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*
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T T BAFFLING
K. KANAP
||SEFEDIGE 彗团晤
冒翡暮 |웰-|| || ||
 
 
 
 
 

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Lovingly dedicated
tO
Kanmanу, Chitra, Uma, Yogendran, Justin, Meera, Rajiv, Renu, Sanjiv and to
Mr. K. V. Somasundaram,
but for whose encouragement and help this book would never have seen
the light of day.
CATHoLIC PRESS, BATTCALOA.

THIS
BAFFLING EXISTENCE
K. KANAPATHI PILLA, B.A., F.R.G.S.
Published
by
K. V. SOMASUNDARAM
Available at :
Ramakrishna Mission, Batticaloa, Sri Lanka.

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The proceeds of the sale of
this book will go to the Sara
dha Girls' Home (Orphanage)
building fund' : Ramakrish na
Mission, Batticaloa, Sri Lanka,
-- II ----

CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION
PREFACE
DISCOURSE
BISCOURSE
DISCOURSE
DISCOURSE
DISCOURSE
DISCOURSE
DISCOURSE
DISCOURSE
DISCOURSE
DISCOURSE
DISCOURSE
DISCOURSE
DISCOURSE
POSTSCRIPT
II.
III
IV
V
VII
VIII
IX
Χ
X
XI
XIII
Page
IV
V
15
73
91
111
121
129
145
173
183
223
237
269
273
I - XXIII

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INTRODUCTION
in THIS BAFFLNG EXISTENCE' the author resorts to present the various puzzlements that confront a person who is a dedicated and sincere seeker after a proper understanding of things - men and matters - as they appear to him in their variety of forms. The Universe appears to him as many at the first glance. That is common-sense knowledge. A scientist-philosopher has an entirely different idea of the Universe. It appears to him as one, single, closely knit unit.
In the first discourse the author makes an attempt to shatter all those forces and events that help to form the total ignorance (avidya), that prevails in the mind of man, and prevents him from seeing the truth, and that mars clear thinking and human understanding. In the other twelve discourses the author attempts to discover explanations for the several phenomena of inert matter, animate matter, mind and spirit. His is a rationalistic approach; and he has not spared any pains to present the views of some of the great scientists and philosophers of the world from Vedic times up to the present day.
The postscript' succinctly summarizes the entire proposition viz “Baffling Existence’. I am privileged to have been asked to publish this very useful and thought-provoking work on “Existence'.
K. V. SOM ASUNDARAM,
Mannan Kulam Estate & Farm, Akkaraipattu, 1983. Batticaloa, Sri Lanka.
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PREFACE
Life has its alternative, the ironic one of being angled at the bank or netted at the weir. We may escape the philosophy of form with its interplay of fate and personality, of the world without and the will within, and flee to the philosophy of measures with its processes of evidence, fact and proof. Here at least we are safe or think we are, from the flats and shifting sands of superstition, and may sail on our daylight ways, scientific, assured and open-eyed, along the charted paths of the sea. The port is fixed, the track defined, the times determined, yet even these our modern ways, like all the wisdom of the world, are writ on water.' W
From Dialectic' - Frank Binder.
These ideas - great in their own intrinsic way - inspired me to seek after knowledge in its clearest form. And I am convinced of this notion, that the Universe is, as it were, hurtling through time and space; and caught in the several principles governing it, a few known and many unknown to man, is taking a shape and assuming a name. And who knows whatever might happen to it when it emerges out of the tangle of time and of space Will it ever ?
And what might happen to man in his body-mindspirit' continuum it is very, very difficult to conjecture.
This is the theme; and mine is only an attempt at holding a candle lit in broad daylight, in the noonday glory of a blazing sun. I thank Mr. K. V. Somasundaram for taking pains to have this book published; and the CATHOLIC PRESS, BATTICALOA for printing it.
K. KANAPATHIPILLAI. 52, Nalliah Road,
Batticaloa, Sri Lanka. 1983.

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THIS BAFFLING EXISTENCE
INTRODUCTION
MEANINGFUL WHOLES
HERE is an effort to understand the Universe. A “thing' or an "event' is a designation that denotes something that exists. If that be so, what is a thing or an event, and what is the palpable proof of an “event? An event, like for instance a particle of dust or an amoeba or man can either be objectively perceived by another event or it may be that which is capable of perceiving itself, ie it can be grounded on its own notion of its existence. An event knows of no other certainty than the self-consistent notion of its own existence. In other words it is a self-contained unit. It has an “awareness', of its own which is its “consciousness'. It is, “self-conscious'. It subsists in its subjectivity. The existence of a thing is, therefore, governed by its intrinsic will to be and to become'. It is “aware' of its "being and becoming process. Placed in the midst of ambient circumstances, it traces and establishes its relationship with every one of those related circumstances, and attains the status of a “meaningful whole' : an indivisible rational unity. It carries a significance intrinsically its own, independent of whether another being or 'event' recognizes it or not. This is its own consciousness' or state of awareness. The universal essence governed by universal laws has resolved itself into "meaningful wholes': each in its own right.
It will have to be admitted that 'consciousness' is a tacit and hidden consent to exist. To put it in the form of another assertion : Every event is the end-product of a thought, which is no more no less than the culmination of consciousness. It is a “meaningful whole'. The cardinal trend in existence, is, that every event tends to
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accumulate a “meaning' in relation to the ambient events or circumstances. And, an cvent has been chipped and chiselled, hammered and rough-hewed, patted and patterned and designed, and moulded and barbered into a shape by its ambient events: its surrounding circumstances. It has been governed by what has been considered as the “principle of precision'. It is the law of tight-knit concision that helps an event to attain its full achievable status; and such an existence as has assumed the status of an event, is a
perfection (‘poornam”) in itself. Ut is, in other words, a "meaningful whole'.
Every meaningful whole' is held in the cleft of time, and shifts in space. Time and space appear to have coalesced, and connived, and become one single inalienable constant feature: a meaningful whole'. They have conspired, as it were, to fabricate and fashion it. Every event is thus no other than a meaningful whole', compounded of time-space and an intent: that is, a desire to be. Clinging to every event like an air bubble to a water beetle is a “duration' of time' and a "point' in space and a “will to be' - intent; and thus all existences exist in kala' (time) and 'akasa' (space), and in a thought or “intent' - 'sith'.
In the dim past, the age of discernment, the Vedic Irishis conceived, these two mighty notions of “kala' and “akasa'. These have helped to form their 'moola prakrti' - primal nature, out of which was said to have evolved 'annam' (substance) and prana' (life principle). One is what has been conceived as “inert matter', the other as animate matter'. There is not much of distinction between these two forms of existence. All distinctions are in the mind. They are part and parcel of the same process of evolving into higher and yet higher states of consciousness. The difference subsists in only the intensity and the temper of the states of consciousness. Not in kind.
The distinction is simply arbitrary. There is continuity and constancy in these states, often designated : “constant conjunction'. It is extremely difficult to draw a clear line of demarcation between what is inanimate, and what is animate. The animate in turn has graded into the plant and animal forma; and the inanimate has assumed the
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categories of solids, liquids and gases. All these are events, and when particularized appear to have, in the process of being and becoming aspired to accumulate more and more meaning. The more meaningful an event becomes, the more
perfect, the more precise, the more tightly-knit, it might be assumed to have evolved into. In other words: it has turned out to be a "meaningful whole'.
Every event is thus relatively perfect. It is in a state of poornam idha: It has attained to a perfectly harmonious state of existence which the Vedic rishi has designated as “rtham'. And “rtham' is a perfection in perfection. It is 'sathyam' - Truth. "Ritham' and "sathyam' are the two primal attributes of existence. A unity and a unanimity subsist in an otherwise chaotic existence. The terminology "chaotic existence' is a misnomer. It might appear to be a contradiction in terms. It rebels : its meaning does rebel. But it is only an apparent contradiction. It is the outcome of an effort (sharadha) on the part of rational man to discover a meaning for a "pre-moola prakrthi state : a state of flux. What is this pre-moola prakrthi state? In his effort to conceive of a pre-moola-prakrthi state of existence, isn't man making an attempt to go beyond the shell of time and the contents of space? Man's mundane earth-clinging “anubhavas' (experiences) and star-adorned aspirations, in his present state of perfection-his meaningful whole-might not, in all certainty, permit him to penetrate time and to plunge beyond the vista of space. Chaotic state is thus no othcr than a torm used to indicate a state of emptiness where the indwelling strife is “nothing,' that is a condition of "no existence." In this endeavour man gets bogged in the mire of mental gloom, and findeth not his way. His intellect in the present state of its evolutionary process is not in a fit condition to take him even a step beyond in the direction of “no existence'. On this condition of the super-sensible, : the meta-physical; the transcendental, all that man has felt and uttered is mere 'avidya'-total ignorance. No one, however gifted he might be, may be certain of things existing-if they exist at all-in the pres moola-prakrthi state. In this connection - a veryx, pertinent question might be asked: Can man penetrate matter and plunge into the ante-matter state of existence? It is no doubt a very perplexing question.
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All that man has achieved in this endeavour is the product of his crazy imagination. Romantic, he can become, and, has the liberty to become, but, it must be admitted in all intellectual honesty, that, that state of mind can never take one to "Truth'. Even saints and sages and god-men and prophets, rishis and mentors, have, over and over again, got ensnared in "avidya' when they attempted to go into the unknown and unheard of domain of the metaphysical and transcendental, that is to say, an existence beyond existence. And, shouldn't man stop at the unknowable? How is it possible for an object of existence, however intellectually and intuitively gifted it might be, to go beyond its “meaningful wholeness' of existence? I am wondering whether I have been attempting the impossible. This is a matter to which every sane-thinking person, void of all forms of dogmatic and doctrinal conditioning, has to address his mind in all earnest. Let man not fall into the pot-holes that beset the path of life he has proposed to tread. This is no attempt to sermonize and load one with platitudes, maxims and homilies. It is a genuine attempt to make a concerted effort at discovering the genuine facts that govern human existence.
And now let us clarify and clearly define the cardinal issue: 'consciousness." It is a form of energy that might be said to be pervasive in all existence. It is a
regression in the universal essence that is constantly present, and may be imagined as having an upwardly spiralling motion. And what is motion but a change of position in relation to another change of position or rest. And motion and rest are bound to go check by jowl; for motion is the sort of relative existence in space of two or more things or events. The entirety of existence is no other than an effort and an endeavour to move on and on; to be, and to become. The "having become' state of some philosophers is a thing that cannot be conceived of. But who knows; it may be there. In such a state, time and space would have ceased to be; and motion is unimaginable and “the material would have melted back into a single flux" - the universal essence. All our earth-bound laws, and star-involved time and motion would have been annulled. It would have
-س4--

resolved into a state of "nothingness' where even the eternal will-to-be' would have achieved the status of a zero. In this state it may be said to have become involuted. Here, in all certainty, is a puzzlement; for our analysis appears to have proved barren.
Is it possible for any one, even the best of mathematicians, to apprehend “nothingness-the zero state of existence? It is only a verbalism-a mere word that transcends all man's endeavour to think. A thing that goes beyond the pale of thought and consciousness is a thing that existeth not. Logic with all its art of reasoning, its deductive and inductive dialectics, cannot outwit it, neither can silly, forked-tongue gossip unravel its mystery. And mysticism tends to render it more of a puzzlement than an evidence. It is, therefore, highly presumptuous on the part of the eers of the world-the so-called mystics-to dwell on the transcendental. If they presume to have unravelled this denouement, they may be said to have been intellectually dishonest or mentally deranged. But yet, the world of today is brimming over with these-to use an expression of Spinoza“inadequate notions. Man's imagination has, in more instances than one, led him astray. It is a mosaic, a piecemeal, hotchpotch, crazy state of anarchic thinking, disorderly reasoning, a true state of mental chaos. Could existence, the totality of being and becoming, have ever been in a state of chaos? To think of a state of nothing-soonya'- is to get out of time and flee out of space. Is it possible to do so? The question comes insistent and repeats itself, pounding as it were in multifaceted forms, and in multitudinous ways.
Once again we are prompted to ask the very pertinent question: Why then rack one's brains, and hack one's reasoning powers in quest of a 'final cause", a 'causeless cause', an "uncaused cause' and the "absolute'? Aren't these all aisleading words: tantalizing quiddities, designed, as it were, by misled man to mislead the innocent thing that man essentially is ?
Plato and Socrates, Aristotle and the Semitic prophets, the doctors and dogmatists and the divines of the various sects, nay, even the religious teachers with
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perhaps the rare exception of the Buddha, even, some of the rishis of old, have posited a 'causeless cause' : ultimate and absolute, and based all their artless art of thinking on it. And in this wise they have misled the generality of mankind and buried them in heaps and heaps of exegeses and kerygmata and commentaries. And the questions arose. where will the soul of a stillborn infant, go : to heaven or to hell or to purgatory? And how many angels can dance at the point of a needle?
It is unimpeachably true that the Romanticists had been misguided by their imagination, coloured with their feelings and emotions and maudlin sentimentalism; the Utilitarians were far too engrossed in their fork and spoon and other utility contraptions and even engines of destruction; the Schoolmen were too much involved in their holdfast doctrines and dogmas and streamline orthodoxy; the logicians were ensnared in epistomology, the pragmatists had their attention focussed on the practical consequences of their assertions and their importance to human interests; the dialectic materialists were involved in promoting the material needs of man : his earning and his spending; the 6 will-to-power Nietzscheans were in quest of the attainment of the “enormous energy of greatness which can model the man of the future by means of the discipline and also by means of the annihilation of millions of the bungled and botched.' (B. Russell). At a time when even Kant hadn't awakened from his “dogmatic slumber' there came Hume to bring man to down-to-earth realities : to the genuine facts of existence. And Charles Darwin who by his stupendous effort to unravel the mysteries of living forms, the origin of species, which resulted in the publication of the “Origin of Species', showed man this truth : that he is of a piece with the rest of living nature. Here was an awakening at last, a breakthrough, and an effort made to understand "creation', and incidentally it did do away with doctrines and dogmas and weakened the knees of religious orthodoxy. Man began to understand man, his ambient nature and the mind of man. Galileo and Kepler helped in this process; and Newton, and in later years, Max Planck and Einstein showsd the mathematical way to the understanding of the universe. This is the second age of braveries: of discernment.
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By sheer chance I glanced at two aspects of the achievements of the modern utilitarian endeavours of man. The one is a city in China and the other is a city in the United States of America. They are definitely symptomatic of the senseless and stupid aspirations of modern man. One is the photograph of the city of Makati; the other is of Chicago. Both are pictures of mountains of brick and mortar: gigantic and massive: assimilating antidiluvian, prehistoric creatures of the Reptilian age : huge, lethargic, sluggish, pin-headed, marvellously inept and lamentably out of proportion as regards the true aspirations of man, devoid of form and of balance. The question why has Man: so nobly evolved, so nobly designed, chipped and moulded and brought forth into form with a mind of much vaster dimensions than the Universe itself: designed these stupendous anthills and imprisoned man in them? Here, in these two cities, you find a true expression of. man's endeavours and his idiotic aspirations. Has all man's thinking, his capacity to reflect, resulted in these pathetically inadequate, inept creations: his Selvas of stone and iron and mortar Whither has fled his marvellous engines of thought and contemplation?
If man were to survive the tyranny of destructive matter, vast changes will have to take place in this little corner of the universe that goes by the name of the bauble called the earth. Man must be of the earth, but his mind must belong to the ethereal domain of thought. Man has to think: think intensely and in unhampered, unbridled and true earnest. He has got bogged in the slough of carnality, his “will to power' and “will to be stupid' and purblind. Man has hoodwinked himself in avidya, that is, his wilful ignorance, so wily and so wretched. He has got, entangled in a trance of ignorance, for he has ceased thinking, ceased evolving in the direction of the attainment of pure unsullied thinking: the attainment of 'sweet reason'. With very few exceptions man has gone on sounding his perilous way, confused and confounded, befuddled and bewildered and dazed and mystified, stupified and stultified. And what will be the outcome 2 Man is nearing the perilous brink of a caldera of annihilation and self-immolation.
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Admittedly all these efforts and endeavours of existence and of Nature should not end in a stupid, mad hurry and total annihilation Even as insufficiently and meaninglessly forecast by Sir James Jeans, the universe can never come to an end in the distant future some million million years hence and be shattered into splinters and dead debris and broken bones and cracked craniums: a heap of cosmic ashes aimlessly circumnavigating the outer space. Why this folly? And, why this bovine endeavour on the part of thinking man to come to naught: a zero existence? Hasn't man to come into meaningful grips with existence? Goaded by prick and induced by praise man has to go on and on, never ceasing to pause.
Now, coming to "consciousness' which permeates the entirety of existence, residing in every event, weaving it into a "meaningful whole' and what might be posited as "pure thought' or cosmic consciousness, there is a secret denouement. Every event, as it were, has to find lodgement in a “meaningful whole' and spiral through and push its way ever upwards propelled by the “will to be' : the being and becoming' process. At every stage of its existence, it completes and perfects that stage of its progress which, governed as aforementioned by the "principle of precision', becomes a fulfilment of the “will to be'. It becomes a whirlpool of action: of movement and of rest. Every such stage, however insignificant it might be, is a "poornam'; that is, a perfection in that peculiar ambient condition. Thence, consciousness ripens into thought', and the endproduct of a thought is a “meaningful whole". What we have in the universe in its present stage of existence are meaningful wholes'. Amoeba is one such stage; man is another, and a particle of soot yet another, and so on, and so forth : from atom to sirius.
Now, let us come to man. As has already been stated: he is of a piece with nature. He is self-subsistent; self-evolved; self-conditioned. To be brief: he is a "meaningful whole'. He is self-contained; hence he is a thing of perfection-poornam'-placed as he is in the ambient circumtance into which he has projected himself. In him is encoded all his past, in "all its trailing clouds of
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glory'. He is like unto the flame of the torch that had been lit by inert matter in the dim past and carried all along the vista of time. The primal stir, the motion and the rest, the energy consciousness intrinsic in the “meaningful whole' that an atom is, has spiralled it, nay sky-rocketted it, and sent it through various phases and brought it to that complex stage that goes by the name of MAN. He happens to be, at least he appears to be, the end product of a vast expansive thought. But yet he is mutability itself: seldom constant, rarely solid.
Pause and think. Here we have to dwell for a short while on this grand thought : the birth of MAN : his debut on this planet. “The past lives on into the present and interpenetrates it.' It survives in the forms that we see and feel and have a thought to put on. It persists in the memory and has sneaked into the present. And all man's past is encoded in his 'coil of life'-chromosome. Isn't this a plausible explanation for the debut of man on this Earth? And, doesn't man appear to be at the omega point of existence? This theme has to be deeply contemplated upon before it is brushed aside as a mere figment of the imagination. Even if this view is rejected as fiction we are left with one solid fact of existence: one inescapable evidence of a stage of consciousness that has evolved to such a height as to be capable of making 1t the simplest yet grandest of human creations: the multiplication table or even the notion of the sum of the three angles of a triangle is two right angles, or, even better still, to think of himself as the self-existing “I’. The last at least is a self-evident truth that needs no further proof of existence. It is a thing grounded on itself. It is a “meaningful whole'-'poornam idham'. And man's “memory is matter entangled in mind' in the space of a duration. It is self-consistent. Can this be disproved, dissolved, and annulled? This is a supreme notion: as old as the hills, as grand as existence itself. The entirety of existence is rooted in this notion of “I-ness' : this primal memory: this prudent potential. If it can be annulled, let it be. Even if a relentless effort is made to annul it we shall be left with the state of "nothingness', which, again, at some stage or other, would imply existence, for
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one cannot possibly go behind the fact of one's “oneness': “a meaningful whole". It is the supreme notion of the
consciousness, or 'greater awareness' that resides in existence.
This is not crazy thinking : a cranky notion engendered in a cranky brain. It is not mere logic-chopping, conventional polimic, bleached bone dialectics. It is a genuine effort made to annul, to reduce to zero existence, the existence of a “meaningful whole' that goes by the name of MAN. But the effort has failed, and man has survived the cataclysmic attempt.
In man, inert matter has assumed the dimensions of animate matter; and in turn, animate matter has resulted, in the evolution of the “mind of man'. In this process of the evolution of the “mind of man' it would be most absurd to think, that the “mind of man' is a sudden, haphazard emergence. It has to be reasonably assumed, that it is no other than the outcome of the evolution of the "mind of matter'. This notion might appear somewhat bizarre : the notion of the “mind of man evolving from the “mind of matter'. Who can deny the facts of science, even if they appear to be in this instance hypothetical ? That inert matter is potent, has been tangibly proved, and demonstrated. Matter has in it that much of stir, volatility and turbulence that one might expect to find in man, although that which has manifested itself as the mind of man, is, in a sense, in a more highly evolved state. How dare we deny the fact that there is as much stir and swell in dead matter as in living matter and that it has helped to beget the mind of man in man 2 The primal swell in the amoeba, is, in no whise, different from that in the mind of
man : the thought force. There is no difference in kind; only a difference in intensity.
This again has to be admitted : that animate matter has its sensations, its perceptions, its impressions, its experiences, its “anubhavas (consolidated experiences), which are, of course, of quite a 'different order'. It has at a higher state of evolution the capacity to call things by names and to motivate actions: motion and rest. Every action of man has been nnderscored by an inflexible intent.
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Let us take an instance. You have a thought that has been engendered and registered in your memory. You have resolved, that is to say, conceived an "intent' to be present at a certain public function, at a certain time, on a certain day. But you have forgotten all about 1 t. It has sunk into your being', and apparently gone into oblivion. And the day has come; but you are blissfully oblivious of it. On the day in question you are at your work - desk, working at some favourite project of yours. Then a few minutes before the hour, when the function was to commence, there flashes across your mind the thought of the appointment. You are, as it were, suddenly awakened to it; and you get ready, and you are present at the function. The "intent' that had gone into the fibre of your being has acted as a triggerdevice. Most of our "intuitions' are no other than longforgotten hard line intents' that had sunk into our being'.
Names and predications are basic fabrications. They are ideas and concepts. There are concrete-based concepts, and abstract-based concepts. And concepts lead up to organized thinking which involves the drawing of "relations'. And they have been formed by two mental processes : the eduction of relations and the "eduction of correlates', hese notions of P. Nunn will be discussed elsewhere. The mental processes that relate things and ideas of things help to form the organized whole of notions that may be designated as the “intellect’. When we speak of “eduction of relations' and "eduction of correlates' we have this in mind : "contemplation'. And it is the cardinal predication or working of the mind. It may be crudely defined as the piling up of ideas upon ideas. When ideas get piled up in the conscious being, there is a tuzzle among them, a run atilt, an attempt to test them by accuracy and appropriateness, a clarification of mental issues, and the final outcome is the organization of “values'. The notion of 'ought comes in. Here comes "ethic'. There is an inner zone of opinion formed and fabricated, about “nouns and their predications'. Some things “ought to be done', some others 'ought not to be done. The voice' in your 'inner being tells you : these things can be done; these cannot : these are permissible and these are not. The assorted heap of nouns' and predications', of action are being sorted out into bad ones' and good ones'. Here are
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the "angelic' deeds, and here the “satanic' deeds. Th
judgement day' has dawned on you, and your inner being maintains, as it were, two registers : one for the good and the other for the bad. Mind you, you are the sole judge of your good deeds and your misdeeds. Here COnes the idea of 'ethic', of “freedom of choice in action'; so that, in the final analysis : you are the captain of your soul, you are the master of your fate'. You have earned your hell and your heaven; and they reside in your inner being. Here have come the idea of right, and the idea of wrong; of true and of false, of truth and fallacy; of order and anarchy. Here we have come upon a point of great nicety.
What brings us satisfaction we are prone to accept as right, and what brings us pain and suffering and discomfort we tend to designate as wrong. We carry two bags forming our ethic : the bag of "rights' and the bag of “wrongs'. In other words we judge actions and sort them out as “permissible' and “impermissible' actions. There is necessarily a taint of irrationality in this way of thinking: of judging and evaluating events. But as we gain in experience, as our muddled notions get cleared up, and our worthless lumber of inadequate ideas gets dumped into the caldera of dirt and dross, our intellect becomes keener and our understanding sharper and sounder. Our ideas obtain consensus, and thus we gain knowledge which again may either be adequate or inadequate. Adequate knowledge is like clarified butter; and inadequate knowledge is that which has been improperly organized and unclarified. Knowledge is undoubtedly the end-product of our 'anubhava’; it may also be the outcome of what some think as "intuitionthat is the basic element of a way of thinking that appears to have no link with experience. In other words it is not empirical knowledge. It is "inspired knowiedge. It appears to dawn upon us - to flah across our inward eye - and force its attention on us. But one thing is certain, it can't be qualified by the attribute : "prophetic', for there can't be anything prophetic in any experience or utterance. What are erroneously designated as prophetic utterances', and intuitive experiences are no other than experiences that have been brought into one's focus of consciousness after they had lain sunk in the unconscious mind for an unduly long
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time. So it is wrong to say that intuition is not experiences based. It has had its root in experience, and had gone into one's state of oblivion. Having ben immersed in the unconscious, it has gained the status of a deep-seated, completely forgotten intent', generally an unfulfilled desire or a craving. And so, such a "forgotten experience' has all the semblance of having had its origin in the primitive trends or instincts or inborn urges and impuls es.
Contemplation helps man to conceive of the things of the world as “meaningful unified wholes'. And it would appear that what may be termed as the "totality of existence’-the universe - is the end-product of an intrinsic grand thought that has had its birth in the mind of man. So far, so good.
But, be it known, that most knowledge : both scientific and religious has been expressed in meaningless, empty formulae, and time it is that we evolve a philosophy of discretion and a solid way of life based on the hard rock of true knowledge and experience. Then shall we be able to bear all the travails of life with perfect carriage and mental equipoise.
And now arise the questions: Why and wherefore strife? Why will to power'? Why “will to be'? Why all this stir, this motion, this struggle, this endeavour? This awakening and this slumbering? This cosmic virility and this yoganithira'? These interrogatories have to be investigated; and adequate solutions secured for every one of them. That would be the aim and end of all existence. Otherwise, why have these queries come up Why these heart-searchings? Of course all thess questions can be settled with one single answer: the 'Divine will: the "uncaused cause' : the Absolute. But admittedly it is no proper answer to all these secret musings, misgivings, and silent heart-yearnings. 'ሥ
And, hence, when man goes yearning, searching, questioning, inquiring and sounding his way looking for a cause for all these effects that we have designated as “maningful wholes' there comes a flash across his "inward being'-the being of deep contemplation. Then the creative vision
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the "ego", with its several koshas'-maanifolds-its "unified wholes' vanish, and what one is left with: endowed with: is the realization that all these have been compounded into the “One': the “Cosmic Mind'-the end product of the evolutionary creative procession, creative craving and creative energy-flow. All these designations that we have the privilege of culling from the various sources at the disposal of the man of today, will find clarification in the discourses that follow.
Bear with me, gentle reader, if they in a wise tire you, nay bore you. If such a state of mind prevail, crave your indulgence. But, should you wade through the discourses, I can assure you, you will find matter for serious thinking.
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TS BAFFLINE EXISTENCs
DISCOURSE -
THE PUZZLEMENT
THERE is nothing in the universe to indicate why it exists. Things exist by virtue of their awareness. The ravelled skein of existence has to be disentangled. Existence is, therefore, an awakening process. Awareness varies only in degree from object to object, not in kind. The aware. ness of an Einstein is not different from the awareness of a flea in kind. But they are different in their degree of intensity. Every atom, every sun and moon and star, every object, however big or however small it might be, is aware of its existence. That is why it exists. There is no existence possible without awareness. Existence is the sane centre of the universe. It resides in eternity. It revolves upon one single pivot for its certitude, and that is its own “self".
A “thing has existence; that is all. Neither has it a beginning, nor an end. It just exists. The forms of objects : their configurations, quality and relation: their natural dispositions change. Change, there is : infinite change. There is no such process as creation in its accepted sense : that is, the formation of something entirely new. There is nothing new in Nature, Nothing comes out of nothing. Nature abhors creation from outside, since creation by an external agency or fiat binds Nature and cramps natural freedom. In fact therc is neither creation nor creator, for both are conditioned. Nature is not entangled and enthralled. The mere fact of existence is a self-evident truth; it is infinitely complex. Hence no proof is needed for one's existence; for the mere fact of one's awareness is ample proof of it. We know this by a native art of feeling and knowing. We know this by "intuition" : that is, by an inner sense of our being.
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There is an infinite variety of existences, since there is an infinite variety of intensity of awareness. And awareness is an ever-changing, an ever-unfolding process : a constant flux and reflux. In every moment of existence of an object there is change - infinite change. Change is intrinsic in it. It is the very essence of existence. In every entity there inheres a tendency to actualize itself, to become its highest potential. It has the urge to unfold itself; to trick out; to expand and to extend; to develop and to mature; to express and to activate to its fullest capacity. This is the cardinal trend in Nature : to achieve the fullest, the noblest and the best to exact consideration under the prevailing circumstances. “Intrinsic in the thing is everything that will happen to it” (Leibniz). 'Everything that exists is in a manner the seed of that which will be. (Marcus Aurelius). It is a closed volume that will have to be opened and read. And why do things exist? There is nothing to show why they exist. Governed by the principle of “sufficient reason they exist. They exist through compatibility : a condition of necessity determined by each. This notion we derive from experience and observation.
Time and space involvement in existence
Time and space are limited, but have not cramped the awareness of objects. The moment time and space cease, objects become mere nullity. Their relative existence ceases. But can they become "greater awareness'? Or can they attain to the state of “pure consciousness ? ie consciousness : unenthralled and free
All objects are caught, as it were, in a web of time and space. They are in a state of continual uncertainty. Time and space are limiting factors. They are mere conditions of “apparent existence'. They constitute the "maya' of some philosophers; and are the figments of the “mind' of man. The moment these conditions cease to be, "absolute existence' comes into being. When light comes darkness ceases to be. This is pure existence, and this is pure consciousness also. When time ceases and space ceases, there can only be one thing, and that is pure "consciousness'.
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In such an eventuality-it is difficult to conceive of such a
situation-the universe itself goes into the state of pure consciousness.
There is ample meaning in these lines of Emile Bronte : “Though earth and moon were gone and suns and universes ceased to be and Thou wert left alone, Every existence would exist in Thee'. What is this “Thee"? That is the question. It is perhaps the 'supra-conscious state - the 'wholeness', the entirety of existence that pervades when all accounts have been cast up. Malebranche has hazarded the notion: “We are all things in God'. Lao - Tzu says: obtain the One; all things live and grow'. Who can deny one's own existence? Every object is aware of its “being and becoming process'. It has been so designed and constituted as to be meaningful : to have a particular mission to fulfil; a purpose to achieve. This is an incontrovertible fact. It is self-evident truth. There is no denying it. It is a subject to be treated with the greatest deference and respect. S. T. Coleridge says: “Existence is an eternal and infinite self-rejoicing, self-loving, with a joy unfathomable, with a love all comprehensible".
Haven't we observed with a keen warmth of interest a day - old baby growing up in its own awareness There is patent in its development an unfolding, an expanding, an enlarging and a blossoming of its consciousness. It is able to locate its own identity by crying, by flexing and stretching its limbs, by pushing its fingers into its mouth, into its mother's nostrils. It has a “solipsistic' world of its own. What a tremendous advanco Nature has been able to make in its efforts to make its members aware of themselves and their environment? And, what a vast gulf exists between the awareness of a new-born human infant and that of a full - grown ape? And then imagine the vastness of the gulf of difference that exists between the awareness of an adult ape and that of a living animalcule like, for instance, an amoeba. The gulf widens when we take into consideration the amoeba and a plant, a plant and a nonliving thing like a crystal of salt.
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This is a vast thought, a gratifying notion - a thought as vast as the skyey vault. To reflect on the awareness of things, their subjective existence as determined by the intensity of the various degrees of awareness is immensity itself, and is very gratifying and self-rewarding. And the question" now arises : Is it possible to spell out the true meaning of existence or the state of greater awareness, or what may be termed in philosophical parlance, the "supra consciousness' of an object independent of the object itself? Can such a state of consciousness exist? If it does, can it be the self-creating, self-guiding, self-constituting, self-governing, self-forming, self-maintaining principle pervasive in the germ in all objects?
The entire universe appears to be in a state of flux and change, evolving and devolving, never commencing. never ceasing, with neither a beginning nor an end. It tends to go on and on ever beyond the bounds of time and space. But the question is whence? and whither? The very interrogatory involves us once again in time and space How can we, poor humans, humble mundane and puny*
things, riddled by time and space, free ourselves of these tremendous shackles and perplexities, and penetrate the dome
of time and the frontiers of the void? It is possible. So long as Nature has in its essence the unduenchable urge, the craving to evolve, to unfold and the infinite capacity for better and greater becoming, for better awareness and greater awareness. Man is bound to succeed in his effort. The outcome may be something beyond our concept. We cannot perceive it in perfect circumspection. What are its forms ? Its configurations? Its dimensions? Its scope? Its possibilities? And its potentialities? What is the nature of the mysterious ground of the universe? Of its being?
One would be at pains unravelling the mystery. It may not be possible in the present state of our knowledge of
the evolutionary process of our mind to do so. But yet, the finality of its determinate end, can never be extrinsic, but intrinsic. There are immense and infinite passibilities for the future mind of man. Hope outwits dejection. Why not then hope for that perfection that is yet to be 2 In his most highly evolved state man has a hidden sympathy, an intimate empathy with the hidden purpose of things. He 'sees into the life of things'. The subject engrosses him.
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Man, the creator
Man is, in a sense, the creator. He is in fact the totality of existence; the dim wholeness evolving into a perfect state of awareness. This appears to be a simple thesis; yet its magnitude is immeasurable and unquantifiable. It needs the clarification of two important concepts : REAL TIES and TRUTHS. What are realities? And what are truths? Be it known that all forms of existence are “realities-in-themselves'. I have a fountain pen in my hand. It is a "reality-in-itself. It is, to be more accurate, from iny point of view, a partial reality. It is not the total treality; neither is it an absolute reality. Objectively viewed it is only a phase of reality as perceived by me. It is fragmentary, nay atomistic. Almost all the things that we are capable of perceiving, of seeing and apprehending in the present state of our existence, that is, the evolutionary unfolding of our mental make-up and understanding, are, only partial and piecemeal realities. We see only, we are aware of only, an infinitely small part of the realities that we are in ourselves, and that appear before us as our “objects'. Our notions of things : our empathetic knowledge, our penetrative understanding of their existence and of their being and their becoming process, is, very limited. Since the present state of our being is limited, it is most grossly inadequate to enable us to get a total view of a thing external to us or even of our own “true self' which is our “wholeness' or poornam'. Our understanding and knowledge of them is far from being fully “perfect'. We have still a long way to go to attain perfect knowledge. We are in a world of which we have only a fragmentary understanding. A fragmentary existence is ours. It is in short a fiction, purely because we fail to understand it in all its fullness. Hence, its conflicts and imperfections and evils that appear to beset the world as conceived by us.
Man has, therefore, to establish right principles of thought and action. He has to elucidate the essential nature of human consciousness. He has to determine his modes of activity : his modus operandi. But it might be said that the spirit is willing though the flesh be weak. There is helpe for a better world, and a better and fuller understanding of things: a better and clearer grasp of things, although, more
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often than not, the ideas may appear to be somewhat deluding. There is likely to be an endless meandering of the stream of knowledge before it reaches its destination : the ocean of greater awareness.
The world of human understanding is, as it were, in a mess.
It won't be far from the truth to state that the world of human beings is caught in a web of “maya', in a tangle of illusion : "avidya'. It would appear as though man has been ushered into the universe owned, claimed, enslaved and conditioned. He has been drowned in an ocean of nescience. What we see and hear and touch, smell and taste and perceive, is not the total reality. Hence our understanding is deplorably imperfect. It is grossly inadequate to grasp the “wholeness” of things and events : ie "meaningful wholes'. Our tongue prattles, but our brain does not think. Our churches, our courts of law, our parliaments, our conferences, our everyday talks and discussions, Olur theological and philosophical disquisitions, our confabulations, our intellectual confrontations with others have been marred by a taint of misunderstanding and muddle-headedness. We fail to see eye to eye with our neighbours. Why is this? In this messy state of affairs how can we love our neighbours as ourselves? How can we love them with intellectual clarity ?
We haven't even had a clear notion of ourselves. We have learnt the art of hedging, and sparring. What are we? Whence are we? Whither do we go? What is the purpose and meaning of our existence? Can we spel them out with a certain degree of clarity? These are questions of great moment Can we hope to find reasonable, near reasonable or meaningful answers for all of them ? Or for some of them? Isn't there in us an inborn urge tở seek, to unravel the deep mystery that enfolds things?. The sun, the moon, and the starry host, this very firm earth itself which man and the animals and plants have made their home; the infinite space; the beyond, the beyond, and the beyond; the tiniest atomy; the immeasurable i nebulae; time itself and its never - ending flood: Whence are these and whither do they tend to go? O mighty thought! Thy solution should be immensity itself! And Ol' puny hurhant
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O thou human savage, naked both in mind and body Is it possible for you with your limited intellectual capacity to undo these mysteries?
