puranic', mythical, legendary literature and even our ethical codes, (dharma sastras), our "ithikasas' (epic literature), our
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religious doctrines, our dogmas 'ahamas', our tribalistic and ritualistic practices. The concepts of "the chosen peoplc' and the "heathen' and pagan are again tainted with these conficting concepts. Has not Satan rebelled against the Almighty god's noble, laudable, designs and intentions, and had evil designs pervasive in his art of thinking? Has not an "asura' attempted to foil the b nign favours bestowed by. Siva on his 'sivanadivars', subservient devotees? Have not the evil ones acted counter to the noble intentions of Ahura. Mazda his threefold precept of: perfection of good thoughts, of good words and of good deeds? And why, pray, has Tbilis set his evil hordes against those of the Almighty Allah? Hadn't Jehovah himself his opponents and antagonists in the persons of Beelz:bub and his abhorred compeers? Even the Buddha, despite his crystal clear thinking, and logical atomism and sharp intellect, and remarkable powers of mental analysis, was said to have been assailed and afflicted by Mara's (Eros') enticing allurements. What do all these indicate? There is basically good'; and basically 'bad'. They point to this fact that there is a rift in the lute of creativity-a trend that dissipates and annuls the grand feeling of sympathy-an 'us' and a "them' trend in man's way of thinking While creating his “SEt F he has succeeded in sundering it into two halves and setting the one half against the other. In the noble creative trend a disruptive element-'ahankara'-ego has entered; and what do we find today in human society? Ali 'us' and a them' trend; a “tempter' and a “tempted one' trend: a complete
mental vacuity. All our insurgency, all our insurrections, all our rebellions, all our social and political upheavals, all
mutiny, all our wars, civil wars and global con rontations, our skirmishes have stemmed from this inherent divisive pronenees in human nature-in man's creative propensity The result is that at every turn of min's behaviour there is a conflicting, an ob structing blind-alley His creative vision, his highminded nature bring completely clouded and bef gged by a conflicting amalgam of inadequate ideas, he is not prone to see b yond the tip of his nose. His "ego" having been nourished on thoughts of his own greatness, he has got inflated beyond bounds and maimed his powers of understanding. This is what we have called pedantry', and often times we use the terns 'vanity' and "conceit' and 'arroga tice' to denote
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it. He has failed miserably to reach out deeply for the "something sublime' entrenched in the inner depth of his being.
It is because of this splinter trend in our nature that we have sullied creativity in its endeavour to build up the totality of human mind, and have helped to form what may be called splinter groups of human society We have drifted into tribal in-groups, racial out-groups, linguistic privilege gr ups, and cultural, denominational and racial camrs super powers and humble nations Human society has thus become a divided house; and it has been well said of yore that a house divided cannot stand. It will soon crumble into dust. Where is the bond? Why has man brought upon himself this load of affliction? He has, refused to concede to the “others' the toleration he himself has enjoyed; and those whom he c pnsidered to be in the opposite camp he has insulted; and heaped upon them all sorts of opprobrium’ and ab use. To o conciliate one group with another, one ideology with another, has, of late years, become a super human problem Man has to fend off his mental mist; his drowsiness Hence it has become a fundamental issue in human existence that all humanity must get together and help to form the social or collective mind-the ineffable milieu: the 'One'. This exercise has been in evidence among gregarious animals and insects, especially among the ants, bees and termites. They act and behave as if governed by a single intent. Habit formation among the higher animals, and instinctive bahaviour are devices that have been evolved by Nature to economise time and conserve energy and short circuit thinking.
All divisive notions of caste and creed, race and established religion will have to be cast to the four winds and all such elusive labels should be burnt in the fire of pure reason Unless and until we resort to these disciplines of getting our behaviours stream-lined along rationalistic lines we are bound to suffer the bark of human progress wreck on the Scylla of power craving', and ha yhdis of orthodoxy. Society has begun to burst at the seams with social pride, and utter lack of sympathy and empathy. The human civilization five thousand years old, if not more,
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is about to break into smithers. “Our eyes run over with tears and our tongues are wet with brine.' The grim tableau vivant-living pico ure—has been set. Who knows how long it will last whole! The curtain of the temple has been rent in two.
Are we prepared to face such a grim eventuality? Such a global cataclysm? And, shouldn't we be prepared to behold the light of day'? As I sit in my room I can hear the trill of the cicada: the chirp that is thrillingly suggestive of the creative expression of the “thing-in-itselfthe inner urge, the ever-swelling craving to create the ultimate inner reality making an all-out attempt to find its fullest expression to create itself, to bring to the surface its inner essence-the eterna craving to be Every form, every figure, every limb, every organ, every single cell in the animal body is an accurate expression of the most anpropriate "creative craving to be. Hence the entirety of existence, individualized or otherwise is the outcome of the innate teleological intent to be. Tt is the "creative craving to be' that has provided the mitochondrion in the cell with the required energy-flow, and energy-control.
3Watare: Grand Creator.
Nothing not even the smallest particle of dust; not the minutest bacteriophage, nor even an atom can exist without being governed and patterned and overseen by the
inward creative urge to be In short, existence itself is no other than the creative stir to be. It pervades and dominates and governs and monit ‘rs the wholeness of existence. When we contemplate how the two severed ends of an intestine sutured by the surgeon anastomose and become whole, nerve tissue fusing with nerve tissue, vein with vein, capillary with capillary, artery with artery, muscle fibre with muscle fibre, tissue with tissue, &c. we are almost оverpowered with a deep sense of awe and wonderment at the marvellous forces of Nature at work that contribute in their diverse ways, to the creative concern of healing
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To be an egg What a marvel of creative energy
“From inert matter organized in a certain way, impregnated with another bit of inert matter by heat and motion-sensibility, life, memory, conscious-, ness, emotion and thought are generated.'
---- Diderot.
The human brain (mind) is the only thing known to man that has intrinsic in it the faculty to create thoughts ie ideas and fantasies. Its creations are no other than "thoughts' and "fantasies'. It creates by formulating ideas, thought patterns. And this it does by begetting “anubhavas' or experiences; by establishing meaningful relations with things outside it. It begets images of things which we call its sense-data. One cannot insert the external world into, one's brain. With the help of one's sensations and preeptions, and cognition one is able to form one's images of things: one's concepts; one's thought patterns. Hence all creative processes occur in the brain of man. They are mere fancies; 'symbols and conventions' (Poincare) and they help fabricate and assemble things to form new patterns.
Our intellect-relation computer device of Nature might, in all probability, have been a later off-shoot of the 'craving to be' intent. In the progress of our evolutionary process there comes a stage when we crave to feel, to know, to will, to understand, to comprehend, to apprehend, to be awakeningly aware of the ambience: both immediate and beyond and beyond; to evaluate, to weigh the pros and cons, to draw a line of demarcation between what we consider to be right and what we adjudge to be wrong: to be deliciously aware, in short to appreciate. In this endeavour we can't help but pitch ourselves against the background of our tribe or community or race or nationality or society; and we wish to measure up our goodness and our weakness and wickedness in terms of the social norm or what may be considered as good or what may be considered as bad. Society has acted as the judge in adjudging the good and the bad. It has set the standard. Accordingly on the basis of our conduct and behaviour-our “karma': action-we are adjudged. Our worth is weighed and reccrded; and cur
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character (nature) is said to form when we act governed and directed and monitored by our maxims and inward monitor (conscience) “As ye would that we should do to you, do ye to them likewise ' This is psrhaps the highest and best basic principle of morality founded on the social instinct of sympathy.
It would appear that character resides in our inner being. It is rooted in either our “will-to-be good' or in our “will-to-be-bad'. It is an inner, covert intent that seldom surfaces; and wheresoever it surfaces by way of deeds, thoughts and words and intentions it displays our can science-the deep-seated sense of right and wrong. It is, in the words of Kant "the-thing-in-itself-the ultimate inner reality-the ground of all existence: the be-all and end all of existence: the creative craving to be, 1e to recover from life's fiful fever. Being grounded in one's self, conscience has bacome an inveterate and solid desire to create one self into a better and yet better being It is an eternal urge to create and re-create oneself, guided by one's own-maxims.
Things have been endowed with such a variety of astonishing qualities, that the marvels that they are, have 'seen the light o' common day' and no longer astonish us. And 'the flesh is so gifted with such marvellous qualities, that it has 1nherent in it the potent and the capacity to assume the status of things much more unsubstantial.' The fact is that the flesh and the spirit are of the same category though with a certain degree of remove; and that the one (flesh) has the potent to evolve i to the other, (spirit). This vedic notion has much to commend, and St. Augustine's is not much different. And the notion of the resurf ction of the flesh and its transubstantiation into the spirit is much more ancient than we think. It goes far bayond all church history; even beyond the Christian era.
A person lacking in the inner urge to think through and to attain to sub'imity-rta-is mere inert matter with the spark of craving for sublimity in its minimal potent. He may b : said to b3 lacking in the 'm ment' when be can have realized his true worth. He may be likened to the dying spark in a fluff of cotton wool that has caught
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fire. And inhering in it is the potent of the original flame, about to be snuffed out,
Here is a point that has not to be overlooked. Governed by our irrational emotion of narrowed down love for race, creed, caste, tribe, culture, colour, language; our rational and logical intellect gets tarnished; and we get sunk into the slough of messy, misty thinking We get muddle headed and madder and madder than ever before, for most of our thoughts are mere feelings. They have a veneer of emotion, less of deeply considered contemplation. They dwell on the surface of our conscious mind; and are seldom deep based in the creative craving subconscious tred. All our creative energy gets dissipated and drained away and ill-spent in fighting tribal wars, communal insurrections, racial riots, and getting entangled in ideological c inficts. Difference in religion, caste, and colour and race, languge and territory and terrain, does not necessarily point to biologically different personalities. A person’s II Q. does not differ, and need not differ from that of another because they happen to belong to different cultural or racial groups. Our capacities are the same. “Men's natures are alike; it is their habits that c, rry them far apart,' says Confucius. We are 'ssentially human. We have our human failings just as much as we have our human achievements. We have such tragedy and dignity in us. With what marvellous aplomb do we overlook our own failings, and remember and even advertise and maximize the trespasses of others, esp: cially those whom we have categorized as our foes and opponents! Observe, says Schopenhauer, how long we remember our victories and how soon w: forget our defeats. " ft is all due to the abysmal selfish desire to hate our enemies a 'd be partial to those who are alike us in their views, beliefs and their ways and aspirations. In this respect have not religions-official, established, convertional and orthod x-sundered our society? And have not political ideologies, religious convictions pushed us, nay driven us into opposite camps? Our caste mark has herded us like goats and sheep. Our surface plausibility complexion has branded us blacks and whites, coloured races, white racesCaucasioids, Mongoloids, ustraloids, Negroids and Capoids. How often has mankind boiled over into violence over
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these futile, petty, hair-splitting, meaningless, ethnic differences? Their bestiality has surfaced in the worst forms
And these embroilments and feeling-based actions and behaviours have, in a way, stunted man's judgement and prevented him from recognizing the great truths; and the neglect of them has entailed upon other races and other nations the most despicable of pogroms and calamities. The holocaust at Hiroshima is a case in point. The cause for this difference, this feeling of antagonism has to be sought for in our narrow, selfish, racial and national bonds; and the antagonistic discrepansies that subsist between countries and races These trends have stunted the progress of nations, dwa fed their energies and checked the growth of liberty. Aren’t they er snar da? Isn’t their morality enfeebled? Aren’t they so near tears?
3Cope for better race.
Scientints have told us that we tend to conveniently forget the fact that we are a mixture of all sorts of genetic characters. Our gene pool'-sum total of preserved inherited characters is all in a mess; and to be frank we know not who we are and whence we hail. Whence is “everyman'. and whither does he wend his way? And where did he stem from? Well; ask the genes; for no one knows the inner. secret of things: "the lorg littleness of life". Scientists say. it has taken about ten thousand years for man to become civilized. But how many million years it would have taken man to evolve from the lower, humbler forms of life, even from the pre-man stage, it is not so easy to compute with any degree of precision. And, all this has been made possible because of the germ of the creative craving psycho-physical intent, the secret code that resides even in inert matter. Grour ded in the unconscious which pervades, as also dominates, like a magnificent cloud, the totality of existence, whether it be planet, plant or animal, the “creative craving tre d' has been on the onward march towards the awakening f the intellect or pure reason-the greater a wakening-the awakened awar eness-the breath of reason (digydidsthu dysgyGOOTris)-Manikkavasagar. Admittedly
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all things that exist have their inner urge to be: a teleological urge to be: an end in view: whether keenly and clearly felt. surmised, or not. It is sunk in the depth of things; in the delicious solitude it subsists like unto a dream that has not been dreamt as yet. The cardinal trend, it w suld anpear, in the majority of things, is, to go into a state of sleep, and plunge into a dream world; to vegetate-like the dream people of the ancient races of mankind. the “aborigenes”-and to be in a condition of peaceful somnolence: 'shanti'-perpetual peace geot 55 gridg). Here is a state of conflict; but the contrariety is only a surface gloss. It is only apparent, for in most people the clergy and the “shaman' and the temple priests controlled their conscience.
They were considered the accredited repositories of learning and knowledge, which honour, they claimed by right Rather presumptu vus on their part to have taken such a big bite off, much more than they can chew Isn't it?
The depth of our being, the inward monitor is felt onty in a state of sleep; Seldom or never in a wide-awake state; and our intentions and our urges, our secr’t cravings, our instinctive drives and willings and Smothered and suppressed desires are plunged into the bysmal depths of our unconscious mind. This is the view of S, Freud. The intuitive flashes and the monumental abilities of the ris his and yogis and sages and saints, though not scientific in their approach to the art of thinking, had their source in the unconscious. Like un to the bottomless ab vss of the ocean is our unconscious, and the frothy foam apnearing on its surface is our conscious self How profoundly are we engulfed in slumber And how diceply enshroudsd is our waking life as lf in layers and layers of dream's sleep, and how irretrievably does the entirety of existence appear to be plunged in deep sleep! It may by that we are heading towards that end, of interminab'e slumb r, from which we shall awake gaily and laughing'y, as if after a refreshing sleep. v
And thus does Prospero moralize on the evanescence of the world of consciousness.-
SO

These our actors As foretold you, we are all spirits; And are melted into air; into thin air, And like the baseless fabric of this vision, The cloud-capt towers, the gorgeous palaces, The solemn temple, the great globe itself Yea, all which it inherit shall dissolve, And like the unsubstantial pageant faded, Leave not a rack behind'
And here are lines not excelled in their profundity of thought even by Epictetus.
We are such stuff as dreams are made on,
and our little life ls surrounded with a sleep."