A number of persons view the same prospect. Yet they fail to get the same identical notion of it. Thelr notions of it are variously coloured and even perilously discoloured. No two persons get the same impression; the a notion. Why is this? Every individual is nothing short of a sumtotal of experiences, of impressions, of preconceived notions: all his own. When he views a new prospect, he views it against the background of preconceived notions that have gone into the very fibre of his being'. Hence no two persons, in normal circumstances, can ever see eye to eye; and no two persons can ever hope to have the same notions of things; they never hold can the same view of things. They are at variance which is characteristic of most of our views on men and matters. No two persons can have the same belief; the same convictions. They cannot entertain the same faith, the same religious persuasions and opinions. They can never hope to profess the same religious faith. It is therefore unnatural and absured to expect any two persons to belong to a particular faith, to subscribe to a particular political doctrine, to owe true allegiance to a particular form of polity or even a religious dogma or a particular conformity. Hence a common belief or a faith or conviction is the most unnatural thing. It is impudently absurd and stolidly stupid. So long as Nature's key - note of existence is to be at variance; and there is variation, not in its essence, but in its apparent reality and practicality, it will be futile to look for absolute unity in thinking, in behaving and in the process of being and becoming'. So long as we are entangled in time and space these variations are bound to persist.
A person might have lived and moved and had his being in the midst of persons holding, what might appear to be a firm and indissoluble faith in a certain religious persuasion; yet, it is most unnatural for him to have caught the very essence of the “true spirit' of the faith. It is very foolish indeed, and the height of folly, to look for what is erroneously termed the “true spirit' of a faith, for it is reasonable to question the nature and dependability of the
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“true spirit' of a faith; for instance the faith in the existence of the 'one true God'. In whom or in which group of persons does such a spirit reside? How is one to say whether it is the “true spirit"? or not? Which is the yardstick with which to measure the “trueness of the spirit of a faith'? and what is the proof that so and so is the one true God? Aren't these mere verbal plosives? This is a futile search and most unreasonable and profitless inquiry; and how much of breath has been wasted in expounding the existence of a true Almighty God? Man will have to fight against ignorance and pedantry.
Humau life must mellow and mature in vividness and depth. Man has to realize the paramount importance of an intrinsic spiritual consciousness which is a common possession of all men. Here sweet reascn gains dominance: the faculty of immediate accession to truth. In this state no authority, no doctrine, no dogma shall be availed of. Only conscience testifies; not aniable vanity.
What is truth? asked Pontius Pilate and paused not for an answer. This irreverential hastiness of Pilate is characteristic of the hastiness inborn in humanity. It is the inordinate hastiness of things that are of the flesh. Most men do not pause to think, and to reflect, and to deliberate. They are in a nighty hurry to draw conclusions. What might appear to be true to a person in a moment of haste may be found to be false in a moment of calm and sedate contemplation. Individual man, nay even closely - knit and most advanced and progressive nations themselves, have not learnt to think clearly and to deliberate carefully. The world of human beings has become a perpetual battlefield. We discover man gory in his hands, and gory in his teeth. His intentions have become dark and dismal. He has turned out to be a brute; a much more blastly creature than even the worst of creation. Wnither has fled his rationality? His capacity to think clearly and to reason sweetly and charitably? What has his sweet reason devolved into? And where has dissipated the light of the world? His enlightened self? The gloom of ignorance, superstition and prejudice has enshrouded it. The ambient darkness has deepened into the sticky stygian gloom, and the spectre of wicked superstition
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and narrow prejudice haunts every nook and corner of it. The manacle of cramping religious doctrines and accredited dogmas adorns its wrists, and the cruel fetters of rotting, putrid, petrifying tradition and wicked and throttling political propaganda have fastened their feet to the rock of ignorance and conformity, and prudery.
O, Ye man ! Born free as thou art, thou findest thyself in unendurable bondage Ye have been incubated and gestated into a slave. On the very first day you came into this world, crass ignorance, characteristic of your society, has taken possession of you. The very parents who begot you have become your jail wardens. The priest who came in his garb of sanctity and religious authority and piety to initiate you into the mysteries of his special brand of religious dogma has owned you, possessed you and has clapped you in the strait waist - coat of ignorance. You are bound hand and foot, as it were, to be cast into the whirlpool of ignorance that goes by the name of conventional, revealed, oficial and orthodox religiosity You are born in ignorance, bred in ignorance and destined to die in total ignorance. Your mind has been so habituated as to act without thinking. You have become a slave to established office, routine and practical expediency. You have inherited the kingdom of the King of darkness. You are destined to cross the Syx and enter the gates of Hades. You have been ensnared in an ancient complex social net.
What a despicable and desperate state feather - headed man has been reduced to The moment he opened his eyes on this earth, the light in them had been snuffed out by the burdensome notion of, original sin: the three “malas” flaws, vasanas'. According to this notion every child is born in sin, in sinful wedlock. This is the burden of the song of the faith of the majority of mankind. This is admittedly a sardonic view; but o yet it appears to bè brim - full of truth.
Nature never intended her true-begotten offspring to be born in sin. And, in fact, man is never born in sin. It is an absurd notion - the notion of original sin. Anything exists in so far as it is good. It is the religions designed and organized by man : conventional, official and
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revealed' religion : that has brought 'original sin' on the p Jor human race. What a shame? How cruel How wretched How wicked Selfish and truly wicked man, governed by sinister motives, has enslaved the rest of humanity. He has put himself and others in chains. The blind have not only attempted to lead the blind; they have also manacled the blind. Man born casteless and Creedless and classless, free from the bonds of pestilential tradition and crippling superstition and idolatry, has invited and brought upon his head all these curses.
Man you have deluded and stultified yourself. Why have the rishis and sages and saints and lawgivers and preceptors, mentors and prophets helped, as it were, put mankind in chains ? They should have spoken for themselves; not for the rest of mankind. It is utterly preposterous on their part to have done so.
Existence itself, in this potty little niche, the earth, appears to be in a mess. Man exists in a whirlpool of confused thoughts and beliefs, persuasions and prejudices, professions and convictions and social entanglements. He has been voluptuously clinging to life. He wallows like swine in filth and dirt and mire. His notions are petty and narrow, his persuasions are skin-deep, his professions are a mere whitewash. He has become a whited sepulchre with internal corruption and an outward semblance of purity and spirituality. Humanity is synonymous with hypocrisy and superstition and prejudice and deception. Man has put on several garbs, and has concealed his genuine self. They are the garbs of conventional, official and mystical religiosity and piety, the garb of status and of rank and superiority and privilege, the garb of wisdom and knowledge, the garb of learning and talent and authority, the garb of university degrees and titles. He has used these idols to conceal his own foibles. He has turned out to be crafty and cruel, capricious and unpredictable, greedy and cravenly. All that is good and loving and honourable, magnanimous and beautiful, sublime and genuine in his nature has been obliterated and annulled. His moral character has been tarnished. He has become a downright rogue, a mean hypocrite, a heartless marauder, a cheat and a sharper, a
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chauvinist and political adventurer, a parasite and a speculator, a religious crank, and a mob - rouser, a fracas - blazer and an insurgent. To what a depth of perdition man has descended! He has even called Eternal Judgement to sit in
judgement over his deeds. How dare he cheat; how dare he tempt providence
Is there a thing called Eternal Judgement? A day called the day of last judgement? Man's reason does deny the existence of such things. They are mere myths and fancies. Who is to be the final judge of man's actions? Man, and man alone can be the judge of his actions. He is a judge unto himself, and a law unto himself. His own conscience, his inner voice, is, in a position to tell him which of his actions are good and which bad. There reside in the inner core of his being the ability and the capacity to judge his own actions. Of course, he must pause and reflect before he adopts a course of action, and ask the very pertinent question : Is it in order? Is it proper? Am Il in tune with Nature? Does it or does it not go against the grain of my own inner self? What has my 'small inner voice' to say about it? Is it right? Or is it wrong? Is it in harmony with the collective understanding of thinking
man? Ts it in harmony with the ordering of Nature? Is it sound?
This ability to discriminate between right and wrong is in born and is subjective. It is not to be considered a special gift from a higher being but an adjunct from a higher state of being. Every one has it. But the only thing is that one has to bring one's own ability to judge and to bear on every single issue that one is confronted with in
life. A process of self - examination, self – reflection has to be resorted to.
MAN AND NATURE
Man is part and parcel of Nature. He is one with Nature, and Nature is one with him. Says Spinoza: “We are a part of universal nature, and we follow her order". Man is of a piece with Nature just as much as the trees and the stars are. He is the child of the universe. Is he not
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to be proud of this fact? In fact he is the acme, the crowning glory of the ever - unfolding, the ever - being and becoming, the ever - evolving, self - actualizing process that goes by the name of “creation'. The plain fact is that creation is an ever - growing, ever - changing, ever - going and an ever - improving concern: a flux and a reflux, a flow and an ebb. It is not a mere happening of yesterday or of the distant past. Nor is it an event engineered by an extra - universal or supra - mundane entity. It is a happening - an event - in the never - ceasing, never - ending beginningless present. It has neither fixity nor duration. It is constant conjunction. It is eteraity itself.
Our past and our future are nothing short of phases of the present. They are mere figments of our memory and our imagination. But the present is a reality: an absolute existence. It is the true essence of being that is characteristic of existence. The mere plain fact of existence is the present. It is undeniable, incontrovertible and prehensible. It is final, determinant and positive. It is'. Its content is the totality of existence. In it the totality of existence is implicit. It is immanent in creation. It is universal. It cannot be disentangled, disestablished and dissociated from all-that-exists. It is inextricable from the universal process of being and becoming, and having become'. It is in the concept of the rishis of old "samsara itself - the cycle of mundane existence. Any one who denies himself his own existence can venture to deny the universality of the present.
TIME IS SINGLE
Time is single. It is indivisible. This no tomorrow hath, nor yesterday, Running it never runs from us away. But truly keeps his first, last, everlasting day, That has neither beginning nor end." - (J. Donne)
It is consistent with existence. “What is, is only ours'. Francis Quarls. The mind that conceives time as being composed of the past, the present and the future ís caught in the web of "maya', of "avidya' - of uureality and
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of ignorance. Such a mind is lacking in wisdom. It has no enlightenment. A highly evolved and matured mind is one that has a correct conception of time as a single indivisible event. Time is not only an earthly event; it is also a universal event. It is an intra - mundane and an extra - mundane event as well. It embraces the total concept that goes by the name of existence. How is it possible for universal, all-embracing, comprehensive existence to be divisible? Hence three - pronged time has been wrought by the mind in mischief. It is the brute mind that gave time plurality.
Of course time, understood as it is, in an earthly, common - sense point of view, in the practicality of earth - bound cxistence, and earthly everyday happenings, is divisible. Man, pinned down to the earth, has his yardstick: his years and his months, his days and his hours, his minutes and seconds, his moaents and his instants; his dates and his appointments, his births and his deaths; his span of life punctuated by happenings, occasions and events; his entry and his exit; his pauses on the time - book, time - card, and time - clock, his foot - prints on the sands of time. And after his exit comes what appears to be the ages and the aeons and then we say: Now he belongs to the ages. But, what after all are these punctuations? These slots and puncta Aren't these mere atomizations of duration? What are these moments in one's existence? In that vast beginningless and endless catena - the sagara - the ocean of Time? They are nothing short of mere figments of the mind, caught as it inevitably is in the tangle of time. The mind, in its attempt to make time tangible, which in its essence is intangible, has been getting more and more involved in the threefold concept of time; and like a silkworm has woven around it a cocoon of no - knowledge' and deception and delusion. The mind has deceived and deluded itself.
What a sad pickle man has found himself in . It is all his own seeking. He, and he alone can find the solution to this, his unhappy involvement. No preceptor, no redeemer, no "baghavan', no saviour, no mentor, no prophet, no madhi, however great he may be, can come, to his aid in this matter of disentangling himself from the
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mess he has got into. He is his own redeemer. He is "the fnaster of his fate, he is the captain of his soul." It is really stupid for man to think that this world of practicality and of pragmatic sanctions will be in a mess if he conceive of time as a single, indivisible unified event. It would certainly be the other way about. Man, not having fully realized the unified event that time is in reality, is, in a mess. His life has become messy. He has muddled up his own affairs, and the affairs of his everyday life. His day to day existence has proved to be a blind-man's buff. His domestic life, his social participations, appointments and dates, his political aspirations, his attempt to ascend the ladder of social status, his efforts to find a secure and comfortable niche in life for his sons and daughters, have all proved to be futile; for, in these attempts he has got involved in the threefold notion of time. He has frittered away precious time and has become puny. His life has turned out to be a life of dodges and escapes. If man can live in the present without the distraction of looking before and after and pining for what is mot,” follow the behests of his true mentor, Nature, he is certainly bound to discover the peace that subsists in the universal present. He has inherent in him the capacity for infinite wisdom. Man should, therefore, elect to live each day singly, happily, usefully and as fully and as richly as possible. Let today be the first day of the rest of our life. Let us eke out our work without pageantry.
The sun and the moon and the stars, the innumerable nebulae and astral clusters, and the meteors and the cosmic dust that people the visible and invisible universe, the infinite space itself, the immensity of the void : are all caught up in the web of time. They appeared to the ancient rishis to have been born out of the womb of “KALA - Time, in its all-comprehensive concept, its ever - expanding vastness to embrace every existence. Nature in its totality has been born in the womb of Time and in the vacuity of the fluid void.
How did TIME KALAI come into existence? How did space (Akasal dilate into its ponderosity? How was the time - space continuum of the modern mathematical physicist; How was Nature itself designed, structured, and moulded
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into form? These are questions of great moment. Caugh up as we are in the time - space continuum of existence, limited as our intelligence is, enshrouded in the pall of Maya, and such a mixed stuff as we are, it is immensely difficult for us in the present state of our intellect a understanding to find a plausible answer. Should anyo venture with a solution, it can at best be only conjectural and hypothetical. But, since man is involved in the procs' of evolution, since he is growing into ever - increasing ever - widening, ever-enlarging, ever - awakening ever-selfactualizing consciousness, nay a subconscious, rather supraconscious incubation and maturing of his mind, the may come a time when he would be able to get a partial not necessarily, a total solution to his problems. This will be a blossoming of the subconscious into the conscious, if not the supraconscious state. But there is one area of certitude, and that is that TV1, and SPACE and NATURE itself in its multiform, multifaceted manifold subsist in the ETERNAL PRESENT.
For practical considerations TIME is to be conceived of as being composed of an infinite number of instants, just as SPACE is to be conceived of as being made up of an infinite number of points. Space is no other than a system of closely packed points, just as much as TIME is a system of closely crowded instants. A point has dimensions since an infinite number of points huddled and closely packed together form the space. Just as much as a point has space value, so has an instant, time value. But the irreconcilable fact is that a point and an instant have according to the mathematical physicist no real existence, and that they have as one single entity excited a notion in our mind. Thus TIME and SPACE are existences in our mind.
All forms in Nature have spatial and temporal relations. They have come into being as a result of the conjugation of TIME and SPACE. They exist in the mind and they are the projections of the mind: each one of them being “the-thing-in-itself. that is, the thing that has the inherent capacity to feel, to sense, to say in its inner depths: “I am'. All existence exists in “I am'. It is self
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predicative; universally present and is rooted in eteraity. It is grounded on the most inadequately understood of notions: I and my Father are one.
Every entity, every existence, every thing has inhering in it a provenance, a location, a time, a movement and an action; all its own-all constituting it : a “swadharma' : a rtam": in short a harmony, a concord, a sweet perfection in relation to the ambient circumstances. Even though hyperbolical doubts about these qualities, attributes and accidents have assailed many a sincere and truly devoted seeker after truth, yet on a more careful and lawful investigation it may be asserted that nothing can exist completely stripped of the adjuncts mentioned. A proper understanding of these adjuncts disposes the mind to peace, to harmony and a gentle and concordant mood. When the mind fails to have a clear understanding of things and is so disposed as to form incorrect judgements, it incurs the odium of picking holes in others' garments. It develops a fault-findiag trend and becomes inordinately cantankerous and vapid and bored.
Hence, unless a person be with a good sense, a clearness of vision, a largeness of heart, an understanding of the several principles of order, as also of good form, he will ipso-facto become a misfit in life and in human society.
Now, let us come back to our subject. It may be asked: What is the end in view of a point? Points are of necessity meant to be drawn together, to be herded together to form one single unity, namely 'space' which. in its essence, is infinity itself. Similarly the end of instants, is, of nscessity to b2 drawn together, to be huddied together to form one single unity, namely: ‘duration', which, in its essence, is eternity itself. There can be only one existence that can be infinite and at the same time eternal, and that is “Oneness' or , 'Wholeness' - the “Poornam' (perfection) of the Vedic rishis, the "I AM of the Hebrew prophets.
The void is fluid and contains ail possible formas : geometric and otherwise: regular and irregular. A multitude
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of shapes exist in the void. There is finality in all shapes and forms. Not so in the void. It is infinite; it is illimitable. Space signifies the presence of an end that is yet to be, but yet contained in the present. It signifies the existence of something beyond and yet beyond. Since it is unlimited. like, for instance, the surface of a sphere, it must, of necessity, be curved. It has curved on itself and hooked round TIME. Both TIME and SPACE have got caught in each other's inextricable embrace, and the outcome is the “totality of existence'. The KALA and the AKASA of the Vedic rishis, most probably, refer to these two substrates of existence, to wit, TIME and SPACE. They are the twin stuffs of existence.
NATURE may be said "to be'. It just “IS'. That is all. And every object in NATURE 'is', since the past has gone into the storage of the present, and the future has not come into being and is latent in the present. There is no such entity as blind Nature'. Nature is a selfforming, self-propelling, self-revealing and self-evolving concern. It is not a mere blind mechanism probing its. way not knowing whither. It has neither a beginning, nor has it an end. It is a fund of motive power, a fountain of energy, a potent unsurpassed. It is imprudent for man to seek for a cause and an effect in Nature's varied patterns of existence. There it is, undergoing a change: an unending catena of changes. It is being put through the mill of time. The mill of time grinds and the change occurs. It is the being and becoming' process. So, it appears to man : that things have got entangled in time and space, and that they have got interfolded each in the other.
All that man sees, observes, investigates in his effort to understand Nature, to discover a meaning in it, are mere appearances. A pall of semblance has invested man's vision. All that he sees and hears and tastes and feels and senses may or may not be real. They are mere symbols. They may be only partial realities. They are the mere shadows, phantoms of the reality that resides in things : the “wholeness' in them. A thick film of doubt and ignorance has been cast over entire nature, so much
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so, that man cannot with positive certainty say: this and this alone is the reality: the ultimate shape of things. Where can reality be surprised?
Power
Inherent in Nature there is power: Nature's potentiality: the energy-flow that has begotten the various forms static energy and dynamic energy : motive power and formative power. A watch has, for instance, motive power, a bee has formative power.
Now, we are impelled to ask ourselves the question : Aren't we in a mess? Isn't our understanding pathetically clouded? It looks as though we are plunged in a mire of confused thinking; as though we have been lost in a maze and could see no way out of it. Despite the fact we are potentially, infinitely intelligent, we are abysmally ignorant. Although to all intents and purposes we seem to be in a sad pickle, still, there is hope that springs eternal in the human breast. All trends in human cognizance point to a goal full of hope, replete with a perfect understanding and enlightenment. There is bound to be a stage of complete awareness in man's evolutionary progress. Then he becomes the Beer : the man of perfect wisdom: the man of reason : the man of an expansive, enlarged mind of consistent thoughts. "He to whom all things are one, who draweth all things to one and seeth all things in one may enjoy true peace and rest of spirit.' (Jeremy Taylor). a the words of Spinoza: “Nature is the sum and substance of all that is.
When we study the biographies of the enlightened ones of the earth we come across instances of beings that have attained the state of perfect awareness. But unfortunately, for the generality of mankind, the simple and clear utterances of these perfect beings have been got hold of by their wrong ends by selfish, foolish, stupid and often cunning, cynical and wicked men, and turned and twisted and misinterpreted so that they may live in comfort and luxury armed with authority and invested with power. These self-seekers, these wicked and blind moles, these
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privileged few, have, by virtue of their authority, their artful rituals and religious rites, their words of charm, snslaved mankind. They are “accomplished deceivers'.
Every existence occupies its own characteristic duration in time and point in space. This is the burden of our psalm of existence. An existence is. It can never be repeated, replicated and made to re-exist or relive. It just exists: that is all. There isn't such a thing as personal survival. It is a mere myth. Survival, there is bound to be; but it is in a state of greater awareness; and a much deeper consciousness. Personal survival, whether in the form of transmigration of the soul or incarnation as also reincarnation, is all illusion. They are neither grounded on any appreciable degree of probability nor of certainty. They are grounded on our fastedious craving for personal survival. We seek survival not as an awakening awareness but as Dick, Tom and Harry. These notions cannot be relied upon. They delude those who repose belief in them. Hence belief in them is not even of any pragmatic value. They serve inc purpose whatsoever to enable a person to lead a meaningful life.
What is often termed and accepted as the “hereafter is an unknown area; and whatever man has said about it under the guise of revealed truths is not of much worth. In man's conjectures about life hereafter, heaps and heaps of rubbish has been propounded, and the doctors and divines and even commentators on sacred writs have wasted all their lifetime on this insolvable problem of the nature of the hereafter. In the words of Omar Khayam: They are all caravans that have started for the dawn of Nothing. The hereafter is a door to which no one has found a key. Even the best, the divinest and noblest of solutions come short of the truth.
Since we are in a world of relative existence conditioned by circumstances of an assorted nature our feelings and our thoughts, the value we have set on , our several patterns of behaviour, even our moral values are of relative worth only. We know not what spiritual and absolute values are. We are mightily and painfully ignorant
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of the perfection that goodness is; for we have seldom or never attempted, and never made a sincere effort, and never endeavoured to participate actively in the eternal and never-ceasing process of heing becoming and having becomme”.
How often have we, in our conceit, thought, that we and those of our coterie, and we alone are in possession of the TRUTH; and how frequently we hear in our religious sermons uttered in all seriousness from a million rostrums and pulpits and podia that we who belong to such and such a religious persuasion are the only people in possession of the TRUTH, that ours is the only true God, and that we and only we are qualified to enter the silvern portals of heaven and have the required status to occupy a seat on the right-hand side of God the Almighty Father, and not the others. For, they all are destined to go to hell and suffer in the ever-lasting fire throughout eternity. This is a sad thought, an uncharitable belief, a wicked and darkly cynical warning. It is a cynical doctrine of belief and formalities. It has nothing to do with what they considered to be the teaching of Jesus. Yet all our orthodox conformities have clung to this most uncharitable and bizarre and wily notion, this central dogma and article of faith most assiduously, as though the very existence and salvation of the entire human race depended on this pivotal thought’. In what crass ignorance these people have been brought up, and how systematically they have been indoctrinated
Nature: a thing of beauty
Nature in its totality is fa thing of beauty. It is a drama of breath-catching suspense. It is something grand, as also something noble; and, all that is best in creation has taken the form of MAN. He is the king of creation : the Lord of the Universe. Nature appears to have endeavoured to bring forth out of her womb the fruit of her supreme effort. And that fruit is man. His rationality and intelligence, his raw feelings and his nobler sentiments, his insatiable longings, his irrepressible passion as also his higher aspirations, in short, his discernment: all, all point
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Io the regality of man's status in Nature. Longinus has given expression to this notion in these words: “From the first Nature poured into our souls a deathless longing for all that is great and diviner than ourselves.' Nature is indued, and induces us, with its very spirit.
From inanimate and inert matter : the rocks and the stones and chemicals and metals and minerals, Nature has pushed and felt its way through urea and the amino acids and viruses and bacteriophage and amoeboid existences and forked into the two great branches of living forms: the vegetable and the animal kingdoms. While the former has more or less found its highest achievement, reaching its consummation in the flowering plants, the latter has gone on branching into various forms until it reached the twig of anthropoid apes; and then made a tremendous leap and achieved its highest goal in man. Man - with his rationality, his discernment, his capacity to reflect and reason, his ability to count and to calculate, to believe and to doubt, to sart out fact from fiction, to accept, to reject, to collate; gifted with the noble sentiments of love and magnanimity and his noble altruistic motivations, his prodigeously good memory, his ability to bring together the past and the future into the present; - occupies the highest position in the evolutionary scheme of Nature.
It is indeed a very powerful momentum, with an infinitely high potential that must have pushed man and projected him to such great heights and crowned him the king of creation. He has in him a perennial potency to reflect, to think, to relate and correlate events, to plan and to execute his designs. This is an inward process with its mystical spiritual, heights and mystical love which is rarely, and in fact, seldom found in any other member of the animal kingdom. The mind of man has been evolved because of that immense potentiality, that vast endowment, to progress, to be and to know that which is inherent in Nature. The evolution of the mind of man is a timeless and eloquent proof of Nature's insatiable thirst for the attainment of "greater awareness' which is no other than an apocalyptic vision: that is a vision that uncovers the pall of 1gnorance. Then the scales fall from one's eyes.
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In the Hindu myths there is the story of the Devas who got together, made a supreme effort, and churned the ocean of milk (space) using Mount Maha Mehru (matter) as the churning psstle and the serpent "adhisesha' (Time) as the churning rope. Their intention was to obtain “Amirtha - deathlessness. But, unfortunately, quite contrary to their expectations, surprisingly there issued the poison of boundless desire: the prime cause of death. And the Divine Design assisted by its “Sakti” (potency) through compassion for the living things, especially for Man, swallowed it, and thus annulled its malignity to save the entire world from destruction and annihilation. Here comes an act of supernal self-sacrifice : an act of nullity and of self-effacement. Without infinite suffering and endless selfsacrifice and the noble sentiment of altruism, it is not possible for man to make any progress, gifted and destined as he is to reach the goal of greater awareness' and greater perfection.
Man is admittedly caught in the web of desire : the net product of his past and his future. Since man attaches too much of importance to his past and expects too much from his future he has brought upon himself a crushing burdea of sorrow. Isn't man a botched and particoloured work? Let us not, therefore, suffer ourselves to collapse under the crippling burden of accumulated yesterdays and empty-handed tomorrows. If man can think and reflect in such a manner as to live and move and have his being in the immediate present, then he will be able to free himself of the shackles of the past and those of the future, and thereby lighten the burden of sorrow. In this respect Dale Carnegie's advice is : “We should concentrate on living only today. Better tomorrows will inevitably follow'. This is a perfectly pragmatic piece of advice.
All the enlightened ones of the world: the Buddha and Jesus and Sri Ramakrishna and Francis of Assisi lived in the immediate present. The past was dead for them, and the future had aborted.
Being part and parcel of Nature man should not have attempted to misuse the forces and wealth of Nature for deriving satisfaction for his ugly cravings and low
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Passions. Modern mail, with the help of his scientific knowledge, has raped Nature to the limit of criminal wastage and merciless brigandage. He has misused and mishandled Nature's forces; he has attempted to satiate all his unwarranted desires. In this attempt he has lost sigho of his pole-star of existence, his principal aim in life, namely, that of possessing a clearer vision. He has been wallowing in dirt and filth, completely forgetting the goal of existence, his purposive intent. His bark of life has severed its cable and drifted from off its moorings, and has ben tossed upon the wanton waves of inordinate desires, gruesome greed and boundless lust. The mind of man may be likened to a turbid stream that has lost itself in “the dreary desert sand of dead habit'.
Man has immolated himself on the altar of sensual pleasures and limit less carnai desires. The martyrdom of man has baen going om despite the at tempts made by the truly great ones of the world to redeem him. To attain worldly ends: what Himalayan sacrifices have been made? And how many human beings have become martyrs? To attain spiritual ends; to achieve greater awakening, to discover the self, alas how few The heart of modern man has shrunk to such an extent as to make him narrowly selfish in his outlook. His ways have turned out to be "full of tongue and weak of brain'. (Hooker) Nature on her part cannot tolerate this; cannot suffer her true begotten son to shrink into oblivion; for, at any cost, he has to be led up to the altar of spirituality and crowned king of creation. Scientific truthfulness should inspire man to a noble way of life, not necessarily a belief in an absolute being an extra-mundane, extra-universal divine entity, a faith in a creed, a doctrine and a religious dogma.
Why has this penury crept into Man's heart? The reason is not far to seek. Man has drifted away from Nature's ways and disregarded Nature's laws. His pattern of life is not in consonance with Nature's. The note of discord has been struck; and man has moved away from the path of righteousness; the ordering of Nature. His actions are no more in keeping with Nature's Laws. His wants have become inordinate, his cravings wanton and Self-seeking.
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His needs and his desires have outrun his capacity to fulfil them. Time and circumstance have conspired with him in this ignoble, sinister attempt to satisfy his cravings. What a vast gulf of disparity exists between man's wants and his potentiality to fulfil them He chases the shadows having lost sight of the substance. The shadows belong to the past and the future, the substance is of the very essence of the present. Nature, as it has fashioned itself, belongs to the immediate present.
The birds of the air and the beast of the wilderness live in the immediate present. They “weaved not they 'span not'; they did neither dig nor did they delve; they laid not stores for the morrow; never did they mourn and never did they show pangs of agony or of pain; they suffered not, neither did they enjoy ravishing pleasure. They were born, they searched for their food, they hunted in packs, they grazed in herds, they procreated, they aged and they died, and vanished from this arena, unmourned, unsung, and unremembered. Not a tear was dropped on their behalf, not a voice whined and whimpered. They were, for all practical purposes, simply forgotten. But, be it known, that they have left an indelible imprint of their pattern of life on the pages of the vast tome of Nature.
Man, gifted as he is with a powerful intellect and an infinite competence to reflect, has, no doubt, a wider area, to wit, a much wider stage to play his role on. He has his entry and his exit, just as much as the membèrs of the brute creation have. But, yet, what a noble role he has to play What a sublime goal to seek What grandiose schemes to design and to execute In his search for this goal, let him not go against the behests of Nature: the stern, yet benign laws decreed by Nature for his own good. He who transgresses these laws seeks his own perdition. He is tossed “on life's rough ocean luckless starr'd. Man recks not his own rede. One should therefore live a life consonant with Nature.
Afterall hel) and heaven are of this world. It all depends on how we make use of the gifts of this earth. It is man that makes his heli and his heaven. There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking make it so'.
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Shakespeare. It is not prudent to postulate an external entity, an extra-mundane intelligence sitting in judgement over our deeds and assigning for us a place in hell or in heaven. Our outlook on our existence, on Nature, on our neighbours makes for us our hell or our heaven. In our moral and religious, cultural and racial pride and enthusiasm and fanaticism there is an ugly emotional stain that needs he removed and purifled. How often have we suffered excruciating pangs in our heart and mind, and physical suffering in our body, and felt in all sincerity, that we have afterall, brought to this lovely earth of ours the very hell spoken of by the blessed ones and wise rishis. In like manner we have had experience of heavenly bliss on this earth, and felt sincerely and truly that we have discovered for ourselves our heaven on earth. One stage binds one upon a wheel of fire', the other transforms one into a “soul in bliss'. Nor are these just floeting experiences, mere meaningless notions. They are the abiding and lasting facts of existence, and even attain permanency in our awakening which we have designated 'greater awareness'. It is a state of consciousness, of universal awareness, of “creative visualization' in which one feels that one is freed of all worldly shackies and has liberated oneself from the clutches of time and prehension of space. To attain to this state of tranquility one need not make gargantuan efforts. One has only to live in the immediate present and act in consonance with Nature obeying the law of the heart and the law of the head.
What Henry Thoreau experienced in his sylvan home at Walden, what Count Leo Tolstoy discovered in his farm Phoenix, what M. K. Gandhi felt by being one with the entire human race, the collective soul, when the assasin's bullets penetrated his bosom and when his biorhythm rose high and fell low with its aspirations and failures, and the supreme event that Jesus experienced when he was nailed to the cross, the deep love and compassion that welled in Gautama for the sheep that wass driven to be sacrificed : these are events that are justly indicative of their all-embracing, pervasive, comprehensive and expansive love for Nature. They had a perennial love for Nature and her laws.
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*Greater love hath no man that this, that a man lay down his life for his friends'. Can there be a more magnanimous act than this: that one finds satisfaction in the thought - thy need is greater than mine, and acts in consonance? The meanest flower that blows can give thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears'. He is a true poet, a truly wise being who is capable of reading into the heart of things and feels for them and becomes one with them. Then his heart throbs in concord with nature. The most supreme value in nature is all embracin love, mystical and universal in its dimensions, and circum ambient in its effect. It alone persists. It is permanent, perennial and everlasting. It has to be extended to man and beast : the “Wee, sleekit, cowrin, tim'rous beastie,
O, what a panic's in they breastie'.
(R. Burns)
The Bond of life is the bond of love.
Love is perhaps the only and the highest achisvement in human endeavour. The love that a mother cherishes for her child is the tenderest in form and content and expression. It is rich in affection, replete with tender feeling and devotion for the object of love. The love that is engendered in the hearts of two lovers is of a different order. It is mutual; and though solicitous and charged with tender emotion and a deep sense of mutual companionship, it is tainted in its youthful phase with lust and a craving for the flesh. It is suffused with boisterous passion; and unless and until a child is born, th: bond of family affection csin seldom be established. The sense of ownership, of belonging exclusively to each other, and mutual partnership may be there between a devoted husband and a devoted wife, but, unless this bond is braced with the love for a well-begotten child family love is seldom complete.
Nature intended the Sex impulse and tender emotion. and love to assume greater dimensions, greater cordiality, to bloom into the wider love for humanity. This will eventually pave the way for the attainment of greater awareness, which is a mystic feeling of love for the greater good of mankind: the noble sentiment of "maithri' - compassion - of the Buddha.
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We have digressed in this inquiry and moved away from the physical to the metaphysical plane. In fact there
the metaphysical. The one grades into the other insensiblý. The world of physical realities and the world of metaphysical values are in no way, distinct from each other. Love and the object of love are one and the same. The real and the ideal merge into each other. Distinctions vanish when true and genuine experience sets in; when we feel and pray in earnest. Says Montaigne : Truth and falsehood have the same visage, the same port, taste, proceedings'.
The art and the artist are one and the same. The law of empathy governs them. The one has merged into the other. Perhaps the greatest and truest artists of the world are the true saints and sages and the poets. Can there be a greater artist than Jesus? Suffering and a comprehensive love or "maithri' for entire humanity and creation have become the very essence of his art. This artless art of compassion embraced a mystical concern for the sinner and the leper, the prodigal and the possessed. Lust and greed, jealousy and malice, anger and hatred are driven away like chaff before the mighty gust of mystical love : sacrifice and suffering. “Suffering is one great moment': So is love.
Nature in its scheme of things has assigned a special place for love and suffering. We discover this aspect of Nature permeating the entirety of existence, for the moment love ceases, the universe itself ceases to be. It is through the intensity of love that all things be.
Jesus, the master revolutionist that he was,
made mystical love the ground of his teaching.
His commandments differ considerably from those of the Mosaic code. Love permeates every one of Jesus's injunctions; not rigidity. But though his laws were all simple and clear, unequivocal and practicable, and in perfect harmony with the laws of Nature, man, the egoist that he is, has tampered with them and given them his own inter
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pretation; for, he has pronounced them to be impractical. The laws admmberated by Jesus are those of the head tempered by those of the heart; but selfish man has tainted every one of them.
See how egoistic man and his dead church have misconstrued Jesus's universal laws. Judge not that you may not be judged. Forgive your transgressors. Our laws and our law courts have been designed and set up in open violation of this simple law: Don't sit in judgement over others, for you don't have the authority to do so. Love your neighbour as yourself. It is intellectual love that is involved here : an understanding of the other man as an object of nature. Despite this simple, easy and natural law, has not man, generation after generation, gone on hating his neighbour, his enemies, other nations, other races, other religionists, and bas waged war on them? Hurt them and maimed them? Destroyed their culture their identity and laid waste their lands, their property and their possessions?
Do good to all alike. Have we done this? We have one set of laws for us and our kith and kin and another for our neighbour.
Don't put away your wife. Don't do so for any reason whatsoever. No amount of laws on divorce can absolve you of this heinous crimc of abandoning her who has made up her mind to cling to you like Ruth unto her mother-in-law even after her partner's death. "For whither thou goest, I will go; and where thou lodgest, I will lodge. Where thou diest will I die, and there will be buried.
Avoid all such occasions as might arouse lust. What are your night - clubs and your cocktail parties, your attempt to live away from your partner in life and lead an artificial life of stress and strain?
Have an abiding interest in the commonweal of the entirety of humanity, not in that of your narrow circle of friends and relations only: your caste group, your creed group, your nation and your tribe.
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Give up all that thou hast. You have to be detached in all that you do. Give up your craving for wealth and pelf, for intemperate power and possession. Make them all the common property of all humanity, for “thy need is greater than mine'. If you hug to them you hug a panda. You are in for trouble.
We owe our existence to the supreme ethical value of love. It is impossible to conceive of the intensity and immensity of love and suffering that have gone into the making of a human baby, or for a matter of that of any baby: be it human, b2 it brute. The mother cow is all out to sacrifice and risk its own life for the sake of the safety of its calf. Even lower forms of life, like the insects and the fishes, have been observed showing tremendous concern in, and bestowing devotion on their young, for their welfare. Toads have been known to carry their eggs on their back, and fish keep watch over the nest in which the young are cradled. Some even carry the entire brood in their mouth. Nature appears to have been dominated by one salient master sentiment, namely, the sentiment of love and mother-care and of suffering and the will to sacrifice one's own comfort and welfare for the sake of another - the only sentiment which is altruistic in its motive. The motive force in nature is love: intellectual and intuitional and mystical love: and love alone accompanied by its visible externalization: suffering.
Maternal love in its purest form is the highest and sublimest of human sentiments, that one can ever conceive of “Love thy neighbour as thyself", is, perhaps, the highest and most imperious of human motives and human endeavours: the supreme moral code. “It is twice blessed; it blesses him that receives and him that gives'. It is symptomatic of the triumph of love over brute nature.
Renunciation and detachment are two other aspects of love. They are the obverse and reverse of the sterling of love. Renunciation is the most perfect form of detachment, so cleverly and clearly enunciated in 1he Gita; so passionately adhered to by Jesus and Gauthama, and Ramakrishna. The modern world is very much lacking in
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this signal virtue of renunciation and detachment. In spite of the phenomenal advancement modern man has made in the field of scientific research and discovery and invention and application of scientific data to technology. his life is marked by poverty of thought and penury of heart. He has been divested of his nobler and finer feelings and sentiments. His ego has been pampered, extolled to the skies, and the outcome is, that he has become narrowly selfish and depressed and inordinately power-hungry. The human commune has gone crazy: crazy with 'spiritual power and temporal power'. There is far too much talk and far too little thinking. Mass murder and orgy of blood have become the order of the day. The hungry hawk, that man is, has lost sight of his blessed goal, his “royal end in human endeavour, He has cast his much-cherished values to the winds; and is fast moving in the direction of utter destruction and stark ruin. The kings and rulers of the nations of the earth are corrupt, ambitious for power, intriguing and dissolute, degrading and deceptive though their courts and assemblies and conferences are picturesque and scintillating and dazzling. It looks as though man is determined to wipe himself from off the face of this lovely home : this earthly paradise: this bauble of the heavenly powers ensnared in the savagery of the times. Isn't he playing with danger and fire and death and dissolution? If he succeed in this ruinous and stupid and short-sighted and inept and cynical pursuit, the supremely noble goal towards which Nature intends her endeavours to lead man will be lost sight of, and man will not be able to reach his goal. Then will come the end to bird and green grass'
Now, the question is : will Nature that has taken such immense strides towards the attainment of the goal of "greater awareness' tolerate this stupid and blind endeavour on the part of man to destroy himself by wallowing as he does in the slough of ignorance? No, certainly not. Nature is too harsh a taskmaster to yield to the whims and, fancies of wayward man. The winnowing process, the survival of the best and the fittest is taking place. And the grain that falls by the wayside will be picked by the birds of the air, and that which falls on stony ground will not germinate, sprout, grow and bear golden ears.
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Man will be sorted out, picked and chosen in a similar manner. And he who is unfit will have to g) to the wall. And he that is wide-awake will be chosen. Such a man will then become the acme of creation: the omega point of existence.
The so-called advanced nations and civilizations that are today b hasting of their raterial progress, their power and their pelf, their destructive nuclear weapons shall be brought down to the dust; and they shall grovel in it like mean mangy curs. He that is high shall be brought low, and he that is low shall be raised to the point of highest perfection. Then the grading of powers into top grade, second grade and third grade Nations will cease to be; and only those that are awakened will reign supreme. Man that bas started with time will have to plunge into the Timeless. Be it known that timelessness is not a negative state. It is a perfectly positive state of existerce. It is a state where attributes cease to be.
Man is admittedly the foster-child of Nature. He is “a child of the universe no less than the trees and the stars are.' The intimations of immortality inhere in every object. From the tiniest particle of dust to the king of creation that man is ultimately intended to be. there is a state of consciousness in every entity. And consciousness is the determining factor for any form of existence. The opening and the finis are in the same chapter; nay, in one single word, a tight-knot concisien in one single syllable: “AM” - (Om). In this state of existence the subject and the object are identical. It is its own predicate. Man exists between two is finities. Our birth and our death have merged into the self-same event of existence. Either we bump the stars or crawl upon the earth. From our earthly point of view we have a beginning and we have an end. But it is not so when we shift our position and our ground even one jot or one title; when we dissociate our angle of vision from time and space. Then we feel; and then we are certain that we are’. Then the delusion of existence ceases, and we are left with its essence of being : namely: "I AM". This notion is man's daily sustenance. It ought to feed him and sustain him.
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Nature is a stern disciplinarian and an inexorable, unrelenting task master. He who transgresses her laws perishes. In the race of life he is left behind by the wayside. “Thou drawest love from thee who drawest me'' (Francis Thomson) is trtue of Nature. He who flees Nature, who fails to observe her laws, fails miserably. The creative drive is the supreme directive principle in Nature that makes things assume the pattern and the design characteristic of each one of them. Let one contemplate the form, the structure and pattern of growth assumed by a flowering twig of a Bougainvillea plant. What a oomplicated and intricate design is unfolded in its growth and development. The buds unfold, the leaves grow and assume a definite shape, the flowers bloom in all their flamboyant colours, and stand out at given definite angles and their leafy tissuey bracts crinkle and curl like a cluster of cockle shells. There is a miraculous and mystical directive principle, a formative power encoded as if it were in the plant cell itself that has been shaping and fashioning the spray which, we, for want of a better term designate as “creative drive'.
The energy-flow held within life's embankments, more often than not, overflows its banks, and gets embanked once again in various forms assuming various configurations : an amoeba here an Archimedes there; a mere stir and a bulge here, a gigantic motion there: a conscience that conceives and shares in the notion of 'cosmic consciousness'. Says Montaigne : There is nothing that is so certain, resolute, disdainful, contemplative, grave and serious as the ass'. And yet another instance. Have we not observed the marvel that is, that unfolds itself in the process of the growth of the antlers of a deer or the train of a peacock or the tail feathers of a bird of paradise? We can visualize how the “creative drive' enshrined in the blood and the cells, encoded in the DNA orders the several cells to move and post themselves in such a manner as to assume the form and shape and pattern of the antlers, and iridescent colours of the train of the peacock and the tail feathers of the bird of paradise. Having observed and studied the numerous phenomena of nature and investigated their form, growth and development, we are impelled to come to the conclusion that there must be a motive force, a directive
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principle inhering in all existence: be it living or be it inert matter governed by the law of precision : that breathes a breath, inspirits a motion, gives it a form and imparts it a "nature'. This force, this directive principle is inborn, not extraneous. It is the formative power, actualizing principle, intrinsic in Nature: not a mere blind mechanism. It is the self-created, self-evolved, self-perfected, self-adjusted, selfharmonized mighty intelligence, a design and a plan which
we call Nature and which holds its hands in benediction over us; over the entirety of existence.
Certain it is that environmental factors (Nurture) such as the light of the sun, the temperature of the atmosphere, the chemicals in the soil, the moisture content of the soil, the humidity of the air, the food intake of animals and of plants and other extraneous factors do go a great way in determining the shape of things, their growth, their structure and development; but not to such an extent as the inherent "creative drive' - self-actualizationand the principle of precision'. From its pitifully ape-like resemblance at birth the human infant within a matter of a few months grows and develops into a shape and assumes a form and a pattern, that, in a way, confirms our belief in the evolutionarv descent of man from some ape-like ancestor. The various stages of the human embryo, or as a matter of that, of a butterfly, a moth, a bee or a mosquito, the incubation of a bird, the g-station of any mammalian form are brim-full of marvels.
Much as we may like to shift all responsibility of creation, of growing to pattern, to an unknown and indeterminate factor called the Divinity, the "uncaused cause', and remain smug and complacent, nursing the notion, that an extra-mundane, omnipotent, omniscient being created all things after its own heart's desire, gave each one a niche and an intrinsic craving to bs and a cranny in the scheme of things, in the order of events, in the eternal timeslot; none the less, we are left with the enigma of growing into pattern unsolved. But, from our study of nature in its multitudinous forms, we are compelled to come to the inescapable inference that there is an inborn natural
perfection in all nature's forms: be it a snowflake, be it an elephant.
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Even our attempt to posit the presence of a “creative rive' pervasive in all nature, is, we have to admit in all sincerity nothing short of shifting the problem farther. Our solution is only hypothetical, but still, a very palusible one as that; for, it is neither extra-natural no extra-mundane; neither supra-natural nor supra-mundane. It does not seek the assistance of an extra - or supra-universal Divine Being. If the ultimate uncaused cause is an extrauniversal intelligence, then, again the question may be posed: Wherein is vested the cause of the ultimate cause ? A very sneaky question that derogates from God; but yet, it merits an answer. This will have to be admitted : this sort of inquiry leads us nowhere, and it fails to give us a solution to the never-ending inquiry : Whence are things? Who created them 2 What Robert Hooke has said comes true : “Nothing in nature is a “lusus naturae” sporting herself in the needless formation of useless things.' Everything is a “meaningful whole.
CREATVE DRVE
Self-actualization
The 'creation drive' immanent in nature creates, conducts, supervises, monitors, oversees and invigilates, and directs : the incubation, the gestation, the growth and development, the form and pattern and design of the several things that go to constitute nature. It is selfgrounded, unconditional and self-illuminated. It is its own light. Its existence is not contingent. It is neither finite nor infinite. It is both in one. It is a principle that operates from within: a principle necessarily solipsistic. It is not transitive. It is a self-creating, self-maintaining, self-directing, self-satisfying, self-validating, impenetrable principle immanent in all Nature. Since it is self-predicative, it is an irborn constant amenity. It is the supreme law that tamed the chaos. It sheds its own lustre: b.6ir 36f பெருக்கி,
It is an unfolding of the in-folded and in-coded patterns and designs. It must be admitted that everything, however minute and microscopic it may be, has its N and OUT. That means, it has in it the potential for an
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in nate process which is the very germ of reflection and imagination. Advanced as we are in the scale of evolution, we are able to reflect, to think, to say "I AM", because of the capacity to involve ourselves in an inwardly directed introvertible process, a deeper and abiding sensitivity to human milieu. This is the 'consciousness"-shall we for want of a better terminology call it “collective cosmic consciousness' - that inheres in all objects, in all thoughts, and is responsible for all existence: be it an atom, be it a Goethe. It is a motion and a spirit that impells all thinking things, all objects of all thought, and rolls through all things.' (Wordsworth). The poet calls it the spirit of Nature. Call the rose by any name; it smells equally sweet.
NATURE AESTHETICALLY AND ETHICALLY AND MATHEMATICALLY ORDANED.
Everything in nature is aesthetically and ethically and mathematically ordained. Existence itself is supremely and supernally ethical in its moulding, fashioning and bearing. Had it not been for the hidden laws of nature, often unfelt, and unknown, and uncomprehended, nothing, could have come into existence, and nothing may abide. The laws of Nature are inextricably involved; they are puissant and gay, yet most marvellously and simply ordained. There indwells in them a tantalizing simplicity and gaiety. Not a single law of nature is at variance with any other. They are all in perfect harmony with one another like the smile that bangs on baby's lips.
Nature works in every object in harmony with its tructure and form, so much so, that even the minutest particle in it has something to do with its configuration and its pattern of behaviour. We, therefore, venture to think that there is no waste in nature, no extravagance, no redundancy, no falling by the wayside; no meaning in the biblical maxim: Many were called, but few were chosen. Every event however mean, weeny, flimsy and flimflam it might appear to be, has assuredly an end in view,
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and a goal to seek. Isn't it the end-product of a thought: a thought concretized? A plan and a design that has taken a shape and assumed a form ? Hasn’t it conscripted a signal good quality?
Nature is an unbroken melody: a compactedly composed rhapsody ? What marvels do we observe in the ordering of Nature What miracles unfold themselves before our eyes every moment of our existence: Even a single star shining all alone in a velvetty dark sky is tender and beautiful and mild." Only those who have the eyes to discern behold them, and those who have the ears to hear hear them. There is a divinity that shapes our ends, rough-hew them as we will." (Shakespeare). We have to bow humbly to the dictatates of Nature.
Man has to put to use the things of nature but divest himself of the wrong notion : All things have been created for man : to satiate his sense titillations and his wily cravings. He has to live his life brim-full, and drain the cup to the dregs. His senses and his appetites, his powers of reflection and reasoning, his understanding and his sense of values, are intended to enable him to enjoy the various gifts of nature and to wring out a significance from them. The things that go to nourish his body and thoughts, that go to enrich his mind and equip him for a fuller and happier existence are not only the food that he eats, digests and assimilates, but also the sights that he sees, the sounds that he hears, the very notions that he entertains and reflects upon. They are all his food for thought; they enable the mind to expand, and the spirit to grow, and to evolve. The sweet, bitter, pungent, the sour, caustic and acrid tastes that he is able to sense with his tongue and the numerous taste buds in it, his sensation of smell, his capacity to capture the several odours that are borne in the air, and to gather the various gamuts of notes of different wave lengths that reach his ears; the heat and the cold, their actual qualities, and the numerous sensations that he is capable of Sensing through his skin
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and his sense of touch; his ability to form concepts, to cduce relations and organize correlates, to reflect and to think, to extract abstractions aad draw inferences, to form concepts from his perceptions, to distill lofty ethical values, to fashion and order his life and get a vision of it, his instincts and emotions and sentiments that provide him with the necessary motive force for leading a happy, contented and peaceful life: in short his power and his efficacy: these are some of the blessings, the benign Sensitizing gifts of nature that are his birthright and his rich endowments which when properly wooed Nature reveals her numberless secrets. Does man make the best use of these gifts. The misuse of these gifts and powers has led him into blind alleys and intricate mazes. He has strayed and has gone off the track, and he knows not how to take his steps in the right direction. That which is most hostile to man in the domain of nature is man. He falters and he falls, he faints and famishes, and the net result is misery, despondency, decrepitude and death. It would appear that man is irretrievably lost.
The voluminous tome of nature with its innumerable precepts, its 'sermons in stones, hymns in running brooks and good in everything' writ large in letters of gold is open right before man to read and comprehend, to reflect, to imagine, to stand and stare and live a life of perfection and attain greater awareness.' But poor blind mole that man is, owing to his own folly, he has lost sight of these noble precepts of Mother Nature and has taken to evil ways. Having been so much accustomed to filth and ugliness, man has lost sight of the beauty in nature, in the inner core of being.'
it was an evil day when Christopher Colombus discovered America; Captain Cook landed at Botany Bay, in Australia, and Livingston and Stanley and Mungo Park explored the 'dark continent', Tasman sailed for Tasmania, and Hernando Cortes climbed a craggy peak in Darien and saw the Pacific Ocean. These discoveries and explorations, despite the fact they were notable feats of adventure paved the way for the successful and systematic enslavement of a large proportion of humanity by a wicked, privileged, selfish
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few. In fact the age of discovery is nothing short of the age pf enslavement of the coloured races. Entire races of people, mismamed aborigenes, and native inhabitants of Tasmania, Atistralia, NewZealand, North and South America and South Africa have been mercilessly and successfully eradicated from the face of the earth. The notion of . The whiteman’s burden' like a gigantic ogre, a cyclopean force, has completely decimated such fine vigorous races of mankind as the Tasmanians, the Maoris, the Emu men of Australia, the Bushmen of South Africa, the Zulu and the Bantu tribes, the Pigmies, the Red Indians of North America and the native tribes of South America. The “Expansion of Europe' is no other than the enslavement of the coloured races of the world, , and the enslavement of the sense of beauty that resides in the inner core of every being. It is the harrowing tale of the aggrandisement, of an inveterate attempt to own land masses, to rule over empires where the sum shall never set. v
Having been assailed by a feeling of revulsion and abhorrence at the treatment meted out to the slaves of Rio de Janeiro by the Spanish Colonists at the time he visited the South American coast while he was on the Voyage of the Beagle' in 1835, the illustrious naturalist, Charles Darwin writes : Picture to yourself the chances ever hanging over you, of your wife and your little children - those objects which nature urges even the slave to call his own - being torn from you and sold like beasts to the first bidder And these are done and palliated by men who profess to love their neighbours as themselves, who believe in God, and pray that his will be done on earth It makes one's blood to boil, yet heart trimble to think that we Englishmen and our American descendents with their boastful cry of liberty have been and are so guilty, it is no consolation to reflect that, we at least have made a greater sacrifice than ever made by any nation to expiate our sin.' Is this not an appallingly sad commentary on the civilization of some of the Eurapean nations?
These acts of violence perpetrated against humanity, that have resulted in slavery, social up-heavals, holy wars,
racial hatred, religious bigotry and genocide have syste--
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matically stemmed the tide of human progress and betrayed man and stood in the way of the evolution of a peaceful social sense, and the formation of an integrated human society and cosmic consciousness. The tide of human progress had been effectively stemmed and compelled to flow in the reverse direction. ature may have to sift and winnow and cast aside the chaff and garner the grain. The time has come for the mind of man, lacerated as it is, to evolve into the powerful and wideawake mighty intelligence that it is destined to be. Man's steps have to be taken in that direction.
The future of man despite the evil ways he has adopted and despite the fact nature appears to have implanted in him a tendency towards the bathos, is bound to be a glorious one. The evil shall ultimately be shed, and lofty values, like rare rays of hope, shall lead man to his ultimate goal. No more shall entangled feelings keep man from man and make him a stranger in the midst of his own kith and kin. The house that has got divided cannot stand. Even the church of Christ in South Africa and in the Americas has got split up into the white man's church and the black man's church.
(One Life’ - Christian Barnard)
It will fall. But yet there is a happy trend in humanity's ways to converge, to get together, to conform, to confabulate, to form one single family with common interests and common aspirations. This is an ecumenical effort, and it will lead to the formation of a single comity of nations, an undivided commonwealth of benign mutual interests. In such a happy circumstance, he that became estranged from the human family, is bound to become one with it, thereby befriending it. The prodigal and the proftigate shall return and join the family, and help rnake it an integrated whole and a bastion of strength. The cumulative effect of this unifying and uniting process in nature, this happy 'get together' shall serve as the omega of perfection of the mind of man. This trend shall lead man to mystical heights and mystical depths of love unknown to the generality of mankind all these long years, except the true Saints and the sages.
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in the ordaining of nature there is patent a science; and also an art.
There is some order, some method and some system that may be comprehended with our intellect; some inherent beauty to be felt in the coursing of the blood, in the fulness of noble passion, and appreciated. This is the law of nature; and nature has intended man to be endowed with the rare capacity to perceive, to know and to understand the marvellous order in her and her stupendous motive forces, as at the same time to feel and appreciate the beauty that is intrinsically hers. Hence endowed as he is with feelings a mind and intellect, with the powers of cognition and conation, an overpowering sense of suspense and awe, man should not fail to know and to be awed. He should learn to enter into the being' of things. But this power and this efficacy to understand and to appreciate the things that constitute Nature should go hand in hand like twin bulls yoked to a plough. Neither the one nor the other should either go ahead or lag behind singly. Neither the scientist nor the poet can afford to remain smug and complacent confined to his own ivory tower. They must meet as philosophers; as lovers of Truth. There should be a dialogue; and a confluence of both their faculties. The streams should meet and swell into the one mighty river of Truth; but yet, this fact forces itself upon us, and that is, that “modern physics is losing matter, and modern psychology is losing mind," that the knowing process has come within the field of science, that the feeling process has gone outside its pale and control, and that man has learnt the art of imitating his god instead of imitating Christ.
TRUTH can never be like Janus, double-faced. It is a meaningful whole that is capable of existing; but Fate is an unknown future and Regret a dead past. Then why should one regret? Truth is the one coherent, indivisible factor that governs all existence. It transcends all climes, all political, racial, caste, creed and linguistic barriers. The seeker after truth should, therefore, be prepared to give up his voluptuous entertainments of the courts of stupid kings and blind rulers, his vapid political leanings, his cast-iron religious, orthodoxy, his special brand of doctrines and
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dogmas, his time-consuming religious rites and rituals. Shouldn't he shed his quaint complexion of caste, his longche rished traditions, some of them petty and putrid, his racial characteristics, his bondage to machinery and a
convictions and prejudices, his tribal gods and his social heritage? Many things which were yesterday articles of faith are today nothing better than fables' - vsontaigne. Why should man owe allegiance to any kings? Any emperors, rulers, and for a matter of that, to any particular system of government ? Why should he be conditioned by any specialized mode of thinking? Why should he belong to any school of philosophers and thinkers? Why should he bother to prepare a pack of lies to be offered to another, calling it a faith or a belief? Why should there be any package deal of any sort in any of his transactions: economical, mental or spiritual? Why should he trace his lineage to his first parents? His first home to an Aden? And his weaknesses and foibles to the fall of nose first parents? Why this tendency to nerd together, to seek a hovel-post to lean against like a Gobbo He is in the words of Einstein: “a horse for a single harness." He is neither a stoic nor an epicurean. He is neither narrowly regimented, nor rigidly disciplined. He is just a man making an effort to be the "Son of Man': the true spirit of man. In other words he is brutally human; intrinsically divine: Spiritual.
He that discovers the truth, the naked truth that resides in Nature has seen it. Having removed the pall of superstion in which he is enshrouded, he is able to see the “Grand Unity' that pervades entire existence : the "grand meaningful whole'. He is a seer: a true rishi. He sees and yet he does not remain content in that state. He makes superhuman efforts to make others also see. Since he is of a piece with Nature and having become one with the totality of existence, to wit a 'child of the Universe', the seer may rightly be said to be the epitome of nature's endeavour. There is a feiicitous completeness, a happy fullness and oneness in nature which reveals itself to the genuine and resolute seeker , after truth. Nature reveals herself to her votary; and he, in turn, sees Nature's
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law encompassing the most divergent phenomena. He discovers a happy method and an aesthetic unity, and what appear, to be a uniformity in diversity, a concord in plurality. No more have the Fates and the stars and the planets and the zodiac the power to control and vary his destiny. for he has learnt to outgrow their influence. The pall has, been lifted, the veil of avidya-ignorance - has been drawn, up, and he is no more a stranger to the things that be.
In a scientific inquiry into Nature's mysteries and
laws, man finds satisfaction for his intellectual urge. In
act even the crudest form of superstitious and religious belief, is only the frontier of truth that has to be crosseds to enable one to see the “whole truth', not a mere fragment of it. The discovery of bauty and truth, love and compassion justice and integrity, gives satisfaction to man's imagination: and affetions and in nate urges. There is an ineffable charml in Nature, that only those gifted with a poetic mind can capture and enjoy. It is a charm associated with the
innumerable nysteries of Nature. Fairies and gnomes, and pixies and elves and genii, devas and demons are undoubtedly innocent lies that may be tolerated and permitted to people our imagination if we are poetically bent and emotionally
ripe; but, we are not to be misled by them. They are mere make-believes. They soot he our affections like a satisfactory, adequate and pleasing itching when the affected area is scratched or gently chafed, and they feed our imagination if we are poetically inclined; and our feelings are matured. Although there may not be any scientific data in them, and though they may be denuded of truth, yet, they satisfy our urge to be deluded. The raw materials of the mathematician's and space scientist's and the logician's trade are as bizarre and far-removed from reality as the fairies and as fleeting as the elves that are said to people
the rainbow and the myths. From the prosaic world of stark reality and down-to-earth practicality, man often plunges into the quaint world of his imagination and recollection, so that he may find satisfaction for his
affections in his dreams and phantasies and images and fairies and fancies. A wise man does not bring his notions into conflict with the happenings of the workaday vulgar. world, and give room to stupid beliefs and amentable and
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degrading convictions and faiths which make him lanquidly superstitious. Sweet reason is his guide, not blind folly. He does not hitch his waggon to the distant stars and planets and the signs of the zodiac and have an abiding faith in their so-called influence on his life. But, when one contemplates the earth and the other planets, the stars and the suns, the numerous galaxies, the time-space continuum, the timeless and spaceless void and infinity and eternity, the mystery deepens, and one plunges into the abyss of the mystical existence of Nature, and earns for oneself joy and a pleasure most inexpressible and an illusion of disembodyment, a sense sublime which is thoroughly exhilarating and rewarding. Then, when such a person who has kept his mind open at either side makes an attempt to give expression to his feelings and sensations and the totality of his passions, his tale is the ineffable story of the salt doll that plunged into the ocean in order to sound its depth.
MAN'S KNOWLEDGE OF NATURE
Why do most men find their existence a hum-drum one? Why are they tormented by ennui 2 Afflicted by, boredom? Why is it that existence appears to bear no meaning for them? How is it that they fail to read into the meaning of life? These are questions of cardinal importance, of great moment in man's life. The fact is that man has, because of his sordid utilitarianism, dissociated himself from all things natural. He has severed connection with Nature's ways. His understanding of nature is sadly fragmentary, his knowledge of it turbid and clouded.
At the outset it must be admited that Man is an essential part of nature; that nature is the sum and substance of all that is, and that his knowledge of nature needs necessarily be of two categories, namely : private knowledge and public knowledge. His instincts, his impulses, his intuitions, his perceptions and his apperceptions lead to his own personal experiences, which are of necessity strictly his own, and which fail to find expression except in that they are deeply felt in the adytum of his being'. One's language
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belies one's feelings: the inner swell and the bulge in one's being do seldom surface and become a scintillating gloss. Such experiences may be called private experiences, and the knowledge that one derives from them becomes one's private knowledge. It must also be admitted that one's own experience is a thing that can never be shared with another. I taste sugar, and I say: sugar is sweet. I experience a certain sensation which we designate 'sweet'. I see an object of beauty, and because I have an intuitive faculty to sense it with an immediacy, I say : I have a pleasurable, to wit, a sublime experience: a rare gaiety and splendour. And I say: it is beautiful. Beauty has become objectified. It is an immediate impression and an experience. These experiences of mine can never be shared with another person unless both of us have the same disposition, the same training, in short, have an identical ethos, and have stemmed from an identical gene pool. Of course the observation of certain types of behaviour patterns of conduct, externalizations of experience, expression of emotions on the part of the experiencer enable the observer to infer that the experiencer has a certain type or pattern of experience. The experience of a person can, to a certain extent, be externalized, and can be communicated to an observer by the experiencer's behaviour through the medium of language and through the outward expression of emotional impulses. That is all. Beyond that the observer is helpless. The experience of man, even that of an animal, or for a matter cf that, that of an inanimate object, is, strictly private. It is intrinsically its own. It is subjective. Every existence is a shut volume, tightly closed and the pages glued. No one can, therefore, have even an inkling of the experience of another. Nature's law of impenetiability' is exemplified in our experiences which are strictly our own. How then can we share them, even through the medium
of language. Language is no other than whole-sale lies quibbles; seldom quiddities, since a word can never be a meaningful whole'. A word, however perfect and effective it may be, can never be equal to the inner feeling that a true, experience is. It fails to be efficacious, and is thoroughly inadequate as a medium of expression. If that be so, which is the medium , that is most efficacious? Intuition and intuition alone. It is a form of sympathy; to wit empathy
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that completely conquers. In this scheme of understanding words have no place. •
"செம்புலப் பெய் நீர்போல அன்புடை நெஞ்சந்தான் asovisasar. Says the poet: The heart is brim-full of tender love mixed and mingled like the water poured on dried red earth. That is the power of EMPATHY: so enduring and yet so single. It is characterized by a sustained unity.
How then, does man boast that he has the capacity to read into the thoughts of others? It is a stupid and vain boast: a desire and an attempt to deceive, and exercise control over one's neighbours.
Emotion is catching : it moves. We cry when we see another cry. We laugh and we smile, when we see these expressions in others. We are empathetic : that is, we have the power to project our own personality into others; for, emotionally we have a common ground. But, it is difficult to assert that we have the self-same experience, the self-same feelings and sensations and perceptions as others. Every one of us, therefore, is a tied up secret packet of Nature. In short, every event in Nature is a thing unto itself possessing its own peculiar vortex of forces. It is a law unto itself. It is a self-contained, selfpriming, self-actualizing self-motivated unit: be it a human being, an animal or a plant or a microbe or even a grain of sand; a planet or a star or even a distant nebula. Every one of these existences is a locked-up entity: a mystery: a "thing-in-itself. It has a tremendous Secret of its own - a secret that cannot be fully known by another: a mystery that deepens and defies unravelling: a totality of experiences of ever-growing, ever-awakening and discerning awareness in a thing. This wide-awake awakening is called its 'consciousness'. When consciousness pervades the totality of existence, it becomes a 'compresence'. We may define it as "collective cosmic consciousness'. What the great Kant has said is full of significance at this juncture. Says he : 'Two things fill my mind with wonder; the starry heavens above and the moral law within'.
There is thus a common sensory substrate which enables us to share our experiences to a considerably limited
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extent with others. And, this is, as afore mentioned, our empathy: the power to flow into others and become one with them. It is the state of “compresence' of personalities where a “mind' flowing into a mind becomes a “mind". The law of the Vedic rishi is perfectly significant: “Peornam adha : poornam idham'. “That which prevails yonder is perfection in as much as that which pervades here is perfection'.
There is, however, another aspect of the experience of man, and that is his knowledge of nature external to himself. This we call public or objective knowledge. Man lias his inborn drives; his impulses, his urges and wants, his cravings which are his instincts. His desire for food; to acquire, collect and hoard it; his keenness to preserve his own life; his craving to procreate and preserve his race; his warmth of feeling and sense of security that h derives by getting together into a group or a clan or a tribe or a nation; his sense of collective security, of a mutual and reciprocal feeling of oneness; his agressive and anti-social tendency to fight, to defend and to assert his rights and those of his group, and its collective well-being by fighting and aggressively upholding his clan's or nation's rights: these and many other similar impulses are some of the native trends that man has in common with the higher animaľs, for example the anthropoid apes, the birds and other mammals. These inborn drives form the basis, the common substrate of his feelings and sensations which go by the name of "emotions'. Our anger and our hatred, our love, that is, our tender concern for our near and dear ones, our fear and our reserve and our maiden coyness, our jealousy and our envy, our altruistic solicitude for others and a host of other feelings that shake us, and quake us, and that are the result of the combination and modification of these basic feelings and our primitive wants and desires, form the conative aspect of our being and becoming process. They are all primeval, apparantly blind, chaotic and inscrutable, fundamental and intuitive drives. Had it not been for the warmth of feeling these inborn drives generate in the depth of our being' we would have ceased to exist, and all the living forms would have ceased. to be on the surface of this mundane home of ours.
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But between the living and the non-living, in the scale of existence, it is very difficult to draw as line of demarcation; for “reason in Nature responds. to the reason in Man'. In the lower reaches of the stream of animal existence things grade and slide insensibly and incessantly into the domain of chemicals and minerals... Man. gets to know his external world, and so do most living ... things through the sensations of sight, hearing, taste, touch and smell, and an overall smug feeling of "being.
Man has also been able to expand and enlarge his field of vision and of 'sensations, with the aid of instruments that he has invented by virtue of his ingenuity and skill. Man is perhaps the only being in nature, that has the power to communicate its notions of things, to discern and to exchange its views with other human beings. Man is able to 'perform this very important function of transmitting his feelings and notions to other human beings and receiving, conceiving, comprehending others' notions and feelings through the medium of speech and language. Man thinks, reflects and he gives expression "toh thoughts and feelings and sensations and to what
imagined and understood. He does these things through
the medium of language : the spoken word and the writter word. He has the potency to raise himself from the dust of ignorance. •
LANGUAGE is a highly specialized art; and is man has been able to cultivate and perfect this art by, virtue of his skill and power to interpret, to infer, to reflect, to say 'I' and "mine', 'you' and "yours', they and theirs', this and "that’, ‘either this or that', 'yes' or 'no'. He is able tó assert, to deny, to discriminate, to discern, a to maintain an argument, to pursue a thought, .to; impose his view on others, to stress a point of view, to accept or to reject or cavil at otheis' opinions to see a point of view and to maintain it, to focus his attention on; some salient point of view like, for instance: , 'struggle for existence and survival, of the fittest' or 'origin of species as a result of natural selection'. In other words, he has the capacity to pursue a thought, to work on a hypothesis until some result has been achieved. Unlike the other animals man has been able to work out his problems and
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discover the right type of solutions for them. He is able to plunge into himself, to introspect and come out with the notion of his own existence: to seek and find the how and why and wherefore of it: He is able to affirm the notion of "" which implies a very deep philosophical notion, namely: "f ami': 'I exist": "t am rooted and firmly established in myself". ft is his integrity", his "wholeness'. In this state he is about to sink into "being' and to enjoy the intrinsic harmony of its form and the bliss of its immanent particular heaven. This is a singular capacity that man and man alone has been able to acquire and to inherit - the capacity to integrate. Now he is able to say: I have a feeling.
It has taken several million years for man to evolve into this stage of virtue of which he has been able to think, to reflect and to discera. In short : he ha evolved the faculty of cognition.
At this stage it is relevant to distinguish between "consciousness' and "thinking'. Consciousness, it has to b8 maintained, is the very essence of existence. It is the inherent capacity to be aware of one's own 6xistence, to imagine and to know the thing that one is. It is a concomitant of the process of being and becoming. Both existence and consciousness are compresent and co-existent. They are closely linked up by the relationship of close contiguity. Hence, divested of consciousness, nothing can exist; not even an atom. It is a state of being'.
Thinking is the capacity to reflect, to say and feel : '' and “mine': I have a feeling and a notion. It is an intensifieđ state of consciousness; and a capacity to bé aware of one-self. It is an active state of being: td. wit a stir in a being'. But, can it be said that mari and man alone has this power, and not any other entity of existence? Its maturity occurs in this order: object : feeling: thought. To know is to be; and knowledge proceeds from "knowing“ and ends with 'being'. When we say: 'Í have a pen'. In reality it is this: I have the feeling or perception of a pen; for no one can ever hope to have a pen unless and until the pen' and the 'perceptor' have
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Goalesced and become a single indivisible ovent. We thus have tot things but impressions, feelings and thoughts of
hhing.
Now, it will have to bs admitted that the other animal, however highly evolved it might be, is able te rasp the simple notien of : 'eae” or “t wỏ and two fiñàkề four'. Arithmetical and Mathematical notions are foreign to the animals other than man. Animals feel, ånd so does man, since feeling is the nefve tingle it the being if response to some object or other. But animals think nosti and man does. It maay be that animals - the lower forms - are at the fringe of 'conseiousness'; and that iriett, deadshatter is at a very lew ebb of 'conseitousne'.
Although dogs and apes and rats and evef birds have been known to associate their behavitself with the thumber 'two' concept represented by two spots br lights their behaviour is one of a very low order of reflectibi called "conditioned reflex". It is still at the instinctive level, though of a soaewhat higher order. In this patterh ef behaviour there appears to be some kind of inwardly directed meatal prooess bearing some resemblance to thinking; yet it does not involve the complex process which is characteristic of human refleetion. The thental process of educing relations and discovering correlates it a capacity that may be said to be a specialty of man's stipér-mental make-tip. This process of thinking involves two categorie of events. At first the relationship between two events is brought out: say, for iristanes : light' and élark'. This relationship here is “opposité”. Thồn this educed relationship is used to correlate two sets of events thus: light is tes dark as virtue is to vice. This in the complicated preeeg of a percept maturing into an apperception.
Seeing a cat is bfe thing forming a generalized notion, ie organized impression, abstraction or idea, that is to say, a residuum of all our experiences of a cat is another thing. Impressions, in fact, deepen into concepts Thus the formation of a concept depends on manifold factors. They are all mental processes. All the perceptual mental processes like those associated with, and are the cumulative outcome of . sensations like seeing, hearings
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sfnelling, tasting, feeling and the various emotions and their manifold gradations, no doubt, go to assist in forming a percept. But the sum total of experiences that one has been able to get, the dregs of impressions that one has been able to form about a particular event, say a cat, enables one to form the concept of a cat. The richer the experience that one has about a particular thing as a result of circumspection, the more defined the concept becomes. In which event it... attains the status of an apperception. Thus the minds of the great thinkers äre replete, with a goodly stock of well-defined concepts, which are all tightly knit together forming a complex organized whole of ideas which are known in psychological terminology as "Gestalt'. Man's capacity to form concepts is almost enormous; nay infinite; and the mind of man, as regards its evolutionary, development, is yet in its infancy. Tt has its woof of clear thinking and web of fancy. Man has just stepped on the threshold of civilization. His mind has yet a long way to go. His moral order has not yet been perfected. His apperceptive power is still at a very - low ebb. His morality is still fear-bound; his religious convictions area conglomeration of superst1tions. His' thinking power is still in chains; it has been sadly entangled and enthralled. Harsh looks and harsher morals of the censorious keep man within the bounds of propriety, "Candour, not deception should increase with increasing years'.; And the proper delineation of man would reveal more of dirt than of beauty. His appetites are strong even to gluttony; his morality and piety are nearer high meat than freshly carved sirloin. His mind has tricked his flesh out ... in a super garb; for his flesh is a compost of carnality and superstition, iespite the fact it -acintillates with purple patches:
THE MIND OF MAN
what is this talk of the mind of man-his iManas'? Is it a physical entity, or is it a mere effect? A cerebral emanation? A cerebration? What is its origin? And where is its source? If it is distinct from matter, is there a causal interaction between mind and matter? Does the mind outlive the body? Has it any survival value?
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What is its potential Is it capable of evolving at some future date into something permanent and everlasting? Has it an infinite capacity for corporality, and for evolving into a collective mind? Into a benignant plenitude? Does mind in effect exist? What are books? What are thoughts? What are notions and ideas? What is the sum-total of human knowledge? Aren't these the mind of man in effect? Is there any distinction between mind and matter?
One thing we are dead certain about, and that is, that mind is an entity; not a physical entity, but an effect of the brain. It is almost impossible to distinguish between mind and matter. Matter is physical existence. Mind is, in all probability, the effect of the brain : the psychiç substance: the essence of the total being. So long as man exists and his brain exists the mind of man also exists. This much we are certain about. But mind, the effect of the brain, is more or less an emanative entity, which in its cumulative effect, is likely to out-last the brain as a living organ. It is an emergence, a proliferation, an actualization and a propagation, and has to be inferred
value. It is, in other terms, an entity: a thing with neither a beginning nor an end.