And thus does “inadequate knowledge” (Spinoza): "maya' surround our earthly life, and at the end of the course of attrition of our creative craving we would rest and get rounded with a peaceful sleep. This, again, is the craving to rest: the urge to be in a state of 'shanti' (peace) and harmony with the rest of existence: a wish and a hope. Then will come the night as if only to burst into a fresh dawn, with fresher and newer urges surging in nobler and kindlier hearts And the "self-that indefinable bundle of desires, urges and cravings-goes on pulsating in an endless succession of w kings and slumb ring a day and a night experience: a pulsation in the eternal mind.
The immensity of the unconscious universe-that totality of being-has polarised into a moment of consciousness, an event that goes by the enigmatic design a ion '1'; a rid it has to be conceded that the total universe is contained in the notion of I, for the moment the I-consciousness ceases the entire universe appears to cease to b. It gets properly squashed It will have to be owned that the totality of existence is centred in the f-notion. And the I-notion, I-event is infinite and eternal. Here is an aside: may be this is an insane vapouring: “I am that I am'-the master evant. It is the "heart's endeavour to get its struggling passion free'. - R. Browning.
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There are in existence two states, The state of "everythingness' (sarvam), and the state of “nothingness' (nirguna); the 'one' and the 'Zero' (a 6itongjuditti, gdipogiudittii); and despits the fact they appear to be contradictory states, in reality they are not They are the obverse and reverse of the same coin They are two different aspects of the one and the same theme.
Admittedly there are those fitful moments when we are impelled to entertain misgivings as regards the benign intent of Nature: her useful purpose; when we are prone to think that human life is no better than a loose bundle of di connected sensations and images and feelings: a downright will to be; come what mght. And that is perhap what some thinkers call sensationalism.
And T, for one, avidly entertain this view and think it perfectly intelligible, for T have seen man turned brute: his b-y life in a b-y mess; wreaking vengeance and smoking blood, making a b-y shambles of human existence. Aren't we smeared in blood and so near tears?
We are like the whirligig beetle which, most of the time, lives in the depths of the pool, and comes up to the surface now and again, for a wee bit of time, to trap a bubble of air, to take it down into the pool, and to breathe. Most of the time we are sunk in the deepest abyss of the ambient unconscious (yoga nithirai), surfacing only when occasion demands or when the craving to create stirs us up, to get awakaned, and produce a surge and a swell in our being Then a sort of charisma seizes us.
THOUGHT
A THOUGH, it will have to be admitted, is a tacit desire that is born on the su face of the conscious. mind as the resu't of a concourse of perceptions wherein the sense of sight, of heating, of smell, of taste, of touch, of feeling etc are active participants, and thence fit ding its way into the unconscious, establishes lodgement the rein, and like a fertilized ovum in a womb, gestates, develops,
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and becomes a-problem'. Here, what may be likened to a mental kink is formed. And either the THOUGHT might remain apparently and irretrievably lost in the profundity of the unconscious, or it might get buoyed up into the “conseious, in which state, it has become a useful, if palpable solution. It is, in other words, an intuitional approach to knowledge. (Of course there are those who completely deny the faculty of intuition e. g. Bertrand Russell and Hume.)
In our half asleep and half awake state (torpor) these solutions, more often than not, surface on the awakening consciousness as a new notion, a new idea, a fresh thought, a 'something more' worth our consideration. This creative trend, call it by any name (intuition-pragnans, gnanadrshti), is the common experience of most thinkers, mathematicians, and scientists upon whose consciousness, what may at one stage be thought of as an insoluble problem, finds its solution unexpectedly after a lapse of time, usually after they had gone to bed to roost with the problem in their head, and got awakened to its solution. This is the metaphysician's inexplicable, suddenly dawning thought process, that has been designated as "intuition-a flash thought. And born (f thought is one's deep sense of duty-a desire to do a thing much against one's intuitive will: to do a thing that 'ought' to be done, for one's inward monitor commends that course of action. In this regard this is what I. Kant says.-
“Duty! wondrous thought, that workest neither by fond insinuation, flattery, nor by threat, but merely by holding up thy naked law in the soul and so extorting for thyself always reverence, if not always obedience; before whom all appetites are dumb, however secretly they rebel; whence thy original'
The supremest creation ever is one's own sense of duty-the sublimest emergence.
é9 magining and feasoning,
Involved in creativity are two mental processes. They are imagining and reasoning. It is imprudent to se’
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a greater value on the one than on the other. Both the processes are equally well involved in creativity On the one hand a preponderarce of imagination over reasoning takes one away from the everyday happenings of life; and such a person spillitig ov'r with imagination turns out to be a dreamer, and dwells in a dream w Yrld of his own creation. Satyrs and Pans and chimeras of all sorts people his mental world He just dreams. And they are all idle dreams: un productive af any tangible results He can never act; he can never ble a performer His creations are fantasmicalities, and hyperboles. There is no salvation for such a person unless an attempt is made to rescue him from the whirl and the swirl of his sea of chimeras “My thoughts are my company,' says W. S. Landor, “I can bring them tog3ther, select them, detain them, dismiss thm.' And that's how man should husband his thoughts. He should have complete control over them.
On the other hand, where reason alone pervades one's life and holds sway and determines one's actions, then life bec mes cold and steely, petrified, woody and formal. It loses its warmth; it loses its expansiveness; it loses its freedom. It is deficient in gentleness and mildness and the spirit of self-sacrifice. The music of life, with all its manifold and varied vibrations and notations enriched with a a riety of fugues and moods, is missing in it. It is lacking in zest. Its vigour has been impaired; its animation curbed It has emotional poverty. It may be that its cardinal tenets are righteousness and justice; vet it is deficient in the warmth of cxis' ence, in the feeling of fulness and wholeness; in sympathy, fellow-feeling love and enpathy. In it the tridimensional feelings that may vary from: p'easantness to unpleasantness, excite-ment to quiescence, tension to relaxation, haven't their sway any more.
Where imagination, man's highest prerogative, runs riot it turns out to b3 fanatical; its enthusiasm ebbs and flows; its fier v fierceness increases, and it borders on militancy and fanaticism Then all the amiable, urbane qualities of life such as mildness and sweet reasonableness take wing then one rationalizes oneself into perplexity. Imagination' shall, theft fore, have to be cross-fertilized
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with pure reason; and reason in turn has to be tempered with imagination Like the two oxen yoked to a plugh, these prime factors of the mind, when given the same reins and the same prod and the same curb, help to take the tenor of life along the even course of creativity.
9nternal Secretions.
Physiologically the internal secretions have been deemed to be the prime motive agents in animal and human bahaviour. They help link mind and body-the passage from body to mind: the psycho-physical link. All animal intents, and animal behaviours have, it is believed, a hormonal drive. In other words they are instinct based, and triggered by hormones entering the blood stream and stimulating the muscle fibres. Animal motivations, including those of man, result from the level of hormones in the body, and are determined by various environmental factors such as light, temperature, sound, humidity of the atmosphere, smelling substances in the air, presence of dust, pallen, and smoke in the air etc. The body secretions of certain mammals (e. g. musk, must) serve to attract members of the opposite sex. They triggar a train of events preceding copulation and terminating in copulation. Such chemicals are called 6pheromones'. It has been said that horm nes affect or stimulate nerve cells and synapses within the central nervous system. They influence the hypothalamus of the brain; and in turn the hypothalamus can motivate a variety of behaviours by inducir g the endocrine system, especially the pitutary; for the removal of the hypothalamus has resulted in the complete wiping out of the hormonal effects. It may be that the endocrine system is triggered into action by external stimuli and the consequent perceptions.
Thus it may not be far removed from the truth to say that all our thought pricesses are nothing short of motor actions. For, just as much as we may, in common parlance, be said to think with the brain, we may also be said to think through and with the entire body, despite the fact the int nsity may be polarized and felt more keenly
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in the brain than in the rest of the boby. To wit, the body thinks as well as the brain. And feeling is, in a sense, a form of thinking; and as the body varies the mind varies; and we are creatures of moods. The following exposition of the views of Feuerbach and Engels is worth our consideration:- the material, sensuously perceptible world to which we ourselves belong is the only reality ... our consciousness and thinking, however supra-sensuous they may seem, are the products of a, bodily organ, the brain. Matter is not a product of mind, but mind itself is merely the highest product of matter.'
Conscious creativity in the human being has its start as early in childhood as the age of two plus. Watch a child's move ments, its organiz d motivations frum its second year of life; and you will come to this conclusion: that its responses become purposive and thought-based as from the age of two plus. He begins to think and reason at this ag; and his creative trend stems from his second year of life.
These are my own observations and conclusions. Children, especially those between the age of two and twelve, are 'all creativity'. They act, they plan, they organize, they bring abut an ensemble of thought force and with its aid they form a meaningful matrix of thought and things thought out; and they create In short they assemble their thoughts in relation to things that interest them. And thus they create some figure, some form, or if they are dominantly imaginative, some figment of the imagination. Here is a simple experiment that amply testifies to this aforesaid conclusion Stage set: my study room-my study table with a number of drawers containing all sorts of things: paper, view cards, envelopes, pencils, ball-point pens, paint-sticks, leaves from magazines, erasers, sealing wax and what not. Enters Sarj v-my grand-son, age; two plus; amply qualified in 'mnking mischief? He opens the drawers one after another: pulls out the things in them; puts them in a heap in my waste paper b x. Carries the box to a corner of the room. Sees some chair cushions. etches them. rranges them in shelf-form Then arrange the contents of the drawers in a certain order. Pencils in one heap, pens in another; bouks,
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pictures etc. in a definite order. He is self-critical. Putting the things in a certain order, he stands at a distance. has a total view of the entire arrangement; mutters: 'O Bull This is dirty. This is good'. He goes on doing up things interminably. After some time he comes to me and says: 'Appu, this is my shop. I am playing shop; come and buy"-
In his activity I have ob s e r v e d a planned pattern of bahaviour. There is a c ignitive process. There is an eduction of relations. There merges an eduction of correlates. He saw; he has put two and two. He criticizes his attempt. He evaluates results; he appreciates. If not satisfactory, he demolishes the thing he has built. He dismantles and attempts some other form of discipline. In short he has relativized. life is, it would seem governed by this chain formula: Seeing: perceiving conceiving: relating: correlating: planning: acting: achieving satisfaction. Then come ennui: boredom, dismantling.
Building up and "Breaking down,
The critical element in the creative process is an "emergent something': part and parcel of it. This process of building up and of breaking down, we find, is amply significant of Nature's pattern of events. Interest and ennui are the governing emotive factors in creativity. And intervening, there is a variety of moods,
CREATVITY FOUNDED ON LOVE AND LOVING KNON ESS
CREATIVITY IS ESSENTIALLY of the heart, and of the imagination; and creativity trend has love as its base. Love is enthroned in the heart. It is tender feeling. It is of the warmth of the heart, the heat of the palpitating furnace, that creativity has been engendered. It is governed by the principle of continuity; and is a continuing process; and a great concern in life. Does not the interminable flow of energy have its head stream in the heart? Isn't there a mute urge and a mute adoration for the attainment of success in the establishment of the perfect
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(poorna) being. And don't we experience moments of “passion in tranquillity"? And doesn't the heart cry out? When it ebbs man feels darned tired and very stupid.
Then energy flow reaches the head and the brain; then it flows into the creative limbs and organs of the body; and then we feel with a capacious heart: we are what we are. We are pushed into being ' A tongue of primeval creative fire rages through our whole being, and then we are prompted to say in all sincerity: I can create; I am a creator. We are aware of a “pragnanz' - a meaningfulness in our existence; in our mental forms. We are infinitely happy and pleased and satisfied. A fullness and a wholeness reigns supreme in our heart. So long as this urge to create persists in our being we cling to time, and we are hooked to space; and we live. And so soon as the idea loses hold on us, we cease to be. The eternal brahman' - the creative process - is ever awake in us, and it keeps us going, and is ever goading us on from one phase of existence to another, from one phase of the 'event' to another. Then one phase of existence twins with another; and in its details life becomes great fun. We are pushed forward by an inner urge, and we tend to move forward; and we pause not and falter not. We just proceed - we can't help but proceed - because we are urged to move on and on from one aspect of purposiveness to another; from one meaningful state to another. This is the very essence of our being: the great event.' This is a pregnant thought : a queer notion.
We have our pre-formed 'conceptual frames', and all the time we tend to think and are prone to reflect, we make an effort to post our new experiences into the one or the other of them. And thus we enrich our being' process: and thus we create and re-create ourselves. Scraps of time and chips of space cling to us. And we go on, and on jauntily. Would to God that I could give tongue to the great notions that spring in met Details don't matter. It is the grand notion -- nay feeling of Love.
Woe to him in whom the creative urge is in a state of abeyance, in one of regress, for he shall not love, and
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he shall not live. He perishes; he has become a waking spect re. Then dawns a pernicious trend in his existence. The outcome is “spectre thin' and an ignoble death governed by boredom. Life then becomes a terrible tragedy.
“For we are boun in other’s pain,
And perish in our own.' - F. Thomson.
Creativity What a grand notion! What an illuminating thought ! What a comforting assurance The more we dwell on the significance of this event that occasions in man, the more we create ourselves into the the greater “self' (EVENTF) that we in essence are, There can never occur any recession in this progression No blackening sin has the potent to deter one in one's endeavour to move forward; no swooning dejection can thwart one in one's progress No second person can vie with one. You are your own commander; your own admiral. The first and the second in command; the commandant and the subaltern; the major general and private; all are rolled into one-and that is one's good "SELF'.
The effort and the endeavour is to make “something meaningful' out of a jumble of events. Let me instance. A child sees things (lego pieces, building bricks) lying in a heap, all in a jumble. He sees; he perceives; he plans and deliberates; a form'-a complete thing-is taking shape in his mind. In other words he perceives a form-a Gestalt-a whileness, a configuration, a oneness. Then he puts two and two together, and makes an effort to build, to create an intelligible collation of events; to beget a grand total that was never before. Of course his creativity has its material limits and bounds By putting things together in a certain juxtaposition: acid, copper plate, zinc rod, wax etc. Michael Faraday was able to harness that mighty force obtainable in Nature : E L ECTRIC 1 T Y. Something 'new' emerged. And in every child's, every person's activity-deliberately planned and brought into action-something meaningful (a meaningful whole) comes into being. You rub two pieces of reed, and in the friction fire is born.
As you sit there in your room, caught in the Sweltering heat of an August afternoon, steaming and sweating;
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and having caught a smothering stuffy cold; fuming and fretting, sneezing and snorting and trun peting with an unbearable bodyache that often persists when the flu has taken complete possession of you, you cannot fail to realize this supreme fact of existence, that the creative trend in you is firging a mighty go ahead, a break through, despite all the uncomfortable, sneaky, miserable circumstances like the unbarable heat, the parching searing wind, and the stuffy oppressive atmosphere Our discomfort is only an expression symptomatic of the creative force acting from within us, pushing against the inclement circumstances impinging on our
being', building up resistance.