The mind of man has found expression in thought, in reason, in reflection and moral order, that is to say, in ethical values. All that mankind, during the long process of its evolutionary history has thought out and reflected upon, organized and codified, has come down to us in the form of a vast corglomeration, nay a single body, of human knowledge - vidya'. Reflections, reasonings, thoughts, discriminations, discretions and evaluations, abstractions, discernments and inferences have a lasting value. They are tightly knit. They persist. The efforts of the poets and the philosophers, the scientists and the thinkers, the saints and the sages have not been made in vain. Their thoughts and their art of reasoning are inherent in them, and have the substantial potency to survive. Great thoughts are for all times. They are seldom obscure; never dark. This demonstrably points to the notion that mind has survival value; that it has the capacity to feel, act, think and believe
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and form opinions all on its own. Pure reason, that is clear thought, unconditioned and unenthralled and free, tends towards greater progress, greater awakening, greater discernment and greater awareness.
It is not prudent to distinguish between mind and matter. Hume in his effort to discover the “self - mind - stumbled on perception. And what is mind and what is perception? Mind is a fact of inescapable reality, just as much as perception is. The one is the end product in as much as the other is the initiating entity. And who can gainsay the notion that mind and matter are one? So long as mind is the effect of matter - brain is no other than animate matter - they are in all probability concurrent existences. They are co-existent and "compresent'. In other words it is hardly possible to think of the one without thinking of the other. Mind and matter both persist. Like the pathi' aspect and the pasam' aspect of some advanced religious thinkers they exist side by side. All forms', when they persist, have a fitness and a necessity to exist - like the idea of God from which it is so very difficult to derogate. And its counterpart the idea of satan - adharma'. A balance and an equilibrium of forces have imposed upon them a native stability, and the material media have, as it were, yielded their consent to assist, to co-operate and conspire in the formation and formulation of the “thingin-itself'. The Taj, that rhapsody in marble, for instance, owes its majesty of form, its solidity and stability of structure, its permanency and individuality and singularity and mystical charm and its bewitching beauty to the multitudinous forces known and unknown : explicit and implicit-gravity, magnetic and electric forces, the various rays, heat and sound, the cohering energy that binds things into a single meaningful whole, the unity that unifies and renders a thing a universality - the creative will of the architect, the delicacy, the grace, the fineness, the pliability, the plasticity, the yield and consent and superb beauty, precision and excellence and filigreed texture and willingness on the part of the medium - the Rajasthan marble - selected by the architect to serve as the medium. There is, of necessity, a profundity in the theme and a sublimity of thought, a potency and a power that have conspired to
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body forth the marvel that it is, and bring it into existence, and give it the required stability to be a thing of beauty in time and in space : to convey a deep-seated significance
and inspire a magnanimous yet sublime thought. Isn't
there a startling minuteness and an awe-inspiring immensity. embodied in it.
Hence, everything has, as it were, three phases of existence, namely: “the-thing-in-itself, "the thing experienced and “the thing suggested’ — ‘swadharma” : “anubhava” : “anubootha'. The “thing-in-itself' is the assemblage of intrinsic qualities and structure that it essentially is. It is the very essence of the thing: all its inward and eutward qualities, form and inner ebullience and structure. The si “thing experienced is that aspect of a thing that an experiencer is capable of experiencing. It has in it the characteristic quality of immediacy: the aspect intuitively perceived. The “thing suggested' is the perceptive quality of the thing. It constitutes all the emotional colouring which forms for the experiencer an aura of warmth of feeling whenever he sees it, contemplates it and reflects on it. Sita’s ring in the hand of Rama had a world of emotive suggestions for him when it was handed over to him by Hanuman on his (Hanuman's) return from Sri Lanka.
1n the process of being of mind and matter there is the likelihood of the effect apparently surviving the cause. Not that matter goes into non-existence, but that the mind-effect to all intents and purposes outweighs, outbids, eclipses, outwits and survives the matter-effect. There may come a time when Nature in its continued and persistent process of evolution would be bound to rosult in the greater awakening and greater awareness which we, in the absence of a better terminology, have called 'cosmic consciousness'. The totality of the effect of matter, the emergence of its plenary essence, we may safely style and even define as mind.
In the final stages of apparent existence - plural existence - after it has undergone its full term of evolutionary process in tims, matter undergoes a complete transformation and ethical change' and becomes mind. At
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this stage of our assumption we may be said to have strayed from the physical and perceptual field into the ontological region: the region of ethical existence : that of being and having become'. But, as has already been assumed, thefe is no hard and fast distinction bitween the physical and the metaphysical areas. The distinction is only one that exists in our perceptual field. We perceive a distinction that in reality does not exist at all. This, we call “maya'. Existence at the physical level so it appears to us - capable of emanating motive power, that is some form of physical ferm:ntation, in some form or other, may be called matter; existence at the m2 taphysical level capable of emanating psychic power, that is mental fermentation may be designated as mind. The energv-flow in both matter and mind is the same in kind, although it may differ in intensity. Matter and mind are thus not discrete, disparate existences. They are one and the same, and occupy what appear to be distinctly incommensurable areas which we for convenience denominate: the domain of matter and the domain of mind. Just as there is incredible “commotion and heat' at the heart of the atom, there is incredible 'commotion and heat' at the heart of a dying star and the expanding universe and the crushing in universe. And just as much as there is an incredible commotion at the heart of inanimate, inert matter, there is in the mind of man an infinite power for soaring and expanding in an unending chain of thoughts over matter.
Investing everyone of us we have an ambient aura of effect' - perceptual reality - which overlaps the aura of physical reality. By way of illustration let us take a lead pellet. Let us call it 'A'. It is to all intents and purposes, a physical entity. 'B' is the same lead pellet as perceived by X. 'C' is the selfsame physical entity as perceived by another person Y. At the perceptual level the physical reality 'A', unrelated as it is in its pure physical state to the mind of man, varies in relation to the percipients X and Y. That which is a lead pellet as perceived by me is not the selfsame lead pellet as perceived by you. They appear to be entirely different existences at the perceptual level of different persons. The physical existence that a leadpellet is, has in it, all that is intrinsic : that is its
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essence of existence: its essential stuff. It has a form; it has a structure, it has a nature. It embodies the totality of attributes and structures: the residuum that pertains to a lead pellet. The selfsame lead pellet at the perceptual level of various individuals need not cover the dimension of its cntire intrinsic physical existence : its complete structure and total attributes; leave alone its psychic attributes and essence, which we can never hope to know.
But in everyday practical life, that is, day to day life's dealings, and transactions, there is an area of existence and experience common to two or more pereipients. This is the common sense percept' which includes a relevant portion of the physical existence. This is the common sense value' of the lead pellet. It has a common substrats : a common ground of existence. Persons who have some business dealings in lead pellets are more or less aware of the “common sense value' market value and practical value; and this knowledge of lead pellets enables them to have dealings with each other with respect to lead pellets. That area of their existence that interests them has a pragmatic, that is practical-end-in-view significance. Since there is this common meeting ground of Common sense value' men are able to conduct themselves and manage their worldly affairs without coming into conflict with one another.
Apart from the two forms of existence already mentioned there is another form of existence in relation to the selfsame subject, and, that is its ontological existence: its metaphysical phase : its mind-effect: its being. Hence every existence or event may be assumed to have three aspects: the physical aspect, the perceptual aspect and the ontological aspect. The physical aspect, that is the cosmological aspect of existence is entangled in the timespace continuum - a state where time and space are not discrete. The moment an existence slips out of the timespace continuum it ceases to be a physical entity. Then it assumes the status of an ontological entity. When h physical existence gets related to an existence at the perceptual level then it assumes the status of a "perceptual existence'. The mind of man entangled in and conditioned and sequestered by the time-space effect, cannot possibly,
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in its normal state, conceive of the totality of existence in its finest and subtlest and purest form that goes by the name of "mind'. The "thing-all-that-is' cannot be easily perceived with our normal perceptual senses. Hence man hasn't the right and the freedom to people the vast province of ontological existence, which we have called the mind with all sorts of chimeras, gnomes, devils, demons, spirits, angels, gods and the like which are the mere figments of an idle imagination. If he does so, and he has already done so, and clouded his vision by creating these eerie forms and phantom walls with the aid of his fancy, he would certainly be getting himself involved in superstitious notions, ideas and idols, and thus lose sight of the reality in which inheres the whole essence of existence, and which man is ultimately destined to realize. Once again for purposes of clarity we are constrained to emphasize this notion: Truth is never fragmentary; it does not inhere in parts; if is no piecemeal arrangement, no patchwork device. It is one single, indivisible integrated whole. It is "oneness with a vengeance. Truth is the very foundation of human understanding; but where can one surprise it? There's the rub. Therefore, snstain a faith, if you can afford to; but never choose one, and be confirmed in it. For most of the things we find in the world are governed by uncertainty. It is an illusory world; nevertheless right reason can disper the maya.
Accustomed as we are to a relative state of existence like fish living in a watery world, much as we may try to get out of the ambient circumstances we may not find it possible to come to know of and understand the non-relative, unconditioned state of existence. Our inability to understand the "absolute state of existence' does not necessarily preclude the existence of the absolute state. Organic evolution that has been going on during the past 1700 million years or so, has achieved its purpose, namely, the evolution of man, a phenomenon in which physical existence has paved its way to the evolution of the mind; the capacity to reason. The evolution of the mind aspect of man is still in its infancy. It is only, as some have estimated it to be, about a million years old. It has yet a long way to go, before the perfection of the mind of man emanates in the shape of “absolute reason'. . In such
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an eventuality where the absolute reason shall have been achieved, an instant will be of the same duration as an aeon. Then time would have reached the Zero hour. It would have sunk into nothingness in the scale of time; and space would have lost its relative value so that an iota would have been of as much value as the biggest nebula. In other words, in the absolute state of reasoning, existence ie Time and Space, would have shrunk to zero, and there would emerge an existence in which all other existences that appear to have crased to exist do inhere.
This is the final result of the process in nature that may be designated as "involution. It is a state of pure self-actualization. In such an eventuality terms such as “creation' and “dissolution of the world convey no meaning. There are only two processes in nature that are responsible for the coming into being of all existences and their going out of existence - not completely ceasing to exist. They are evolution' and involution : an unfolding and an infolding process : a blossoming and a brooding process: a motion and a rest: the “Nadarajah' and “Muyalahan' states.
Abe Maslow suggests that "growth takes place when the next step forward is subjectively more delightful, more joyous, more intrinsically satisfying than the previous gratification with which we have become familiar and even bored; that the only way we can ever know what is right for us is that it feels better subjectively than any alternative. The new experience validates itself rather than any outside criterion. It is self-satisfying, self-validating. This is the way in which we discover the self and answer the ultimate questions: Who am I? What am I? It is formulation of growth through delight.'
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DISCOURSE -
THE DENOUEMENT
OR
THE DIMENSIONS OF EXISTENCE
WHAT are the dimensions of existence? This is a very intriguing question, and deserves a very elaborate and exhaustive treatment under five separate heads. They are :
Y
O Sphere of inert matter,
Sphere of animate matter, Sphere of mind,
Sphere of knowledge, Sphere of spirit or cosmic consciousness.
SPHERE OF INERT MATTER
We are familiar with the sphere of 'dead matter' - that intractable basic factor of existence: At least that is how it appears to our Senses. What we see, touch and feel, smell and taste is a good deal of dead matter. Somehow, in this corner of the Universe where our residence, the earth, happens to be we are confronted with an immense quantity of inert matter which appears to our common sense as the five elements of the ancients, namely: water, air, fire, earth and ether, and as 'annam', prana' and 'akasa' of the vedic seers. These have tactual qualities. Of course modern physics and chemistry have classified inert matter, analysed its physical and chemical properties and effects, given it diverse names, and traced it down to what might appear to be its very fundamentals: the atoms: the packets of organized energy. Physical science aided by Mathematical measurements, has
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gone a step further, and made a study of the structure of the atom. According to modern physics an atomic structure resembles the solar system. It has an inward and an intrinsic capacity to exist : to be.
The atom has its organized system of protons, electrons and neutrons. The idea that the atom resembles a billiard ball is no more tenable. The more we study physical phenomena, and the more we investigate the structure of matter, the more we are being led away from the common sense world of apparent reality: the world of practicality. The scientists of the present day, unlike those of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, are losing sight of matter just as much as the modern psychologist is losing mind. The modern physicist deals with inferences and abstractions and semblances. He has left the world of tangible matter and has even ventured into the sacred precincts of philosophy and metaphysics. He has hopped from one level of existence to another; from the physical to the metaphysical, from the mental to the ideal, from the mental to the spiritual, from the factual to the ideal, from the factual to the intangible. Even atoms and protons and electrons posited by the scientists are, in philosophical parlance, “Convenient fictions'. 'Matter is what satisfies the equations of physics," says Bertrand Russell. And George Berkeley assumes that matter' does not exist; that things exist in the mind, and that the entirety of existence exists in the mind of God And Jean Paul Sartre holds this starkly naked view: "Every existing thing is born without reason, prolongs itself out of weakness, and dies by chance. ... ... Questions of origin and destiny are absurd, for they have no answers. The vedic view is that a “thing' exists in its own right. The black hole' of Hoyle is no other then a vortex of immense forces. And it has been posited that in the distant future, if not in the near future, our universe might get drawn into one and become a nullity.
Science, looked upon as a pursuit of power; energyflow, has led man to discover things which, when ill-used, bring more of distraction and destruction than anything of lasting benefit to humanity. But Mathematics as a measuring and structuring device has enabled scientists to express
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cicnfific data in as few words as possible. It is considered to be the paradigm of knowledge. It has almost done away with language-a very inadequate instrument for expressing notions and feelings - and has become the instrument of expression of the scientific facts of today. Mathematical thinking has led to relative accuracy in expressing scientific notions and the exactitude obtainable. In the field of mathematics accuracy, appropriateness and certitude are the basic goals to be achieved. None the less in his attempt to fathom the universe and its mysteries Sir James Jeans is of the opinion that : “everything that has been said, and every conclusion that has been tentatively put forward is quite frankly speculative and uncertain.'
Nature itself, in all its impenetrable and intractable manifolds is, perhaps, the greatest mathematician, and is unerringly suggestive of the existence of a super-mathematical trend governing the totality of existence. Nature's laws and forms, her forces, her manifold vexations and apparently erratic existences exist in a super-mathematical mode - state of substance - immanent in Nature, but for whose supreme planning, designing and revealing the universe could not have come into being. A relevant and perfectly correct, reasonable and rational corollary to the above proposition is this: that when the super-mathematical mode that Nature is in its essence, ceases to be, the universe is bound to recede into a state of chaos. The universe comes into existence, or rather it unfolds itself. or appears to nu fold itself, to structure itself when mathematical truths and laws governing movement and rest, pulling and pushing, attraction and repulsion, impulse and intuition get formulated. And then, Nature unfolds inself in all its manifold order: its principal ingredients being configuration, extension and properties : matter and motion and order: in brief, activity. Nature is alive: seldom or never dead or inert. Then prevail harmony and beauty while its essence has bien with held as an inner secret. The triad, namelv, configuration, extension and properties are all perceptible qualities; whereas 'essence' is an imperceptible quality. There appears to be an opaque curtain between the perceptible and imperceptible properties of an object. The one is knowable, the other unknowable; the one snbsists in objectivity. the other in subjectivity. Are
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these notions acceptable. It is open to the individual abserver to accept them or to reject them; but he should do so only after careful considerasion, circumspection and true analysis. And he should know this that in his everyday dealings he is only concerned with how things would appear, not with what they, in essence, are. It would appear that the universe has turned out to be a gigantic chess board where the Men move almost mechanically. But, can they? And where its
three pawns : permanence, immanence and transcendence are motion.
Although it may be said that a very vast portion of space is empty and that matter, in the common sense view, occupies a very limited corner of space, it is difficult to trace a line of demarcation between pure matter and pure space. The borderline is frayed, blurred and misty since the one grades insensibly into the other. Both these entities are so well and intimately and in extricably
commingled that no physicist will be able to separate matter from space-time.
Matter is not an instrument in the hands of an agent, nor is it an occasion - inactive and unthinking - nor a cause, nor even a substratum or matrix, nor an 'object'. It is no other than the effect of the “will-to-be' inherent in all nature: a presence that perseveres, persists and pervades: a will-to-be and to-have-been. This might still appear to be a bizarre notion: a new one: an innovation that shall have to be discountenanced - a dangerous opinion and a disturbing hypothesis. But yet, just turn it in your tmind and you will find it endued with a truth that can never be denied. It is a notion that had been fathered by he scars of old a nd given the garb of 'moola prakrthi' - substance of fundamental existence, almost coeval with nature. It is a trend and a tendency: a process which as accidents and attributes and contingercies accumulate, assumes various forms and consistency - here a tree, there a nouva; here an atom, there a black-hole'. Where matter is, there subsume order and harmony and a rare rhapsody. Where matter is not there is, in all probability, disarray and disorder, and there supervenes chaos. But yet "Nothing is wholly trivial and everything has some nobility' - may a need. (St. Thomas Aquinas)
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It is pure and simple truth that matter exists because of the close juxtaposition of fluid space and fleeting time: the one appears to our lay mind to be at rest and the other in motion. It would appear that wherever space curves and clings to time, existence comes into being; and that the 'curving' and the 'clinging involve a willful action - the “will-to-be'. It is a tenuous connection: unseen, but deeply felt and understood. Is it possible to have rest and motion, passivity and activity, together? A rather cnigmatic question. Whether one is able to grasp it or not, yet, the fact impinges on our understanding almost irresistibly, that motion and rest are basically one and the same phenomenon. Suffice it to say that, that which at one stage of our inquiry and investigation appears to be at rest, is nothing short of a cyclonic upheavel, nay a volcanic, turbulence at another. Our observation, our probe into, matter by looking at it and peeping into it, tends to bring about a great change in it and alter it to a considerable degree. The mind of the observer has its impact on the mind of the object observed. They get intimately indentured in two dimensions: in what things are and in how things, are - the one is physical, the other metaphysical. We see, in “objects what we intend to see. We love what we want to love; we hate what we want to hate; we judge what we want to judge, and in the way we want it to be judged; we accept and reject in accordance with our peculiarities of temperament. Hence, most of what we want to know of a thing is "intentional', not necessarily real. It is our own creation. We make our friends just as we make our enemies. Ours is, in short, a tainted world. It is our own creation. It is composed of intentional inexistences. Their boundaries of objects are fluid and fluffy. Every animal cell, every atom has a nascent thought content, a slumbering intent: a will-to-be, failing which, it ceases to be. This cessation can never happen once the thing has come into existence. Hence the thought, namely, the designing content of an object is in it: be it a plant, be it an animal, be it a distant star.
Nature has thus implanted in matter something basically dynamic and essentially static. How can these two
apparently contradictory incompatibles be mortised and
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annexed? From the common sense point of view, inert matter appears to be static. It is apparently passive and calm. But in the core of it there is a storm: a gale of volatile forces resulting in the involution and evolution of energy. That is how the physicists view it. The potency of matter is limitless and unfettered, exceeding all definition.' A body has come to rest by the fact of its being caught up between two or more opposing and lateral forces of equal intensity or of infinite potentialiiy. So, it is impossible to assume that anything has come to a state of absolute rest. Everything is in a state of motion. Again, and again and yet again energy is evolved, energy is given out, and energy is taken in. Atoms do not take out or give up energy gradually or in a continuous flow but in finite packets or 'quanta'. How does this happen? Only physicists can explain this. This upheaval, this sound and fury in the core of the atom, must, of necessity, be responsible for the multiplicity of forms and activities in nature. These notions appear to be muddles. “Habit and memory, when descriped in physicalist terms are not wholly absent in dead matter; the differences, in this respect, between living and dead matter is only one of degree. ......... The ultimate coastituents of matter are not atoms or electrons, but sensations and other things similiar to sensations as regards extent and duration.' B. Russell.
Let us digress and shift our position to what appears to be an entirely different plane of thinking. I am at home seated in my rattan arm-chair. My grand-child, a baby girl, barely an year old, comes crawling to me with a broad grin. Its behaviour has "moved' my whole being. A wealth of feeling wells in my heart. To resort to a very commonplace expression : I have been moved. I have been in rapport with nature's event. I have been transported. It is, in a sence, a transcendental experience. And, here is motion, and, here is rest. The commotion at the core of the atom has found its echo in the emotional upsurge of my whole being.
The wave that tumbles on the shore has had its
origin in the abyssal depths of the distant ocean. The emotional stir and the peaceful calm that I experience in
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the abyss of my being are nothing short of the turbulent gale and the nascent calm felt in the heart of the atom. it mere flimflam? In any event' matter and mind fuse into oneness. This is a constant feature in any aspect of Nature. Be it a sweet smile on baby's face or the wrinkled care that sits on the brow of a modern industrialist or politico or entrepreneur: they are all echoes of the inner stir of the atom. By and large it is the mind that is in action at varions levels of experience and awareness that surfaces as behaviours, as expression of the emotions, as thought and planned action: rational and irrational. Says Jeremy Taylor: “He to whom all things are one, and seeth all things in one, may enjoy true peace and rest of spirit.'
The poel sees peace coming dropping from the skies to where the cricket sings.” Matter has intrinsically implanted in it the power to move, to exhilarate, to exhalt to inspire and to pull down to the deepest depth of despondency. There is torpor and there is action involved in c very particle of matter; and consciousness is coextensive and cocval not only with universal life but also in organic (lead nature; for, organization is no other than extension of matter in a state of awakening action, Here matter passes from passivity on to activity. Atomic upheaval - the wave generated by the electrons, the protons and neutrons - can tven move a Macbeth to murderous resolves and bloody ulcids, so that with the best will in the world he couldn't have done anything better. Haven't the physical and the psychical energy-flow much in common? Haven’t they been tightly tcnoned, annexed and even welded. We cannot in true earnest blatantly ignore this point : that the line of demarcation between the physical and psychic effects is very fluid, tenuous and ill-defined; and that the two effects shade off by imperceptible degrees into each other.
These seemingly idle speculations, these intuitive convictions these sidetrackings, digressions, side-steppings ori the power of the atom' may appear to be piddling fancies, mere moonshine; the outcome of a drab meaningless phantasy, airy nothings that portent neither good nor evil. But be it. as it may, there is perfect justice, eternal ethics and the serene balance inherent in nature. There is much in human
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nature that can be interpreted in terms of the IIOVement in the atom. Physics has not to go far to mortise these distant phenomena: the upsurge in the atom and the aberrations of the human mind. We can see the St Of in the mind of a King Lear just as clearly as its co part in the elements.
raging Inter
Rumble thy bellyfull spit, fire
spout rain ... ... ... then let fall
your horrible pleasure; here
I stand, your slave;
A poor, infirm, weak and
despis”d old man.”
Both are akin, and in essence the same. Otherwise why does our mood, our temper change with every change in the atmospheric condition? Isn't there a tenuous link betwe “motion' in the physical and phenomenal world, and "emotion in the mental or noumenal world? Can we attach any weight whatever to this notion? In the organic world "matter has been cut up into properties and tendencies bringing it closer and closer to individuality.” H. Bergson.
The poet has it:
“Every morn a new beginning,
Everyday is the world made new.”
A floating rack, a surging wind in the trees, an inky overcast sky, the weary dreary, rain', a rosy sun-set, a knocking at the door': how well they are capable of moving us to action or to inaction, to decision or to indecision, to exhilaration or to despondency Isn't there a nostalgic appeal in the coming of the seasons? Why all this concern on the part of man for things in nature?
The domain of matter is in no wise different from the domain of mind. Matter is in a state of flux just as much as the mind is. It appears as organic and inorgonic matter. “Life is connected either with consciousness or with something that resembles it,' says H. Bergson. Have we not felt the elements speaking to us in colourful tones? The meanest flower can give thoughts, that do often lie too deep for tears. The poet spoke so articulately and so touchingly in
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such an entrancingly simple diction because he saw it and feld it clearly - the vigour of the creative motion in nature. He sees matter and mind rounded up in one single existence. He sees not the division, the separation, the discerption, and the diversity : the sterile security of the logician and the scientist. He sees the wholeness of existence : the undivided empire that the univese is. Even inscrutable inert matter like the steel in a razor blade and the metal in a the nib of a fountainpen have felt the ennui, the boredom and the fatigue in performing the selfsame task over and over again. And once matter has been given the time to rest, to stand and to stare', to "enjoy the leisure, to get over the fatigue and to recuperate, it miraculously performs its task to perfection. Has not inert matter in the shape of chemicals and minerals - inorganic matter - gone into the constitution of our living body ? If there was no living principle in them no organic effect, how did they coalesce with the living essence and become the flesh and the seat of memory apparently encoded in the R. N. A. ?
"It's a very odd thing
As odd as odd can be - That whatever Miss 'T' eats Turns into Miss T.' (Walter de la Mare)
"Assimilation' and intussusception' are designations that perform very responsible jobs in physiology - whether it be plant physiology or animal physiology. And physiological processes are again marvellous creative phenomena in nature. You consume milk and mineral waters and your system accepts and accommodates them. You take strychnine or any other deadly poison, your system rejects it and throws it out. How does inert mineral water get assimilated and become one with our system if it hasn't something in common with our body ? That something is the “movement: the organum : the mind that is common to both the living and the non-living. It is the nessary base of all existence, the common substrate, the essence, the norm in all - the idea and the notion : ineffably promising.
How do we assimilate ideas, notions and thoughts We see the notions of others; we assimilate them. They
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blend with our thoughts. 'Do you have them?" they ask; and we say: 'Yes'. They have become our own. Life blends with life. Mind connives and conspires with mind. We put our heads together, and then we arrive at a 'consensus. Our understanding', the life-principle that we have evolved is the outcome of some such "conspiracy'.
The physiologist, the physicist and the chemist may possibly explain the process of absorption, adsorption and assimilation and intussusception in terms of osmosis, “selective absorption' and some such similar process. But yet, the acceptance and rejection of inert matter by the living body is a process that has to be explained in terms of the 'mind of the body cells' and that of the molecules of inert matter. The explanation that one is constrained to advance with respect to the various growths, formations, configurations and structures abtainable in nature's members is one with a teleological trend, that is to say : There is a tacit purpose, a means and an end and a design underlying the manifold forms in nature. There is a complete agreement of the manifold in a thing with an inner character belonging to it as its end. This constitutes the perfection of a thing in accordance with an inherent design. These views and conclusions appear to be scientifically unwarranted and inconclusive.
We are becoming increasingly aware of the fact that at this stage of our inquiry, we have perhaps, far too rashly, ventured into an area bristling with Himalayan doubts and thorny problems. But, be that as it may, we have deemed it our duty to provide food for thought for the smug physiologist, the physicist, the philosopher, and the molecular biologist.
Immense are the possibilities of the combination of animate and inanimate matter. As in matter, so in mind, there is a deep-seated purpose, and a deeper and yet deeper intent underscored; encoded, and ensconced, and en-scrolled. And what inner force, what packet of energy, what storm and fury, what fire and brimstone, what unseen emanation of matter inhering in it has been the basis of assimilation, absorption, adsorption and self-actualization
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is still a question to be fully investigated, since its mystery remains unravelled and tends to deepen when we attempt to investigate it. The so-called dead-matter and living matter, though at the surface they appear to be at variance with each other, are, in essence, one and the same. The one is distinguished from the other by either the latency or the manifestation of the motive force in the heart of their atoms - the creative energy-flow. Here all philosophers a Te at One.
Common sense matter, apparent matter, inferred matter, abstracted matter, essential matter: these are not mere miserable makeshifts. These are the forms in which matter appears. Common sense matter is allied to apparent matter. It is the matter of everyday life, and is of practical importance. It is just the shape of things, the mere shell of objects, the outer encrustation of deep-seated matter. Tt does not denote anything in the depth of the being', of matter. It had been captured, altered, coerced and put into Some use or other by man. Apparent matter is "at tenuated and intermittent, seldom solid and continuous.' (I. Berlin). An object is not mere permanent possibility of sensation'. (J. S. Mill). It is something more : infinitely more : a spontaniety that brooks no interference. And aren't we beneath the spell of matter ? The entire humanity is, to a lesser or greater degree. We are matter, in matter, and of matter. And all that we have is matter; and matter is an abstraction that eludes true understanding, for we are of it and are in it.
The table that we have in our room; which we see, touch, and feel, and put to some use in our daily life; is common sense matter. We use it, buy it, sell it; we sit at it for our dinner. It is a piece of useful furniture in our room. It is four feet by seven in dimension; chestnut brown in colour and smooth. It gives us the appearance of a table; and everybody who enters the room gives it recognition, and calls it a table. Tt is only an apparent reality: a "seeming table: a cognizable object. There is a substrate as regards its usefulness, oommon to all of us. It is our common-sense view of the table.
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The scientists deals with inferred reality. It is his inferences that supply him with the basic stuff for his investigation and observation. He gathers from his perceptions and observations certain data about an object. These data enable him' to draw inferences regarding the facts of existence in relation to that object. The object becomes an inferred subject' in his mind. It ls, however, only a partial view; not the whole fact of existence as regards that object. The scientist has missed the “essence' of the matter. The “mind of matter' has eluded him. Even the conclusions of science may be upset, and controverted. When generalizations are drawn in relation to an object or a class of objects, they, - the generalizations - become mere abstractions and contractions: mere verbal jugglery; verbal evidence - verbiage. They are condensed notions. After having seen a number of dogs and after having associated the objects with the name "dog the child draws an abstraction, distils an idea of a dog in his mind. So that, when the next time the child hears someone speaking of a dog, the child depends entirely for his understanding about the dog on his abstraction, which, in common parlance we catl "notion or “idea.
The 'essence of matter is its “wholeness', that is, all the subjective, predicative and structural qualities: the figure, extension and properties relating to an object. The “thing-initself", its “nature' is its essence.
Most of us are more bothered about images and illusory appearance than about the essence of things; because we haven't the time to stand and stare,' and our life is rounded up in a dream. They people our imagination. We talk of a prime minister who is in power, and who at the crest of his glory has lost image as the resulf of some unstatesman-like action or policy of his. In fact, the whole of our life-time we are consumed with maintaining an image that we have managed to foist upon ourselves. It must be admitted that we are, because we have been bolstered and propped up by other's notions and apinions of ourselves. Our personality and our image and character are not ours. They are aspects of our “self that have been built up by others : our friends and relations, our foes and our rivals, our neighbours, our teachers, our colleagues and our admirers.
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'We' are not what we essentially are. Our 'social self is a mere fake, a downright fraud, a legalized and recognized falsehood. A number of false garbs have invested us and have eompletely masked our true self. The primal chaos that reigned supreme before matter assumed its multitudinal forms, has shrunk into our mental chaos. We shall return to this subject in our next topic viz the sphere of mind.
The living and the non-living have, in their inner core of existence, the totality, the potency, the possibility or the germ of a thought to become fully aware of their true essence. This aspect of matter the seientist can never hope to see and investigate unless and until he learns to read into the heart of things. This task can only be achieved at the mind-to-mind level of experience, where, at the fluid boundaries, mind flows into mind, and they mix and mingle, and become one. The scientist of today has still a long way to go in his endeavour to get at the essence of things. Yet, there is hope, that some day, in the distant future, he will reach the goal. But the only hitch is that his method of inquiry will have to be reorientated. Then, for him, matter would have assumed the dimensions of the mind; both would have become one and the same substance. At this state of human understanding and inquiry into the mysteries of matter and its potentialities the frontiers of science would have ceased to be; and science and philosophy, metaphysics and epistomology and the rest of human understanding would have found their confluence and merged into one another at the intuitive level of "creative visualization.' This is a different area of experience and thought. At this awakening stage, by peeping into a dewdrop one would be able to get an insight into the visva roopa'; the totality of “universal existence'. At this stage new ideas and new notions float into man's ken, and new frontiers of knowledge get organized. Hence one will have to justify one's existence by doing something creative. In other words one will havv to be creating oneself. One will have to "ex-sist: proj ct oneself outwards and be encompassing. Is this muddled thinking? Or is it petty verbal hair-splitting?
In every living cell, and in every atom of dead matter, there is a dictation and an eternal code of precepts
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"vidya'-to be obeyed and strictly adhered to. The protonneutron-electron organization in an atom, the motion in it its pull and its push, its giving-out and taking-in of energyflow: all the phenomena, so apt, so fitting, so adequate, so replete with precision and so enriching, are clearly suggestive, and point to the presence of an “intrinsic dictation' and a code of instructions, a deterministic order governed by the “principle of sufficient reason (Leibniz), that makes it possible for the atom to exist. The moment the dance at the core of the atom - energy-flow - ceases, the atom assumes the nihilistic status of “nothingness: “no being'. Bnt even in the state of "nothingness' there is potent the state of “wholeness' or ‘all-there-is' : "poornam', for there is no cessation in existence. It has neither a beginning nor an end. it just is. Existence is. And through “necessity' it is. And the cardinal issue is: what is the necessity to exist? God. This is a Marcellian view. If that be so : What is the need for God to exist? A very fantalizing question What is man's essence? And what is this being that understands Being ? In all probability existence is the essence of man; and man has to stand out in the truth of Being.
How long, how long, O man, can yon hope to go on hoping against hope in this wise? You are brim-full of wishful thinking. You are not prepared to face complite annihilation. It is perhaps too frightful, too disconcerting a notion for you to entertain. It appears as though you are not prepared to confront the apparent cataclysm of your total annihilation. With this obsession so heavy on your mind, and with a view to positing a never-ceasing existence, you have endowed the atom, is matter, with a multitude of powers and adjuncts. Can this be true? Are we to live, to be aware for an instant, and then cease to be 2 Is matter facing total annihilation? If not now, in the distant future or a million million years hence? The answer is this: so long as there is no possibility of estimating the beginning of time and space, there is very little chance of time and space going out of existence. If mathematicians have set a value on "infinity' as something that has neither beginning nor end it is perfectly reasonable to give this value to time and space. They commence not, neither do they cease. They just are. The predieation "be' is reasonably and justly
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applicable to them. Hence, we are confirmed in the convi. ction that matter is and that mind is coexistent and compresent and coeval with matter; and that both are so indissolubly intertwined and intermingled that the one is only a phase of the other, and that the other is a phase of the one. Man need not therefore, be labouring under the impression that nature has in store for him only carking pains and stalking pessimism. It was said of Montaigne that when scicncc failed and even his trusted reason deceived he turned to Nature for guide; for the great Mother can neither injure nor betray us. Nature, in brief, can do all, and doth all. Yet it was not given for every man to hear her voice or to divine her laws. A home-coming is a must: the prophet, the politico, the poet and the scientist philosopher will have to organize a home-coming: an ensemble; pool all their resources and break down their frontiers ane rebuild the true edifice of sublime thinking. "The being speaks and they will have to bespeak it.” (Heidegger.)
What are the dimensions of matter? As is an atom to a grain of sand, so is a grain of sand to the sun, as; so is the sun to the milky way; so is the milky way to the known universe ie to the space-time continuum. How can they be measured except in these relative terms? The proton, the neutron, the electron, the atom, the earth, the sun, the milky way, the known universe, and the time-space continuum. the unknown universe: What a vast range of dimensions? Would to heaven they cease not and in fact they wont; and they possibly can't and this vastness is poornam' that which alwavs makes its presence known, which does not appear itself, but from which everything comes to us: that is the essence of existence. Of necessity all things “are.'
These vast problems confronted the scientists, the astronomers and mathematicians when they dared to evolve equations to infer the dimensions of the phenomena of nature. They were the problems of defining linear measurements, area measurements of solids liquids and gases, straight lines, flat surfaccs, curved surfaces, points, angles and vertices and curvature; instants, time and space, moments, durations, light years and aeons; elects city, viicocity, hardness and softness, movement; the now and the then, the here and
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the there; the present, the past and the future; certitude and probability and possibility; the predictable and the unpredictable; the determinate and the indeterminate. For this purpose, were employed the simple, the simultaneous and the differential equations, the quantum and the wave, motion and rest, wholeness and nothingness, unit and zero, the infinite and finite, the integral and fractional, the tones and the volumes, the velocity of light rays, the sharps and the flats, loudness and mildness, the crescendo and the diminuendo, the heat and the cold; matter, and ante-matter, expansion and contraction; immanence and emergence and latency; predestination, finalism and determinism; creation, disruption, destruction and annihilation; fatalism and necessitarianism; evolution and involution and devolution, selfactualization; flux and reflux; change and mutation; harmony and disharmony: these, again, and many more and yet more such notions have occupied the attention of the seekers after truth. The outcome is a vast volume of knowledge Isith that has gone to form the ground of the “collective mind' that pervades the entirety of existence.
In every aspect of Nature, from the formation of an embryo in the egg of a bird to the evolution of a giant nebula, there is patent the moulding principle, the self-actualizing and the driving and directing principle. Matter is the moulding principle and mind is the driving self-actualizing and directing principle. It is, in a way, the determining principle as well. Matter lends itself to being moulded into form under the guidance of the mind which is no other than the principle of configuration and of precision. The mind is the ferment in matter. But yet it is imprudent to separate matter from mind. If we attempt to do so the outcome would be “a rebuttal of our claim to knowledge - an infinite regress, a recession.
The totality of nature is a marvellous work of art, the artist being no other than the collective mind : the principle of “creative visualization, of configuration' inherent in matter. Time and space, the raw materials, the twin stuffs of existence, in submission to the principle of creativity, have conspired towards the formation of matter; and in due course, matter had perfected itself by assuming
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form and its attendant attributes of symmetry, balance, order, proportion and reserve, to which notion the ancient Greeks attached so much of importance.
In the ultimate analysis it is rather difficult to distinguish between matter and mind, between matter and 'ante-matter, between the being' and the "non-being so that we are left with the notion that the domain of matter is conterminous with the domain of mind. That is to say, matter cannot exist without mind, and mind cannot exist without matter, and matter. cannot be without ante-matter. The raw materials of life with its boisterous emotions, and its infinite variety of sensations (perception and cognition and conation, memory and reflection, volition and even precognition) is the common property of all: from the most ignorant to the most highly cultivated.' This statement of R. A. Scott James is pregnant with meaning when viewed in the light of the proposition: that matter und mind are coextensive; for all man's emotions and his sensations have had their genesis in matter. After all, is not man's body like an ocean, now disturbed as it were by equinoctial gales, and now calm and placid like an ice field? And what deep-seated and hidden emotive whirls there are in man's inner being
The “e-motions find expression in every physical aspect of a person. Under the stress of an emotion his eyes tear, his nose flows with rheum, his entire body frame appears to shake with palsy; he spews and spumes; pearly drops of sweat appear on his brow; his vision gets blurred, and things firm and stable and solid appear to wobble, lose their balance, become fluid and even levitate and swim before his eyes. It might appear as though a sudden earthquake had sent its tremor through his bodily frame: a brick had been heaved at his head. He reels, he staggers, he trembles, he collapses under the strain and the stress. Such is the effect of his emotional upsurge when it is eased through matter. And then, what a gamut of feelings courses through his fickle frame And yet man has withstood and braved such severe shocks and handicaps by virtue of the potency of the matter that has gone into his make-up. The mystery of matter is so deep that it
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appears to the common run of humanity a closed volume, a sealed treasure trove that foils all attempts at laying its collections bare. Nature keeps guard over her treasures with infinite assiduity and utmost care, defying all attempts, on the part of man to delve into them. The secrets of matter, its inner forces, vibrations, its total potentiality, its vast possibilities, can only be unravelled with incessant discipline and industy on the part of the investigator. Nature is essentially secretive, impenetrable and niggardly. The task of the scientific investigator is, therefore, not an easy one; nor is the task of the philosopher who synthesizes all known knowledge, free from insurmountable difficulties. The poet, despite his refractory nature, is, as much near the truth as the scientist and the philosopher, if not perhaps nearer. Perhaps the only persons to come in close proximity to the Truth are the sages and the seers and the mathematical thinkers. Even such as they
have touched only on the mere fringe of Truth and felt it and have couched their notions of it in a paradoxical language far too abstruce for the generality of mankind to grasp and to comprehend. In fact all great mathematical thinkers like Newton and Einstein and Max Planck are sages in the true sense of the term. They are the true seers; for they have the power to see the true essence of matter, its form, structure and extension and order. Take for example a particle of soot that gets severed from our kerosene lamp and drifts away into the air: so small so insignificant, so mean and yet so brim-full of a totality of arcana of truths and essence is it, that even the greatest
of physicists of today, and even the greatest of mathematical thinkers like Albert Einstein would have stood non plussed at the sight of such an impenetrable, awe-inspiring and superbly enigmatic phenomenon. His mathematical acumen would have assisted him to follow it up and determine the character and plot the course of its peregrinations in space, but yet, what of its inner mystery - its infoldthe forces that keep it going, and that let it be 2 Despite all man's efforts to get a proper concept and understanding of the "known universe' all that man has, is a haphazard conglomerate of physical objects, forces and natural laws formed as the result of his chaotic experience and confused thinking. Are these not less chary and more sweeping judgements? And should we force facts to square with a theory?
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DISCOURSE -
SCENTIFIC KNOWLEDGE OF MATTER
EVERY science has its own frontiers; its own bounds; it own principles. Physics has its, own, frontier just as much as Biological science has. They have their limitations; for, even the instrumental aids they employ in their investigations, and the language they use have their limitations. They are governed by natural laws. They have their own ends despite the fact that their absolute ends-if there be any such-arc not known to the physicist and the biologist. If they, the scientists, wish to look for teleological purposes subsisting in each one of the several events that confront them they will have to penetrate the time-space continuum and cross over into another domain - the domain of “ante - matter”, a domain absolutely foreign to them and new to their method of inquiry. It would be most absurd and presumptuous on their part to look for an absolute cause for an event or an occurrence of a physical nature. Why and wherefore is the eletromagnetic field? What is its ultimate end? What purpose is it intended to serve? What is it designed for? Well, this method of inquiry is not going to give us any satisfactory answer.
A plunge from the domain of Natural phenomena into the domain of metaphysics can only reward one with barren findings, and empty phrases. To posit a “causeless cause', a transcendental cause, an infinite cause for the infinite multiplicity of the phenomena of Nature is ridiculously unsound, unscientific and illogical. To attribute the manifold forms of Nature to a 'super-intelligence governing and irdaining the entire universe, transcendental in character, is not only bad logic but also bad metaphysics, and an og regious blunder. Looking for final causes in the field of natural science is an endless search, barren and unrewarding.
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We have now come to a stage of our inquiry in which we may venture to ask the question: Are the events in nature the outcome of a master design? To all intents and purposes they appear to be, for they act in accordance with definite and perfectly consistent and deterministic natural laws. But it would have to be admitted most frankly that the design is not an extraneous one. It is inherent in nature's phenomena. It is intrinsically and indissolubly bound up with them. Acting from inside the event, it codifies, it directs, and it designs. It is not extraphenomenal; it is intra-phenomenal. For instance the design, form and pattern of a flower, or of a leaf, a feather or a cowrie shell, a worm or a bird are intrinsically registered and most accurately, assiduously and elegantly recorded in their germ plasm or D. N. A molecules: say the cellullar biologists. For a matter of that, the pattern and design and form of any natural object, are the outcome of an infinitely unfolding emprise determined by clearly defined natural laws and principles. But the design in nature, the design of the geneticists should not be confused with the “divine design of the metaphysicians and religionists. The one is intrin sic, the other extraneous. The one has been the outcome of scientific investigation; the other of guess and fancy : faith and belief.
Pray, why does the Gardinia right before my window grow and assume a special form? Why do its leaves have a definite shape? Its branches shoot off at given angles from the main stem and attain a definite pattern? Its blossoms don ivory, white petals curling and twisting in a characteristic fashion? Its pattern and form, its structure and bearing, its morphonomy, its configuration are quite different from those of the "kaduru' tree. This characteristic and specific difference in form, pattern and design has to be attributed to the difference that subsists in the self-creative, self-directive, self-deterministic principle inherent in them: the principle of precision: Gisit disilu GibiTdicy' - an aim beyond and yet beyond.
Metaphysics has taken too big a bite. It can't
possibly crunch it and masticate it. It cannot therefore, lay claim to any extra-natural or superor, supra-natural
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agency or power or extra-universal presence that may be said to create, design, fabricate, fashion and lick into shape the multitudinous events that go to constitute nature in its plurality of forms. There is the vast field of the unknown "inner basis of nature' - 'swadharma' - which remains open for inquiring man to investigate. But the whole hitch is, man is still at the perimeter of the physical world - the perceptible and the phenomenal -, and has not gone even an ell, nay an inch into its interior. Hence the vista of science, vast and boundless as it is, must be left untampered with by metaphysicians; for, it is generally of a biological, physical, mechanical and mathematical nature. It may be asserted by the theologians and metaphysicians that every object has been so “created', so self-actualized as to have
an ultimate end in view, teleological in character, that is to say, it exists for a specific purpose. But it must be
known that the “end” visualized by an object is merely arbitrary, and, that before it can be reached and comprehended there is a long, long way to go which is still no man's land, and which is left open to the scientific investigator to probe and investigate, to apprehend and appreciate. Suffice it to say the so-called “final cause' is too distant to be seen and investigated, too hazy and too clouded. If one makes an attempt one is either lost in a mist of uncertainty and fluid thinking or creates chimeras that are said to
exist only in the imagination of the mvstics, the superstitious, the sensational minded, the kaddadyas', the “shamans' and the cultists. It is intriguing, often reassuring, to reflect on the vast possibilities that exist for the genuine scientific investigator to probe and to unravel the arcana of nature. And, admittedly many a fact relating to an object grounded in its inner basis - substrate - can be brought to light by the scietist and put to use for the b2nefit of humanity, and for widening man's scope of the object and of himself. One need not, therefore, be obsessed with the notion of the impenetrability of nature,' since one has the freedom
to probe the secret of the inner substrate of things and derive pleasure and satisfaction in getting at a better, truer
and clearer understanding of Nature. Isn't possession of Truth power? Hence the need to know and to investigate.
Neither can the imposssibility nor the inevitability of the production of natural events by simple mechanical
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means be proved by scientific investigation. Natural events are just there. They are occurrences. Thit is all. They are as afore-mentioned the outcome of manifold circumstances that have brought their components into close and efficient juxtaposition, and given them the innate base and made them what they are. How many aeons it would have taken the 'inner cosmic consciousness'-the animal intent in the amoeba to fashion, to produce and perfect the marvellous edifice that 'it-is-in-itself so as to enable it to attain to that precise state of “self-containment' and to find a comfortable, appropriate and convenient niche in the vastness of the universe, is inconceivable. It is a staggering thought, and so the philosopher says: “I don't like to butt into nature's business.” - F. Bacon. At least one thing is certain. It wouldn't have been the product of a simple mechanism of nature : an elementary fiat. It is a whole series : a catena of events -- what are often inadequately and erroneously designated as causes: necessary causes, sufficient causes and efficient causes -- aad, the modus operandi that bodied it (amoeba) forth must certainly have been a very rich process : rich in thought, rich in design, rich in deed.
The upshot of our disputation is simply this : lt is most impertinent, nay preposterous on the part of theologians to dismiss the why, and the wherefore and whence of any natural event, like for instance the amoeba or a virus, with one single sweeping and dogmatic statement: "God, the Almighty, created the amoeba and the virus. He designed them, and fashioned them; he breathed “prana' (life) into them, and he was infinitely pleased to perform this supreme act of creation' The all-sufficient principle of the possibility of a natural object such as the amoeba is a partially closed volume for man the seeker after truth, for a greater part of it lies locked in the super-Sensible; in its subjectivity, that is, its own awareness of what, it, in essence, is.
In a scientific inquiry we are so disposed as to be able to get at only a fraction, a pathetically small fraction, of the total number of attributesproperties and aspects inhering in a substance or a thing. But as often as not, even the scientist misses the true nature of a thing; so that; he has only half the truths and,
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even much less. He is not aware, and he can never hope. to be aware of the totality of attributes : the essential ture of things. He knows only the mere outer veil of listence. Even most of what is known as Scientific information is cluttered with an assortment of facts, disorderly and disjointed, so that it is no better than inadequate knowledge. Hence scientists cannot pontificate on the nature of science; and in any scientific explanation "some-thing has been left out." The 'thing-in-itself may and can only be known by the thing; and by no other external thing. And this potency to be, to apprehend itself is its 'consciousness'. Hence, we reiterate the fundamental proposition : A thing exists in virtue of the fact of its being conscious of its listence. Its existence is conditioned by a thought centred in it. A thought: an intent: appends every event; in other words every event is the end of a thought, namely: a tacit will or intent to be. “Who can wrxst nature's whole secret from her E. Kant). Thoughts are the springs of action and events.
It was an evil day for grammarians and for the rest of humanity when they divided the sentence into subject and predicate, and for the philosophers to have divided the world into a passive element and an active element. The world should have been suffered to maintain its unity in the singular and grand notion of 'I' and 'I' alone. The verb “to be' should not have been appended to it, and the outcome has been the pivotal point of all existence, namely,
I AM.
To think that man is the measure af all existence, that all things in the universe have been created with one clear express end in view, namely, to please man, to be of use to man, to promote the well-being of man on earth, so that he might, pleased with nature's bounty, be thankful, and ever bholden to the Almighty Being; sing his praise, adore him, and extol his mighty deeds; and that man may 'stand and wait' on him, is an absurd, ostensible, puerile, self-conceited and meaningless notion. Things exist because they have willed so. It is not a partisan will. It is a “neutral will' : not biased. Each natural eatity is a thought in form, an arch republic having the sovereignty of independent existence vested in it. It has been designed: that is to say, it has actualized itself on the genuineness of the basis of
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its own inner ground: the “universal substrate', “the eternal energy-flow' which is capable of self-creation, self-sustenance and self-existence. It has its own coherence and balance of parts. It is a law and a being and a measure unto itself just as much as man is a law and a being and a measure unto himself. This is a putatively philosophic assertion.
Mr. Jacques Monod has been hectic in this regard. "Chance alone is at the source of all novelty : all creation. If we accept evolution man is not necessary.......
“Objective knowledge is the only authentic source of knowledge. It is the conclusion to which the search for authenticity necessarily leads. The ancient covenant is in pieces; man knows at last that he is alone in the universe's unfeeling immensity out of which he emerged only by chance. His destiny is nowhere spelled out nor is his duty. The kingdom above or the darkness below: it is for him to choose.'
TFrom: 'Chance and Necessity'I
WE VIEW A TENG. Now what does it mean There are three sets of elements involved in the process. They are : we ourselves, the intervening media, and the thing-in-itself. All these three sets of elements or circumstances do record changes. That is, there is a time lag between our “intending to view' the thing and our seeing it; there is change in the order in which our “seeing device' - ie our eyes, our optic nerves, the optic lobe in our brain - has been set; there is change in the spatial media - light, air etc. - through which our sight is focussed; there is change in the order in which the substance constituting the thing is disposed. In short: there is change; infinite change between our wanting to see the thing Iconation 1 and our seeing it Icognition.J. Hence in the final analysis what we are left with is a changing impression of an appearance which is no other than, as far as our certification of the thing is concerned, mere confusion; and certitudes in perceptive experience are a nullity.
Even what the scientist considers and signalizes as "matter' resolves itself into a metaphysical quiddity ; a thing
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unknown, and unfelt and very little knowable. Is it therefore to be conceded that causal laws, as such, do not exist. There may be occurrences; there may be processes; there inlay be relations and correlates and, there may even be, mere appearances and images. Causes and effects cannot be certifified as true relations. Laws of change' there may be; hut even then the laws of change' are mere working hypotheses. They cannot be validated, and authenticated. Some of them are more near the truth than the others. But seldom do they assimilate to the whole truth. They approximate the truth. The quantum of truth even in scientifically certified facts is very limited and their properties are fragmentary, jumbled and haphazard. Isn't our vision chaotic
All human knowledge, proliferated, assembled, coordinated, integrated, and in its plenary content made meaningful, enables man to take his stand on the shore of the occan of reality and get only a glimpse, a wee bit of ita immensity and sublimity. Of course scientific facts will have to be correlated, collated, and hypothesized into meaningfully 'satisfying patterns'. Man is often conceited, as the fly that sitting on the hub of the fast-moving chariot wheel of Ajax was labouring under the false notion that the vibration of his pair of tiny wings was the naain cause of the cloud of dust raised by the chariot wheel. Man believes that he and he alone has been solely responsible for the material advancement of the world. When man becomes n rrogant and self-cenceited the philosopher, the saint and the sage in him: die. Self-conceit kills all that is genuine in him. Let not, therefore, the scientist and the philosopher, the saint and the sage, the poet and the thinker and the yogi, the mentor and the preacher be tainted with this deadly sin: the venom that destroys the genuine man, the man of nature. Let him go and seek in all humility and in true earnest, and he shall find the truth. Then Nature will unlock the doors of her sanctum sanctorum and reveal to him the truth of truths treasured therein. When you go before the altar of Nature, O, ye Man, remove thy shoes and assume an air of humility and inspire thyself with the spirit of inquiry, for thou standest on holy ground, and thy task is that of a humble acolyte. Infringe not the laws of Nature. What appears to you as 'gross matter' is not
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something flashy and trashy; something paltry. Its Content is the taeasure of Truth: the sensible, the extra-sensible; the normal, the Super-normal and the transcendental. Thes form the very fibre of our being. But the present trend in scientific and logical inquiry points to this curious state of affairs, namely : physics is losing matter and meta-physics is being increasingly dominated by mathematical thinking; and metaphysics and theology are fast losing ground and making man what he ought not to be.
Why do things change? And why do they behave? Science cannot explain phenomena; neither can it give
answers. It pushes back the problem further and furth into the far ends of time. The answers are couched in puzzlement. In the beyond.
We are demeaning the sphere of matter by calling it “inert matter.' It is neither inert, nor is it dead. It is as replete with ebullience and motion, and energy and impetuosity, and stresses and pulls as any living Organism.
Physicists and mathematicians and chemists will have to have a completely new approach to the study of inert matter which gets often intricately dovetailed with living matter. The first thing they will have to do is Ο set their mind - their power to think and feel and perceive - and shed their prejudices, their special brand of convictions, and go with an open mind. They should brace themselves up and be free of any form of conditioning. They have to divest themselves of all meaningless bluster, of all dreamy vanity and of lab puring under the CTfOneOS impression that they, and, they alone are the torch bearers: the custodians of the whole truth. This attitude of mind has to be heartily rebutted. Then, inert matter will reveal itself, and then, they can have a peep into its inner being. Much as scientists may attempt to split it, crack it, explode it and explore its area of existence, inert matter will not reveal its whole being to them, unless the mind of matter and the mind of man are in a fit state to meet at the horizon where matter sets and mind dawns. This is O idle metaphor. Whether or no we accept it, it merits our earnest consideration. It is an impeccable truth. The day is not far off when the scientist and the Sage, the philoso
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her and the poet and the seer will meet on common it round and see eye to eye with each other, and probe the fundamentals of existence in all their simplicity, neutrality, II:kedness and entirety, and dovetailed complicacy.
Then man will come to see the hypothetical oneness of Nature. Then, there shall be no supernatural events , or causes: No transcendental cause, since the cause is immament. It is within man; within nature. Everything in the universe, is; and nothing is contingent. It is free and selfdetermined. But since man is entangled in his deceptive tentiments and passions his atavistic lusts, his faiths and heliefs and convictions and prejudices - so many and so multitudinous - man has lost his freedom: that is, his capacity to think freely all on his own. The outcome of it all, is, : that mental chaos prevails in man. You can "smell out' the nonsense in his high-flown intuitions and private insights - his proud pretence of 'gnana drishti, his emotion-rousing ineptitudes, and specious ecstatic sermonizing.
When we become mentally disentangled and free, then, perhaps all our conflicts will vanish and the mist of misunderstandings will clear, and the mind of man will he able to grasp and comprehend inert matter' in its fulness and wholeness. Then we shall have attained to the fit status to appraise matter as a thing that does really matter. The magnitude of this task is tremendous; for, man is deceitful above things and desperately wicked.' (Jeremiah)
ASTRONOMICAL ASPECT OF THE DIMENSIONS OF MATTER
NOW WE come to the astronomical aspects of the climensions of matter. Something has already been said in this respect. But it is very difficult to come to any final conclusions as regards this subject. But this much we know : Physical things just are.' The “reason why of the existence of the universe is a puzzlement and a paradox. It defies All attempts at answering. The universe may be divisible into the known and the unknown or little known universe : the measurable and the un-measurable or unquantifiable.
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And how vast is the measurable universe, how immense the unquantifiable are questions that will have to be dealt with in due course.
Armed as he is with his mathematical acumen, man has been able to make meaningful the movements, structure and nature of heavenly bodies, the nature of space, both inner and outer space, from the dawn of the present civilization some six thousand years ago up to the present time. The ancient peoples of Mesopotamia, China, India, Greece, Assyria and of the Maya civilization of Mexico : the Aztec in Mexico and the Inca in Peru, have been directing their attention to the heavens and have discovered facts about the heavenly bodies and the nature of space which have formed the ground of the astronomical inquiry of the moderns.
But it must be admitted that even long before the people of the present era attained the present stage of civilization, there are ovidences to show, that there must have been other waves of civilizations which might have been much more advanced than ours is today. Our knowledge of nature and our much-vaunted civilization pale before the civilizations of the past yugas' - epochs of time. (vide “The Bermuda Triangle” by Desmond Miller)
Pythogorean geometry, Mesopotamian dynamics, and Einsteinian physics and cosmology together with the more recent Quantum Mechanics' of Max Planck and the discovery of “black holes' by Hoyle and several others have gone a great way in unravelling the mystery enshrouding the starry heavens and the immense void : the outer space. To the ancients of the present era the sky appeared as an immense vault with its infinitely retreating void set with a myriad spangles: tiny flecks of fire. Even so it appears to most of us. The sun, the moon, the stars, the planets and their anparent and true motions through space set them thinking. The rishis of old having bien inspired by the vastness of space and awed by the sublimity and the order in the heavenly bodies sang their praise in immortal verses that were called the “vedic sloghas': the songs celestial and truthful. But it has to be admitted that those songs had
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their limitations, since they failed to speak the whole truth, just as the semitic veda or any other ancient literature did. However, these primeval utterances, despite the fact they were inadequate expressions of the perceptible reality, inspired mankind for several generations and even gave them such great truths as : “poornam adha : — poornama idham” — Perfection is pervasive: It reigns Supreme there, as much as here.
About 150 B. C. Hipparchus surmised that the earth was spherical and was stationery; and that the sun and the moon and the stars and other heavenly bodies revolved round it. In their attempt to measure space and calculate the relative positions and the velocity of the movements of the heavenly bodies the early astronomers were confronted with what appeared for several thousand years to be insurmountable difficulties and unresolvable problems. They were the problem of the cumbersome Roman numerals that defied easy calculation, and the need for a suitable yard-stick to measure the immensity of space and a suitable mechanical contraption to measure Time. The Roman numerals were far too clumsy to embody and represent such vast distances as those between the earth and the sun, the moon and other planets and the other heavenly bodies; the stars and star clusters - the nebulae. Measuring time presented formidable difficulties.
Primitive man must have seen the sun rise and set, the moon going through its several phases; he must have observed the movements of the stars, the coming of the seasons, the awful and apparently foreboding phenomena such as the eclipses of the sun and the moon, the passage of the comets across the sky, and the erratic movements of the asteroids, meteors and meteorites, the awe-inspiring phenomena of the aurora borealis and the aurora australis. Those who dwelt near the sea-coasts, on the banks of cstuaries, fiords and gulfs and bays and coves and rias would have seen with open-eyed wonderment the ebb and the flow of the tides and their close association with the phases of the moon: especially the full-and the new
OOS. −
Dwellers in dry open plains like the Mesopotamians, the Egyptians, the Arabs and the Indians and the Chinese,
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the desert dwelters of the Gobi and the Shamo, the Huns and the Tartars : the Turks and the Turkomen, the Aztecs and the Mayas would have watched and gazed at the heavens and peered into its illimitable depths on clear nights, and in their primitive sense of wonderment and curosity and inquiry would have wanted to go into the why and the wherefore and the whence of these enigmatic phenomena.
Some six thousand years ago the Chinese rivalled the Mesopotamians and the Mayas and the Incas in their attempts to read and understand the secrets of the heavens. The Egyptians must have used the pyramids for determining the astronomical positions of the heavenly bodies. The Indians freed numbers from the cumbersome Roman numerals and gave the world the notion of the decimal point and decimal fractions. This made a tremendous advance in mathematical thinking. It would appear that the notion of decimal notation went into Egypt and the rest of the then known civilized world under the name of Arab numerals.
In the distant past, in the endless depths of the dimness of time astronomy often got mixed up with superstitions, cults and mysticism and became the pseudoscience of astrology: “the effeminate musings of a decadent civilization lacking in virility and dominated by an irretrievable faith in fate, mystical and mythical influences and bare-faced lies and ancient, atavistic fears. Mystery is delightful,' says Bertraid Russell, but unscientific since it depends upon ignorance.'
The first man to map the then known universe was Ptolemy who believed that the universe was earthcentred. The credit goes to the Greeks of some six-hundred years before Christ for their having freed astronomy from the stranglehold of astrology, superstition and mysticism and occultism, and made it, a pure science. It was the Greeks of our era who gave it a mathematical base, and used time and distance to measure space. Thales of Miletus, for the first time, propounded the truth that the earth was round; and the credit goes to Pythogoras for his having said that the earth was not only spherical, but it moved round the sun. The notion of the earth rotating on its axis appears to have ben known to some ancient Inga Indians.
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In tbe third century B. C. Aristarcas of Samos r affirmed the view that the earth was a sphere, that it fevolved round the sun causing the seasons, and that it rotated on its own axis causing day and night. There are those who are of the opinion that in the distant future the arth has every chance of rotating in the reverse direction. in such an eventuality who knows what changes might occur on the surface of the earth? This belief, somewhat ancient, was prevalent among the Incas of Peru. Eratosthenes calculated the earth's circumference by making observations of the sun from two places 500 miles apart at the summer volstice. Somewhere about 500 A. D. the Arabs came out with the notions of zenith, nadir, and the almanae. Then, in the thirteenth century was invented the weight clock and time was measured for the first time with a mechanical appliance.
The true astronomy of our times, as an accurate science based on mathematics and the observations of the astronomers made with the aid of thc telescope, commences in the fifteenth century, when Copernicots, a Polish astronomer, enthroned the sun at the centre of the Solar System, for which act of his he was persecuted by Martin Luther and other zealous Christians. The most phenomenal advance in the progress of modern astronomy was made by Galileo who invented the first telescope, and in 1609 he discovered four of the moons of Jupiter. The Inquisition compelled him to recant and placed him under permanent housearrest, Galileo was also able to observe the moon-like phases of Venus. Johannes Kepler (57 - 1630 showed that planets moved in elliptical orbits, not in circular orbits.This was his first law. His Seond law was that the planets moved faster when they Were farther away on their orbits. His third law was that the time they took for going round the sun was proportional when squared to their distances from the sun when cubed. Based on the findings of Galileo's and Kepler's three laws Sir Isaac Newton deduced his universal Law of Gravitation.
The early astronomers were confronted with several intriguing problems, One of these was the problem of taking measurements in space. For this purpose they employed the velocity of light. Light was “the many eyed messenger
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of the universe." The speed of light: 186,000 miles per second, served the purpose admirably. No other phenomenon of nature, known to man at that time could exceed the
speed of light. A light year was employed as the unit of measurement for measuring spatial distances. A light year is the distance that a beam of light can travel in an year; that is : 186,000 x 60 x 60 x 24 x 365 miles: approxi.
mately 6 billion (6 x 10') miles. They also used the parallax, the spectrum photographic plates, radio signals -- what are known as Jansky's whispers - for the purpose of estimating the various dimensions of the universe. The spectrum and the newly discovered micro-pulsations, that is wave lengths of millions of miles, also became very handy for measuring space.
Faraday and James Clerk Maxwell were the pioneers in the field. Then the scientists who came later discovered a new field: that of Radio Astronomy which widened their vista and took them even beyond the Milky Way to very distant nebulae and galaxies. With the aid of this marvellous device the astronomers were able to map the radio-heavens' which was quite different from the 'optical
heavens; and they were able to probe far, far beyond some 1023 miles away. What a wonder
Up to now the astronomers were confined to that range of space where light can travel; but at present the radio-telescope has brought to man knowledge of happenings far, and yet far beyond the reach of light. The astronomer is now able to investigate the composition of a star, its temperature and speed. These facts have been revealed by the spectra. He has started asking such questions as: Why do stars murmur? Why do they whisper? What is the significance of their beeps; their hums and haws? Man has been able to hear the mysterious voices of the most distant void. Can these be the music of the spheres? Mere poetic fancy? Or can they be the murmur of matter sucked into the black-holes, merging into another universe? Again we are being conditioned by "fancy free.'
Be that as it may, one thing is certain, man. has
left this earth and has gone beyond the sun, the nine planets, the thirtyone moons, and 30000, , asteroids, 100,000
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million comets and in numerable dust specks, gas molecules, dissociated atoms, the quasars, the 'dark-holes' in space, Stephen Hawkinss “mini-black-holes", the bullet-like “quanta of energy, far, far, far; and penetrated the abyss of Time and the depth of space.
From the microcosm man has gone and attempted to probe into the macrocosm: from the swirling mass of indeterminate energy that he interior of the atom is, mani has plunged into the infinite, impenetrable and expanding depths of space and time, and attempted to probe the nature of the distant nebulae and cosmic dust, the infinite space and the black-holes.'
What an astounding advance has been made by astronomy, that king among sciences, that supreme knowledge, that mighty experiment in thought, that has brought into its vast ambit a whole range of human knowledge and understanding: from mathematics to physics, from statics to dynamics, from pragmatic thinking to the most abstruce abstractions in logic From the crude telescope of Galileo to the giant eye', the Palomar telescope with its 200 diameter lens of the Kitt Peak National Observatory, and the radio telescope, what a vast improvement has been made in the technique employed by astronomers to probe the mysteries of the heavens These are the Herculean attempts made by man to know, to understand, to think and to measure the dimensions of matter, inert matter, in its varied forms and settings. And, yet, matter defies man's intelligence and persists, in its adament to continue to remain a mystery of mysteries. The essential nature of matter still remains a shut violume to man. He can only look and be awed and laugh and wonder and b2 spell bound and say with Aristotle: matter has substance and form.
Why should time and space be curved, and time appear to seek a straight course? Can the universe be limited and its bounds unlimited Can it be a sphere or an ellipse ? Or can it be a limitless void ever-expanding, ever-contracting, ever-pulsating? And what, in the name of sincerity, is it? Is it a speck of dust, an immensity, an airy nothing? Or, is it something solid and something substantial? If so, whv all this unsubstatiality? The space
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and the time? This absence of a solidity in the vastness of the infinite void? Why should matter-if at all it does appearappear at the curvatures and kinks of space? And what, in the name of most truly true reality, is the true name of that fleeting thing called time and that fluid existence called space? What is the essence of that most enigmatic and indeterminate event that has taken upon itself the name of “existence? Of substance and form. These still remain open-ended questions. Perhaps the true solution may be lurking in that unknown, unexplored zone: the mind of man, freed as it ought and destined to be, in its perfected form from the fetters of mundane, self-centred existence. As we pose these questions and seek for answers we tend to shade insensibly from the physical into the metaphysical : from the atom into the all-pervasive "universal presence',
In bringing to light the secrets of matter in its inert form, the science of physics has made the greatest contribution. Of all the branches of science Physics is perhaps the most accurate, and the most appropriate Physical existences lend themselves readily to experimentation and observation. The aspirations of Physics are great; its achievements greater. The physicists have, however, varied and varying views on natural phenomena. Einstein's view of the structure, configuration and nature of the universe differs from Newton's. The concept of the atom of the scientists of the early eighteenth century is not that of the atom of the present day physicists. Physicists today have moved away from inadequate realities, fragmentary in concept; and have based their theories on abstractions and inferences. They appear to have taken a step closer to, and in the direction of, reality. But their theories have remained mathematical in character, somewhat fanciful and fleeting. The contents of physics consist of the motion and the quantitative properties of matter. Galileo conceived the notion of time and motion. He was able to investigate the acceleration of falling bodies.
Then came the notion of the atom. It was, however, Dalton who first gave the atom a form and a value. He gave it weight. To a certain extent he revolutionized the view men already held regarding matter. Dalton, held the
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view that the atom was the smallest indivisible particle of An element that can exist in nature. This was followed by the notion of energy, Radiant energy, it was maintained, spread out from its source in the form of waves. This was followed in more recent years by the 'quantum hypothesis' which propounded the notion that radiant energy spreads out like a flight of bullets. Thus the structure, nature and form of the atom have undergone tremendous changes: if not in reality, at least in the mind of man.
In modern physics the concept of matter has become more and more abstract; and truth regarding ... it more and more inferred. It has become an inferred, not a physical reality. It has to be admitted that the notions and conclusions of the scientists as regards matter are largely hypothetical. Matter, today, does not matter. It has only its mathematical specification. Then there are the other aspects of physics: heat, light, sound, electricity, magnetism, electro-magnetic effects, laser effects etc. The physicist came to certain specific facts which became the fundamental principles of physics. The most astounding of such principles is this: That energy and matter can never be created or destroyed; and that energy and matter are converitible entities. When matter is at rest there is congealed energy in it.
In measuring the dimensions of matter and space and time physicists encountered considerable difficulties. The early physicists, Newton himself and others, used the Euclidean geometry for their calculations and measurements. But Einstein found that the three dimensional Euclidean geometry was not suitable for measuring the four. dimensional space
time continuum; and was, therefore compelled to resort to the four dimensional Riemannian geometry.
Einstein was of opinion that the space-time continuum varied from place to place in outer space; that gravity curved both time and space. For example the planets moved round the sun in well-defined ellipses, not because of any gravitational effect but because of the peculiar nature of the time-space continuum in the neighbourhood of the sun. Hence the rays of light entering the time-space continuum get curved. The gravitational field of the Sun disturbs the transmission of light." R. A. Samson. It would appear as
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if time-space geometry varied from Zone to zone, that time measurements and space measurements also varied, and that the vibrations within the vortex of the atoms also varied from zone to Zone. For instance, it would appear that the vibrations in the vortex of the atom in the sun vary from the vibrations in the vortex of the atom in the earth or from those in a distant star.
Einstein's assumption is that the universe is finite, but boundless; that it is curved; it has a tendency to expand, that the particles close together tend to scatter and that the “island universes” or nebulae are tending to recede. Hubble has it in the form of a law, called Hubble's Law. This is what it states: “The farther away a galaxy is the faster it moves. The present universe that we live in is the aftermath of a gigantic explosion - the big bang that perhaps came at the birth of Time. And who knows, at the end of Time the Universe might go into a state of “no existence.' And who was the prime mover? A silly question to ask, for no one can unravel this mystery of the mover and the moved. At the horizon, that is, at the perimeter or brink of the universe time tends to slow down, and so does the velocity of a receding nebula.
According to De Sitter space bends round on itself, which is not true of time, for otherwise events will tend to repeat themselves in time. Time cannot be closed: it has an open end pointing to the future and a closed end in the past. It is a more recent assumption that the available energy of the universe is steadily on the decrease. The total energy of the universe might, most likely, get in drawn into a black-hole' and completely disappear and end in the complete deficit account of a state of “nothingness' - that is to say in the total negation of "available energy." This is a condition of NON-BEING.' Who knows It may result in the emergence of another universe: perhaps the solfsame universe in a different swing of the pendulum of KALA : TIME. To vary the mythical metaphor : KALI has swallowed Kala.
The picture of the future of the universe as presented by the “black-hole' astronomers is not too rosy, for "some
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scientists believe that the “black-holes' would provide additional gravitational braking and reverse the expansion. If that is the case the universe - like a giant, collapsing a tar - will eventually begin falling back upon itself. Some 50 billion years from now, the galaxies will crush together to form the ultimate singularity - a single gigantic black hole - and the universe will cease to exist.'" According to Wheeler: there is no escape from this final crunch.
If this “final crunch' is a possibility there is also the possibility of a now universe being formed out of the energy that might have been pushed through the black hole. ( TIMES: 4-9-1978)
So it would appear that matter and energy when taken together only are conserved, and that there may come a time when the total available energy in the universe will get disorganized and become non-available and non-aligned, and that the end of the present universe is likely to occur in a finite time. Once in the past the universe must have been in a highly organized state. So, it must appear that the universe must have had a begining.
Sir Arthur Eddington is of the view that the universe is constituted of point-events' which are determined by four numbers ie their dimensions; that only the structure of matter is known to the scientists; and that they can never hope to know the nature of matter, for it defies penetration and investigation. The knowing-power of man can never take him anywhere near the nature of matter; it can never make a dent in it. Time and space being in a sense mere creations of the mind, it would appear that the entirety of existence is no other than the end product of a mighty thought : an all-pervading cosmic mind. So this point at least has been systematically made out: that the “wholeness' of matter does not reveal itself to the scientist. The “wholeness' of matter can be comprehended only by the mind of matter; that is by the inwardly-looking process; that is, the process of getting infolded, getting crushed in and looking into the essence of things. Here is a remarkable process in which the process of thinking gets folded on itself. In other words the Idea begins to think. And nature'
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with just pride, can still proclaim the impenetrability and sublimity of her secrets by saying: “I am all that is, and all that was and all that shall be and no mortal hath raised the veil from before my face.' Man's ignorance with respect to this domain, it must be admitted, is still appalingly profound. Man is still lingering in the region of surmise. The virtual has become the actual. In man's attempt to reflect he has got into a rut, and he is unable to get out of it, for, there is a glaring inconsistency in his art of thinking, in his "impeccable logic; and what Einstein has said in amazing candour has become true: “Man is just theorising; he is dabbling in his thought experiments. All that man has and holds and affirms is mere moon-shine. Isn't it nightmarish to think in this wise ? And isn't the world of matter nightmarish? And isn't human life a mighty joke? And aren't our thoughts joists? Never can they meet. It is not given to man to . hear all of Nature's voice, and to divine all her laws.’ But yet man bears the dignity of being statuesque and all of a piece with nature. What C. B. M. Joad has to say of science is meaningful: "Science is organized common sense.”
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DISCOURSE - IV.
SPHERE OF ANIMATE MATTER
WE HAVE learnt that at the heart of the atom there rages a violent storm. It is a storm of forces: of energy: a perpetual dance : an electromagnetic tremot that seems never to cease. It is something similar to a game of musical chairs in which the participants are the neutrons, electrons and protons. It is a vortex of energy and a movement, There is a good deal of pulling-out and taking-in, an admission and an expulsion, an injection and an ejection: a constant interchange of negative energy and positive energy: of energy - flow. It is apparently, the very same 'cosmic dance' that is going on, on an immensely large scale in the immensity of the space-time continuum. What is being enacted in the heart of the macrocosm is also being enacted in the heart of the microcosm. Call them what you please; the truth is that relentless forces are at work. Here, matter is connate with spirit. lt was said of the Devil that he had left form and was all for matter'. Energy-flow in its ancient purity appears to have assumed two distinct diametrically opposite characteristics, moved away to opposite poles, and having concentrated into two polarities fan “uma” and a “Shiva' polarity) and potentialstwo opposite camps - they seem to be chasing each other like a pair of infatuated lovers.