Every moment of our existence we are reminded of the presence of this favourable, ponderable, cardinal principle in Nature, namely the craving to create; to re-build that magnanimity which had been shattered and piled shard upon shard - a heap of barren debris The poet Francis Thomson] saw his mangled youth lying all around him when he pulled down its "pillaring hours', and then came the creative intent that gave it a push, reared its form to assume its pristine grandeur. The poet, a semblance of a true creator, is so inspired that his breath seems to stop with a gulp of certainty and happiness. In every moment, nay duration of our living, there lurks the spark of creativity, which, it is our bounden task to discover and to fan into a powerful configuration.
What are all our teeny-boppers, flippant maids and our irresponsible lads up to? Aren't their actions, though frtatious, suggestive of an endeavour, to create, to bring into firm themselves into newer and newer beings everyday of their existence? They have turned crazy; they have pushed themselves forward, as it were, to deck themselves a new everyday, since they have a new role to play. Despite the fact their behaviours are only external expressions of an inner creative urge, they appear to be, for them, the only saving devices for ridding their life of the fast piling feeling of attrition and b predom Short of creativity and imagination life becomes an unbarable burden.
And man creates himself into a greater being Influenced by "love of praise and the strong feeling of glory,
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and the still stronger horror of scorn and infamy' deep based on sympathy and other social instincts, there emerge in man a moral sense; and this resolve, so forcefully expressed by Immanuel Kant, gets evolved and reinforced in man's moral being: “I will not in my own person violate the dignity of humanity' I ought to be this, and . no lesser being': that is the dawn of morality. If one can beget the confidence : "I am the supreme judge of my own conduct" (Darwin) then one would have evolved into a truly moral being “Man is a wonder'; but occasionally, "what a fall “Nothing begins and nothing ends, That's not paid with moan.'
8vening of Cife.
In the evening of life, how many of our elderly uncles and auts, our matronly maids and cantankerous housewives, our busybodies: the politicos, the business tycoons and others of this category, suffer from the crushing burden of ennui and of disinterest in life! All, because of the ebbing away of the creative throb in them And w'at an inferno pervades Even a person of a disciplined life-style of the i category of Charles Darwin, has, in the dit clining years of his life, complained of a wooden, mechanical mode, setting in his life-style. He had lost the warmth of life, that emitional interest in poetry and drama and music and all such beautiful things, and had become a mechanical contrivance for collecting, collating and grinding facts and arriving at conclusions. When he sat at the death bed of his dying child, he sat stock-still observirg the expressions on the face of the child. And, when the child breathed its last not a tear of anguish trickled from his eyes.
And so, how many of us have learnt, and have been disciplined to conclude our earthly journey and help to close the chapter of our life joyfully and in perfect peace, so that 'shanti’ (tranquility) may slip in where boredom was 2 Wordsworth was no exception. Please note his feelings of boredom expressed in these lines:-
"The rainbow comes and goes,
And lovely is the rose;
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The moon doth with delight Look round her when the heavens are bare; Waters on a starry night Are beautiful and fair; The sunshine is a glorious birth; But yet I know, where'er go, That there hath past away a glory from the earth. Whither is fled the visionary gleam? Where is it now, the glory and the dream?"
immortality Ode]
When young lambs frisk and bleat and gambol, and children romp and jerk and play, creativity is making an attempt to overflow and take shape as creative forms and patterns ef behaviour. Though the children may become a nuisance to their elders, they are all the time endeavouring to find expression for their creative end avour. They are creating themselves, moulding and surfacing their youthful exuberance into eboullient, ofen boisterous human postuings: ferre ting and pro bong, pullir g a d pusling, ir, flating and deflating, ever pulsating always moving forward by trial and error making here a slip, and getting there a firm grip: all 'anubb vas': experiences galore. All through existence it is the interminable throb of being' and becoming': the inveterate will to move forward, to assume a batter and surer and solider can figuration and a more sublime and stable form, and attain to the status of a thing of perfection: of beauty and of truth : 'Sundaram, rtam, satyam."
Apart from the physical world: the world of ths physicists, the astronomers and the mathematicians; of Einsteins, Hoyles, Eddingtons, Jeans, Hayleys, Chandrasekers and Ramans and others of their sort everyone of us has a world (universe) of our own. It is a creation of our own. It is a creation of our own craving to create. Thore is an intense desire to see things as we earnestly would, for "We are the dreamers of dreams.' And most of what we have created have in them a lot of our imagination; for they are mostly chimeras crammed with fate. How many worlds: earths and heavens and hells; paradisos, purgatorios and infernos have we created: Rome of them phantoms, some of them down to earth realities? And how often have we, in our calmer
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and sober moments thought out, thought through, designed and secured and carved out for ourselves, a world after our own heart. Such a world, it will have to be frankly owned and accepted is a thing cf our own creation. It is of the shape of our conscious self: our inward monitoring: the shape of things to come. Our likes and our dislikes have mingled in its day; our loves and our hatreds have warmed it; our secret yearnings and our overt behaviours have mulded it into form, blended it, and given it a shape. Our world has been watered with our tears, it has trembled in our sighs, and has been made to blossom and mature into mellow fruitfulness with the warmth of the autumn sunshine of our deep-seated emotions and intentions and aspirations and hidden springs of action. We have created it, fabricated it, we dwell in it; and we should therefore have little cause to be grumpy and broody We should have no cause whatsoever for regret, c m plaint and lamentation. All that which is good in us embodied in our world: physical, psychical, ethical; so is all that which is bad. Our world is, in short, a perfect reflection of our creative craving We have created it; It has assumed a form, breathed in an “elan vital' (breath). And it is a r. plica of our own “being'. It is a world of distilled values: all our own. But it is livable ?
Ölan's Gunas.
Having created the world after our heart's desire, why should we feel the pang of discontent and the attrition of ennui 2 The morning of our life is ours, as mnch as the prime and the evening. What we have sown we certainly havo to reap. This being the law of action of the universe, why then do we grumble? Viewed with a becoming sense of the importance of living a meaningful life, we have to know that life is essentially and intrinsically our own. It has been designed by us; patterned, moulded, shaped, figured and fashioned by us after our sweet will and desire. There should, therefore, be no cause for groaning, whimpering and lamentation of any sort. Regrets have no place and status in this scheme of things. Now, why should man labour under the crushirg burden of the totally misguided and mistaken and mishapen idea
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that he is under a load of original sin- "prarabta karma'. Let man cast aside the notion of the burden of his sins, the primeval dirt if there be any such; put his machinery in gear, and let him awake and arise with the reawakening and reassuring notion: "I am the master of my fate; I am the captain of my soul". Let him feel confident that his wrld has issued from the lyre of his life like an interminable harmony shorn of a y from of discord. And then he will certainly find life worth living; and he will then be able to take his first step in the right direction, for the kindly light' of his clear intentions will lead him onwards despite the “encircling gloom'. It matters not that the dogs bark, that darkness encumbers; the caravan shall move on, and on till the end of time Surely man is not a golem supernaturally brought to lite. Every action of man has an everlasting effect,
Like a wave sprung in mid ocean it goes on and on and eventually breaks on the shore of eternity.
It is a curious, if interesting fact, and a sober truth, that when one falls ill and betakes to a life of quiet and of silence the creative craving, in its unsullied purity, is at its height. It feels, it thinks through, it coordinates, it correlates, it resolves, it designs, it figures, it relativizes, and, in short, it creates. Man's conscience is guided not so much by his knowledge and intellect as by the apparently blind striving that inheres in his unconscious self All our ethical and moral values, our sense of right and wrong, our guiding principles, and our maxims that "help to maintain our moral standards are all grounded not so much in the conscious self as in the unknown, unfelt, deeply seated inwald monitor. So much so, that in the eyes of the world that sets a standard: you are either born g od or bad. To all appearances you have either good trends in your inner being or bad trends; and you display either a moral pattern of conduct. or immoral or amoral pattern of conduct, You can as much try to charge the spots of a wild cat as to reform a person's character. Character is deep rooted, inherent and reinforced and determined; for, all man's interminable past has done this, since it clings to it. This is a much vexed question.
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Has his caste been already cast in a set mould? Well, he is what he is, since he hails from a thousand thousand years. He is not of yester year or the year before; not even of yester century. He belongs to the ages. His SELF is sunk in the depths of the dim past; and his true concern ought to be discovering his true, genuine self; his genuine breed and pure lineage; he has to discover the native genre of his course and espouse it, and lead it along the path that Nature has prepared for him. He can create himself only when he has discovered his ancient trends. For this he needs a sound education. Not the cranky, crawly, hard-boiled, ensnared circumstance that today has donned the false garb of education. Life is profound; life is potent. There is poetry in it; there is zest. There is youth in it, there is prime; there is old age; there is decadence; there is freedom, there is serfdom; there is stirring animation (elan), and there is moribund let har gy. The three gunas: 'sath vic', 'rajasvic', 'thamasic': tranquillity, exuberance, lethargy: are in it. They come and go like the rainbow. Joy and sorrow reside in it; gaiety and melancholy come to brood in it, corroding cares and cirking pains have gone to roost in it. What a medley of feelings and sentiments. What deep based longings! And what a flood of cares! What a fount of overflowing ebullience!
“What pipes and timbrels
What wild ecstasy!' –Keats.
Now it touches one on the raw like a red-hot poker. Now it soothes and salves like a heaven-sent unguent. Now it sits brooding and moping in the dismal deserts of its misery and melancholy. Now it takes to its festive wings of name and fame and honour and glory. Now it lies smelling and rotting and put rifying in the ditch of misery, and downright debauchery.
Now life sits careless on a granary floor (Its) hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind; Now “drowned with the fume of poppies', NJ w it "kasps steady its laden head across the brook; Or by the cyder-press with patient look, It "watches the last oozings hours by hours.'
(With apology to J. Keats)
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What a variety of moods and posturings! What non-ego moves! All of these man's corporeal structure has been heir to. And man has been crawling along his slurry, slushy way, slouching and weary-limbed. And in this “tham asic mood” (dejection) Death might seem an admirable solution to the endless problems of life. But, is it?
In reality no one is a sag; no one is a saint. Every person is in fact, either a man or a woman; and each one wants and is prone to go his or her own way; and each one makes an effort to drag the other on to the wrong track; and ipso facto both go the wrong way. And then comes the big bang - the crisis. And the man hates the woman, and the woman, the man; arid the one thinks he or she has bounced the other. This bouncing game is so common, and very few escape. Man is so often 1n the grip of the non-ego (the not conscious self) He has no control over himself. He is more impulsive than creative
Though wayward and varied in its course, life has a definite goal to seek There is a finalism in every live process. A teleological trend: definitive articulate, and deterministic, despite the fact there is a freedom, a wide scope and a will-to-be, in trinsic in it The liver has thus to live under the pressure of severe calamities, of disconcerting and heart-rending failures, of dissolute degeneracy, as of moral decav; and face all circumstance: benign and adverse with for titude, governed and overseen by a dreadfully bravado spirit, like unto Job's.
The main task of life is this: All decay and degeneracy, all despondency and mental depression, all bredom and brooding care, all moroseness of age and infirmity, all utter prostration and prosiness and frustration shall have to be countermaided. A thundering delicious joy of living and keen power of understanding and sedulous care i. e. begetting a sound sense shall enable one to surm sunt all difficulties, overcome all lets and hindrances, and discover the true meaning in life's designs and postures.
In order that a person may be in a position to discover the creative trend in him, so that he may live a
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peaceful and useful and meaningful life, especially town ride the last lap of his life's sojourn, let him make all possible efforts throughout his life to discover the right tone and tenor of his life, and then so attune his life that he may understand the final resolution of the pattern of his life as has been designed by Nature over the years and countless ages. His life shall have to slide from civilizationterrifyingly. It shall then mature into sweetness and light. The dawn shall then be divine, and sunset a blaze of colours." “if you do not want to commit suicide, always have something to do' says Voltaire. If you want to discover the joy of existence, let not myths-religious and otherwise-stunt your intelligence, and let not superstition cloud your vision; let alone your understanding guide you.
We have to live our life to the optimum limit, quaff the cup to the dregs taking our steps one after another with the greatest concern and deliberation and foresight guided by our own maxims. We have to galvanize ourselves into action, for through sheer necessity we have to act, and act rationally. Aristotle must have had a glimpse of the total fact of existence when he said:
“There is a power within that moulds every form, in plants and planets, in animals and men.' This idea grows on us, emphasizes and stresses the presence of a teleologicl trend in all aspects of existence-a deterministic end in view: a tacit purpose: a deeply silent satisfying concern. Do we understand and do things?-a necessary poser.
3/he Stimuli 8truggle.
HAVING INHERITED an intricate and complicated nervous system, the outc me of the intent to possess an enriched and awakening experience, man has at the afferent and efferent ends a multitude of stimuli, and as many responses. Man is prone to get the maximum and optimum amount of stimulation from his environment. He is ever alert. He wants to be excited; to crave for emotional expression, smooth and delicious, to get a thrill from every situation that confronts him There is a struggle, as it were, in his attempt to derive the greatest amount of kick out
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of life's confrontations and conflicts and situations. And once he has derived the maximum of stimulus he possibly can from one source, he craves for more by increasiug the quantum of the source of the stimulus. In this way the creative trend in man enriches his experiences by supplying more and yet more of the stimulus factor. He seeks an alignment from every source This thirst for more and more stimulus has its evil consequences too. Too much of anything is good for nothing Satiation seems to be infinitely remote.
A simple instance may suffice to explain this mode of behaviour. A person who takes to intoxicating liquor or a narcotic for getting a mild kick, derives it at the start, from a small quantity of the stimulant. But in every additional attempt he makes he derives the same amount of stimulus fr, m the use of increasing quantities of the drug This would mean that every drug-stimulated activity. wheth r creative or otherwise, needs an increasing dose of the drug for continued or repeated stimulation, and for a m re effective kick. There is thus patent a stimulus struggle in the behaviour of man; some stimulus produced by a particular drug gaining predominance over some other. The effectiveness of the drugs is in this increasing order: narcotics, alcohol, opium, cannabis, heroin, marijuana, hashish etc.
The most potent among the hormonal stimulants are the procreative hormones. They hold the greatest sway over man's actions-creative or otherwise-by serving as an excitatory and an inhibitory trigger device-an 'extensibility and a contractility " (Bichat); the impulses they engender being grounded more in the unconscious than in the conscious mind. The sex based stimuli are so potent that the intellect and the reflective principle in man are not in a position to cope with them. In other words they have no control. over the sex-based stimuli Never put a man and a woman in a separate place. It creates an eruptive and incendiary situation; and a man is a slave to woman when he is not married and free love prevails, and woman turns cantankerous. Says Schopenhauer: “The relation of the sexes is really the invisible central point of all action
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and conduct, and peeps out every where in spite of all veils thrown over it. It is the cause of war and the end of peace; the basis of what is serious and the aim of the jest; the inexhaustible source of wit, the key of all ilusions and the meaning of all mysterious hints." Ayd what mysterious hints have been suggested by the phallic worship of the ancient Greeks and the “lingam' cult of the Hindus! The “Virgin cult' is an effort to keep the potent of the “lingam' under the veil and give it a setenity and a purity undreamt of by man.
The snake stone, the wayside pillayar' and shrine and grotto, the khaba and Mount Kailash are no other than revised and glorified editions of the creative propensity solidified into stone and mai ble, clay and plaster of paris. These are not meant to be disparaging and damaging remarks. They point to the truth: the true potent of the sex impulse: the creative cravir g tre rd; the foi mative impulse translated into a form in flesh and blood. The lingam' and “yoni' cult are after all symbolic of the eternal craving of the be-all and end- all of existence. The ancient Greeks and the ancient Hindus were great fellows; and bold, fearless and honest thinkers, for they had evolved a system of worship and a cult founded on the basic urge of existence: a system, the overall influence of which over mankind can scarcely be over estimated. It has been most graphically said of the hot days in the Mediterranean lands: In every grove and shady nook you are sure to meet with either a saint or a sinner.' That's life. No hide and seek. A free-for-all discussion gives us this view. Sex cannot be made to appear as a subordinate secondary concern of life. It is madly and wildly enchanting. It cannot be bought and sold, as it is done today, in the matrimonial market; for in formal marriage' a woman sells herself, and a man becomes an abject slave. Free-and-easy ways are lacking; and what ensues is more a dog's life than any other: not a "graha dharma": homeliness of the home. It is in all certainty the lowest common denominator of existence. It is also the prime mover: the crucial stir in all life's designs: the omega point attainable ever.
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Now it is possible to ur derstand why a modern rishi fell at the feet of his youthful virgin partner in life in humble and self-surrendering, mute adoration; why a father becomes a suppliant at the feet of the mother; why a parent sacrifices his all for the well-being of his child, and why the individual succumbs to the species. It is all a matter of the preservation of the human race: the best that is yet to be.
The male and the female forms and contours having been begotten as the result of the craving for expression of some inner urge, are complements-the bulges in the one supplmenting the dimples in the other. What one is lacking in, the other fulfills. The weak and the virile, the harsh and the soft, the crude and the elegant, the bland and the beautiful get mortised and annexed, and they get moulded into a form-a perfection in design, both bodily and mentally alike.
Nature's inherent craving to propagate and thereby preserve the species has assumed the two complementary forms, namely the 'lingam' and the 'yoni,'-both terms signifying the perfection that resides in the reproductive systems. There is in all probability a mutual fitness to procreate, to perpetuate and to continue the species and the race despite the manifold hazards that life is confronted with. And all this, for what end in view? To seek for a "oneness' and a “wholeness' - a "thath elkham' ia existence : a unity and a universality. Reading for the first time Charles Darwin's "Fertilization of Orchids.' I was deeply impressed with the remarkable manner in which the flowers of the several species have been adapted for the i reception of their insect visitors so that pollination and fertilization may be effectively brought about. Says he: "It has, : think, been shown that the Orchideae exhibit an almost endless diversity of beautiful adaptations. When this or that part has been spoken of as adapted for some special purpose, it must not be supposed that it was originally, always formed for this sole purpose. . . a part which originally served for one purpose, becomes adapted by slow changes for widely different purposes.'
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With what profound consciousness and concern, solicitude and awareness do we go into every detail of the nature and physiognomy and form of the person whom we love! All her elegant lineaments and feature lines and contchurs; all her movements, all the expressions of her farded face and her lascivious curls, have been traced and studied with the greatest and most meticulous care. Her form would have grown into ours; and her spirit would have mingled with ours We two have become aware of the ultimate excellence of humanity. And that is true of creation. If that be so, where does reside the much-flayed notion of male and female conflict Man - woman confrontation Some, there are, who have put the man and the woman in opposite camps, and placed betwixt them, the mother-inlaw; the concerted cause of their incompatibility. Doesn't the notion of the factitious 'yoni conflict" drag man into the deepest depth of debauchery? We have to play, straight with sex. No hide and seek, pray; for doesn't it occur to us that it is the mightiest of the mightiest? It is dog-eatdog life.
There is a good deal of truth concealed in what Aristophanes conceived in regard to the origin of man and woman. Originally man and woman were one entity coiled up into a ring. And they moved about rolling like hoops. Then the living hoop (artha-nareeswara) - half man and half woman - androgynous form - conceived a thought. It wanted to divide. Then it split up into two complementary halves. That which was wanting in the one being' was supplemented by the other. They were basically complementary contiguities, for the one cannot exist and attain perfection in existence without the co-operation and aid of the other.
Once again we pose the question : Why did a sadhu lie prostrate at the feet of his youthful wife? He just stooped to conquer his passion. And why does a devotee bend his knees at the foot of the statue of the virgin aspect of the divine: The Divine Mother? The answer accords with the ancient vedic view. Never can man hope to recover from the shock of the phallic urge; and never shall woman be free of the enduring urge, to cling to him like, a lizard to the tree which it had made its home. The vigour of man, his virility, has all been drained
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by the feminine elegance, her delicacy, and the whims and wiles of winsome woman. Man has b en conquered; and he lies prostrate at her feet, grovelling in the dust, tired and worn out to a rag through sheer "necessity.’ This is the symbol of the relaticnship subsisting between man and woman - their sex bond. It is invigorating as much as it is enervating. It ennobles, as also denigrates. It promotes virtue in as equal a measu'e as it does vice. It exalts at one moment and ever so desperate the next It brings heaps of social approbation at one stage; and social reprobation at another . It is the most enigmatic, the most tantalizing; the most puzzling. as also the most potent; gingerly event in existence. It is undoubtedly the noblest of themes: the man - woman relationship Any other relationship pales before it. When the “one splits up into two, the "contra’ emarates: the Adam-Eve contrariety. If at all there is any will in man, it is the will to conquer the woman; and if there is any will in woman it is the inveterate will to cling to him thrugh thick and thin like a leech, to suck his vitality to bend his will, to entwine him in her winsome ways, to make him sweat and toil, and ensnare him in her charms; and thus, in the end, to reduce his will to naught : one, single, incomparable will. Hasn't woman fashioned and fabricated man after her heart's desire? If aught I know, Sakti has moulded Shiv : weak, meek, pliant and submissive: brim-full of the soul-shaking feeling of remorse, regret, repentance and shame. It is utter folly; there is nothing - sacred about it. Sakti is great.
Where is the man that has conquered the woman? The world did produce such men; but then, they were few and far between. And every one of them invariably stooped to conquer. The generality of men were, and are all abject slaves. Man in his masculinity is yet in the foetus stage. He is bodily robust and virile, yet still tender and feeble, so far as his will is concerned. He has not mellowed into maturity. Hic is not free and fetterless. His intellect is still ensnared in the web of his sex urge - his phallic craving. Sex:... bared, divested, and stripped of all its finery and drapcry and gewgaws, is not, as has often been presented, under a veil; a gentle, sober, elegant, subordinate and subservient concern of life. Being the ruling passion, it is
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the primary concern of life. It is the supremest of emotions, for it lays siege to all the other emotions. They become secondary concerns and are more often than not relegated to the background Your hunger and your thirst, your elementary loves and hatreds, your anger and rage, your envy and your jealousy, your greed and your gluttony, your enmity and your magnanimity, your all-embracing kindly love, your insatiable thirst for knowledge, your massive intellect, your discretionary powers, your pruderce, your intellectual tuzzlic with life's problems, your imirpartiality, your passion for truth, for beauty, for justice: all of these, all vanish like the morning mist before this mighty sun surcharged with an unimaginable potency.
The phallic craving just wants to possess and enslave, to negate all vigour; to tame the brute, to break the mettle, to annihilate the ruling existences so as to bring frth a greater existence endowed with noble, beautifuller, kindlier powers than those that dwelt in the man and the woman who were magnetized and drawn irresistibly together in an all consuming fire of procreative passion. They wonder because they are ignorant, and they fear because they are weak The Adam in man and the Eve in woman are no other than these two elements, namely weakness and ignorance; which when they mix and mingle, become feminine qualities and estimations like veneration, self-adoration and self-regard.
At the consummation of the energising process, namely, the procreative union, a tremendous sacrifice has been made; and the bonded beings cease to be. But yet the death of the individual has resulted in the preservation of the species with a goodly load of the 'something more', the creation of something new, something superior, something enriched and endowed with a greater capacity to resist the degenerating trend Who can go counter to this cardinal idea? It has survival value. . The 'something more' is the mind of man, the “nous that never, dies; the torch that never gets snuffed out, that burns and is being lit for ever and ever, and grows brighter than ever before. It is always watchful, always aware of the dawn of a greater awakening And humanity goes marching, singing the anthem:-
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"We are the music makers we are the dreamers of dreams,' with an indwelling, in-welling urge to go on and on into the beyond, , and the beyond, in a never-ending quest, singing a never ceasing litany. In quest of what? It is better to leave the question unanswered, for the answer, when got at, appears to delude and to tantalize.
But, when man and woman come together it is imperative for the well being of the human race and for the evolution of the super-mind of man - 'one' - to organize an eugenic supervision of all reproductive relations. Yn other words indiscriminate mating should be barred if it is to result in benign fecundation; and woman shall have to be shorn of the popular yet erroneous notion that woman is merely a sexpot and a sex symbol. She is much more than sex. She is noble. She is queenly.
But for woman, loving woman, man is no man. He is only a bauble in her hands. And Shakespeare has it. Apart from the love of a loving woman, life is not worth living.
- "banished from her
Is self from self, a deadly banishment. What light is light, if Sylvia be not seen? What joy is joy, if Sylvia be not by? Except I be by Sylvia in the night, There is no music in the nightingale Unless I look on Sylvia in the day, There is no day for me to look upon. She is my essence, and I leave to be If I am not by her fair influence Fostered, illumined, cherished, kept alive.'
Isn't man fully dependent on woman? And doesn't woman, in turn, cling to man? Life is that. A poser! A posture Man and woman' ought to be in each others perpetual presence. See Sri Ramakrishna. And should they fail to be, by any evil chance, they pine and waste away. For the attainment of a perfect harmony in life, a man ineeds a suitable partner in life; and so does a woman. And WOMAN, gentle woman turned bully, becomes the devil, incarnate. She is at the extremes; She is either a
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creator divine, or a blooming destroyer. And man is no less. And woman keeps man most of the time a mere curiosity; and woman in the possession of a self-willed man is a mare trinket. Should they entwine in each other's tender love, then heavenly joy descends to earth.
Woman, noble woman, the queen of the family hearth, she who reigns supreme over the 'Queen's Garden', why should she demean herself and sink into the slough of beastly carnality and expose her fleshly form, sell her divine incorruptible flesh in a variety of ways in our modern “civilized society' by participating in beauty contests, night clubs, club dances, bathing sprees, hippy hikings, voluptuous assignations, and operatic scenes, - all per verted exhibitionisms of some sort or other, in some form or other -- meek, weak; mean and dirty vagabondage. Creativity is thus a matter of two complementary forces ever in motion, ever attempting to be at rest, ever on the swell to reach the maximum of attainment. Otherwise why all this warmth and heat? Why all this unending, unflagging ardour 2 Why all this sizzling and sputtering? Why make all this pother? All this joy 2 All this ecstacy, all this bliss in the 'arthanareeswara - the half-male, the half female for m? All of us are that: it half-male, half-female. It is an interminable procession, which, when mathematically represented and formulated, assumes the form of the paradoxical equation : O = oc. It is self-knowledge, self reverence and self-control. It is energy driving one on and on, and on "The power that informs the body informs the thought also."
The configuration of the “mind' or being with the infrastructure of sensations, perceptions, concepts, imagination, impressions, images, correlations, ideas, thoughts, the conscious, the unconscious and the willing and wanting, the emotions, the impulses and passions, the "pragnans', the intuitions: are expressions of the creative craving trend for an inherent specific purpose. In short the repertoire of all the varied mental, psycho-physical processes, as it were, provides the correct explanation for our desire for rest, to go inio a lethargic condition, to will to be in peace (shanti) with the rest, of the universe - animate and in animate - to go into a state of 'yoga-nithirai' - (non-ego) the sleep. of
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peace, the ascent of the “nous' (self) to the grand status of the “ONE”: (supra mind). This craving to rest and to brood is yet another version of the craving to create; to be what one is born to be, and made to be. It is creativity in perfect abeyance : a tacit expression of all creativity brooding over the mighty design. Matter (an nam) may be said to be the slumbering partner; and when the matter aspect (event) of existence predominates tedium and ennui and prosiness set in and the life-throb in the heart of existence is at its lowest ebb : nostalgic, incipient. And when the "minding' (beirg aware: prana) aspect of existence gains dominance, there is awak-'ned the eternal creative craving to be; ard then the being' comes in to being. It is the incomparable “ONE” that Plotinus had in mind when he conceived the notion of the happy trio: soul, nous and one.
"O, who shall from this dungeon raise A soul enslaved so many ways, With bolts of bones, that fettered stands In feet, and manacled in hands; Here blinded with an eye, and there Deaf with the drumming of an ear?'
(Andrew Marvell)
Here in 'one' the designer and the designed have coalesced into one; and the "craving - to-be-in-deep-slumber' seeks its fullest consummation in death, which is no other than an expression of perfect peace and harmony: "the dead fare neither ill nor well." And they answer not. Beyond the grave there can only be one form of existencerefrain from being dogmatic - and that is that state of profound, nay ponderable unconsciousness which is the nullity of all our urges, desires and cravings, struggles and thoughts and ambitions and aspirations and life's puzzlements, and mush. It leads, perhaps, to the perfectly unconditioned state that has been designated as "nirvana' -- the state of perfection in the cessation of desire, of all craving : creative ' and disruptive. Some, there are, the bakti cultists, who may consider it a deplorable state, for it is extremely difficult to conceive of a state of nullity wherein resides the extinguished fire of craving (Galasub) in a state of nescience -
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the perfection of the unconscious state of existence. A simple exercise will enable us to conceive the idea of nescience. Make an effrt to concaive of your state of existence in a condition of deep slumbar. Isn't it of daily occurence? But is there anything to match an awake ed life? Anything else but to experience and taste; and taste endlessly with the least of pain and pang ? (Indra loka : houri voluptuousness)
Pleasure - Pain - Creativity ar
It won't be in order to judge of "creativity" either by the effects produced or by the results obtained. The effect of a certain course of action or relationship may be, in popular parlance, good or bad, gratifying and pleasuregiving or distressing and pain-producing. But the effects alone need not be the correct basis to judge of relationships and arrive at a right, deep, profound judgement.
. It is a stupid way of judging events, and relationships. It is hedonism with a vengeance, and no mistake, and pragmatism of the first water the most egregious blunder that one can ever make in, adjudging notional and emotional relationships. Therefore to judge of the soundness of an effect from its practical consequences is bad philosophy: meaningless, pointless and impulsive the worst of illogicalities.