And what a display of animality, of passion heaped upon passion's head in its tenderest and most pristine and refined form do we find emanating from two true lovers in the persons of a Romeo and a Juliet. It is no more no less than the hardly perceptible swell that appeared in the depth of the vast ocean's abyss, that grew intensely in its volume and dimensions into a mountain - high breaker and crashed with all its might on the rocky cliffs. The movement at the heart of the atom: the stir; the push and the pull,
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has assumed gigantic and passionate proportions and has shaken the hearts of the love-lorn partners. Aren't these agitations, these crunches, in their pristine purity and naivety, in essence, the same? Isn't there a unity that binds? Isn't this the fundamental principle in existence? The primary cause, if it may be called so? It is the external creative energy-flow that keeps on moving endlessly and resulting in these expressions : an atom here, an amoeba there, and a human being a little farther away in time's scale.
The boundaries of our sensations and sense-data, our perceptions and our concepts, our mind and our self are fluid, just as much as the boundaries of matter are fluid and frayed. They merge one into the other as if in a vortex, and it is extremely difficult to demarcate and say: here the sensation ends and here commences the mind. Even the boundaries of our bodies and other forms of physical matter
are all fluid. “Doesn't the fallen angel tend to become a malignant devil?"
We have to delve deep into the depth of our being and search and discover this cardinal truth in the estimation of the pristine stuff: the substance and its form. Let us not be just satisfied with being posted with this valuable piece of information, namely, that matter and mind are connate; let us in our own way, become the searchers after, and investigators of the truth that underlies these phenomena in nature. Let us discover for ourselves the “life principle that is essentially our own.
How now, O truth Thou art a deluding j9y. Thou hast hidden thy true face and presented only a semblance of it, a mere shadow. At the bottom of what we have recognized as the living and the inanimate there resides the same, the selfsame principle. One phase of it appears to us as animate matter, and the other as inanimate matter. The substrate is the same, but it assumes different proportions: insensible substrate, sensible substrate, super-sensible substrate and transcendental substrate. They are the inanimate matter, animate matter, mind and spirit. It all depends on how you look at it. From one angle of vision you see the one in the many and from another, you can see the many in the one. Says T. H. Jukes: “The organism is simple in
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fundamental structure, complex in operation, ageless in continuity, and infinite in variety.' It is perfect in its ambience. It has its true spirit: the immanence in matter. The amoeba has it, and so has man. He has evolved the spirit in the course of human development.
“All flesh is not the same flesh, but there is one kind of flesh of men, another flesh of beasts, another of fishes, and another of birds': so said St. Paul. Everywhere, in every existence there is a specificity and there is also a generality. The body cell of a hare differs in its structure and form and nature from that of a cat. By carefully examining the feather of a bird or a single tooth of a prehistoric mammal an expert naturalist is able to say to which species they belong. Says Bertrand Russell: The world is so organic, so dove-tailed, that from any one portion the whole can be inferred, as the complete skeleton of an extinct animal can be inferred fron one bone. (Analysis of Mind' - P. 20) who knows, in years ahead, a scientist may be so skilled as to regenerate and induce the reproduction, a perfect replica of an animal from one of its somatic cells (body cells) in a specially prepared culture medium. If such a thing were to happen mankind may eventually be fully emancipated of the crippling sex activity and its emotional chores and entanglements, and rendered perfectly intellectual. In this state matter would have been converted into mind.
There is this possibility also. The DNA in the chromosome is capable of such remarkable permutations and combinations of hereditary characters that every time we reproduce an individual it is likely to vary from its parents to a certain degree, often to a considerable extent. Nature ways are often enigmatic and unpredictable, especially in the area of living matter. There the most startling changes occur. Chance appears to have greater sway over nature than certitude. The outcome of unexpected variations are the “sports." According to this law of chance and "sport it may be possible for mind to emerge all on a sudden as pure mind or pure consciousness from what appears to us as animate or even inanimate matter. A purpose seems to merge out of chance.
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Everything in nature acts according to laws, says Kant. In this process of natural selection and survival of the fittest” it may happen that the fitt est are not in a position to survive. In such a contingency where a beneficial Species' is likely to go out of existence, Nature circumvents the situation of the inability and incapacity on the part of the species to survive, by bringing about a 'sport' or a mutation, which, according to molecular biologists, is the outcome of a slight adjustment in the gene code. It is a short-cut device to meet the sudden exigencies that may arise as the result of sudden and unexpected enviornmental changes. X-rays and radium-emanation and cosmic rays have been found to produce mutations in those species that have been affected by them. It would appear that the electron released through the cell by the X-rays can possibly hit the genes and disturb the established order and pattern, 1n the chromosomes and produce something new.
The great Dutch Botanist De Vries had anticipated the notion of the existence of genes and D. N. A. in his classical statement: “Attributes of organisms consist of distinct, separate and independent units. These units call be associated in groups, and we find in allied species the same units and groups of units. The experiments and findings of De Vries supported those of the Austrian Monk Gregor Johann Mendel according to whom "Heredity was a giant shuffling and reshuffling of separate and invisible hereditary factors.' But it was brought out that there was mathematical precision in the pvocess of the shuffling and the reshuffling of hereditary characters. The admirable notion of mutation' of De Vries and that of 'sport' of Charles Tarwin were the same; and this notion was expanded and elaborated in later years by a number of enthusiastic geneticists and molecular biologists of whom the best known are Focke, Correns, Tschermak, T. H. Morgan. H. J. Miller, Beadle, Tatum, Pauling, Crick and Watson. Here is a rare syndrome; a characteristic combination of opinions in biological thinking, as notable and grand as the notion of
origin of species by natural selection." The outcome of all these researches was the grandest of notions, that hypothetical
particles...... packed with unthinkable precision, order and potentiality constitute the chromosomes.
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It has been found that each cell has encoded in its chromosomes the master plan, the D. N. A. and a full set of working blue prints - R. N. A. Specialization starts after the first four cells have been formed in an embryo. A whole &atena of cells: neve cells, liver cells, brain cells, blood cells and a host of other specialized cells are formed according as the "necessity' arises for their formation. The "necessity' may be said to be determined by the teleological intent' intrinsic in the chromosome of the cell. It would appear that the “intent is encoded in the chromosome. And the predominant law according to S. Meryl Rose is this: Like normally inhibits potential like.' For instance: Pinch of a terminal bud on a shoot, then comes another to replace it. Not otherwise: When the terminal bud is present it is seldom or never superceded by another. A necessity must arise for a similar bud to be formed.
At long last after nearly a hundred years of research in which Neveral scientists were involved, the cell scientists have discovered the D. N. A. and have come to the conclusion that the D. N. A. stored and transmitted the specification, the master plan of life. The mystery surrounding the D. N. A. its form and structure has at last been unravelled. In 1953 Pauling and Corey worked on the formulation of a structure for the nucleic acids; and two young molecular biologists: F. H. C. Crick and James Dewey Watson working in the research laboratory of the University of Cambridge had engaged themselves in the engrossing task of building a model of D. N. A. They worked on their model, and strangely enough, when it was completed, it resembled a winding staircase with four different kinds of Steps. It appared as if organic nature's impenetrability had been resolved; and life's mystery appeared to have been on the verge of nearing a solution. D. N. A. has been conclusively proved to be the determinative stuff of life. The frontiers of biological science have been shifted far, far into the depths of the cell, far beyond the normal ken of man. It has penetrated the arcana of the cell, and is perhaps at the point of resolving some of the deeper mysteries of life: it form: structure, basis and nature. It has provided 'the information and plan that account for the complexity of the countles' billions of living creatures, Ruth Moore. The
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molecular biologists have today a “knowledge of the intrinsic nature of that which lies at the far ends of the chromosome coils.”
It would and it does appear as though a slight quirk in thế quiddity, a aubtle change in the genetic code in some primitive race of people like the veddahs and kuravas of Ceylon or the aborigines of Australia would have given them the virility and stamina needed to face such environmental hazards as would have been occasioned by atomic 'drop - outs' and nuclear radiation and bacterial attacks, and to re-people the earth with a more virile, more pristine, more adaptable, more intelligent and more meaningful race of human beings much nearer Nature than any of the present day civilized races.
Hence arises the necessity to preserve the ancient pockets of gene pool' that lurk in our primitive races. And it will be utter stupidity on the part of civilized races to attempt to civilize them and convert them to their way of thinking and worship and faith and make them humble, religious and pious. Anatote France in his book 'Penguin Island' points out the folly in such attempts. The ancient and primitive races shall, therefore. be suffered to preserve their pristine purity and be in their natural surroundings unconditioned and unt rammelled; for, one day they might become the salt of the earth.
In the case of an emergency, or even a major cataclysm, Nature knows how to circumvent it by playing her quips and her pranks by slightly tilting the gene code in the primitive races th2 reby enabling them to survive such treacherous holocausts as have been designed by man : the Christian, the Moslem, the Hindu and the Buddhist : all civilized and 'enlightened' religious groups.
The world of living things has its own wonders no less than those of the world of inert matter. The whole of Nature is replete with power: the unseen, unflagging energyflow: the inner urge to move and to be and to become : power in its multitudinous manifold. It is governed by laws. From the motion of the heavenly bodies, the birth of the stars and the satellites, to the fierce interminable commotion
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at the heart of the atom, power emanates and vibrates in all its varied forms. In the black holes' of space, power has been and tends to be packed in the most concentrated form: so compactedly packed, that, if our earth were to approach one such black hole' even one so small as a mustard seed, it would draw into it with tremendous force the earth, and swallow it. Isn't the tangle getting unravelled? Hasn't the notion of a “pulsating universe' some meaning? Yuga succeeds yuga.
in the heart of every living creature, in the nucleus of every cell, there resides a power that is capable of the infinite capacity to serve' as its intrinsic basic drive, which, in essence, is the “directive principle" that inheres in all nature's forms. This power is orderly, and marvellously ethical' in its nature, for it presumably propels and it guides, and it is formative in principle. The muscles and the tendons, the nerves and the ligament, the marrow of the bones, the blood that courses through the arteries, the veins and the capillaries, the endocrine glands and their internal secretions: the hormones: all - all of them have derived their motive power: the power to flex and to stretch, to pull-releasecatch-pull and release, to slide-in and slide-out, to collect and to combine, to amplify and to animate, to cxpand and to contract, to pull and to push, to contract, to pull and to push, to elate and to depress, to think, to reflect and to put a thought upon an idea, to beget an ultimate and absolute notion from the self-same, self-priming source : the primal energy that is intrinsically nature's. But the pecularity of the living machine is that in its ever-evolving, ever-tending to stretch, to expand and to strive to improve from hour to hour, from yaar to year, from generation to generation, from age to age, from epoch to epoch. The net resuit appears to be the betterment of the species, due to its greater adaptability to the ambient conditions : namely the numerous shaping and moulding forces and social and moral circumstances and ethical climate and individual maxims. The tendency on the part of the species, its, individual maxims. The tendency on the part of the
species, its individual trends to perfect itself by conserving power and ehannelizing it, self-actualizing it, in the appropriate direction, is quite patént in animal nature. There is an unceasing urge, an insatiable craving and an innate
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dedsire, an impulse pushing fuom behind to move forward, to progress, as it were, without an end in view, without a goal to seek; and in Hegel's words, to tend towards: becoming, being and having been'. It would appear that the future of matter is promisingty bright with an open end where the push is impulsive; and the pull increses as it goes up the scale of evolution. What appears to be ripening and ripening, tending towards rotting and rotting, leads to better growth, better development, better adjustment, better adaptation and better progression. On the foot-prints of death and dissolution treads life. Dissolution results in creation; in better life-building process: in the appearance of more and better adaptable forms.
This notion is amply warranted; amply rewarding. Nature in its pristine nudity possesses an ineffable charm. Have not mammals learnt to fly, and land spiders learnt to live in water-proof webs in a watery world, and microorganisms circumvented a hostile environment by their adaptability to surmount all obstacles? Then comes a new departure and a new way of life. Two of the most eminent of biological thinkers in the persons of Charles Darwin and A. R. Wallace may be said to have put their hands in the same cupboard and laid considerable stress on 'struggle for existence and survival of the fittest' ie the origin of species by natural selection' aspect of the evolutionary process in the organic world. and no less a biologist than Lamark was of opinion that "powers' that are acquired can be inherited. If that be so, what a collective and cumulative effect acquired characters must have had on the total potential of an organism to surmount obstacles and encumbrances! Thus in the creative evolution of individual characteristics one gets the impression of limitless resources which seem to point to the existence of an inherent mathematically inclined progressional mind directing and guiding every organism in nature. In the end one is left with the over all impression that there exists a potent being and becoming' process, to wit a life-building process immanent and emergent in the totality of existence. The balance sheet has always tended to be weighted on the credit side; not
on the debit.
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Animal body: an intricate Machine.
The animal body is a very intricate machine: a complex contraption adapted for the performance of manifold functions: pumping blood, conveying electronic messages and impulses by way of their nervous system, rousing the Cmotions, curbing them when the necessity arises, registering a desire by a push, recording sensations, invoking the deity, encoding information, ordering and organizing events, transferring telepathic messages, apprehending intuitionally, performing what might appear to be miraculous deeds such as levitation, and materialization, secreting hormones, excreting waste products, translocating nutrients, reflecting and emanating thoughts, sending out and sensing radar waves, forming concepts and images, educing relations and discovering correlates, stringing together “meaningful wholes' ie catena of adequate, well-knit ideas, apprehending extraneous and harmful forces like foes, waging a relentless war against harmful microorganisms and lethal viruses and venom, procreating and caring for the young: these and many more such functions are being performed by animals and in animal bodies by millions of body cells, (There are some 10 cells in man) muscle fibres, oxygen-carrying and nutrition-conveying red blood cells, nerve cells, miles and miles of blood vessels, innumerable, infinitesimal genes or hereditary factors, and the D. N. A., R. N. A., A. T. P. and other cell unit characters. What marvellous division of labour: what 'sliding-in and sliding-out' of protein filaments in muscle fibres What pull! What release ! What catch Waat ineffable motions in muscles What movement in our nature What power generated in the mitochondrion of the cell And what thought force What mind-power What creative understanding And what a vast organization of inter-related functions: some of them complementary and some supplementary
Plato was certainly far too wrong in his judgement, of the body when he said: “Having got rid of the foolishness of the body we shall be pure and have converse with the pure, and know of ourselves the clear light everywhere which is no p:he than the light of truth." This point o view of Plato has influenced considerably the style of
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thinking in Christendom, in India and in the Semitic world. The charge brought against “the frail bark of the flesh, namely that it has inherent in it evil trends has to be rebuffed; for all power is generated in the flesh.
Despite the fact most of our strong emotions - passions - are ferociously destructive : envy and pride, hate and resentment, jealousy and remorse, despair and despondency, cruelty and wickedness, martial ardour, conceit and arrogance, contempt for the lowly and the under-privileged and downtrodden and the slaves, the deformed and crippled: yet there are the nobler sentiments of intellectual love, compassion, sympathy, altruistic motivation, sense of sacrifice, that help to take one higher and higher upon the scale of true human progress. Now" hasn't the animal ascended? Hasn't animate matter taken a step in the right direction? And isn't man, the crowning glory of the universe, more of a miracle tham a monster ? Isn't Nature a well-docketed document, and a breviary to be recited every moment of man’s existence ? And shouldn’t he die fortified by the sacrements of Mother Nature? And, no other? Y
in brief: Having been enthralled by TIME and caught in the grip of SPACE, EXISTENCE, that is, the “state of being', enjoys an immediacy and endures. And every form of existence from the minutest bacteriophage to the grandest nebula; be it plant, be it planet, be it man himself, occupies a pocket in TIME which A. N. Whitehead has designated as its "duration' The peculiarity of duration is that it entails an "anubhava' or “total experience' the outcome of which is a prehension or interpenetrative understanding: a feeling of being'and of consciousness. Thus every object is conscious of itself; and depending on the depth of its consciousness the object assumes an appropriate form: a true configuration and a structure in keeping with the degree of depth of consciousness. Hence a crystal of salt, an ant and a man are what they, in reality are, because of the potentiality in them to be actualized: that is : to evolve into a tree or a crystal of quartz or an animal. And what Bertrand Russell has said brims over with meaning: “Matter is not so material, and mind not so mental'.
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DSCOURSE - V.
SS
OF VALUES
OF VALUES there are three main categories: personal values or maxims, social values or rules of eternal values. Personal values serve as our moral guide-lines. They are our own rules of conduct, and they enable us to conduct ourselves in a seemly and acceptable manner. They are our principles which we have formulated in our own minds, That we ought not to harm others, or damage their belongings or deprive them of them is a maxim that we instanctively felt as something good and acceptable to ourselves and our social set-up.
Then when we come into closer and more intimate and wider contact with the various aspects of society, namely our famity, our tribe, our community, our religious interests and concerns, our social aspirations, and our state machinery; then we evolve in us our social values: honesty and sobriety, loyalty and dependability, mutual trust and forbearance. Our love for our father and our sisters is consanquineous; then comes our respect to our teachers and elders, and finally we have a great regard for our rulers, for law and order. In this wise our sentiments of immemorial antiquity have grown and matured into our social values and our loyalties. But these values are not there of their own right. They are not ends in themselves. They have their own ends and their motives. Beyond those ends they extend not. They are our obiter dicta They help streamline our conduct.
Then come enternal or ultimate values. They are ends in themselves, and they subsist in virtue of their own intrinsic right. And when we have eternal values to guide us we are capable of surmounting all our weaknesses, our temptations, our errors of judgement, our narrowness of vision. We hate because we don't love, we fall into error
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because we don't see the truth. we commit crimes because we fail to see the pre-ordained harmony in nature, and the beauty in things; we are cruel and sardonic, for we fail to be just and reasonable and charitable. By and by, by sheer effort, by dint of the exercise of right thinking by dint of proper education, we begin to see our true self; and through our sheer endeavours we get disentangled from our worldly embroilments such as craving for power and money and pleasure of a sort. We begin to see clearly what we ought to be: our true life's goal of human existence: our jiva dharma'. If not this. then what other? And be it known that every object has its own, true 'swadharma' - its own true end in its existence. And in no sense is man a better evolved being than an infusorian. Ask the amoeba; it will tell you in its own tongue who is the better evolved: man or the amoeba.
AESTHETIC ASPECT OF NATURE
THERE is beauty in Nature; there is truth. They have become, perhaps, its very important feature. The greatest mathematician, the most skilled mechanical engineer, the most eminent artist, the most thrifty and expert economist, the greatest and most meticulously designed show-piece, the grandest object of entrancing beauty, is Nature. The greatest thinkers of the world, the most eminent among poets and artists, the noblest and profoundest of saints and sages have read deeply of the voluminous pages of nature and have found truth and beauty and peace; pre-ordained harmony, order and arrangement, and unity of form and structure in her multitudinout forms and manifold designs and patterns, and have evolved in them an intellectual and sublime love of God. Nature, endowed as she is with an immense potential and mighty inhering power, has chicelled out and projected her manifolds from within, impulsively, and as the outcome of a sound education as if to indicate there was a push in every object's unconscious depth that accounted for every progressive ie beneficial move it made.
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Maurict Be Guerin's account bears ample ιestimoήν to the beauty that resides in naturo. Here, it is: “Today has enchanted me. For the first time for a long while the sun has shown himself in all his beauty. He has made the buds of the leaves and flowers swell, and he has woked up in me a thousand happy thoughts. The clouds assume more and more their light and graceful shapes and are sketching over the blue sky the most charming fancies. The woods have not yet got their leaves, but they are taking an indescribable air of life and gaiety, which gives them quite a new physiognomy. Everything is getting ready for the greatest festival of nature.'
The warmth of feeling in birds has found expression in the richness of their voice and variety of their songs and the beauty, form and balance of their body'. The prairie hen is just a flame of feathers' when the surplus energy-flow is the highest in it, and the kob' of Uganda, a species of deer, has perhaps the most perfect body form to match not only the bush surrounding but for fleetness of foot. In the insect world there is such a variety of tools and instruments, contraptions and weapons of offence and of defence in the form of especially evolved mouth parts and bodily forms, of colours and patterns, of imitative designs and mimicry, of concealment and protective colourations, of camouflage, of fighting armours and concealed capsules of venom, of minuscular brushes, of spraying devices in the cat family, of syringing devices in the dog family, of remarkably sensitive sense devices like the nose-leaf of the bat, the keen sense of smell of slot-hounds, the balancing organ in the ears of cats and house geckos : that one is left with a sense of open-eyed wonderment at their marvellous gift of initiative and creative adaptability and instinctive territoriality. Having been drinnk deep of the marvels and beauty of the aesthetic “whole of Nature Hermann Lotze was of opinion that it is the fortunate revelation of that principle which permeates all reality with its activity",
The supreme wonder and crowning glory of life appears to be the evolution of the mind of man and his capacity to reflect, that is to have ideas of ideas, to formulate maxims to regulate one's own conduct. Mind and
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body have interacted on each other to such an intimate extent as to make us confirmed in our belief, that these two aspects of a being, though they appear and, are considered to be distinct and disparate cxistences, are inextricably, and indissolubly interwoven. When animate matter is contemplated aesthetically there is in it truth, beauty, balance, form, purpose, motive, wisdom and reserve. We have in a casual manner dealt with the first five aspects. The very fact of existence of “being and becoming' is the greatest and sublimest truth, an undeniable fact, a ponderous necessity forced on our attention with what might appear to be an inhering motive. Beauty, balance, form and power may vary from organism to organism. In any case the acceptability and necessity and fact of existence remain uncontested and unchallenged. Beauty and balance and form are the artistic aspects of nature's existences; and they are most remarakably brought out in animate matter. They are all sublime realities that have to be felt, studied and realized. The perfect balance inherent in animate nature has, as has already been pointed out, “found expression in the richness of the variety of forms' and the subtle "intent -- “intensive impulsion to be', from moment to moment - that creatures possess.
The last two aspects, namely, purpose and reserve need clarification, and, should, therefore, be expatiated upon. Existence is purposeful and governed by a tacit, inhering grand motive. So is every activity of every organism from the minutest bacteriophage to the most ponderous of animal forms like the elephant and the Arctic whale. Man-strange creature that he is - monstrous in form yet marvellous and miraculous in intent, in thought power: appears to belong to a class by himself. He is, in all probability, a measure of all things by virtue of the fact that he has evolved the rare capacity to reflect, to will, to want intensely and to abstract notions. He has the vision and the intuition, the inspiration and the imagination which seem to be lacking in animals. He is, in short, a rational being. “I have seen no monster or miracle in the world more manifest than myself”, says Montaigne. Man is capable of reasoning. Man. is capable of enjoyment. And 'enjoyment is to be sought in the development of a talent'. (Kierkegardi Satisfaction in life is the outcome of a sound education. Well, this is
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the opinion of man. How about the opinions of the other
creatures? Each is great in its own way. Every vat stands on its own bottom.
At the outset we must know this: that nothing would have come into existence haphazardly; there is patent a nethod and an order, a design and a tacit purpose, and a sublime motive, an underlying and an implicit objective, and an end in every form of existence. We are almost compelled to read an inherent teleological meaning - a meaningful meaning: an objective, a subjective and a transcendental - a beyond - reference - in nature's ways. This is perfectly patent at the animate level of existence, th ugh most succinctly and tenuously implicit at the inanimate level.
We mate, we procreate, we get entangled in emotional upsurges, we find peace and tranquility in sedate thinking and in perfect calm, we reflect and we evaluate, we judge we draw up and collate accounts and in our rarer mosments we even reach ecstatic heights, and more often than not, we sink into states of mental depression and despondency and temporary states of insanity and of oblivion. At these, that is: our conscious and unconscious actions, cannot have been purposeless. Every activity, howerer insignificant it might be is an expression not only of the individual self but of the universal self as well. There must be a special significance in our life. The organism, as a whole, is nothing short of the sumtotal of efforts, strifes, on its part to adapt itself to the manifold environmental circumstances, the innumerable, the immeasurable, the unquantifiable and inveterate forces of the universe that have been impinging on it in astronomic numbers and have had their impact and left their imprint on it. The stimuli: the impact, the push, the pressure on the part of the envirchment, and the response: the pull on the part of the organism, have been incessantly at work. They act on reach oner, they interact: the net result being the organism, its peculiar form, its marveilous structure and its inscrutable nature: its teendencies and impulses; its cognitive, congeneric and conative contraptions.
EVERY ORGANISM is a form of planned, conseved bundle or quantum of creative energy; and, in its life-long struggle and striving for existence and incessant effort to
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adapt itself to the oft3n hostile, barren, inhospitable environment, and life's circumstances, it has to expend energy which has to bs replenished by constant metabolical processes. There is an increasing going-out of energy and coming-in of energy. an inward flow and an out-ward flow: a breakingdown and a building-up process, technically worded : katabolism and anabolism. The balance-sheet should, however, never show a deficit; for a deficit means a running-down,
deteriorating process in which the organism in its struggle for existence would have been riven, defeated and would have to quit the ring.
Many an animal, some of them of gigantic proportions and complex configurations belonging to the dead past, which peopled the earth some millions of years ago, in the paleolithic age, such as the Dinosaurus, has become extinct and has either left behind it its descendents or has lift no living trace of it but its bones and form and remains in the record of the rocks, which we call its fossil. The mastodon and the mammoth, the dynosaurus and the ichthosaurus, the sabre-toothed tiger and the lizaed-tailed bird and other nutnerous species of strange creatures have left their impressions on rocks; and their skeletons as geological records that have given the clue to geologists, evolutionists and palaeontologists like such a galaxy of research workers as Buffon, Hutton, Playfair, Lyell, Lamark, Curier, Guide, Nicholson, Ray Lankester, Lydekker, Prof Owen, Arthur Keith and others, to recast the forms, structures, and rebuild them and even to reconstruct the terrestrial environment as it did exist during the secondary and tertiary periods of the earth's geological history. The age of giant ferns and lycopods, the age of reptiles and of birds and insects, and then, of cycads and flowering plants and mammals in their prevalent environment, have been most sedulously studied and their characteristic scenery so carefully reconstructed as to bring back the long-forgotten past; and thus nature's stage has bsen set up before our very eyes
Why have these animals become extinct, and why have some species of plants belonging to the temperate and frigid zones gone up the higher slopes of the mountain terrain in tropical and sub-tropical zones? The reason may be sought for in the nature of the terrestrial environment.
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that prevailed in those distant epochs, brought about as the result of a change in the inclination of the earth's axis to the plane of the ecleptic. Then came the ice-age, and it was followed by the prevalence of Arctic conditions in the equatorial zone. Again, when conditions returned to what they are at the present time, that is, with the torrid temperate and frigid zones arranged in the order in which they occur now, the temperate and frigid zone plants which inhabited the equatorial regions were compelled to go up to the higher altitudes. This is the view of Charles Darwin,
With the change brought about in the nature and disposition of the rocks and soils and the surface terrain that formed the outer crust of the earth after the period of the earth's evolution durring which earthquakes and volcanic activities were much more frequent and in evidence than they were in subsequent periods and in the early climatic conditions that prevailed, the vegetation must have changed; and on the whole the environment must have become hostile to, and inhospitable for the continued existence of the giant reptiles and mammals; and they might have, as ages rolled on, vanished from the scene. Some of them have connpletely made their exit from the terrestrial stage; the others have so adapted themselves as to fit into the changed conditions. So, long before the ante-man, that is, the predecessor of man, came on the scene, the environment must have been quite like our own as it appears in the
various Qlimatic zones, mountain terrain, plateaux, sprawling plains, rolling downs, deep river valleys and sea-beaches with their frayed margins: deep gulfs and bays, gullies and gutches, fiords and rias, islands and archipelagos and peninsulas. [vide A. R. Wallace's " Malay Archipelago''.]
What an assiduous effort can have been made by Nature in her endeavour to make the earth a fit home for the “naked ape' that man is . The anthropoid apes that peopled the eartb might possibly have been the stump in the tree of life from which man must have sprouted. As the body structure and form evolved, and as the fore-limbs of the anthropoid apes were freed from clinging to the earth, and the habit of walking on all fours given "up and as their eye-sight was directed to the front, and as they were able to take a fuller and clearer view of the
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environment, their brain capacity also must have increased, and the outcome of it all was the crowning glory of evolution: a thinking mammal : a rational being with a "pulling capacity' - to see ahead, have a vision and to act guided by a thought to think of the future. And that is how man must have come by the being and becoming process. Man must certainly have been the by-product of a sudden, favourable multation: a chance change in the gene code which must have persisted in him ever since he entered the being process.' He is in a sense a “chance product,' possessed with the property of besting all evil designs, if there be any such.
Now the pertinent question is : what is the extent of the time-scale when reflecting man made his appearance on the scale of life? It is very difficult to gauge. Only a very rough guess may be hazarded, for man appears to have lived even at the same time as the mastodon and the mammoth some 40,000 years ago. His becoming process - the evolution of his mind - is still going on. The creative energy-flow the pull forward in man, is still at its flood. but not at its fullest swell. It is in its early stages of evolution. Charles Darwin’s “Descent of Man' gives a full and reasoned account of the manner in which man must have evolved from some man-like ape. And now he holds the mirror up to Nature." Man is no more on all fours protected by a hairy covering. Man's being' - his creative intelligence - has been projected into this world of which he is the essence. He is certainly moving towards an angelic existence: the spirit that is yet to be: the 'becoming' immanence.
Says Alphonse De Condolle: Every plant, whether beech, lily, or seaweed, has its origin in a cell, which does not contain the ulterior product, but which is endowed with, or accompanied by a force, which provokes and directs the formation of all later developments. Here is the fact, or rather the mystery, as to the production of the several species with their special organs.' Here is implied the grand notion of 'self-actualization," of Abe Maslow; and self-integration. And every being' is in possession of these urges.
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DISCOURSE - V.
NATURE'S LAW OF PARSIMONY, MPENETRABBTY AND DETERMINISM
THE conservation of matter and energy is the keystone in Nature's triumphal arch. Nature is neutral, indifferent, parsimonious, very niggardly, methodical with regard to the use of the raw materials at her disposal. She is very economical. There is precision in the magnificence and magnitude of Nature. Not a single claw, not a single hair, not even a single somatic or even a reproductive cell, nor virus would have been produced by Nature in excess of her, specific needs. She is governed by the principle of necessity and determinism that dictates and controls all forms, all configurations in her scheine of things. Every one of Nature's designs and activities: physical, physiological and psychological: all mnemic phenomena such as: acquired habits, images, associations, non-sensational elements in perspection, : all behaviour cycles: is purposefully motivated and is an empyrean secret, The why and the wherefore of Nature's designs and schemes and motivations cannot be easily decoded. “Nothing in nature is wholly trivial.' In nature's scheme, energy has to be conserved, economized and put to the highest and best use possible. There can't be any wanton wastage in Nature. Nature is reserved and secretive in her ways. She organizes herself into recognizable and meaningful units called species. New departures and new ventures are forbidden unless and until dire necessity demands.
What appears to us to be sheer wanton *器 that obtrudes itself upon our attention in the large-scale
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production of fruits and seeds, of spores and pollen, of ova and spermatozoa, in the burgeoning of life in the sea, of umbrageously spreading branches, of penetrating net-work of roots, of a wealth of marvellously and intricately patterned foliage and of a multiplicity of forms in insect life and micro-organisms and viruses and bacteriophage by the million at every minute of existence, may, at first sight, to the eye of the untrained observer, appear to be nothing short of the appaling prodigality of Nature. Thus laments Julian Huxley: Biological evolution has been appalingly slow and appallingly wasteful. It has been cruel; it has generated the parasites and the pests as well as the more agreeable types. It has led life up innumerable blind alleys. But in spite of this, it has achieved progress. Perhaps "progress' here means adaptability to ambience. And it is most unfortunate that F. H. Bradley had the guts to make this very pessimistic and unseemly statement: "Everything in the world is a necessary evil.” But it won't be in order to dub nature a prodigal and a wastrel. Nature is bound to be perfectly certain of this: that her members, however insignificant they might appear to be, do not go out of existence without providing the necessary safeguards, impetus and potential for the production and continuation of the species she had intended to bring into being. This was, and is Nature's supreme intent. She preserves them with meticulous care and deep concern so that they may serve as stepping stones to something higher, something nobler. Whoever can know that there might lurk in the gene code of a bacteriophage or a pre-historic ancient coelacanth or a veddha that which might help to mutate and bring forth a very useful and powerful beingit may possibly be another species of a rational being divested of all crippling emotions and sentiments - governed
by an intellectual impulse: supreme and mighty and efficacious and creative in its 1hought force. "Many flowers must perish
ere a grain of corn be ripened." W. S. Landor; and many more ancient forms must be sacrificed before new form have been evolved. ܫ
What is after all the intention of Nature? In other words, what is the purpose, the supreme goal of existence? To bring into being the desired object of existence: the collective mind: the symbol of the totality of existence.
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It will have to be admitted that there is a projective pur. pose in Nature's scheme. Nature, admittedly can't afford to beget a wastrel. If at all wastrels have been produced they are the outcome of the dire blunders committed by man after he had acquired the capacity to reflect. Wasteful man, prodigal that he is, has completely disturbed Nature's plans and balance and has gone off the right track chalked out for him, because of his emotions, passions, his emotiontinged inadequate art of thinking: his inability to evaluato correctly, to judge unbiased, and to understand properly Nature's designs. The generality of mankind at the present time is in possession of, and is oppressed by, inadequate, muddled notions of existence and its absolute purpose. Man's superstitions, his myths and passions have come in his way and encumbered his path. Man's organized concatenation of especially thought out ideas, his intellectual achievement, his totality of true mental efforts towards the attainment of the sublime truth, the universal face of Nature, has so far not become a reality, although he is on his way leading to this great goal. Isn't man all for matter? To the majority of human beings the world appears to be a battle ground; whereas in reality it is only a playing field. Isn't be still going sounding his perious way? He has to discover the “efficient cause that everything in nature is. (That which makes a thing what it is.) He has to give up his dogmatic pretensions and follow a truly scientific method of planned operation inquiry. His “deep-seated prejudices' can never evolve into "heaven-sent intuitions. We have to reprobate our intuitional bias; and every scrap of belief and of faith has to be investigated, sans bias, sans doctrinal gloss, sans authoritative judgements.
THE WAY OF ALL FLESH
in the scheme of things designed by Nature flesh occupies a very significant place. It is an important aspect of animal matter. Although it appears to be, and in fact, it is the vehicle of life and of the mind, not much attention has been paid by man to its well-being. Almost all religious thinkers and saints and even sages have assigned it a very low status in the ethical and spiritual life of
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man. Harassed as they were by things mundane : by iusts and greed, by hatred and ill-will, envy and pride, they thought it (flesh) to be the dwelling place of the evil spirit, of Satan and his woeful and evil breed of compeers.
“Despair behind, and death before doth cast such
terror, and my feeble flesh doth waste,
By sin in it which it twards hell doth weigh." (Donne)
The fall of Adam - man in general, and the temptations of Eve - woman armed with all her winsome ways, alluring wiles and the so-called evil and in ordinate carnai desires - have been attributed by some of the ancient religions to the weakness and ferocity of the flesh. In fact, in their scheme of morals, their ethical code, flesh and evil have become almost synonymous. What the Persian poet has said of woman is this; and it is very suggestive. “In the beginning, Allah took a rose, a lily, a dove, a serpent, a little honey, a Dead sea apple, and a handful of clay. When he looked at the amalgam - It was a woman.
In the ancient “Ithikasas,' ethical literature of the Hindus, namely the Ramayana and the Mahabaratha, an even in the manifold tales and parables of the Upanishads, particularly the Katha Upanishad, the “Ocean of Stories' (Kathasarithsagara), the Panchatantra and Hithopadesa, and the Gnana Vashistam, and even in the Baja Govindam' of Shankara, a very low station has been assigned to flesh and to woman who has somehow or other been closely associated with it. And why are these unfair and unjust allegations trotted out against woman and the flesh Woman has become a sex symbol, in which state, flesh would have become a clog that retards one's spiritual progress. And a wife is often a hindrance that embarasses a person with a philosophic bent of mind and retards his progress. It appears as though Woman and flesh are the same with regard to their evil infiuences on man. Even great rishis like Vashista and Visvamitra - more legendary beings than real - had been subjected to the temptations of the flesh: so say the Ithikasas. And woman beautiful as she is considered to be, appears to have come in the tradition of Helen of Troy. It was "her face that launched
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a thousand ships, and burnt the topless towers of Ilium." She was “fairer than the evening's air, clad in the beauty of a thousand stars.' (Christopher Marlow) Beauty, lustful beauty, appears to have dwelt and to have b3en bred in evil. No less a philosophical treatise than the “Gnana Vasishtam' contemplating on bodily penance and mortification of the flesh, deemed it a virtue to do so. It gave flesh a very low status. Its estimate of the flesh is, that it is mean and worthless, that it is the dwelling place of “ahankara' - the ego and the lusts. “What profiteth this body ? Asks the rishi. “What is the attraction of woman's beauty ? Woman is Cupid’s net to ens nare men” - a medium for carnal knowledge.