Pragmatism is one such way of inadequate thinking and faulty judging. And "pleasure" and "pain' need not be the basis of true, sound judgement,
Let me instance, Sex indulgence when taken to an excess is pleasing, tickling, titillating, pleasure-giving. Regardless of the evil consequences of promiscuity, hedonistically it may be sound; but in the absence of kindliness and light and purity it would prove to be a veritable evil. This is the consensus of the greatest among thinkers. So long as it is productive of results, it appears to be pleasing, gratifying; to be good and soul-stirring and soulsatisfying.
Still, in terms of perceptive values i.e. non-attached, impartial judgement, it is impermanent, soul-killing and
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degenerating and d-grading. Hence mere opposites, and duals and dialectics like: pleasure - pain, humility - arrogance, absolutism - materialism, gratifying - distressing, thesis -antithesis, convey no sense in man's art of thinking They help breed prolixity, and confusion, and optimism.
Doesn't the mind of man constantly “shuttle back and forward in the continuity called memory? How can such an entity be considered to be eminently and absolutely satisfying? Hence all our notions of nationality, race, religion, ill-conditioned science and astrological absurdities are id latrous and superstitious in their trends. They are in short stained ideas: seldom or never pure. They tend to destroy, far less create.
Creativity is grounded in reason; and "Reason is the substance of the universe," (Hegel) Not pleasure; not pain. They are evaneseent: fast-fading postures.
At the end of a term of existence, when the bubble of consciousness merges into the ocean of the unconscious, when the universe (the total being) eraving, as it were, for the much-longed-for rest, falls into a state of stupor, when the pole star of existence is set the self gets involved and involuted, and attains the condition of - there is no better term to connote it - nothingness' - 'no-existence.' (A contradiction in terms, of course : “nothingness' and state.' Pardon me; I am of the essence of "time' and place' and my thoughts are encumbered and ensnared.) Then the awakened brahman'-greater awareness-goes into a deep slumber and qualifies itself to the attributeless state. This is that' - the incomparable indefinable “ONE. The eternal reality has become, to use the words of Mathew Arnold: “an emblem of the power of human life, and the bloom of human beauty hastening inevitably to diminuition and decay, yet in that very decay finding “Hope and a renovation without end ' ' It is the “ONE”- the noblest, the b2autifullest, the wisest, the justest, the sublimest, the best: a perfection in mind and body.
There is a beauty and a magnanimity in life, possessing which, we possess all that which is eminently
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desirable; and we are able to 'advance towards the brink in perfect serenity and with absolute conviction that we have lived it with a just heart devoid of hate for our fellow men.' Devoid of damning, and exploding and blasting. lf life's cause has been just and sublime and majstic, then why be beset wih doubts and fears in the twilight hours?
It would indeed be our fortune if we can have a classic symmetry of body and mind: "a jovous, fearless, versatile, deeply instructed life." This is true perfection that is attainable in this, our mundane existence, assisted, monitored and guided by our creative intent -- our will to be.
.pessimistic trend 4ره
Since our educational system, as in most other democratic countries, has been so geared as to coerce us and intimidate us to worm ourselves up the ladder of respectability and middle class super status morality; since our true self has been befouled and be leaguered; and since the world is, as it were, too much with us, we can never hope to beget a nation of creative thinkers and creative performers. Ours is a kerb market; guttersnipe, hooligan morality. Hence, look sharp; we must.
POSTSCRP
NATURAL LAWS AND FORMS : MAN- MADE
All natural laws, all natural forms, as they appear to man, and as conceived by him, are man-made. They are the outcome of an effort made by man to construe Nature's ways and her pattern of events. And man has made frightful formulae - some of them highly inscrutable and confounding - to express the natural laws which he has endeavoured to grasp with the aid of his mathematical and linguistic acumen. This is one aspect.
Reality resides in itself: not in man's beliefs and faiths and fideism. It is as simple as things, time,
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s nace, mass; push and pull, movement and i rest and other fundamental concepts of science and of "common sense." And we have used certain symbols some of them fright fully complicated, some very, very simple figures and forms - to give a meaning to the ways in which Nature's things have and move. Here is such a formula that has become handy for Einstein to resolve the expansiveness and the inter-relatedness of the uuiverse. It is this: E = Mc2. (E: energy, M: mass, C: the speed of light.) There are un pteen others. This is another aspect.
It is a single universe - all-that-which-is' -- that exists: a single "whole'; but man using his sensations, perceptions and experiences, has split up the 'one' existence into several configurations : visual forms, auditory forms, tactile forms, odorous forms, gustatory forms, time forms and space forms - to wit a multiplicity of man made forms, and thought patterns. A man deprived of any one of his sences has been deprived of the related forms. And when a man is in a state of deep slumber it would appear that no forms of any kind exist for him, though in reality they do exist. In fact they exist objectively, independently of man. In a sense, man has been creating through his senses all the forms that exist in relation to his 'sentient being
An instance will suffice. To a connoisseur of wine : A great bottle of wine is a noble creation, a work of art as well as science, a triumph of talent and initiative, a progeny of natural enviornment and cultural tradition. As complex as a Monet Landscape and as intricate as a Bach partity, such a wine is to the senses of smell and taste, what painting is to the eye, and music to the ear. It is an endless adventure of boundless joy enlivened by discovery of unexpected treasures.” (J. de. Blij)
The multeity of forms that have gone into the so called “universe' of man - thc bricks and the mortar, the metal and the steel rods - all are mere symbols. And the world is symbolic of man's multifaceted sensations and perceptions. An apt lllustration is man's faith, man's beliefs, man’s “bakti”, i man’s religion -- all, i all are the outcome of his optimisms and vanities: some of them
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useful; most, harmful. All the natural laws have helped man to translate Nature and give it a meaning. He has created Nature and formulated Nature's Laws. Man has created universal forms, and has attempted to bring ln order in place of primeval chaos. So he thinks, in his conceit. Surely you don't see a congeries of formulae floating about in nature investing it. But still they are all symbolic of the efforts made by scientists to compartmentalize and comprehend the world and its several laws. It is man's experience that has produced of the 'one' indivisible, indissoluble world, the many events that to man's senses appear to go to compose 1C, and govern its existence. From virus to man, from a particle of dust to the most distant nebula, man has seen them all, smelt them, touched them, heard them, felt them and resolved them into the multitude of forms, assemblages and laws that they appear to be. The creative faculty (ingenuity) of man has helped create the world after his own sensations and interpretations. But yet the world remains ‘what-it-is” : impenctrable and unresolvable : unindented, untouched. And here is a resume of all our reflections on : man the, creator.
The sole source of all man's knowledge is his experience gathered through the windows of sensations;
Fideism and arbitrariness, so far as the origin of knowledge is concerned, is not acceptable;
* Sensations help reveal only objective and related reality;
All forms and configurations are relative to man's sensations and perceptions;
* Things exist quite independently of man, and outside man;
' What "things' in truth constitute, is inscrutable. In all certainty it is the impenetrable, irresolvable 'one';
Man is the sole creator of his world of relativism i.e. related existence. His' cats and dogs and sealing wax and hours are his creations. He is the creator of all his phantom walls. Why then should man bother to figure out the unknowable unknown - the transcendental All that is idle fancy. Who can go counter to this notion: Having
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created our space-bound, time b in ind, matter bound, desirebound world, is it possible for us to go beyond our bounds? We are bound neck and crop. But still our thoughts have the power to figure out the "O NE. Spinoza and Plotinus and the vedic Rishis have come to our help in this supreme task of knowing the all-pervading 'singularity'-- single event.
LIFE'S POSTURES: INSPIRED FOLLIES
THE PHILOSOPHER THE PROPHET, THE POLITICO AND THE POET
WHO are these category of persons? What stations do they occupy in society? Are they creators or destroyers? Is it worth one's while bothering about their true worth, and attempting to assign to them their true place in society?
Well, we shall have to, since they come more into our separate lives than any other person or any other category, and since they conspire to make a dent in our lives. Their ideas have grown on us. And what are we?
It would appear that human nature at its instinctive level (ego) is not so moral as we would desire it to be (super ego). It is neither moral nor immoral. It is neutralamoral. But we have burdened it with a morality far in excess of what we normally could afford to flaunt and bear Hence the frustration; the break down in our attitude towards social behaviour norms. Society would expect us to be so and so. But more often than not we become misfits in society. We are either... far too self-assertive and antisocial, or far too "umble' like Uriah Heep and hypocritical.
Jhe philosopher
Of the postures we assume, the first, the philosopher, is the lever of truth. He goes in search of knowledge and (bhuthi), wisdom; and he has his weather eye open for truth, and truth; alone. In this context we have used three terminologies, namely : truth, knowledge, wisdom. Each. of these needs be clearly defined. What is truth?
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This is the most significant question in clarifying man's existence and its purpose. This was the question posed by Pontius Pilate some two thousand years ago. Pilate did not
have the patience and the sense of courtesy and the courage of a true leader of men, and administrator, to pause, ponder
listen, reflect and figure it out with discretion, courage and concern. He was like all of his kind, in an inordinate hurry. So he brushed aside the cardinal issue in life, namely, seeking the true significance of life and of exis
tence. Most men are of his sort. They pause not; they ponder not They weigh not the pros and the cons; they fail to investigate the main trends in existence, with circumspection and prudence. The general trend is to bypass great issues; to b3 blind to that phase of existence which certifies its being and becoming process; truths alone do matter in life; not desires, beliefs and faiths; for such as these mislead and befog.
The generality of mankind, be they civilized in the accepted, current sense of the word, be they barbarous, be they be of the chosen clan or of the pagan lot, be they be believers, fideists or infidels, is, in the process of living a cravenly life, mali ked by a greedy trend. Mankind is seldom or never in quest of truth. They pretend to be. The only human being who seeks out the truth is the true philosopher. He does not suffer his vision to be blurred, his thinking to be clouded by his corrosive cravings for power, for status, pelf and filthy lucre, his insatiable desire to satisfy his carnal yearnings, and his inherent urge to preserve himself. He has steeped himself in wisdom. His vocation, his sole trade is thinking; investigating the details of existence, and discovering the truth that resides in things and events. He notes with perfect precision and candour that all truths are relative; seldom absolute and transcendental - the other side this existence. (This notion of "transcendence's beats my understanding hollow.) He has no preconceived notions, no handed down encumbrances in the form of beliefs, revelations and faiths. In other words he is never conditioned and dictated to by dissipating, ensnaring mental or physical concomitant circumstances. He is not tied to a mass civilization whose dominant feature is the decadence of wisdom. “He is', in the words of Jean Paul Sartre “alone,

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severely alone.' He has so depersonalized himself as not to get caught to the flix of chance change, in which the ordinary mortals sink or swim. His supreme task in life is to see nature as a whole, discover the relativism (knowledge is relative) in it; that is to say, make an unremitting effort to trace the concatenation of events in Nature in their correct order, their particulars, and relate himself to her as a natural being to all the other events in Nature - his ambience.
He neither extolls his fellow men far in excess of their deserts, nor belittles them; and neither does he belite the other events in nature and make them subservient to man. He attempts to give himself and other events (things) in nature each its own, rightful and legitimate place, and sets unon it its due value. He notes that: “there are general grades of biological organization, and that a beetle is a higher organism than a sponge, or a human being than a frog. There is a greater value in the fulness of love than in sexual gratification, in selfless than in self-regarding activities.' (). Huxley)
He stretches out towards the truth: the essence in things. He judges things correctly, and interprets the universe and he deals with their meanings and values however insignificant they might appear to be, assisted in this regard by a clear intellect : unbiased, unconditioned and free. He seldom clouds issues, by putting his self-regard into them, Since he purports to see, to trace, to evaluate events he does not permit his emotional ties, his partial religious convictions, his evangelical fideism, his traditional beliefs, and superstitious ineptitudes to come between himself and the rest of nature's events. He sees things as they are: in their pristine purity and naivety. He is able to impart a smart emphasis to... events, guided by a clear prevision. He sees that the generality in forms is brought about by thoughts. » (Averroes)
Has it not been said that the prime concern of the philosopher is truth, naked truth; drastically divested of any emotional colouring, any sentimental staint, any selfseeking restraints, to wit any form of conditioning of any
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sort. He knows no enslaving, ensnaring, hard-boiled loyalties; no handicapping, circumscribing circumstances. The shades of the prison house of hidebound, pedestrian, early childhood education have not closed upon him. He is naively detached, neutral, uurestrained and perfectly free. He is like unto a skylark that winging upwards into the ethereal blue, “singing ever dost soar and soaring ever singest.' Neither clinging favouritism, nor crunching nepotism; neither besieging sycophancy nor pettyfogging politicking, nor pecuniary motives of any sort can lay siege to his notions, his judgements or his way of life. He is truly a free man.
He resembles a scientist in that he is ever ready and willing to expose his notions, his findings to the acid test of every possible kind of verification which revelations and prophetic utterances can never withstand analysis. “The universal experience of mankind verifies the philosopher's findings, and "they can be verified at any time by anybody."
When he relates the truths, the things as they are grounded in their totality of existence (unified field) and then relates them to his own, knowledge or wisdom (bhuthi) dawns on him. He is now able to see events in their true perspective. Never does he attach himself to any event by emotional or sentimental nexus: saying and believing : This and this alone is absolute knowledge or perfection. Though resourceful he does not draw any kind of inspiration from his imagination. Divination and conjecture and miracle-making are anathema to him. He is so equipped as to be able
“o bear all naked truths, And to envisage
circumstance, all calm : That is the top of sovereignty.' ' (Keats)
To a human being endowed with a philosophic attitude of mind life presents such a vast and extensive, encompassing perspective as would serve to calm his fretted ego. He bodies forth the noblest and the best and grandest of ideas in their “most secret lineaments. Having come in close proximity to another body of facts, not his own, he bothers not to “discover a wart nor to pry into a pore.' He deals with everyone, friend and foe alike with equity
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and compassion. In his mind the world is a meaningful whole' for he sees the sun shining on palace and hovel alike, on the green sward and the dreary desert, and the heavens, dropping its precious tears, as it were, on the good and the evil, the saint and the sinner alike.
There are infinite perplexities in nature, since nature is essentially inexhaustible and impenetrable and baffling But the philosopher knows his frontiers. He knows where to draw the line and how to demarcate the area of the known from that of the unknown; the discernible from the indiscernible, the discrete from the indiscrete. For him there is no such distinction as the physical and the metaphysical - that which is on the other side the physical - matter and mind, the material and the spiritual, this-worldly and other-worldly, the immanent and the transcendental. He seldom or never entertains hazy and mushy notions of events; and if he does, his infinite effort is to free himself from them and get them so resolved as to make them clear and unambiguous When he attempts to investigate things or events, he does so with the greatest care and caution, and true seriousness and trepidation and prudence. He stops at the threshold of the unknowable. He has no pretences, no distinctive garbs to don. He goes step by step sounding his way. He has firm econviction in the adage : Discretion is the better part of valour.
He feels, he sees, he selects, he rejects, and he confirms and accepts; he weighs and deliberates; he collects and collates information; he heaps reflection upon reflection, recollection upon recollection; he links idea with idea; he clarifies and consolidates the stand he has taken; he sifts and he winnows all the available evidence at his disposal. All these he does until he hits upon the true strings of situations: the right link that subsists between one event and another, and the right relationship that subsumes the chosen event and the totality, of known events - (the unified field) that nature, as known to mankind, is. He bases the totality of existence not on any external ultimate cause, but on the simplest law of existence : the inveterate law of necessity: that is, that "things are.' It is an endless, beginingless process. The whys and the wehrefores of existence
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are fully grounded in the principle of: 'things to be." He does not evade the issue of the hard fact of existence; but owns his inability to solve it; that is to say, he makes a genuine effort to discover a palpable cause for it, if there be any, by grounding it in the inevitable and undeniable principle of necessity." In brief, he makes a genuine attempt to understand things not by short-cutting the supreme and sublime fact of existence by assigning a “causeless cause” or ultimate cause” or “un moved mover”, but by frankly stating that things exist in virtue of the inherent necessity to exist. They simply are. They exist. Why? How? - No answer. All idle maunderings. This notion of “sheer necessity' may, at first glance, seem somewhat fantastic and bizarre; but the one fact one must willy-nilly admit is that it is free from phantasies that abound in the other explanations of existence proffered by the prophets, saints and sages. The notion of “sheer necessity' is a logical fiction like mathematical points and instants. It supports one like a hovel post, the roof. Discard it when not needed.
JAe philosopher and the scientist are on the same footing,
Their domain of exploration is the same. The only difference is that while the scientist is concerned with probing the mysteries of natural phenomena experimentally, the philosopher is deeply concerned with making use of all the scientific data, the entire gamut of scientific hypotheses and theories and discoveries for relating them to the totality of events that constitute nature. While the scientists' stock-in-trade is facts and facts alone and the physical laws, the stockpile of the philosopher is truth": truth being no other than bonded facts rendered superbly and supremely meaningful and relativistic It is one singie integrated whole; and may be compared to the "Gestalt of the psychologist. Whereas from the point of view of the scientist there are isolated facts, in the view of the philosopher there exists only a totality of cosmic events: call it what you will - Univerce or Nature or totality of cxistence, or 'all-that - which-is' or the 'whole-of-truth": closely linked and tightly bonded : "unified field': the
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divine event. Even God has to exist in consonance with Nature's laws.
In the past, for instance, in the 18th and early 19th centuries, it was possible to draw a line separating the pursuits of a scientist from those of a philosopher. But the present century, being riper in its notions of things than the previous ones, it is impossible to separate them The seekers after truth of today may appropriately be called philosopher-scientists' The physicist of today deals with more and mihre of mathematical abstractions and inferences, in as much as the mathematician and mathematical philosopher does. An Einstein or a Max Planck, an A. R. Walace or a William Ramsay, a Charles Darwin om a Sir James Jeans, a Spinoza or a Henri P pincare”, a Deg Carte or a David Hume, a Dewit or a Nicolai and several others of their category are all philosopher-scientists or scientistphilosophers. The philosophio thinking of today: logical reasoning: has barged into the domain of pure science; laid siege to it; and having beleaguered it, has attempted to get a more realistic and a truer plenary vision of things with the aid of the amalgam so obtained. Albert Einstein's Theory of Relativity and Unified Field theory and “General Smuts” “holistic philosophy” are cases in point.
Since the philosopher is perfectly free to think, his findings are necessarily truths or near-truths. They are seldom inadequate thoughts. Whatever the philosopher has found in the form of truths are "thought quanta' or integrated wholes, and assume the status of objective, coherent, pragmatic notions, that is to say, a meaningful practicality attaches to every one of them. They are philosophical truths of a perfectly empirical nature with a useful and practical end subsuming each. Philosophic truths are more realistic and less idealistic, and less unrealistic, less vague, less confusing. They exclude the existence of any truth grounded in the imagination, for products of the imagination are mere chimeras, images and whims and fancies. They are figments and vagaries and airy nothings. They are of fancy's breed: all whims and phantoms: off the chump, crazy notions.
To this category of knowledge and existences belong spirits and ghosts, devils and ghouls and other supernal
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beings. They exist not as objective realities. Philosophic truths, on the other hand, are go ounded in absolute verfi ble realities. They are the brutal f.cts of exister ce perceptual relations, and they are capable of being pursued along an unending catena of events which, in their reality and relationships, help figure nature: so multifaceted, so multirelated, so multiformed. Thus the conclusions of philosophers and the principles f rmulated and enunciated and bodied forth by them have help d to melt away the blinkers and barriers that obstructed man's limited vision that otherwise would necessarily have been matter-bound
As emanations and extensions of truths there are the genuine values that take us to a province (ethics), where they pitch us in such situations as would enable us to lead a meaningful and useful life. Philosophical truths, i.e. logical systematization of scientific data and due cogniZance of Nature's laws, in their application to human life, bring human beings in touch with the great, orderly values of human conduct, namely : truth, love, beauty and goodness. - terms far too flayed from the pulpit, and the forum. There is an immutable constancy and consistency in them; a permanency that can never be dissolved; a sublimity and a plenary inspiration that time can neither wither nor circumstance fade. A clear understanding of these great values is very essential for one for leading a life of norm. In the absence of these moral emergences and emanations; which enable a human being to order his life, and straitlace it, to integrate it and orientate it in relation to the lives of other human beings, their possessions, their urges and their aspirations; human society will turn out to be deplorably chaotic, disorderly and discordant; and human life will lose the sublime significance that attaches to it. Hence a dissipation of, and dissolution in human values will necessarily have a disruptive trend; and in their absense, society will become disorganized, and discordant; and eventually it would disintegrate. Hence many a husband has to ba made to be drunk to make him live, and many a wife has to become a punk to make her husband realize the value of chastity.
It is in the absence of these great values of life in our so-called leaders of society that they get befuddled
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and muddled, b come depraved and bestial in their behaviour, and plu 'ge them elves and their followers and their countries into wars and revolutions, internecine feuds and insurgent terrorist modes The majority of our leaders of nations are lamentably lacking in clarity of vision and foresight, forethought and in the great values of life. They are in extreme penury and are duds and dullards, self-seekers and egocentred fanatical monsters, petulant morons, mongols, fools, swindlers and swashbucklers. They cling to life ignobly and passionately like ticks on a mangv cur. Most of those men the accounts of whose misadventures fill thousands of pages of our historical tomes are no other than man-haters, power-seekers, murderers and marauders of the first water. Accounts of the misdeeds of many an Alexander, a Hitler, Clive, Wellington, Napoleon and Drake have found their way in our school history books. And all our children are fed and nourished, nay poisoned with lies, downright lies, and titanic lies and ossified notions of glorified empires and purity of race and are being indoctrinated so early in life with ideas of the horrible deeds of these horrible monsters and mass murderers. These buccaneers and murderers and public criminals have been dubbed heroes and builders of nations and founders of empires. In plain truth they are the abject destroyers of human society; they are the demolishers of the sacred images of compassion, 'ahimsa' and beauty, truth and justice; they are the crucifiers of humanity (MAN) on the cross of their insatiable and inordinate thirst for power and pelf, their unquenchable desire to lord it over weaker, feebler, less affluent races of mankind. In their abysmal ignorance and by their swanky behaviour they have successfully destroyed the Christhood in man. They have perforce acquired the language of the evangelizing horde: love thy neighbour as thyself: God bless, under the gauzy and flimsy guise of conquest and evangelization - all done with violence. How many fine, vigorous, naive races of people: the Maoris of New Zealand, the aborigines of Tasmania, and Australia, the Red Indians of North America, the Pueblo Indians of South America, have been decimated just as much as the herds of bison that roamed the Prairies of North America, and the passenger pigeons that swarmed in the forests of the early British Colonies of North America have been.
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They have all been decimated, and rendered extinct. Why, in the name of the Father that art in heaven' have all these enormities been perpetrated? In so far as man takes pride in the performance of these deeds of self-seeking; of self-satisfying his low desires, his will-to-power, and will to self-protection and eslf-preservation, and of maiming brother man and lording it over him, and ranting, raging and destroying under the guise of empire building, and extending the kingdom of heaven on earth; of mobilizing wealth, of propagating what they consider the true faith for the greater glory of God and his king on earth, he is deplorably lacking in adequate thinking. His habits lie too deep to be changed; for his "instincts provide a mechanism for acting without (rationality) and fot esight.” (B. Russell). He is actuated more by the lower instincts and passions and fanaticism and obscurantism, big try and self-regard than by his intellect, rationality and wisdom. A great deal of passion, befouled feeling, and muddled thinking have gone into each and every decision of his, and clouded it It won't be far from the truth to state that the world of human beings has, but for a few bright spots, throughout, been governed by incoherent ideas, and misty, vague, notions; and the outcome is a stupid society teeming with crazy nincompoops, charlatans and mountebanks, fools and flunkeys, all the time wallowing in some fluid situation or other. Even the great Patanjali's image is being badly damaged, smudged and defaced by the spurious Yogis of today. The magic rod of fanaticism is preserved in the adytum of human nature and needs only the re-exciting warmth of a master hand to bud forth afresh and produce the old fruits.' (Coleridge). The light of true knowledge, of true understanding ("pragnans') has therefore to be beamed on the festering tumour, and the malignancy rooted out.
This is a tremendous task - the task of liberating the world that is in chains. Man has to be disclassed, and rendered creed free and caste free. His faith has to go bang; and so should his status snobbery, and cheap pretensions of classy jobs, and cushy places. For the present let us not press this question beyond a point. When reason clawns on us our ineptitudes will wither away; and the question turns on the crucial issue: violence or "ahimsa',
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which is appropriate? And this task of emancipation can 2 performed only by the philosopher-scientist and not by self-seeking, ego-centred politicos. The governments of the world tend to get entangled in the strangle hold of butchers, bakers and candlestick makers, black-smiths and road-menders. In other words the servants have become the rulers. In a way it is good for power to be in the hands of those who produce the necessaries of life : the products of human art. But, in sober earnest it must be said that the ragged rabble has more of the brawn than of the brain; and as such, should't man seek the philosopher king's faithful guidance and undaunted wisdom?
Haven't our parliaments and our clerical confabulations bcome the breeding dens of lies and falsehood, fraud and intrigue? Our diplomacy is an innocent guise for fraudulence and treachery; our entente cordiales breed hatred for the other man; envy and greed have become our stock-in-trade.
It is most disquieting, distressing and painful to think how man can still be dabbling in filth and dirt; in superstition, obscurantism and claptrap; how he wallows like swine in the dirtiest and most deceptive ditch call led political polemics The more the world studies and discusses its affairs governed by inadequate knowledge, denuded of true wisdom (bhuthi) shrouded in a hidebound doctrine, the more it plunges into the slough of dissembling and nest of lies. And, the more mankind moves in the direction of perpetual gloom and crass ignorance the more it gets entangled in obscurity and obscurantism - avidya.
The solution for this unhappy involvement lies in the hands of the philosopher-scientist, the "philosopher-king', the man of true wisdom (bhuthi), of enlightenment - that man who is free from any attachments, any form of conditioning; that man who has neither caste nor crippling creed; neither ethnic nor tribal prejudices. Here is a breed of men that mankind has to aim at begetting. This should be considered to be the supreme task of humanity. It's an ill bird that fouls its own nest.
To a philosopher-scientist, existence, that is Nature, in its multeity of forms, is not dull and prosy, but is
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enlivened and is spilling over with a meaningful meaning. It has a fulness and a wholeness yet to be fully conceived and apprehended. He sees a new universe emerging at every moment of his nexus with it. It is emergent evolution. The universe is not a mare provincial episode', but a universal, encompassing one, brim-full of newer and newer meaning - the outcome of his awakening consciousness. This is a holistic and vedic notion that has "emergent evolution' as its basic principle, and a unified field' where matter and mind are indissolubly interfused, and do cohere.
Unlike the philosopher-scientist the prophet, as presented to us, and in terms of the imprint he has left on our minds, is an ignorant person, embittered by class and tribal prejudice, emotionally high strung and obsessed who has a sentimental attachment to, and interest in, safeguarding a particular community or race or tribe of primitive people with primitive ideas, and a primitive unkindled way of life, who has a set of moral values based on inadequate knowledge of nature and of the laws governing nature; whose chief concern is to unite his clan or community or tribe with a system of laws, an arbitrary yet cast iron social regimen, which he propounds or which he has collected, collated and codified under the title: the law of the covenant. He is a self-appointed, self-elevated public figure enraged by social injustice.' (Tomlin) He claims divine inspiration. He bas very little wisdom in him - that width of plenary vision with a sympathetic and all-embracing companionable view of the entire human race in its endeavours to attain greater awakening - since his actions and utterances are all supervened by an incoherent, inchoate and disintegrated, disjointed jumble of ideas. He appeals mainly to the imagination and to the feelings that tingle the nerves of his adherents who are all ignorant men - ignorant in the sense, they are seldom or never governed by a system of kindled notions and a clear vision of life and its trends. Hence miracle-mongering and other-worldliness form his chief stockpile. He seldom appeals to pure reason and to the human unity that subsists in one's rationality and ethical mode. Since he has to deal with very primitive, tribal and ignorant men, he is mainly concerned with making the members of his tribe obey the tribal laws, and
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to be true to the tribal deity, and be subservient to the Ark of the Covenant, the Laws of the Talmud and the Torah. He is a genius, in the sense, he has the capacity and the emotional dive with which to instill fear and obedience into them, and command his followers, and make them so conduct themselves as to be blindly obedient to the set laws. His religious notions are pure myths, and his hierarchy of gods and goddesses, of angels and spirit forms are the figments of his powerful imagination Whatever may be said in his favour may be attributed to his inherent capacity to organize and structure a social edifice, strait lace it, and make it an orderly social group, governed and guided by blind faith and groundless beliefs: fideism of a sort.
In this respect the prophetic influence is grounded in fear. It has a fear base, and it is something akin to that of a police force that maintains law and order by striking fear and terror into the hearts of the rabble. It is lamentaby lacki g in freedom of thought, freedom of expression; and at its best it can only be beneficial in so far as the peaceful conduct of its members may be secured with ease. It is essentially formal; relentlessly exacting.
Since this mass of prophetic information is a ponderous body of surmise and speculation, of inadequate thinking, and is constantly under some form of pressure or constraint, to wot coersion, it can never by conducive to the growth and evolution of pure intelligence in man. In its worst form it can assume the configuration of an autocratic form of government controlled by a cast-iron system of irrational laws and tribal conventions. The outcome of such a system will be nothing short of slavery under the autocratic control of a powerful mad hatter.