Says Nietzsche : “Woman is so much cause for shame; in woman there is so much pedantry, superficiality, schoolmasterliness, petty presumption, unbridledness and indiscretion concealed...... which had really been best restrained and dominated by the fear of man.” Erasmus appears to have held a less harsh view of woman as wife. Says he: “wife, a creature so harmless and silly, and yet so useful and convenient, as might mollify and make pliable the stiffness and morose humour of men." Matter in itself is mean. The whole universe is mean and naught by it. In the estimation of the seers and sages, rishis and wise ones of the world, flesh is weaker than the spirit; and gross matter, if anything, is mean and dirty and degrading St. Paul has spoken of flash in very disparaging terms. Says he: The flesh lusteth contrary to the spirit, the spirit oontrary to the flesh; and these two are one against another, so that ye cannot do things that ye would do.' He has set flesh and spirit in two opposite camps. This cannot be the correct and just and reasonable attitude to adopt, for they are both intended to lead to the blessedness and benignity intrinsic in nature and in universal goodness. Our interest is mirrored in our choice, for more often than not our choice is the flesh.
None the less what charm there is in the utterance of the scientist-philosopher and thinker in the person of Prof. T. H. Huxley who, in the plenitude of his talent, defines matter, thus: “The name for the unknown and
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hypothotical cause of certain states of our own consciousness.' and a learned Christian Professor Dr. Sandys-who dare impugn his honesty?-- is of this opinion : “Judged by the standard of strict logic, the world which we inhabit, is a world of hypothetical existences and hypothetical relations.' And the great divine and philosopher Bishop Berkeley has said in clear unequivocal terms: “The universe which I See and feel and infer is just my dream, and nothing else. That which you see is your dream; only it so happens that our dreams agree in many respects.' The Vedic philosophers go a step further in postulating a finer, subtler and more abiding reality than the mind of man, Thus in matter - mind according to the vedic rishis is matter - and flesh there have come into being what we may call : the apparent reality and the absolute reality: the mind of matter and pure consciousness; the one causing sorrow and fear, the other resulting in sublimity; the one emanating thought and its attendant cares, the other e manating negation of thought, the outcome being peace and its attendant bliss. The rishis have said that the ignorant worship the many forms, that is to say idols; and wisdom is not for them. They are in bondage. We forfeit ourselves in our day-to-day matters arid concerns. The wise are immersed in and are one with the “chit-akas' - spirit space: the realm of pure knowledge - and they are the liberated ones. So much, as regards the evidence borne by the rishis concerning flesh. But be it known that to the nominalist school of thinkers all general ideas such as “flesh" and “corporate substance' are mere bosh. Only stark earth-bound realities like "this dog', that tree' Iparticulars) exist. All universal ideas are mere names. This notion cannot be easily rebutted. But it fails to take cognition of such occasions as beauty, truth and goodness, happiness and bliss, “one and two and three' which are of course of a different order from this cat', that dog, “this particular piece of sealing wax' etc.
From what has been brought out it would appear as though the rishis and seers have spoken with one accord with the blessed ones' of the world on the self-same theme. “To this end was I born and for this cause came I into the world, that I should bear witness unto the truth." It is the “truth' that they have
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all been seeking, the undying and eternal principle in all existence; be it a speck of dust, be it a maha rishi, The common substrate in man, be he a saint or a sage, be he a man of the busy work-a-day world with his normal inborn urges and aspirations, is the urge to see the truth. The common urge of the busy man of every-day existence having been overweighted on the side of the pan of worldliness leads to craving and nullity: to a sinister world where the spirit shrivels to a cipher, where vice and frailty, suffering and sorrow tend to flourish and prosper, where mind" is a tissue of lies and 'soul' mere bullshit.
But be it known, that the negative approach to truth governed by the formula: “not this, not this is not going to lead one to the truth, the entire truth and the simple truth. Truth' and “reason' are in no wise different. "Reason is the true, the eternal, the absolutely powerful essence that it reveals itself iu the world. It is the substance of the universe; the sublime fact of existence, that ffows, becomes runny and in the end stabilizes and even gyroscopes into a transcendental state. The "self' is the only knowable thing, and the breaking of the wall of the "ego" has become a necessity before one begins to know another. The 'egos' have to be shattered the knots undone, and made to coalesce before two human beings begin to ninderstand each other. This is necessarily a solipsistic thought : that the 'self is the only thing knowable. Authenticity as regards existence, it resides in the 'self. We have to merge our self into another's if we wish to understand him. Are we prepared for it 2 And isn't it a tantalizing question? We have in this instance to prefer "passion to cold calculation, and unless we project our self it is not possibie to love each other passionately without reserve. In which case we can't be one. This is the reason why commerce and finance are cold, steely, still, wooden and devoid of any warmth and passion. It is the positive approach: the capacity to see the existence of mind in matter, to discern the goodness in flesh, to spell out its beauty and its form, and frippery in which it is tricked out, its deeper import, the perfection in it, that will lead to the realization of the naked reality. It is the process of 'self-actualization' and self-revelation, and of perfect ninderstainding. The negative notion takes one to "avidya’ - ignorance, -
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and the promotion of calibanistic tendencies. In short in the popular, figurative, pictures que and florid language : flesh leads but to the devil. This is a sinister notion. Enough of this piddling carnality
Viewed scientifically, dispassionately and rationally there is neither good nor evil in flesh, neither virtue nor vice. It is an indifferent, neutral existence. Science purports to give a reasonable and full account of ffesh. It all depends on how the mind of man with its highly blurred and coloured vision and allergic response looks at it, what it makes of it; what man thinks of it. A viscious mind awry in its mental set up looks at the evil aspect of flesh; a virtuous mind, pure in flesh; a virtuous mind, pure in its outlook holds a brief for nobody; it sees only virtue 'in flesh. The virtuous mind sees beauty and balance, form and harmony, order and coordination and an infinite capacity for creative action in all flesh. Brain and brawn are both of the flesh; and they interact on each other in an infinite variety of ways. There is love and hate and strife. Our thoughts, our feelings, our cognition and our conation, our willing and our wanting, our desire to persist in our own being, our capacity to create and to destroy, to build and to break, to do and to undo, to pull and to push, to move and rest: are all, the way of the flesh. Flesh has the immeasurable potency for action. It can never be quiet; it must perform. “Everything, in so far as it is in itself, endeavours to persevere in its own being.” Il Spinoza ] Its “swadharma” — its intrinsic virtue, its striving to persist in its own true being is Nishkamia karma', that is neutral or detached action 3 action untainted, uncoloured, unaffected by either virtue or vice. It is perfectly just and impartial, prudent and unbiased. Like a mountain torrent it flows : but the torrent can be harnessed and put to the best use possible. Tt is the flow of action, energy-fiow: that marvellous effusion from the flesh. Flesh is like a dynamo that transforms mechanical energy into electrical energy. It is capable of converting the static energy locked up in it into kinotic energy; even into psychic energy. What a wealth of power and what immeasurable force and creative energy are intrinsic in flesh An ounce of flesh has inherent in it sufficient power to move even
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the mighty Himalayas, and break it and heap it up in a mound of rubble. It is, perhaps, the most appropriate medium through which creative energy flows.
Time, space and 'freedom'
Time and space as they appear to the senses are not real. They are mere relative existences. They are mere relative existences. They are the products of the mind; and the only free aspect of an object is its freedom that is to say its freedom of action, and its “freedom' to exist all by itself. Buf be in known that freedom is variable in its range. All freedom pertaining to objects have a limited range depending on the evolutionary level of their materiality. Man, for instance, dispite the high evolutionary leval he has attained, has a range of freedom so limited as to be governed by the evolutionary level of his materiality: his material and organic configuration. Every wee bit of his organic and material form has been the outcome of the evolutionary process that has been governing him; and he is free to act in proportion as his bodily form and structure have provided him with a range and a dimension to act. Hence every object, every entity, however insignificant it might appear to be, has a freedom fully governed by the evolutionary leveh of the material that has gone into its being. The amoeba is free to act in as much as a man is, placed as each of them is in its ambience and the evolutionary catena of circumstances. Hence the higher the evolutionary level of the materiality of an object the wider the circumambience, ie its range of freedom to act, and vice versa. In other words the "freedom of every object or entity to push and to pull and to act, to create and to annihilate, is fully governed by the nature, that is the evolutionary disposition or inclination of its material bonds, its structure and from - to wit, its intrinsic materiality: its pre-ordained harmony.
A sick body is no other than a body in bonds. It aloof.1 with a pathetically curtailed freedom; a healthy body. has a wider range to rove, to think and to act than an unhealthy one. A sick mind may thus be said to reside in a tightly-bonded bodily form, ie a body in chains; and a mind in bliss dwells in a body whose bonds have been: loosened and annulled, and in which the dimension of freedom
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to think and to act have been widened to its ut most limit. A body is thus rendered sick or healthy by the mind that governs its “freedom'. The greater the materiality of the body the tighter and the more crippling the bond; the lesser its materiality the les ser the bondage and the freer it is from suffering and sorrow : from ageing, from disease, from decrepitude and from death.
How often have we watched and observed with interest a grown up Alsatian pup worrying a kitten, and the kitten fuming and fretting, spitting and sputtering and simmering like a pentup sizzling “kavun -oil cake - and keeping its assailant at full arm's length. The fear-based selfdreservation impulse in the kitten is so much charged with a chock-full of "energy-flow,’ (I have borrowed this term from: Wells and Huxley) that even such a small creature as a kitten is able to confront a full-grown Alsatian and put it out of countenance. Flesh is very powerful and has the potency to enable the possessor to face any situation with courage and equanimity. Flesh, when actuated by pristine impulses like fear, sex instinct, self-assertive and self-preservative instincts, is capable of emanating such tremendous amounts of energy as would enable it to cope with any situation and surmount formidable difficulties.
It may be said in sober truth that, that capacity to make decisions which finds lodgement in the higher animals and which is called "will' is born of the flesh. And though of the flesh it has the increasing and incredible potentiality even to own and tame the heavens: to be or not to be. The question arises : why can't it tame the flesh and bend it, mould it, and shape it to its own heart's desire? lt would appear that the pristine will that has grubbed up and fashioned the universe, bodied it forth with all its manifold configurations, is also capable of undoing it and compelling it and breaking it up into smithereens or even forcing it to go into a state of oblivion and obscurity and negation ; that is involuted, zero existence - "soonya.” In his own inimitable and simple way the rishi has given form to this thought in the following manner: “when there were neither the creation nor the sun, the moon, the planets and the earth, and when dank
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ness was enveloped in darkness, then the Mother, (the organized effort to operate and to design and to determine) the formless one, Mfalha Kali, the Great Power was One with Maha Kala the absolute.” Here one factor of existence emerges, namely: that “Time' reigns supreme in “all-thatwhich-is' : be it flesh, be it spirit.
“That which is born of the flesh is flesh; that which is born of the spirit is spirit.' This is a Semitic thought, and Jesus puts it succinctly. He neither denies the existence of the flesh nor does he assert the power of the spirit in preponderance over that of the fiesh. Both are of the same value to him, although in their form, design and structure and nature there appears to be a subtle distinction - nay, even a world of difference. Both flesh and spirit are like unto the two bulls yoked to a plough. They are of equal value, of equal potency. The one is more or less a replica of the other. In essence the two phases of matter: “the-thing-in-itself": are the same, although the one appears to be more animate, more enlivened than the other. It is through the way of the flesh and its effect - karma - action potent in it - that the evolution of the spiritual state — action intrin sic in it — is rendered possible. Aren’t we a part of universal nature, and shouldn't we follow her order, and understand her ways Here comes intellectual love of existence: the true joy of life. Note the catena : Existence-knowledge-bliss.
Flesh has, therefore, to be given the same worth and the same consideration as the spirit. Though it appears to be rebellious and refractory it has to be tamed assiduously, cared for, looked after, fed and nourished, nurtured and tended, so that the spirit that is conterminous with and co-existent in it, may be evolved and maw manifest itself. It will be illogical and irrational and irreverent to think of the spirit as something totally different from and oppossed to the mind and the flesh. Inert matter, flesh, mind and spirit are genetically of the same category, though. they belong to different stages of the same evolutionary process: the self-same catena of eventa They are indissoluby. bonded. Is not gross inert matter the 'name for the unknown and hypothetical cause of certain states of our
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own consciousness?' And what is consciousness but a feeling of the whole of one's being? when the proton and neutrons and electrons: again the hypothetical cause of naatter of the physicists: constitutings matter - the stuff of matter-push and pull and vibrate in a particular fashion, swing and give out and take in energy in a thousand different ways, they are suppossed to begset all the manifold states of "consciousness', obtainable in the mind and the spirit, and even perhaps in the state of super-consciousness. Here comes a shift in our attitude concerning matter and mind.
Despite the fact that in this very abstract and abstruce inquiry we have used certain familiar tcrms, familiar to us in our day to day language of speech and discussion and dialogue and disquisitions such as: "mind', “consciousness' and "will', none the less, we shall have to admit the paucity of clarity in our art of thinking. It appears to be slipshod reasoning. Much as they are intended to lead us to clearness of vision and clarity of reflection, all our learning and all our intellect, very often fail to take us to the path of pure thought and unsullied consciousness : the path of truth, of reason and of power.
At this stage of our inquiry into the true state of the flesh, its nature and its potentialities, words fail, language however officient a vehicle of thought it might be considered to be, and logic itself with its manifold systems of sophistry, dialectics, inductive and deductive reasoning, true polimic, fail to guide us and to direct S. They are of very little avail. Says Rousseau: I do 11.Οι deduce these rules from the principles of high philosophy, find them in the depth of my heart written by Nature in ineffable characters. “We preach and talk, say S Albertus Magnus, "only till we feel and adore. Here we are COStrained to feel and adore. Flesh has to be adored; and Sri Ramakrishna didn't spurn flesh and run away from it. He did reverence and adore flash in its naive nakedness, just as much as the spirit. He saw the Universal Mother, the eternal energy-flow, the truth and the power and the reality, the 'moola prakrti,' primal matter, in the fish. If you
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mortify the flesh you mortify the spirit. You tend the flesh and you tend the spirit. This is what the Buddha discovered. Jesus said, "I was born of the spirit into the flesh.' He didn't want to disregard the flesh; he appears to have understood the architectonic of the flesh. Flesh should therefore, be the prime concern of man. Man has to feed it, nourish it and keep it in tone and in the "best of spirits' so that the mind and the spirit may, on their own, be mutually nourished, nurtured, fed and tended. It shall however, not, be the duty of man to pamper the flesh and to indulge in its inordinate aberrations and low desires. Over-indulgence does certainly take man and place him very low in the evolutionary scale of development of the mind. In such an eventuality he becomes the chaff of life; and like unto the “seed that has fallen by the wayside and on stony ground,' he fails to serve any useful purpose.
How long has man tarried in his pilgrimage on the path that leads to perfection - "poornam'. He has yet a long way to go, but he must rest assured that the way of all flesh leads but to perfection in existence. Evolving in man is the being: the essence: the spirit that “pushes toward the whole, preserves, enhances, and relates everything to everything else, excludes nothing and gives to everything its place and limits. Jaspers Man is more than meets the eye." Be the path long be it easy, be the mind resolute be it flagging, be the flesh weak be it strong: the goal will have to be reached at any cost. It is a “must and a “necessity'. In the scheme of Nature, failures are the pillars of success. Therefore, faint not, saying that the flesh is weak and that you have succumbed to it, falter not burdened with anxiety and the obsession that the path is too long. Keep on trudging; for, although close at hand the dawn seems long coming and you are enshrouded in gloom; look, far, far beyond, the western hills are bathed in the morning glory of the awakened sun; for though the tide seems to be slow in coming in the nearby bay; far, far beyond, the inlets and the estuaries are brimming over. Though the path be long and the roadway be sinuous, studded with stones
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and pebbles and infested with briars and bianbies, falter not and faint not, and flag not, for the goal is near at hand; and, Sure and certain, yours will be the kingdom of the spirit, and the peace and tranquillity of mind and the bliss inhererit in flesh. This will certainly be your solid achievement in life.
“Broken the house is and the ridgepole split, Delusion fashioned it'. - Edwin Arnold.
But yet there is the Truth - the eternal truth underlying this thought of the Buddha, the undying truth of intermingled existence in its perfection. At the bottom of delusion resides the unyielding heavy-shotted, skulking reality. Shouldn't TRUTH be presented cogently and persuasively? Man is at odds with himself. He has suffered himself to be mesmerized. In the world of today he is ensnared in an occupational tangle; in an insistent craving for power and pelf, in the universal passion of fear". Says St. Paul : The good that I would, I do not, but the evil that I would not, that I do'. Here comes the moral problem of TEMPTATION.
Many a time and oft, nay, a hundred or thousand times, you would have yielded to your low desires, you would have tripped and fallen and erred and blundered - and what does it matter? - yet, be assured you are not far from perfection. It is close at hand; on the other side of the door is the Truth, and for the mere knocking the door will open, and you will gain admission. Many a magic casement will now be parted wide and the voice of Perfection will come reverberating in its dulcet jars and clash on your ears. Then the final and insistent call will come, and you will be chosen. Then the many would have become “One’, and flesh would have attained perfection. What appears to be dead, inert matter, will now have resolved into the living spirit: the greater awareness, the greater awakening: GpIri sihu Gibstaig: the aimless aid : the supreme goal: the transcendental goal that you can find in the inner depth of your being'.
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Then ail flesh will be the same: whether it be flesh of a man or bird. This is a gasping truth. Hence rest assured that in the flesh is locked up the potentiality. the power for inestimable and infinite perfection. So, hate not flesh, spurn it not, for it is your surest rung in the ladder that leads to success in human existence: The way of the flesh leads but to the spirit. The way of dolour and suffering leads but to eternal bliss. “Over a deep sorrow there floats a divine calm.' Eugene de Guerin J. Let man, therefore, lay down his life void of canker and hatred; without sorrow or remorse of regret of any sort.
Death is no bar to progress. It is intrinsic in life. It has been built into life : encoded in the chromosomes, and writ large in the ambience.
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DISCOURSE - VI
THE SPHERE OF MIND
N the discourse on the sphere of animate matteg we have dealt with this subject to such an extent as to enable us to trace the connection between mind and matter. These two entities, namely, mind and matter cannot, and seldom do exist as disparate existences. Mind is intrinsically matter; and in fact in every atom there inheres the mind of the atom'. Be it known that the external world exists independently of us in one sense, and that it cannot exist independently of us in another sense; that is to say, that it is a creation of our mind in another sense. In other. words it is an extension of the mind. So long as the mind of the atom determines its own existence, and so long as the atom owes its existence to the "energy-flow producing the motions going on unceasingly within it. we are constrained to come to this conclusion that any existence owes its “being to the thought clinging to it - its mind. Mind is an emanation of inert matter as of animate matter. It subsists of itself. It is an emergent or self-actualizing existence or emergence. We may even make ourselves so bold as to say that the mind of inert matter has contributed to the evolutilon of the mind of animate matter; that the mind of animate matter, has, in its turn, contributed to the evolution of the mind, of man; and that the mind of man has had its share in the evolutionary process of the formation of the 'collective mind' of humanity - the mind-body continuum. The mind of man is an emanation of his total physical being, particularly of his brain. It is an emergence of his brain. “I and my body compose a single whole," says Descartes. Says C. E. M. Joad: “Mind finds in the external world what the mind has itself put there'. “The footprint on the sands of time is our own", says Sir A. Eddington. And, so, where-ever we go we discover our mind.
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Perhaps the most complicated material existence, the most highly evolved organ in existence is the brain of man. The human brain has been the subject of research by anatomists and physiologists during the last two hundred years or so. Considerable attention has beed focussed on the structure of the brain in its lifeless form. The smallest cell units of the brain are called the neurons. There are ten thousand millions of them in the brain; and the brain uses more oxygen for its size than any other part of the body, for it emanates a tremendous amount of energy. And thinking involves massive energy-flow in its subtlest form: psychic energy. It may be some form of electro-magnetic energy. Perhaps the most potent, complicated, and complex lump of matter in the human body is the brain. Yet, it is not prudent to think that the entire process of reflection that is to say, being entailed in thought, is being parformed by the brain, and brain alone. Reflection involves the proc'ss of looking into, ie cognizing oneself; that is, the capacity to think and to say 'I', to become aware of one's own existence, to have an idea. It takes place in each and every cell that constitutes the entire body. We reflect not only with the brain proper but with the entire nervous system, the muscle fibres, the vascular system, the bones, the marrow, the endocrine system, and in short with every nook and corner of the body. What makes a person tick, what involves a mere rick? Even the slightest twitching reflex movement of the knee involves a tacit intent, a lurking thought process. We think with all our sensory organs, our organs of perception: the eyes, the nose; the ears, the tongue, the skin, the muscles, the lymphatic and endocrine gland systems. This is our kinaesthetic memory: perceptual thinking encoded in the R. N. A. molecules. This notion might appear to be an sbsurd one, but yet the fact remains unchallenged that our existence is a function of onr entire being. It is not a sectional, localized process. It is an ambient process: a state of awareness: a pervasive operational influence, and an eventuality: to wit a life-force": a life potential.
There is a school of psychologists, the behaviourists, of whom Watsotn was the foremost exponent, who are of the opinion that there is no process called “thought'. They make an attempt to dispense with the mind; and so, they
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have done away with such mental processes as introspection, consciousness, instinct, thought, image, and sentiments: leave alone such finer and near-metaphysical processes as intuition and thought force. According to them all our thoughts are silent vocal productions, silent speech processes that have their origin in our voice-box. They are only reflexes: motor actions. When we think we just speak, and we do so in silence without producing any sound. Our vocal-chords vibrate and a whole series of speeches is taking place in our voice box. By this way of thinking we go to the other extreme of completely denying the thinking and reflecting process. But this fact must be known that although we reflect with our entire body with the 10's body cells, yet the concentrated process of eduction of relations and of correlates, that is, the formation of true, adequate ideas, is, the sole function of the brain. It may be in order to think that the brain is the seat of our conscious self, and the rest of the body - the perceptive body - is the seat of our unconscious self. All our cognitive and even our conative - willing - processes, that is, those of knowing and desiring: willing and wanting occur as a result of the activity of the brain cells. Modern research has shown that the brain has separate centres or areas where the different perceptual processes of seeing, hearing etc. are located. So much so, that by stimulating a particular centre we are able to enable a person to experience the relevant sense of taste or smell, pleasurable or unpleasurable feeling or sensation. All the finer sensations of well-being, comfort and discomfort, smug feeling, depression, dejection, and elation, and the intellectual functions are considered to be located in the frontal lobe of the brain - that portion that goes by the popular name of 'silent area." These are the normal functions of the brain in addition to recognizing, remembering, recollecting, accepting, denying, asserting and discriminating. It also directs and controls the movement of the various parts of the body.
The normal work of the brain, and, in fact of the endocrine system and its secretions, the hormones, appears to come under two main categories, namely : “excitation” and 'inhibition.’ When there is intensive concentration of psychical energy at a certain centre of the brain there is
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excitation, that is to say, activity, and the outcome is an intensive type of feeling: something similiar to short temper, aggressiveness, anxiety, concern, interest, solicitude, agitation, sympathy, curiosity, losing self-control etc. Inhibition on the other hand is the spreading of the stimulus and psychical energy all over the brain and even the entire nervous system and body cells, resulting in the production of a feeling of passion, ennui, indifference and lethargy. A person in such a state is inclined to be stolid sedate, dull, reserved and unresponsive. A state of somnolence is thus induced. In a word the person is apathetic.
MIND IN A STATE OF TENSION AND OF DISPERSON
The mind is either in a state of tension or in a state of dispersion. In the former state the emotions tend to be accelerated and concentrated and intensified; in the latter state they tend to dissolve, dissipate and become tenuous. The tension and dispersion states of the mind are the outcome of externalities or external circumstances impinging on the mind through the emotion - provoking windows of perception. The internal stimuli are mostly the hormones or endocrine secretions.
The entirety of one's “Being' is no other than a constant swinging of the pendulum, as it were, from the state of tension to that of dispersion, and vice versa. Hence the whole of life is simply this: The Swing of the mind between the two extreme states of tension and of dispersion. And why this motion? -
Here is an instance: A baby, a couple of months old often smiles when it sleeps, and yells when awake. The former expression is the outcome of 'dispersion, the latter of “tension.' You hug him to your bosom and chant a soft-toned lullaby when he yells; he stops crying, and the yell gives way to a broad smile. In this pattern of behaviour the baby has gone through the two states of discomfort and comfort: of a state of squall and one of
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calm. And this is the pattern of feeling man gets throughout his life, from infancy to ripe old age; and it would appear as though life is compounded of the two prime elements of “tension' and "dispersion' - of motion and rest.
All our nervous disorders are the result of the brain refusing to take upon itself the various functions of the different centres, thereby displacing and misplacing functions. The functions appear to have been referred to minor nerve areas, even to unchartered surfaces, the outcome being want of coordination, distraction, incoherence in speech and inability to concentrate. In this state the ideas are inadequate, irrelevant and confused. When there is an excess of excitatory impulses we get into a hysterial state; but when there is a predominance of inhibitory impulses over excitatory impulses we get into a neuras thenic state - a state of listlessness. When the brain and the rest of the body are in a condition of optimum health, that is, when they are in "tone' then the brain emanates normal, sane adequate thoughts; and life is at the norm: in a condition of pleasantry. But, when the brain and the rest of the body are subjected to abnormalities, that is, when the brain centres get too much excited or when the impulses, pread out and become a thin veneer and far less effective, hat is passive, as has already been mentioned, then, a state of abnormality prevails. The 'rajasvic' and "thamasic' states of mind well known to the 'yogis' are the equivalent of the hysterical and neurasthenic states. The “sathvic' state is the normal, healthy, balanced state of the human person.' It is normative in effect.
The modern world has its excess of stresses and strains, which, when brought to bear on the mind of man, are far too disruptive of his inner being. There are more split personalities in the world of today than ever before. We are in need of a calmer, less grumpy, less noisy, less gulled, and less blustering existence. We need a peace of mind in preference to a desire for excess power and ardour and passion in any form whatsoever: a state of malice, a corrosive feeling of enmity, violence and wanton destruction; for, the good peaceable man turns all things good."
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We talk far too much; our parliaments and confederations, our confabulations and synods and congresses, our conventions and conclaves are notorious for their riotous verbosity, their wordiness, their parleys - mere sound and fury, signifying nothing. They deal in bare-faced lies, and at best half-truths. What devilish dissembling and diplomacy words! words words! We just have a thicket of words, jumbled and disorderly, divested of their true sense. They are seldom led by thoughts and followed by deeds. They issue from scrannel pipes; and what sense have they? These are sure signs of the times; they bespeak the poverty of our thoughts; our philistine bleakness. They por tend that our minds are going awry and getting distraught, our thoughts distorted and perverted. We are losing mind. And some might say emphatically: never mind.
The mind of man which has taken millions of years to evolve appears to be on the retrogressive move. We are fools to the very marrow of our bones. The mind has, therefore, to be set aright and reorientated.
The principal activities of the mind of man, the fundamental mind stuffs, are, feeling, thinking and willing. These are the motive factors of human conduct. The conduct of man with its manifold behaviour patterns does betoken the presence of mind. The behaviour of inanimate beings differs considerably from that of animate beings. Whereas the behaviour of in animate beings is markedly deterministic and congealed and definite and mechanistic that of animate objects is unpredictable. Chemicals behave : minerals behave: crystals behave : water behaves : fire behaves : the elemental forces behave : liquids and gases behave. They freeze, they thaw; gases become liquids, liquids become gases. Chemicals combine; they break up. They perform all sorts of functions. They expand, they contract. They even intensify memory. They motivate actions in living things. All these they do. But, the outcomes are definite and deterministic, governed by well-defined chemical and physical laws. Water freezes and turns into ice below 0°C; it attains its highest density at 4°C. There are several laws that determine the behaviour of inanimate things. They have a clearly defined pattern of behaviour. Although animal behaviour at the
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lower levels of the evolutionary scale gets codified into behaviour patterns, yet it is not easily predictable. The animal appears to have a will of its own, a decision-making
capacity in however Synall a measure; and hence its behaviour takes peculiar forms.
it can pick and choase; advance which it wil which reject. Animal of configuration and mate matter. But the in kind: in their
has an “intent'; in other words so that it is difficult to say in pick, and which it will choose, and mind is therefore of a different order development from the mind of inaniy differ in their intensity only; not “trone', not in their “essence.”
The mind on man has intrinsic in it the "amalgamo: the sumtotal of the mind of inert matter and animate mattor. It is charactarized by the presenc, F* greater element of unpredictability and impenetrability. Immanent as it is in the universe, mind is also immanent in the very make-up of man. This notion of immanence' seems point to an entirely different direction, - certainly not in the direction of scientific inquiry; for, science cannot say anything definite about mind and mind may appear to be a philosophical extravaganza. And having hypothetically accepted this postulate, we are constrained to slip into a different assumption to discover ways and means of bridging the gulf between mind and matter. The ancient Vedic risis overcame the Sifficulty by associating mind (manas) with matter. In contradistinction to mind as assimilating matter, they postulated the existence of the “jivathman” - animal soul - which, according to them, was nothing short of the spark of the greater conflagration: absolute reality or “paramathman.” Tiis again is another high-flown notion which lies outside the province of scientific inquiry. Science has no idea of an ultimate purpose or of value.
to
Mind is thus not only a directing, designing, and forming, and moulding principle, it is also a progressing, creating and visualizing principle. It is capable of infinite progression, infinite visualization, and infinite actualization. Tt defines, it classifies, it systematizes and satisfies our reasoning and our rationalizing powers. At what extent of the time slot this process of psychic progression began, when it would cease to be, and what will be its final
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outcome, it is almost impossible to predict. All that we know, is, that it is a going concern. It is "creative
visualization'.
TOUGHT PROCESS AND CREATVITY
The thought process in the mind of man involves, according to G. Wallas, four distinct steps. They are: preparation, incubation, illumination and verification. In the process of sensation and perception man prepares his mind in such a manner as to enable a thought to bé born in it. Once the thought has had its genesis in a notion, the notion thus engendered, and entertained, more ofteh than not, sinks into the subliminal self: the unconscious mind that has sunk into the D. N. A. of the body cells, and grows, fed by a number of floating ideas, that have found lodgement in the unconscious, getting drawn towards the notion and becoming organized to form a “meaningful whole or an "adequate idea'. This process may be called the process of incubation. The ground has been prepared and a "notion has now sprouted and taken root. Then it filters through the numerous somatic cells and the nerve. cells dealing here a kick and there a prick, through the unconscious into the conscious and becomes a “flash'. This is the process of illumination. It is the intuitive process. Science places very little reliance on this process. Tt relies on education and the training of skills. Then the conscious mind views the notion from various angles, tests its reliability, dependability, solidity, appropriateness, accuracy, and adequacy. This is the fourth stage in the thought process: the process of verification. A notion that has gone through these four stages may be said to have matured into an "adequate idea' or a "meaningful whole' idea. (The Art of Thought': A. Wallas) Every word, according to Wittgenstein has a "family of meanings' - to wit an infinite variety of shades of meaning; and to get at the most adequate for the occasion is the task of the philosopher.
In the case of the animal mind, , although the process of preparation may be said to be in its germ in
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the form of an "animal intent, the other three steps are not in evidence. They seldom eventuate. The senses which man possesses in common with the other primates give him no stabilized notions of continued existence since they cannot operate beyond the limit in which they really operate. They give us only our immediate impression or sense data. But there is no constancy, no coherence, no solidity, no gestalt as far as sense data are concerned. They are just unorganized passing glimpses that fail to register deeper impressions, unless and until they are pursued and made to form the genetic factor in the thought process. Impressions that are left in their fleeting stage may get an emotional taint and become hazy desires, blurred intents, fuzzy, unfulfilled wishes; and they sink into the depths of the subliminal self: the unconscious mind - the cell-mind.
The subliminal self, having a swarm of unfulfilled desires, stresses, and tensions, and strains, with an emotional taint, has an erotic base. It is the "erotic self'; and is the seat of the faculty of creativity. It has, in all probability found its lodgement in the D. N. A. It is the ebullient cardinal sex vigour, that imparts life its zest. The sense data, impressions and images that have helped to form the fleeting notions of the unconscious, when left in the form of incomplete and confused patterns of thought, gradually assume the status of perfected patterns (gestalts) in the unconscious mind, and appear, and surface as original motions.
The “erotic self', the instinctive urge that has got organized in the unconscious by virtue of the emotional stain and unfulfilled state of the floating notions, develops a tremendous energy potential. It is rebellious, explosive and eruptive by nature, and is the true 'energy-flow", that is the energizing force, that finds expression in the form of creations such as : poetry and drama, painting and statuary and music, and scientific hypotheses and theories and scientific inventions, and other human activities with a creativity base. All creativity is based on the “erotic self" which is ever wanting to create, to make new departures, to rebel against conformity, but not necessarily go counter to perfect harmony. The trends in creativity may either be
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constructive or destructive, depending on the nattire and attitude of the inner-space' and the 'outer-space of the person concerned.
The "inner-space' or inner enviornment and the 'outer-space' or the outer enviornment are the two states of mind: the 6ne associated with the thought process taking place in one's brain, the other constitutes all the manifolds of links, extensions, correlations and associations that the thought process has established with one’s outer enviornment. Consider for a while the nature of the band established between two lovers in the persons of a Romeo and a Juliet: the link between the outer enviornment of the one and his or her inner enviornament: the objective and the subjective areas of perception and feeling.
That man's creativity has had its genesis in the unchartered unconscious area of his mind has been conclusively proved from subjective evidence given by such creative personalities as Stephen Spender, the poet, M. Henri Poincare, the eminent mathematician, E. W. Sinnott and others. The seeds of notions and desires that lie buried in the subliminal self, sprout and come to life when the appropriate season comes. It has been proved beyond reasonable doubt that the subliminal self, is, in no way, inferior to the conscious self. It is not 3 rely automatic and independent in its functioning : it is capable of discernment. It has the intrinsic power to select and choose; “it has fact and delicacy; it knows how to divine'. It even succeeds where the conscious self might have failed. It is miraculous in its effect. It has been the common experience of most creative writers and thinkers and inventors and designers that what appeared to them at first as impossible problems: as galling frustrations, have been resolved for them after a time-lapse by their unconscious self. Even a scientific experimenter's thinking has a creative base and has to be instinctively and emotionally sustained if it is to attain the status of an original thought, a hypothesis or a theory. Who can gainsay the fact that almost all Charles Drrwin's researches, observations, assemblage of facts, have been emotionally sustained? They have had their artistic and aesthetic base. There is an instance of
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the great naturalist's passionate love for facts. Newspaper report dated: May 19, 1886, Leeds. “The following, said to be an authentic anecdote of Charles Darwin is going the round of the American papers. It refers to the period when he was bringing out his books on the habits of plants. His health was poor, and an old family servanta woman-overhearing his daughter express some anxiety about his condition sought to reassure her by saying - “Hi believe master”d be hall right, madam hif 'e only 'ad somethin' to hoccupy "is mind; sometimes he stands in the conservatory from m prnin' til night -just a-lookin' at the flowers. Hif ”e only *ad somethin” to do *e *d be hev ver so much better, hi’m sure.” ”
When a person responds to his enviornment, he does so in two distinct areas: one is his "inner environment', the other his 'outer environment'. When he responds to his inner environment it becomes his 'subjective experience' which entails conscious purpose, desire and thought. By accumulating and coordinating experience and by reasoning, man gains thought power. Clear, accurate thought and clear, accurate ideas accumulating in the mind of man, when organized and systematized by reasoning, gather tremendous momentum. He has the gift of imagination: the capacity to form images, which is the basic factor of his creativity. Aided by man's imaginative capacity new ideas form in his mind. Thoughts, beliefs, desires, pleasures, pains and emotions are all built up out of sensations and images alone' - B. Russell. In consequence his mental horizon widens. New thoughts take shape and posture themselves. They are creative ideas. They are born more in the unconscious than in the conscious. Conscious effort entailing mental discipline is, however, necessary for creative thinking. It has a trigger effect. It maintains a certain system, and entails a definite method. It is the preparatory stage over-lapping and mortising the incubatory stage of the thinking process. But the real creation : the incubation and the illumination, take place in the unconscious. In the mind of the creator inspiration bubbles up again and again like a hidden stream and merges into the conscious field, as it were, in a sudden geyser. To vary the figure, it comes in an unexpected flash. In the unconscious : matter,
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life and mind are most inextricably mixed into a tightbonded matrix. It is a vast, an unknown, an unexplored, and a silent area - the fountain - head of all creative
activity-where impressions, images, impulses, urges, cravings, image patterns, and floating phantasies of the conscious mind have got bogged in.
When the conscious mind makes a conscious effort to view a problem in its correct perspective and fails to get at a true and apt solution, the problem becomes a frustration, and a hobble, and is often shelved and lost sight of. The slumbering unconscious, now takes upon itself the task of finding the true solution. From among the floating images and drifting ideas that are in some way or other relevant to the problem, the subconscious picks and chooses the most appropriate ones, leaves out the least appropriate, and the most awkward and then formulates, and builds up a pattern: a unified “meaningful whole' an infrastructure which becomes the true solution. It may be a hypothesis or a theory, or a work of art, or a rare. discovery. Hence creation may be said to take place mostly in the unconscious. In the words of E. W. Sinnott: "Creation becomes an attribute of life'. There is thus in the unconscious something inchoate, unformed, something seeking to reach expression; and an urge and a desire to form into perfect patterns, into “meaningful wholes'; to mould into tangible and plausible forms. These are the new creations. And the demiurge is Nature herself, with her instinctive base : her bedrock of purposive impulses. And instinct according to Bertrand Russell is :
(a) an inherent trend, (b) It needs no prevision of a purpose, (c) It has just enough precision to achieve the end,
(d) It is capable of organizing experimental move
ments required for the process of learning,
(e) It is capable of being modified and of attach
ing itself to different objects.