The teachings of the “so-called prophets' have, therefore, to be decried and denounced since thay are grounded on sheer ignorance, myth and story, magic, sorcery and thaumaturgy. Almost all the religious leaders of the world with perhaps the exception of the Buddha, Confucius, Zoraster and Chuang Tze, were emotionally strung men who relied solely on their imagination for building up their quaint cosmologies, and scCial systems
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The stock-in-trade of the religious teachers and their evana gelic followers is pure and simple emotional stuff and baseless superstition: all avidya'. They appealed more to the raw ambivalent emotions of man than to his rationality. Their approach to any issue is seldom scientific, never intellectual, never philosophic; far from circumspect: thoroughly tribal and explosive and fanatical. It is mere sounding brass and tinkling cynibal, marked by a characteristic poverty of thought. hey don’t understand what they do. It is through pure ignorance, debased and degraded thoughts and superstitio' and blind faith in an ur known, unfelt and ill-founded existence that they approach their adherents. They ensnare them in a web of sentimental stuff Their teachings have a fear base and a slavish trend. They stop not at the unknowable; they plunge head long into it. But they will not succeed unravelling the mystery try they never so hard. They delude remorselessly with their self.styled power to divine. Rewards and punishments, heaven and hell, Satan and his compeers, the Archangel and his ethereal hosts, ghosts and goblins, devas, devils and succubuses, bad effects and good effects of the ruling cardinal signs of the Zodiac reigning in the skyey dome at the hour of birth of a person, and many such uncertain and inadequate configurations and confrontations in time and space: all products of a morbid imagination; extravagant rites and mystic influences, sacrifices, some gruesome like sati, horrendous beyond words, enabled the prophets, the religious teachers and others of their like to enslave humanity and make it the hodgepodge that it is today. So much so, that we can justifiably assume that the group-mind' of the tribe is no other than a hash, a jumble of ill-assorted ambivalent emotions, mingled minds and their ill-effects. And throughout the ages, as the years rolled on, man has been butchered, murdered, enslaved and brought into the sanctuary of sorrow, under the name of religion, by the so-called prophets and their darkening, ominous and mystical utterances. Thus open-minded and truth-seeking man (for instance
Galileo, Bruno) has been brought to a disabled, disjointe State. What an intellectual may hem!
What the prophet (and others of his category) he and feels and perceives is confused to a greater of
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less extent, for his perceptions are basically frayed, blended, mingled, indistinct, and vague. Not so the philosopher scientist's notions of things There isn't much of vagueness in his art of correlating facts, and his perceptions are less emotion tainted, and his hypotheses are only tools to be discarded when not needed. They are not hidebound faiths. The prophet's deeds had, more often than not, given the lie to his words; and success had often turned his head, and made him a dictator : very, very egotistic, and fanatical.
Hence, time is ripe that man disowns and dethrones his prophetic, self-styled religious teachers and such mentors as dabble in wonder-working and faith cures, the messiahs and Mahdis and avatars; and reviews and revises and collates their ideas and teachings, articles of faith, their appetitive urges, their dogmas and their accredited doctrines, their institutionalized religious rites, and precepts and moral codes afresh in the light of his pure intelligence and his rationality, completely disregarding any sort of pressurization from any quarter. Leave man in the ditch - his original home: his homely niche, and he will create himself. You, clerics, you can't. He will discover his common humanity. It is high time man had a revision of all his accredited doctrines and dogmas; his mind - matter confrontations and mutual rapprochement; for who can say with certainty where matter ends and mind commences? Says Bertrand Russell: "matter is not so material, and mind not so mental as is generally supposed.'
Religion, if it is to be of any worth, has to be reviewed, rehashed, revised, revalidated and revalued and rendered viable in its new dimensions of rationality and scientific approach to all problems of life, to all life's posturings; and grounded on pure reason and plain common sense. The grain shall have to be separated from the chaff, winnowed and husked, rendered pure and wholesome, and free from any kind of spurious guise. But the tragedy of the situation is that man enslaved as he is, conditioned by and enshrouded in the many inadequate notions, mind: matter dualism, superstitious beliefs and delusions and in the orgy of sorcery, magic and thaumaturgy in which he has got ensnared; hasn't the courage to analyse his own
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convictions; to take a detached view of them; to examine his beliefs and faiths and his own maxims and ethic and say: Here I am; I am my own genuine self. I have
divested myself of all my inapt and inept accretions of religion and caste and cultural bonds and political bents, ethnic ties, and guttersnipe habits and traditional mores, and am in a position to review the whole of existence in the new light of pure intelligence, correct reasoning and clear understanding, and to live a life of usefulness. Such a person is the best of all, and he is all in all. He seldom or never destroys; he builds. Neither does he question nor despise; but he teaches, directs and reverences all that is good; all that is true; all that is noble and just and wise. He is not clever. Nor is he an adept in the art of dissembling and diplomacy. He is naive and simple, yet solid and firm like a rock of adamant. In the
words of Thomas Carlyle: “What clearness, brilliancy, justness, penetration Who can doubt this man is right?' He is the original man, and he stands far above us, and he wishes to wrench us from our old fixtures, and elevate us to a higher and clearer level . . . but we demur, we resist, we even give battle; we still suspect that he is above us.'
And this, in true judgement, is the correct posture.
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THE POLITICO
Enough hass been said els euv here to delin easte thia posture. And so uvo shall be content upith summing wp what has already been said.
It may be said of many a politico. He eats into
the core of the heart of the values of the world, worms his way into its solidity, rotting it, poisoning it. The politicos have to be put into a new cast and moulded anew, for they seldom have a peaceful and harmonious understanding of life and its natural trends. Can a mango sprout out of a coconut? They are attempting the impossible. Their mind shuttles back and forward in their desire to convert the others to their way of believing and acting. They are, in their last extremity idolators, steeped in hide - bound Superatitions. In their effort to gratify their desires they fail to think rightly, deeply and profoundly. They often forsake the right to pursue the expedient. What you are is what you would be. You are your own architect; but not so your politico. Not Oven your cleric, He came and he grabbed, and he grubbed." Every one of his thoughts has been caked over in human blood; and in evil. This might aptly apply to the politico.
Onward journey:- "It was roses, roses all the way'
- R. Browning Return journey:- "On the housetop was no woman But spat towards him and hissed, No child but screamed out curses And shook its little fist."
- Macaulay
THE POET
THE POET IS, in no wise, on all occasions, a sane and clear thinker. He is an amalgam of clear vision and imaginative incongruities: a conglomeration of emotion, impulse, passion and thought. He is never the pure - bred intellectual that he is considered to be. He is seemingly an ambivert. Since he is

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prolific and varied in his; thoughts assorted and disorderly in his perceptions and feelings; his productions and his creations, his notios aņd sentiments, his wanton accounts, his terse epigrams and artful dialogues; his soul-stirring, scintillating, paeans, need be sifted; and the grist separated frore...the chaft. His laurels are not always straight.
Despite, the fact that throughout the long and chequered story of man the poet, has hitherto been assigned his pride of place among the elite of the world. His claim to clear, thinking and intellectual reasoning has to be, denounced: the reason being that he has permitted himself to be lifted out of true existence on the swift wings of his emotions, and enthroned in the limbo of his riotous imagination which is the fountainhead of all inadequate thinking, state. of tension and suspense, false ideas chimeras and phantoms. Once he gets uprooted from the realities of existence - the hard facts of life - and sojourns in the vagaries of his imagination, his fears, and, whims and fancies: not, in the present but in his prospects s his, iyory tower-he, severs hims:lf from life's realities. 1.
sd True, it is that there have been great : poets of the class and intellectual calibre of Pindar, Shakespeare and Goethe, Milton and Virgil. Dante and Valmiki and Kalidasa and Vyasa who have had their influence on society, who have provided, at leas; a se!eçt minority group of scholars and connoisseurs, with matter for entertainment, a solid ground for the stablishing of a stable civilization; yet, it will have to be admitted when the subject of clear, rational thinking becomes the pivotal point of our disquisitions, that most of their notions are emotional, and impassioned outpourings of the heart, and half-baked truths, and that they are only of the sort that passes muster for marginal valies. It is very difficult to affirm that the frontiers of their ideas are identical with those of the philosopher and the scientist. In a restricted sense they "hay be considered to be wise, since some of their pronouncements and utterances border on sublimity. Poetical notions of the highest order, like those of Homer and Goethe. Shakespeare and Pindar and Virgil are, at best ... sublime nd impassioned musings of the supremest order, magaanimous in their effects, but lacking in absolute truth and . he potency that truth provokes, and in their R..." , , ,
,f {جتن

their plenary' content.' Their thoughts are a "mixed bag of chaff and grain. They will have to be winnowed and prudently sorted Out,
literature, titles, and honours went with compliancy; they were seldom conferred on profound and independent thinkers, True genius had no place in the courts o princes' Buckle. In the Tamil Nad of the days of yore the poets had often sold their birthright for a mess of pottage. That mentality still persists among the Tamil people. They seldon had any powers of thinking like the literati of the court of Louis xiv. of France, for having risen in status with the king's favour, they suffered themselves to be laid siege to by the will of their rulers and benefactors who were invariably and inteller actually morons. In such a situation the spirit of inquiry had beeR Smothered and extinguished both by the rulers and the religious orders, more often than not they served as trinkets to adorn the courts of princes. They sang of hunger and thirst and starvation, poverty and penury of heart and penury of mind. Their poeiry was suppliant, slavish, snivelling and cringing; often pretentioús seldom free, and sincere outpourings of the heart. They hadn't the capacity to think and reflect and beget great thoughts like free men. They were not bold thinkers, but babies in swaddling clothes. If at all they had thoughts, their thinking was lacking in vigour, curtailed by the stupid personal caprice of their rulers - the princes. Great poets have invariably dealt with great themes such as love and truth, heroism, mercy, beauty and justice. They have attempted to lift man sunk in the morass of degradation, disgust and despondency and the slough of sensuality, and the mush of small talk and to purify him and ennoble him with their tragic literature. They have even attempted to make man sensible and sober by alternately buffeting him with blows and embracing him in their caresses just as mahouts do with wild elephants when they want to tame them. Their thoughts and their words have come to us like water trickling from the rock of adamant. The instruction they can give us is like baked bread, savoury and satisfying for a single day,' but "flour cannot be sown, and seed- corn ought to be ground. Their themes all catharitic, their connoisseur can rest in peace
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They help purge the indigested offensive stuff. They are catheters that relieve us of our tensions and stresses, frustrations and obstructions.
All these things the poets can do, but they are seldom redeemers; they may even plunge man from one depth of des. pondency into a still greater depth of perplexity. Satan, the king of evil, was placed in such a plight by the almighty power. He was confused and confounded. If the poets are able at one moment to lift you as a wave, inspirit you with their impetuosity, and "drive you over the universe like withered leaves to quicken a new btrih", they are also equally capable of dropping you, on a kerbstone, sinking you, depressing you and making you "bloed with a heavy weight of hours', the next moment. You are simply lifted, and you are wantonly dropped. Your soaring hopes and your depressing fears have been expatriated. That is what the poet does with man.
He merely portrays life, and interprets it. He has heaps of myths, a stockpile of superstitions and delusions, and he plunges man into them. He seldon provides man with a permanency and width of vision that is constant, that neither waxes nor wanes, neither flags nor envigorates, neither blinks nor blinds, but leaves man with a bizarre, bleak, forlorn and a far - away fretted feeling; wayward, messy, and impermanent. Man, in such a circumstance, becomes a mere pawn in the hands of a poet; and the poet treats him in the same spirit of unconcern that inveterate Fate does, with scant regard and naeagre respect for bis inner feeling, deep - seated sentiments, lofty, Soaring aspirations and intrinsic urges. The poet makes a bauble of man; and in such a state man "perceives things more or less but always with a considerable amount of vagueness and confusion.' He weaves far too much of the fatalistic elements of chance and hazard into the fabric of man's being, and makes him a feeble thing like a reed shaken in the wind. He makes man wayward, and renders him as impermanent as dreams; as flimsy as gossamers. He disappoints him, and nips his hopes before they could be realized. He creates him a child of his whims and fancies - his illusions, smaya), blear-eyed and blind.
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In the concept of the poet man is meant to be battered and buffeted and deluded by a pitiless Fate like a mouse by a cat, and thus rendered ineffective and utterly insignificant. He puts man in chains. Every star, every, planet, every Zodiacal light has its hard crunch on him. Even so the poet has designed man's life. All man's hopes, fears, and aspirations the poet has linked up with the asceadancy of some ruling zodiac or other. Hamlet was brought under a ruinous and ominous group of stars so was Lear; so was Macbeth, and Julius Caesar, and Mark Antony. Cleopatra and even Miranda. Niggardly Fate brought them upon this earthly stage under the reign of an appropriate group of stars; and niggardly. Fate conspired to give them breathing space to strut and play upon it; and niggardly Fate swept them off the stage just as one would treat a venomous bug. How helpless man has been rendered by the forces of unforeseen chance Man has been impelled to hazard all his eggs in one basket. Sparkle and brilliancy a poet has, but not that depth of feeling, that intimacy and clarity of vision that the philosopher is capable of marshalling. Doesn't the poet treat man like trash? Like gutte dirt? Man is in the dumps;
Relying far too much on the dead past and the dimly visible dreamy prospect, man has been denuded of all his powers, his might and main the potency of his powerful understanding, his true knowledge and his wisdom. He has been rendered giddy, dreamy and riotous. .
None the less there are certain a spects of the craft of a poet that are ennobling, grand and sublime since they have their spring in the advtum of his inner nature. In the words of P. B. Shelley: "To be a poet is to apprehend the true and the beautiful. in a word the good which exists in the relation, subsisting, first between existence and perception, and secondly between perception and expression.' And betwixt perception and expression there is many a slip. And many a would-be pdet has failed miserably. ܫ
If apprehension of truth and beauty and their expression is the principal function of the poet, then, pardon me, he is nowise different from the philosopher. But the difference between
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then libs in this, that whereas the philosopher's șole function is the apprehension of the truth and order that teside in existence, the wholeness and fulness, the summa of existence, the poet in thms attempt strays far away from the whole truth, since he frequently gets entangled in the snares of his imagination, and in doing so sneaks into labyrinths that perplex and lead nowhere, but prove to be bfind alleys. The poet does occasionally put on man blinkers. and he straitlaces his vision, often obstructs it and limits the full scope of his intellect by emotional and lecherous side - trackings, barricades and barriers. Still Shelley maintains that the "poet participates in the eternal, the infinite and the One”. În this regard the poet, is in no way a stranger to the very same notions, "the auances and polish and resignation " that have become this stock-in-trade of the philosopher. ne poet deals more with colours, forms athd motion than the philosopher. Hence he suffers himself to be "deluded, to be borne on the alry wings of his high - flown, high falutin' feelings; emotions, passions and ecstatic heights; and is very often swept off his feet, and thus suffered to lose his equipoise. I do hot think a poet would mess up things, or a phiesopher either; but this I do khow with certainty: a prophet tah, 'ind a pufftcottivariably does.
But still to the credit of the great poets, it may be said that they are more often than otherwise at a point 'uf vantage with the philosophers. They are both alike. They are at one as regards their objectives. They feel alike, they think alike they apprehend the truth alike. They give their thought ashase and a life. But with one difference. The poet's imaginatidin bodies forth the form of things unseen; his pen tirns them to shape. He is on the frayed fringe of the bcean of beatific vision" And "poetry is the record of the best and happiest moments of the happiest and best minds." (Philip Sydney). But yet, there have been poets like Pope who have made their mind a mill for turning verses. - Dr. Johnson. The poet has seen, and he reveals it; we hear and believe, but do not behold-brim." (Carlyle.)
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But all the "same, it would 'appear that 'in 'their dischn. tive capacity the philosophers' are a step ahead of the poets. The pọẹt and the • philosơpher mày be bracketed’’as • craftsmen plying allied, if not the same trade. Their interests assimilate, for both the philosopher and the poet are free from the corruptions of their corruptible times and they have the intellectual capacity ind the courage of their convictions to stand aloof from the oùghánidumble of life: the political upsurts, reocial upheavals $ér† party strifes, wars and insurrections, internecine Yetta'and' if urgencies; and are able to take a detached view of events is they come in into their gamut of experiences, Notwithstanding the fact that there is a great deal ef bucolic, lecherous and erotic delicacy in the poetry of some eminent poets say for instance in that of Homer, Virgil and Byron, there is an incolàparàble perfection“ín' it, anđa thóusänd 'foldo exprès siveness not mere rhetorich trope' that takes the poetto, as close and as high a pedestal as that occupied' by the philosopher. The poets is less * cold, less *wootten, leis frigid; the philosopher ón the other hand is more lucid, 'hore precise' and more terse and more meaningful, stfore orderly, more'thoughtful, more thought provoking. more methodical; much hearer the truth than the poet. While the poetis, ingerival, in'altáneooloñéfalo féhsión,"tres añd often of turmoil, the philosoper may be adjudged to be in a rondition of mental calm-'Shanti'. An impfuhnt poet cuts life short with a hideous infarction. The philosopher has correlated, coalesced and tightly knit nature and discovered the 'One' init; the poet has gone a step further, He has improved on nature. put "something more' into it. Nature's world is brazen.' the poets only deliver, a golden.
The philosopher builds upon the depth of nature. The poet in the first light giver to ignorance, the first nurse." (Philip Sydney) Philosophy and science are inseparables. The poet asight of course, be closer to nature, and rnature's warmth of feeling.
The poot has an immediate, perception of truths, strice he relies of intuitional yet arbitrary choice and inspiration. The hilosopher has a mediate and surer understanding of events. e is sure-footed. He is capalbo of giving a kerp drill to every Wayfarer. He "shows the way. He leads on. He imparts a poise
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to life. The poet "animates and sustains the life of all and imparts a rare aad characteristic warmth and a charm to existence; he casts a something, more', a magic charm over existence: the arcana of events that go to impart the right zest to life. He is more a bakta' devotee) than a "gnani (thiriker).
The philosopher moulds, and shapes and formulates and rounds off the entirety,the fulness and the completeness of Oxistence; to wot, its oneness: its "poornam': its perfection, The poet dwells on the frayed edge of existence; makes, it bizarre and fantastic. The philosopher makes an attempt to delineate existence and define it. His endeavour is to see and know the entire gamut of being, and yet abstain.
The eye is vorthless vhen separate from the body. Šo is a truth when cut off from the whole truth. And so the philosopher seeks to link up and harmonize every event with every other event in the universo. For having an adequate understanding of a single "event' (thing) in the universe, you have an adequato understanding of the whole universe. He is nore in the conscious than in the "unconscious' world. The poet's links are through the unconacious. He dreams, the other sees Here is an instance.
"Her cheek once more blushed bright beneath my burning kiss'. R, Brownig. Admittedly there is a rare warmth in these lines - subtle and divine which the philosoper can never hepe to atomize and split up into sensations, perceptions and experiences. The philosopher deals in an art that is necessary to life; the poet deals with one that embellishes life. And what Cartyle has said of the poet is eminently true and significant. “Though many gird on the harness, fow bear it warrior-like, still fewer put it off with triumph'. He draws out the eternity that resides in every object, in every feeling and in every thought. Here is the judgement, of a poet, on poets, and perhaps we are constrained to accept it with scarcely a demur.- Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the' world." The poet is, in a sense, a scientist with a difference. While the scientist in the higher reaches of his course speculates and conjectures and hypothesizes, the poet in his highest moment of inspiration
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floats away from the wide - awake realities of existence, that is to say, facts of day to day existence; and begins to dream dreams that, when they find expression in the form of poetry of a very high order, lift man and take him into ethereal heights. While the philosopher can 'spell the stars, sift, weigh, and take nothing upon trust', the poet is capable of begetting the “vision and the faculty divine', since he hears, he sees, he feels, and is touched
In the words of Kenneth Walker: The scientist, the artist, the poet and the mystic, all see different sides of Nature and it is bye the pooling of their joint findings that a bctter understanding of her can be reaehed.' And who does the pooling p
And, now here is a warning: Never be misled, in assuming your life's posture by any snivelling, hoarse - voiced miracle - monger, for he is of a bourgeois breed, fed on filthy lucre, and barks for pay, scraping a mournful note on a dead fiddle. He misleads. BEWARE
In the declining years of man's life he needs the poets to stir him, and uphold him, and the philosopher - scientists to guide his foot-steps. He needs no other prop or hovelpost, for man creates himself with pure thoughts, and feelings and not with beliefs and faiths. And TRUTH is all in all to a philosopher; and "fact' is all in all to a scientist. And TRUTH is invested in SILENCE, and in expansive LOVE. Never in violence of any sort, however justifiable it might seem.

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THE COSE
LET Us close our exposition on 'CREATIVITY with
these few remarks. Man being a piece with nature and a mind-matter (psycho-physical) entity, capable of translating and interpreting objective reality, i.e. things external to him, both material objects and their interrelatcd natural forces and effects, into subjective reality through his sensations, sense-data and perceptions, has, been, in some respects, the formulator of the laws of nature. In a sense he is the creator.
Says Karl Pearson: "The laws of science are products of the
human mind rather than factors of thc external world.' What he has to say boils down to this: Man is the creator, and the formulator of the natural laws of relativism' that subsist in
natu Te.
There is a great deal of mystification in this way of thinking. It would be more correct if we put it this way: Man is capable of comprehending the "functional relations' as between, things and the forces of nature, and formulating and marshalling them into theories, hypotheses, laws and formulae. Man has to be 'a fountain of eternal admiration, delight and creative force within him, meeting the ocean of visible and governable things around him.' - Sir J. Hutchinson.
Let me instance. The Sun rises in thc east and sets in the west. This is a constant occurrence as oh served by man in nature's order of events, So far as man's observations go this has not varied. And never did the Sun stay still, so to say, without moving. To say that man is the author of this principle of movement of the sun is sheer perplexity, To say that he creates order, purpose, law; mobilizes causality and necessity, is, in itself, chaotic, and utter misrepresentation of facts. It is not stating the whole truth. It is as chaotic as this existing that nature is the handiwork of a being distinct from nature, apart from nature.
Since man is of a piece with nature, the products of the human brain are products of nature. Hence man sees, observes

investigates, relates and correlates natural events. All of these he does, he does not create. He discovers and formulates tho functional relations as between things; and things and nature's forces. Nature is thus primary, and human ingenuity creative faculty) secondary. Nature is; and human initiative with ingenuity has evolved into the faculty of seeing the relationship; and reading a meaning into nature's ways.
It is imperative that every man chall become a scientistphilosopher, whose supreme task would and aught to be an endless seeking to see nature in its true perspective,
in its harmonious setting, In thus seeking for "relativism" in nature evolves the faculty of "Seeing' and correlating. But he seldom or never creates the phenomena intrinsic in nature. In fact he can't. And it is, at any rate, absurd to pose these questions as regards nature's existence. Why and wherefore does naturc exist? Why are the Several phenomena of nature governed by the multeity of natural laws and forces? When did naturet originate, and how? Who put motion into matter? Why the movement and why the velocity? Why are matter and motion
bonded?.
Don't ask these questions, for heretofore in man's attempt to do go he had got mystified, and bogged in fideistic
ineptitudes his faiths, his beliefs, his desires, his pleasures his prejudices, his pains. his emotions, and his sentiments. Your attempt would be of no avail. The vista of nature spreads before you. and it is left to you, endowed as you are with human understanding and human intellect - your eorrelative faculties - to seek a true solution of the puzzlemcnt of existence both your's and nature's. What the philosopher has said is meaningful. and worth being pondered over: "You are a child of the universe no less than the trees and the stars are.' And the univerdo is an eternal truth, with neither a tangible beginning nor a visible end. It is "rtam" (harmony). It is satyam' (truth).
You have 'consciousness' (awareness) and based on it. you have expericnce. You have the desire to know things, to
understand the relationships that subsist in nature, to occupy

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yourself with, and acquiring for yourself 'all-that-concerns you." This would certainly enable you to lead a meaningful life: persenal
and social. And this shall be your chief concern in life. And all that concerns you is perception seeing.
Don't go and knock your head against the adamant of transcendental existence. Don't knock at the wrong door. Slnce existence is one, there can't ever be anything beyond existence. The search can never be profitable. But cease not to seek for things wonderful and useful in nature, for you are in nature. and you are of nature, and you are in no way contranature. Man's being and becoming, his existence and development are entrenched in nature. Seek for nate re's truths; investigate them, and find joy and satisfaction in the act of unravelling the mysteries of nature. All abstractions, such as time and space, numbers and geometrical forms, all formulae all theories. all hypotheses, all generalizations, all inferences, all judgements, all universals, all moral values, all ideals, all social values are man-made objects'. They are his creations, his chimeras; they are the products of his mind, his imagination, and his relativism. Nature shall serve you as a certain guide.
Hence plurage not into the so-called transcendentals; things sthat are supposed to exist beyond nature, assisted by fideism (i.e. putting "faith" above reason'), for it will make confusion worse confounded; and the outcome would be turgid nonsense; and you will be making a hash of the profound subject of nature; and you will be muddled and caught in the snares of religious orthodoxy and scholastic, pretentious rigmarole.
Have we not to tear the mask from the poseurs that are, our accredited faiths and some of our fossilized beliefs, and hav a peep into the truth that is inherent in nature? Truth: so naive, 1 so simple so unsophisticated, so free? We shall not suffer ourselves to be taken in by the hocus pocus of our regimented fideism; our other-worldly gibberish. There is more in this world than we could bite and chew; masticate, digest and assimilate.
χιi 添冯

And "the ordinary run of men live among phenomena of which they care nothing and know less,' Sir Oliver Lodge. Why then beat one's brains about things that "exist-not-for-one" and are said to exist on the other side the universe? We shall therefore resolve to look into this - sidedness of things - things that have a meaning for us, rather than into the other-sidedness of things - things that - exist - not - for us.
Man himself is a mirror mirroring other mirrors (other objectsu that constitute nature. In his effort at discovering the totality of existence mirrored in every one of the oxistences, rests man's creativity. The act of mirroring is no more no less than the act of discovering the "harmonious relationship, stability, and balance and the law of necessity that subsists in the entirety of nature: According to Leibniz there must be a "sufficient reason" for a thing to exist. And that is outside the universe. Whether it be in the gutter, whether it be on the royal throne life is frightfully exciting and exacting. It is creative, and chock-full of zest. We should learn to care; care we must for life. And that leads to creative living. The whys and the wherefores still remain unresolved, for isn't our life full of dilemmas and surprises p
Primitive Credulity The basic will to create and to exist
- Primitive Credulity' is a term which I have borrowed from Bain. It is instinctive by nature. It is an inherent urge to believe without hesitation; to take. things on trustwithout inquiry; to have implicit faith in certain essential contiguities of life.
We have to have unhindered trust in the firmness and solidity of the ground we tread; we have to entertain the belief that the air we brea the is not vicious vapour. We have to take on trust all that we do when we eat our food, drink our water, breathe the air; and in short, when we live and move and have our being. We have to trust in the sincerity and goodwill of all those with whom we have our day to day dealings, in their inward interest in our welfare. Trust your neighbour in as much as you have trust in yourself. All these we do on trust, and because we have our whole being grounded on our primitivo credulity.
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All our religious faith is based on our primitive credulity; 'seldom on genuine rationality and reasoning. We derive the joy of living eventfully because of our faith in an "inward reality'. which is no other than a confidence in our self-reliance. Primitive credulity is coexistent with "prakrti' - primal existenoe, and is based on the ancient will to be, for a thought and design appends every existence; and to think is to create; for a thought has a creative force emanating from it; and it has "an intrinsic des ign, an ineffaceable pattern.
Despite : the fact there is intrinsic in man's nature an , instinctive trend to believe readily, to accept and take for granted a many a thing in everyday life without testing its reliability, and that even a philosopher scientist has to resort to hypotheses in his pursuit of knowledge, he who goes in quest of true knowledge ought to have a creative understanding of the several events in nature, and has to be genuinely creative and scientifie in begetting an attitude towards every one of nature’s events. Hic has therefore to be a downright sceptic, and put "a modieum of doubt on every one of the events which he purports to investigate and to know with circumspection and with a passion for knowing things in their pristine purity. That is the scientific, philosophic and creative mood that a man has to beget if he is to be a seeker after truth. Failing to beget this mood, this attitude, he persists in his hideous idiocy and is eminently satisfied with a giddy goat mush.
An instance would suffice. The child has a belief that sugar tastes sweet, that quinine tastes bitter. Today the experience is that; and tomorrow the child expects it to be that But art intervenes, and the child, comes to know there are sugar - coated pills also; and so the child's belief has to go a-begging. And by and by he comes to know that his belief' is tempor ary, and so is a 'doubt or a "denial'. There is no permanency in them. At some stage or other they have to be given up, for Sugar tastes bitter in the mouth of a sick child, and the styptic taste of a green coconut or gambier counter - acts the bitterness of quinine. Truth will thus have to, be sought after
لی۔، م۔ نا : Ut .
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without the assistance of binding "beliefs' or "faiths' and hard
boiled prejudices. Religion, for instance, makes an attempt to found morality on belief in a world to come. But that belief can never last long. Hence man has to have "a belief in the essential reality of the ideal of a perfection that is beyond himself or is lagging behind, for there is a poornam' (perfection): whole' which demands our devotion. That is the reality", the backdrop of all our scientific piecemeal findings, our illogicalities, our syllogistic deceptions, our facts and our truths and our conclusions.
The "bakti marga - the way of devotion, is a barren way that leads into "the desert and of dead habit'. And based as it is on belief and "faith' it lies outside the ambit of tho world of verifiable facts. The Buddha forsook it, and so did Shankara Why then doesn't man seek after the "reasoned reasonableness' that resides in things? by doing so, he creates himself. For "Never dream but ill must come of ill." - Shelley "And though thy soul sail leagues and leagues beyond, Still, league beyond those leagues, thcre is more sea' -
Dante Gabriel Rosetti,
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Note: There are some more similar omissions of
letters.

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CATHo CFRESS