If one can so persuade oneself as to dig beneath the sands of one's coascious mind then will one be in the
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fortunate position to get at the underlying bedrock and stone of the subconscious, and then shall one be in possession of the hidden wealth of the wisdom (buthi") cf the centuries, nay millinia that lurks in the adytum of one's inner being. Thought is the life', says. G. B. Shaw and “the body always ends by being a bore'.
Now, one thing must be known, and that is, that a thing created may be either socially constructive or destructive. When the thought process matures and begets something new, it may be either of the rajas vic' type or “sathvic’ typé. It may be parasitic, dominating, domineering and cataclysmic. In which case it may be classed as rajasvic: destructive. But, when it matures into a master idea, and when subjectively reviewed it proves to be of immense benefit to social welfare it may be considered "sathwic' and constructive. There is a third stage“thamasic'-attained by instinctive thought : that is, the stage when it proves to be of an unproductive, indifferent and barren nature. In this stage, it is in a lethargic condition, and is brutally sterile. Only idiots and imbeciles beget such a state of mind. They are incapable of new thoughts and new ideas. They beget mental conditions that go by the name of “neurosis' and "psychosis' and paranoia'. The conscious self in this state has got entangled in a net of phantasies.
It is the creative energy-flow, the 'erotic self of the subliminal mind that is responsible for the creative activity of a Shakespeare or a Goethe, a Kant or a Schiller, a Newton or an Einstein, and it is the selfsame creative energy that is responsible for the destructive and sadistic and masochistic acts of a Napoleon or a Hitler, an Alexander or an Atilla. History itself is the outcome of the "creative trend in man. It is mobile. Ít moves from subject tó predicate. It is in the view of Croce 'a judgement'. It presents the word of man as “a world of practical struggles and of affections'. It is again the self-same erotic unconscious self that prompted a V. I. P. to take his lady secretary by surprise, by falling upon her, smothering her in his oscular expressions, and in a state of infatuation following them by what might be considered to be a wobbly course.
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To a mind that is still, the whole universe surrenders'. By stilling the heart, according to Taoism, a person becomes one with the elements of nature, which are no other than the creative force of the Tao'.
(Chang Chung-Yuan)
The thinking, the visualizing, the designing, and the willing aspects of the activity of the mind of man are mere reflections of the eternal mind, the super-intelligence, the potential that guides and designs and forms from within. Perhaps it is grounded in the D. N. A. The designer and the designed, the actual and the potential are one and the same. It is the thaw succeeding the frost. For the first time we are compelled to accept the view that the unseen mystical force, the potential' : the life-force : the volcanic energy inherent in matter has been responsible for the evolution of the cosmos out of chaos; for the evolution of the being, becoming and having become' process from the “non-being process. That there is inherent in matter a teleological impulse, an insistent craving, and striving, that is : the tendency to progress towards an intended goal or an end or purpose, and that mind and matter are not dual (dhuvaidhic) processes but one and the same process: the cause and the effect in one single entity, “a-dhwaidic', cannot be denied. It is prudent to admit the view that the cosmic process came about by the apparent aggregation and ordering of the force at the heart of the atom It is not a mere aggregation of forces; it is the evolution of a single, self-forming, self-moulding, self-propelling, and selfdirecting, and self-actualizing principle. The mind of the atom has projected the mind of the cosmos, and vice-versa. It is the supreme directive drive : the "creative visualization' in nature. And thus the pendulum swings. A note on “creative visualization is a necessity. It is self-initiated thought-synthesis where the mental product is not a mere summation but an integrated whole: a peep into the beyond.
The world of mind is purely subjective. To know a thing well in all its cirumspect aspects, in its entirety, subjective (reference), knowledge is essential. We have to attain to the truth in all things'. - Descarters. We possess many potentialities which remain yet to be actualized.
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Hence we have yet a long way to go to in our journey towards the attainment of perfection; and we are constrained to admit this notion; for, human urge and human aspiration point in this direction of eternal progress; and the more diligently we pursue this research the more things we come to know about ourselves, the more we are impelled to investigate our own nature. Our senses invariably mislead us, our perceptions are mere floating confused images, but the more we plunge into the inner depth of our Being' the more we discover the truth about ourselves. We have to strip our mind of its trappings; for, it is then that we are prone to discover our true self. I should know myself with greater truth and certitude', says Descartes. And, since things exist because of their understanding' and awareness, and since the intensity of this process of understanding of oneself-intellection - determines the march of the human mind towards greater awakening and greater awareness, it is incumbent on and politic for every human being to make this research in all seriousness and true solicitude.
Now, to sensory knowledge or perception. It is imperfect; it enables us to probe the periphery or shell of existence, not its inner being'. Mind is the total well-being and harmony and balance of the body, just as much as the cosmic mind is the well-being and harmony and balance of the universe. The mind is capable of reasoning, understanding, and desiring, and discriminating; and devoid of the past and the future, it is capable of visualizing. In its fully expanded, extended and ultimate form, the mind of matter has evolved into the “Being' which as predicated by some ancient rishis is just 'is'. It is the “One": unchangeable, indivisible, immutable, universal presence. Man's intellect is capable of grasping this notion of "Being' - the ultimate realityfor, in the sche me cf Natur e m: n’s intel'e ct - “nous” - inner light, or essence is bound to lead him to the realization of the “ultimate’: the beyond. “It is enough that there is a beyond." G. B. Shaw.
Man's senses are deceptive. That is what total experience (anubhava) has taught us. Knowledge derived from the functioning of the senses, that is the sense data, is more often than otherwise, misleading. It is ever-changing.
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The sensory world is a world of change, of flux and reflux, of deluding reality and of illusion grounded in, and governed by the principle of universal change - "samsara'. It is a paradox and a puzzlement: a world of “hypothetical existences: a make-believe phenomenon, a mere dream dreamt by an idiot'. Isn't there an eternal enmity: an inherent contrariness, between man and woman ? It stems from the senses and the emotions. (e-motions)
Man's mind is torn between two effects: the subjective effect and the objective effect. But they are not opposite effects. They are only two different aspects of the same effect; like a man qualifying himself to be a grand father and an uncle without any effort whatsoever on his part. (Bertrand Russell's notion) The subjective effect is concerned with the process of the acquistion of self-knowledge through experience and reflection. It is in a way a form of introspection', that is putting one thought upon another and educing relations and correlates, and finally arriving at inferences'. Every moment in man’s existence has a relative (objective) meaning, a subjective (introspective) meaning and a transcendentah (metaphysical) meaning. (Heidegger’s view). Things exist by virtue of their inborn urge to work towards the attainment of self-knowledge. Absence of selfknowledge implies complete annihilation: oblivion of being'. An orange, for instance, is essentially an orange: call it by any name. In all its intrinsic qualities it is an orange. It is not at all possible for an external body, however intelligent it might be, to probe this condition of being an orange : the ‘orangeness' of an orange. What we know of an orange, that is, our knowledge of an orange : its total attrib 1: and properties that have revealed thenselves to us, is purely objective. All our reference to it is objective. We know only certain aspects of the orange. They are external to it; they are not intrinsically the "orangeness' of an orange. The "orangeness' is changing; it is illusory; for, the orange experience' that x has of it : what x sees and feels and tastes and smells, is not the "orangeness' of the orange that y sees and feels and tastes and smells, despite the fact there may be a common area of experience and of correlations. Objective knowledge is not camplete; its values are not permanent values : they are
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not accurate; neither are they appropriate. They change; they vary; but they are of immense use to us in ںur' workaday dealings, business transactions and common-sense negotiations.
The structure of a thing may be known; it is pure and simple objective knowledge. It is not perfect knowledge: far from accurate; for, Nature is governed by the principle of impenetrability and secretiveness. She tends to hide her secrets. All our scientific information is only partial knowledge. It is imperfect. Opjective knowledge is relative to the possessor. But scientific information has been tested and tried out, examined and investigated. It is acceptable scientific data, having a common, well-defined area of acceptance - a common ground or substrate: a bed-rock of acceptability and rationality and appropriateness. But yet, the nature of a thing, the totality of knowledge concerning it, cannot be easily discerned, since it is essentially and intrinsically its own. It is 'subjective', 'self-contained' information. It has a subjective reference. It is windowless. It is projecting itself into its own possibilities. It does not leak out. Neither does it filter through. Because there appears to be some disparity between mind and matter; the distinction between subjective and objective knowledge is bound to occur. When a person is so disposed as to see mind and matter as one, single, indivisible unity, in other words, when he “effects a mutual rapprochement of mind and matter', the distinction between subjective and objective knowledge vanishes for him. In his realm of “creative visualization' duality gets annulled, and unity prevails. It must be made known that existence in spite of its apparent hypothetical plurality is one single whole : the monad: the absolute atom: the singularity of nothingness the monistic whole. The very essence of existence is grounded in the “will to be one': so solid and so supernal.
MIND AND MATHEMATICAL KNOWLEDGE
There is a category of knowledge which is reliable
and different from the worldly and practical point of view, which has emancipated itself from the encumbrances of
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language, and which is of immense use for man in his inquiry into the why and wherefore of things. Mathematical knowledge, involving mathematical abstractions and inferences, belongs to such a category. It is knowledge that surpasses matter. We are tied to this tyrannous body'. So is our knowledge of things. Not so mathematical knowledge. It takes you beyond the crippling and cramping grip of matter: the body and its adherents. There is yet another province of dependable knowledge arrived at by logical induction and definition. Socrates was the father of this system of thinking. By the inductive m2thod of thinking Socrates was able to establish the doctrine of rational universal and socially acceptable knowledge. Logical inquiry into the mode of existence became the guiding and underlying principle of the scientific method of inquiry. Plato made the biggest contribution to objective inquiry by formulating his 'theory of ideas'. According to Plato “ideas' are not relative concepts. They are self-existent realities in themselves. They have an existence of their own, apart from the sensory world. For instance an orange does not exist only as a sensory object, that is as a thing that a person can see and touch and feel and taste and smell. But it does have also an ideal existence. It exists in the mind - the universal mind - just as much as it exists in the individual mind of man. Thus according to Plato, there are three spheres of existence; the sphere of matter, the sphere of mind or world of concepts, and the sphere of ideas or of perfect idealized forms.
A very important aspect of human existence is the impact that the sensory impulses have on the mind of man. Let us take a very simple instance. You are in your house. It is night; and the house is brightly lit. Every prospect in the house appears to please you. All of a sudden the light goes out, and you are enshrouded in darkness. There is a sudden change in the total aspect of your immediate environment. You feel uneasy. A change has come over you; and a shadow has been cast over your mind. The impact of the failure of the light has had a depressing effect on your senses. There was a change in the total set-up of your house. A gloom seems to have descended upon your “total self. You are not what you
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were a few minutes ago. Your mind has undergone a thorough change, and you are a new 'person' - a new being a new 'gestalt' or pattern, an integrated configuration has been set; and the occasion has forced it upon you.
If a simple trifling incident, such as the failure of light in your house, can cause such a deep-seated effect on your mind, what vast impact could not the thousands of sensory changes of everyday occurrence have made on it? Another important aspect of human existence is the impact that ugly notions or unpleasant and irritating situations have on the mind of man. It is a form of allergy - mental allergy. More often than not, throughout our existence, we are assailed by notions, ideas, movements and behaviour patterns and incidents which have a repulsive and repelling effect on our mind. An ugly sight, a nauseating odour, an irritating caw of a crow have a casual effect; some have a much deeper and enduring effect on our mind. We just can't stick them. We have an aversion for them. we reject them, we deride them heartily, without any rhyme or reason. In ordinary parlance we are "prejudiced'. I here are some persons whom we meet for the first time, yet we begin to dislike them; even loathe them. There are some notions, some ideas we come upon for the first time and yet we don't like to entertain them in our mind. We just can't help but hate them. Again, there are certain modes of behaviour patterns which our neighbours manifest and which we deride and dislike and denounce wholeheartedly. Most of us, in our early childhood, have been instilled with peculiar notions of things. These being mostly of a traditional and religious nature, doctrinal in their effect, they have been indoctrinated into us. We have just champed them and stomached them unwillingly or in blissful ignorance, against our consent; and they have conditioned our lives negatively and smashed and smited our true self. We have believed nothing but lies: lies of gargantuan proportions : mere drivel. They have been thrust into our being', as it. were, and compelled to be retained there much against our will. Such notions and ideas have remained as disconnected adjuncts (disjunctions) to our preson. They are unwanted accretions that have adversely affected our being'. They have encroached on us and have wrought havoc in
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our inner being - the wholeness of our existence, and have been itching to be ejected at the earliest opportunity. We have become sensitive to the human milieu. Then a time comes when we begin to think, to reason, to sort out, to evaluate our faiths and beliefs, and to be rational. As a result of our reasoning and rationality and our imagination we have become bold and courageous enough to reject them. We decry them, disown them, and evict them; and then we become liberated. We are purged of their evil effects. This is because of this : Every individual is a horse for a single harness : the harness being no other than the reasoning power of man. The value of clear thought has been eloquently expressed in these words :
“Clear thought . . . will disintegrate all the force and flummery of current passions and pretensions, eat the life out of every false loyalty and out of every craven creed and bite its way through to a world of light and truth.” (H. G. Wells). It is creative intelligence.
All our religious notions, group ideas and faiths, our traditional beliefs, in short, our human milieu are of this allergic type. All our social conventions, our religious orthodoxy, our social prejudices, our political creeds have enslaved us. They will have to be rejected at the earliest opportunity; they will have to be permitted to wilt and wither away. They are our knots and bonds. They have manacled us and fettered us and ensnarred us. We have ceased to be free men; we are bondsmen. Hence all that we are mentally allergic to, should be uprooted and cast into the fire of clear reason and rationality and rednced to ashes and disposed of at the earliest opportunity. Forsooth there is a constant flux and a change in our mental make-up. We assume a totally new existence every monaent of our life. Every momentary existence of ours is purely relative and hypothetical. It has, hence a dreamy, illusory, blurred, confused aspect, for delusion has fashioned it. The very meaning of life is in doubt ... its essence and its status are alike baffling', says H. N. Whitehead. Most of the time we sit and vegetate. Then all our perceptions are dead. They seldom get correlated with
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present or past occurrences. They are not "mnemic phenomena' - they haven't even a taint of our past experience. They fail to become "meaningful wholes': that is, significant notions and ideas. We fail to understand why we are, and what we are. Our objective world of physical existence has become, so far as our experience goes, a “chaotic experience's
A mind that has not been disciplined by inward thinking and analysis, and has been left to itself, like a vine run wild, to indulge as it listeth in its wanton wiles and idle fancies, will certainly be subjected to the several wayward sensory changes that take place in a person as the result of the impact on his mind of his environmental happenings and circumstances, at different extents and durations. Thus, when we see a thing we see it not only with our pair of eyes, we sense it, ie we perceive it, we judge it with our entire being. Thus, when we see a thing, it is not mere sight only that goes to form our image of itThe entire picture of it is filled out with the image of touch, of hearing, of smell, of taste etc. Our senses have grubbed up details and made them into a single meaningful whole. Some of these sensations like seeing and hearing, touching and tasting and smelling are "public sensations especially the first two. They are “shareable' sensations. But sensations of pain, hunger, pleasure, ennui, nausea, nostalgia, sickness, thirst, ache and fatigue are "private' sensations. They are not shareable. When we perceive a thing we do so against the background of the totality of our experiences “anubhava'. In fact every time we have a new thing to be perceived the totality of experience' (anubhava) will have undergone a complete change and resulted in a new being'- personal milieu. Likewise we hear, we taste, we smell, we feel with the totality of our existence that we essentially are, and, which we may reasonably and rightly designate as our being.
SENSATION - PERC2PTION - BNG
It has now become abundantly clear that the seat of the mind- its extent - is not necessarily the brain only; it is our whole “bsing'. Not only the body with all its sense organs, sense effects and nerve endings and dendrites:
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to wit its total dimension, but even the externally ambient world of ours help to mould our being'. It is our milieu: our 'social self'. To elaborate for purposes of clarity: All that we see and hear and taste and smell; the beams of light, visible and invisible that bathe us, the warmth and coolness of the air that exhilarate and bring us comfort or discomfort, the myriad sounds and noises and tones and shades of Nature that reach us through our ears, the electric and magnetic and gravitational forces that impinge on us; our very outlook on life, oar attitudes, and our opinions of ourselves and of others in whose midst we live, with whom we have our contacts, with whom we have organized our dealings, we exchange views, ideas and notions, we form opinions, we cherish our convictions, thoughts, belief and faiths; in short our various relations - private and public: these help to build our "milieu' and our social mores. It is the outcome of our desires, cravings, our pains and pleasures, our emotions and sentiments: our basic sensations and perceptions: our habits, our images, our impressions, our associations and our memory. We are a universe unto ourselves. Such a universe is our mind: It is shaping itself into Time and projecting itself into space, and all its own possibilities. In the assertion of Heidegger “we are essentially possibilities of being'. We are a makebelieve: an idle pretence.
MIND - FERVSIVE
A single notion that enters my ear, at the right ment of reception carries a world of meaning for me. have a circumstantial aspect of it brought about by my. faculty of "creative visualization'. It has its impact on the totality of notions and ideas and relations that constitutes my mind, and revolutionizes my way of thinking. The mind has as its raw materials "the plastic, the pliant and the indefinite'. It has been conditioned by its chaotic experiences. In consequence my mind has undergone a complete change: in form, in tone and in content. It has become something new. It has resolved itself into a new existence: a fundamentally new thing : ... something appropriate to its ambience.'
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If a drop of colouring matter introduced into a glass of water can bring about a complete physical change in its colour and consistency and other physical aspects, what a vast change must be taking place in the unseen, unknown, unfelt depths of our existence called the mind, by new notions entering it? And yet, what a chaos and motley of sensations and perceptions is our mind! What are the limits of the mind? Its extent and duration? The mind of man, in a sense, has the potency to permeate the entire universe. It has power to probe the whole of existence. Tt is pervasive; it is capable of blending with “all-that-is'; namely the notion of: that verily am I'.
Caught as one is in the immensity and ponderosity of the void; and, despite the notion that “all actual perception is confused to a greater or less extent' (B. Russell), one has the irresistible feeling that one's thoughts have the power to probe the depths of time and of space, to proceed beyond and further, and yet further beyond into infinity itself, and establish contacts with eternity and fuse and mortise and become one with the “wholeness' of being. It has become immanent.
RESON-IMPULSBS – REFLEXES
A wee bit of matter, a mere blob of jelly that man is in his origin, he must have had his genesis, in all probability, in an atom with all its storm and stress, its violent ebullience of forces, its energy-flow. It is marvellous, nay almost breath-taking to contemplate that his thoughts and notions and ideas can have emanated from his mind and penetrated far, far into the depths of infinite space and duration and assumed the dimensions of "creative visualization'- ever - widening, ever-filling-out vision - and become almost like unto infinity and eternity. From thể tiniest speck of dust to the vastest of bodies, from the instinctive swell in the amoeba to the biggest and , profoundest of thoughts that the mind of man can possibly conceive of, every disparate existence, every separate idea and every separate notion is simply marvellous It cannot merely be perception, based on sensation. It is "something more'. And that “something more' is not only mere
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“contraction and expansion of the muscles, : it is “a motion and a spirit that impols all thinking things, all objects of all thought, and rolls through all things'. (Wordsworth). The poet has seen it; nay felt it. Man's springs of action are generally his reflexes, his feelings, his emotions, his impulses; very rarely his reflections and reasoning. Man is essentially temperamental. Where his animal impulses get mixed up with a tinge of reason the outcome is his temperament, his mood. He is impulsive. So he is moved; he has his moods. Often his impulses motivate him into action, and his reflexes serve to conserve the extra energy needed for his thinking and his reasoning. Seldom does he bring reflection to bear on his everyday actions; for more often than not he acts impulsively, goaded on by his reflexes. Actions require pluck, and most of them are foolhardy. And in foolhardiness there seldom resides reflection. Reflexes subsume most actions, in man: be he a fool, a saint or even a sage. Where reason comes into play reflexes occupy the background. And to bring reason to the foreground involves tremendous "life-force' - creative energy. The main demand is a collated discipline in one's own life-style.
CREATIVE VISUALIZATION
My grand-child sees a shadow: Its reflection in a mirror and attempts to probe it: to discover the why and the wherefore of things: of what might seem to us to be a mere shadow. It does all this through "necessity': the necessity to probe and to exist pervasively, ie in harmony with its ever-widening, filling out milieu: “the really real things,” - the “sat-sith-ananda” catena of the process of “being and becoming,' and have become. Its behaviour is a sure indication of its ever-growing, ever-expanding, fast-developing, fast-evolving, self-actualizing theme, for its mind is an expanding, self-forming, self-propelling, unseen, unknown entity. It has evolved a widening expansive and gyroscopic vision of things which we have designated “creative visualization'. It is "something more' - very little known. It appears to be even something beyond the physical scheme of existence : a prevision subsisting beyond the sensory objects of concrete phenomena. It may be said to be
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ultra-physical in its structure and form and effect, and appears to play a transcendental role, and beget a transcendental "anubhava'. It has been clearly professed: “I know not the real nature of any one thing in the universe'. And it has been said in all humility: "Philosophers know that they know nothing'. (G. Berkeley). And according to. Bertrand Russell: the physical world is an experiencechaos'.
If the mind of a child can be so puzzling, so vast, so profound, so measureless, so limitless, so immense and so unique, how baffling should be the mind of a grown-up adult? None the less, be it known, that things concerning the mind are as much the same as what the poet has described in the following lines:
"Heaven lies about us in our infancy,
Shades of the prison house begin to close, Upon the growing boy, But he beholds the light, And whence it flows, He sees it in his joy". - Wordsworth.
In spite of the valuable gifts that Nature has endowed man with, his mind is still "moving about in worlds not realized". Man's high instincts, his pristine power of "intuition' that is, the capacity to know truths without a medium, should enable him to develop within him the 'power to make our noisy years seem moments in the being of the eternal silence'. I man capable of capturing the 'silence' that resides in the abysmal depths of his beinghis unconscious subliminal instinctive self. Every instinctive act has a nascent thought at its tag-end; and brims over with a feeling of a sort: a pristine impulse. Into what a food of love and sympathy and tender emotion do we drown our child? With what a tangle of tender concern and solicitude and parental afection do we entwine it? All this selfless love and deep sentiment of altruism must have had its source in the never-dying, never-abating, perennial fountain of eternal intellectual love: the eternal mind'. Says Spinoza: “As all things whereof a man is the efficient cause are necessarily good, no evil can befall a man except through external causes'.
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BODY MIND STENCE
If the body can be so adjusted in its various postures, stance and relations of sitting, standing, walking, lying, resting, relaxing and working as to be in harmony with extent and duration and other external shaping and moulding forces, the mind can also be brought to fall in line with, and adjust and adapt itself to those circumstances. The secret of success in man's life is his capacity to adjust, to posture himself to his natural and social and psychical environment : his time, space and thought relationship. In sitting, in walking etc. in the various activities of the body, it should be so adjusted as to assume a position, a posture and stance of maximum advantage to the individual. It is life's symphony that one has to seek in one's life. One has to tune one's lyre of life to be in tone. with the supreme lyre that the universe is. Let us discover this symphony, the rishi has said. One can only ill afford to neglect posturing at every moment of one's life. If one sits and walks and relaxes awry one damages one's “rtam': harmonious adjustment, and thus injures the body as well as the mind. A sane mind can only be the outcome of a sane and well-toned and wellordered body. The correct pose of the body begets the harmonious poise of the mind. Every single muscle fibre of the body should be in tone. That the stance of the thousands, nay millions of muscle fibres of the body has an unconscious tonic effect on the mind, cannot be gainsaid.
BODY FEELS - JUDGES - CREATES
The body cannot afford to be at odds, with the mind. It can only illafford to persist to be at the impulsive level, for impulsive activity is seldom precise, and more. often than not inappropriate. It is beset with manifold hazards, and the trial and error method has to be resorted to bafore complete success is achieved. In fact it should not go counter to any other circumstance whatsoever. The mind should discern the several laws and relations that govern and sustain existence : the cardinal ones being: 'rtham' and 'satyam'- the principle of harmonious adjustment and Truth (And "Truth' is essence: all-that-which-is); and be in harmony with every one of them. Our hunger and
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our thirst, our pleasure and our pain, our desires, our cravings, our loves and our hatred: are all confused inner, private effusions; our inadequate thought processes An unconscious thought and the germ of an intent even tuate and reside in every one of them. They are our private bodily sensations: inner feelings, urges, promptings and impulses. All these appetitive inclinations and impulses are no other than inadequately considered opinions or inadequate ideas sunk in the depth of our body cells. When we attempt to seek out what gives us this pain, that pleasurable feeling, this feeling of smugness and that of ennui; how in one instance we are agreeably affected and in another disagreeably affected, we are impelled to come to the grand notion that we have the roots of our feeling and thinking powers suffusing the entire human system. Haven't we weighed up our notions and advanced very cogent reasons that will satisfy all our inquiries regarding the source of our thoughts? We think; in the true sense, we feel our thoughts, even in the utmost tip of our nose and our little toe. In every D. N. A. molecule of our 10 body cells the thought clings; and mind clings too.
Despite the fact that the thought distilled by the mind is not material, it is stangely influenced by the physical disposition of the body. It is the psychosomatic posturing. Shakespeare has it in these lines :
“Yon Cassius has a lean and hungry look.
He thinks too much'.
Thought is also motivated through the windows of the sensations. We see through them in attentively with vagueness, consternation, and confusion. The mind of man has been torn and riven in twain. The harrowing and oorroding influences such as man's inordinate desires and wants, his erotic intentions and actions; his “adulteries, obscenity, murders, thefts, covetousness, wrath, deceit, pilferings, insolence, envy, calumny, pride, distractions, arrogance and every kind of folly,' have brought about a rift in his being' and in his mind: a melee of contradictory passions; and the result is a disparate existence, ie the separation of one's true self-from the great values of life, namely: love,
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truth, justice and beauty : “rtam' and "satyam', (harmony and the essence of being). The mind of man has the power to embrace all that is good and genuine, just as much as to embrace all that is evil and spurious. Similarly it has also the power to sift and to winnow, to separate the good from the evil; the appropriate from the inappropriate, the immediate from the mediate, the maimed from the whole. Once the evil trend predominates then the berserk rages, and nature seems to be tainted with evil and horror, and disarray and disjunction. But yet, the inclination to create, to transform the potential into the actual, to organize and to assemble is greater in man than in any other form of existence. Man cala visualize. The mind of man is capable of widening its field of consciousness to such an extent as to push out the unwanted elements of thought to the periphery of the sub-conscious, retaining the salient notions at the epicentre of consciousness. The joy of self-creation is the immediacy of self-enjoyment, and is perhaps the 'ananda' of the 'sat-sith-ananda' process of being. (Existenceprehension-bliss) It is fortunate that man is guided by the supreme notion of: The best is yet to be'. And this is the supernal element in man’s thinking. Says Spinoza : The dictate of reason is the highest good'. And reason is ethic : man-made values.
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DISCOURSE - VII
EVIDENSE OF MIND IN ANMALS
ACHIEVEMENT and acquisition, self-actualization, self-preservation, self-perpetuation, and self-expansion appear to be the be-all and end-all of animal existence. This is evidenced in the life-patterns and behavioural patterns of living organisms. The animal cell has in it the potential to regenerate and to become any part of the body. It can become bone or blood, muscle or nerve according to the needs of the organisms. The cell achieves its purpose when the necessity arises. There is intrinsic in the cell the power to define the need and dictate the goal that the cell has willy-nilly to achieve: the particular purpose it has to serve : in brief, its precision'. It is a self-chosen, selfencoded motive : a sheer necessity; not a mere contingent, makeshift, chance occurence. The purpose is encoded in what the molecular biologists call the D. N. A. -- nucleic acid. A few examples will suffice. A house gecko, having lost its tail, is able to regenerate it. Crabs and scorpions and spiders can grow a lost limb. When a limb is lost or hurt or injured there is the 'dictation' and innate intent and purpose, a motive and a will, on the part of the cells in close proximity to the region of injury or lost part to close in, to replace, replicate and regenerate the injured or lost part. This is a sure indication of the presence of a "purposive directing principle" involved in the cell: Shall we designate it the cell-mind. This analogue appears to be appropriate.
Animals seek out an appropriate enviornment which is perfectly conducive, and approximates to their well-being, their growth and development. In other words, they adapt themselves to their environmental circumstances in numerous ways. They are what they are because of their environmental pressures: the sumtotal or cumulative effect of
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their environmental moulding forces. They give and take, and they cash in, and they draw from their environmental bank balance. They transform their environment, they transmute it even as much as they are being transformed and transmuted and moulded by it. In ecological parlance they have their own "niche' - their own way of fitting into their total environment. To get out of the prison that matter is, all the senses help us. They have all been so designed as to help us. They are conciliatory measures. Instances are not much to seek. The mole and the earthworm live in darkness most of the time, in burrows underneath the ground. The squirrels, monkeys and fruiteating bats are arboreal in habit, the house-lizard and the tree-frog cling to the wall or to any vertical surface; fish and the sea-otter, the turtle and the whale live in water: and primitive man lived in his cave homes. The shark and the saw-fish and the sting rays move up the lagoons and back-waters to mate and return to the sea. The salmons in north American rivers migrate up-stream cavorting, often daring dangerous and turbulent rapids in order that they may find a suitable environment for spawning. Some birds like the European stork, the Bobolink and the golden plover migrate as far as 6000 miles; whereas the cuckoo, the golden oriole, the cranes, sand-pipers, curlews and Starlings emigrate to warmer climates for wintering. The beaver, the ermine and lemming make long journeys crossing rapidly flowing streams and rapids and even dangerous cataracts in their semi-mad hurry to migrate.
Parenthetically it may be stated that most animals, including man, have evolved a peculiar instinct of sociality which we may call the territorial urge or 'territoriality: that is, the urge of the animals to possess, to safeguard, to defend their valuable possession, namely the extension, the 'aura' of their inner-self- the mind. Some of the most crucial and astounding episodes have gone on record as regards the peculiar behaviour of animals which betoken the presence of a deep-seated intent' in them. It is convincingly suggestive of the presence of a germinal mind which is striving to be decoded all on its own. In Uganda there is a species of deer, the 'Kob loaf that have their own clearly defined feeding greens which they zealously,
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guard and defend so well, that no other species of herbivore is peromitted to trespass on their sacred preserves. The Callicebus monkeys of Columbia have developed such a remarkable instinct of social order that they pair for life; so much so, that a pair found sleeping are generally observed to be intimately interlocked in the warmth of each other's embrace, with their tails tightly intertwined, The male and the female remain faithfully bonded for life. The male-female bond is so great and so tight that a bonded pair is generally antagonistically disposed towards the other members of the same species.
This tendency to pair and bond for life, we find in a marked degree in human beings specially among primitive peoples like the Veddahs and Kuravas of Ceylon, reinforced perhaps by age-old social and tribal customs. The lepilemurs of Madagascar, although they sleep by day in each others company in groups, the moment they wake wp from their deep diurnal slumber in the night, they quarrel with their erstwhile friends - strange bed fellows as they are - and fight for their own well-defined territory and partners in life. It would seem as though they carry with them a keen sense of their environmental territory by day which shrinks into oblivion by . night. Even the Britis stickleback - a species of fish- and the robin red-breast guard over and defend their territories just as our domestic dogs and cats do when they go about sniffing their frontiers and spraying and marking cut ; the boundaries of their territorial possessions. When in their effort to guard over and protect their territories they get disturbed and infuriated, some creatures like the herring gulls become so frustrated and infuriated that their excess energy-flow finds expression in the peculiar and meaningless activity of pulling grass.
The giant fish hawks that have their haunts in the Eastern sea-board of Sri Lanka have their nests resembling an aerie perched on the topmost branches of very tall trees like the Alstonia Scholaris. A pair of them that had their aerie on the Island of Puliyantivu in Batticatoa had been in undisputed possession of a vast territory for well over forty years and were in the habit of declaring their right to possession of their territory by flying and soaring
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aloft very high in the sky and vociferously crying in a raucous voice: a double "Caw Cawl - a voice that sqawks and squeaks. In this manner they asserted their right to possession over an Island which is nine miles in circum — ference. A.
Prof. Cloudsley Thomson makes mention of several desert animals which exhibit a characteristic partiality for possessing as their territory the inhospitable desert environment. Their sense of territoriality is an instinct that is significant of the presence of a mind. The Elf owl which is slightly larger than a house-sparow has its territory confined to a hole in the stem of the Saguaro cactus. He spends the day in a hole in the cactus stem; but at night he occupies a much wider range of territory. The desert side-walker snake has evolved an unusual method of movement by which it minimises the contact of its body with the hot sand.
The long-legged Jerboa and the water rat, perhaps the smallest extant mammals, live in a burrow by day and venture out at night. Their territories narrow as it were, by day and widen by night. The road runner or chaparrel cock of the American desert has for his territory a whole length of road so that one is led to wonder where his territory begins and where it ends. The snowy owl and the Arctic fox have as their territory the vast snowy wastes of the boundless Tundra region; and the Saharan fox, the fennel, with his keen sense of smell, sight and welldeveloped ears, is in a position to range the entire desert area with his built-in radar, to hear and see and sense prey at a considerable distance. His territory must indeed be the vast tract of sand. The night-jar of Ceylon is another bird with the curious habit of making a whole length of jungle roadway his illimitable ribbon of territory.
The beavers of Canada exhibit a tendency to conquer and to possess territory when they are impelled by the pent up energy-flow in them to take long marches and even make incursions into others' territories. They fell trees across turbulent streams that bar their way and form rafts and bridges. Here is an instance of an indomitable urge to move, and to move on and to conquer and consolidate
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fresh territory. The lemmings of Siberia provide another admirable instance of animal hordes that march for days and weeks and even months together in quest of territory goaded by an endocrine urge,
It has been a matter of common observation that
fighting among animals of the same species is of common occurrence along the frontiers of their domains, and that, it is no other than an effort on their part to defend and protect their territories and their bonded partners against the undue molestation of an intruder. Even the instinct of building nests, securing dens, haunts and lairs, organizing colonies and broods is an indication of the expression of the territorial urge, and of antagonism that are characteristic of the bhaviour of closely bonded animals. This accounts for the fact that man, as a general rule, finds joy and even sadistic satisfaction in his neighbour's sufferings, misfortunes and calamities, This is a tendency inherent in man;
and the wars the accounts of which smudge the pages of history: so wicked, so gory, and the hostility and the state of cold war that exists between the so-colled civilized nations and even the racist and communal outbursts of violence have admittedly to be attributed to the instinct of exclusive possession and of hate that in here in the
naked ape'.
The animal instincts of territoriality and of antagonism have been the basis of the inordinate desire on the part of man to a mass territories and call them his tradional homes, his domains, his dominions, and his empires. The mind of man, more often than not, goes awry, and he does not make a scruple of committing acts of self-aggrandisement, self-assertion and enslavement. Man has become a marauder and foragir, and he has reducad the earth into a “half-dying green kingdom,' thereby adopting a scorched earth policy. Man should now move to the other extreme of self-effacement to bring him to the norm. The very fact that man shares this basic drive of territoriality and sense of ownership of place with the other animals is a sure indication of the fact that the mind of man has much in common with the mind of animals, that mind at all stages of the evolutionary process, is, a psychic extension of all living beings, and that
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it is the bounden duty of man to arrive at an ecological balance with nature. He has to strike a conciliatory mean between destructive exploitation and a peaceful adjustment,
We have taken pains to explain how the varieties of behaviour, characteristic of all living organisms, are indicative of the presence of a guiding principle in their inner being: the mind. There is the well-defined conative process of stimulus - response: the inner commerce of an active desiring and active aversion: a voluntary action trend: a kind of seething and fermenting on the lees of the being'. Organic activity at all levels of animal existence is strangely purposive and meaningful, often controlled and directed by chemical messengers called pheromones. The size of beehives and termite colonies is determined by pheromones secretad and served broadcast by the queen' and the “workers', wherever the necessity arose. The living organism has that ebullience called life. It has an inner being - an inward - an extension; a surfacing of that inner being - an outward - and an interaction with the environment which is pervasive, and the inner urge to mutate encoded in the DNA when the exigency arises. As we have already known, every organism is a complexity of existence, of stimuli and responses, guided and directed and controlled by the mind, the hormones, and pheromones. It tends to mutate, to become as perfect as prevailing conditions permit. This is the principle of precision' and exactitude. This is the 'NICE' of the ecologist. Although the behaviourists may deny the existence of mind, of the process of thinking, of intelligence, of purposive behaviourpatterns, of introspection and consciousness, of instinct and thought and image, emotion and sentiment, of intuition and energy-flow; the presence of a self-guiding principle and of purposive activity and “creative visualization' in living organisms cannot be denied. Pavlov's classic experiments on 'conditioned reflexes' which he carried out on dogs show that change of physical conditions from moment to moment results in appropriate physiological responses. There is precision activity. But the responses do not completely rule out the elements of the thought process in animals, and the presence of mind in then.
Kohler's observations of the behaviour of his chimpanzees provide ample evidence of the presence of insight,
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the rudiment of a mind, in them. Faced with problem situations the chimpanzees were able to attain their goals by certain behaviour patterns which indicated an “intent and an insight. Surprisingly enough, they were able not only to. sense a problem situation, like wanting to reach a banana kept out of reach, but also to plan and contemplate a device, to relate events and to reach it by fixing end to end two bamboo poles kept within reach. Although this assembling and organizing an elementary contraption may, at the first instance, appear to be a mere blind stumbling on a solution O expediency, it has admittedly provided a very significant stepping stone for gaining an insight into a situation. This new experience has added not only to the sum total of experiences of the ape, but has also completely changed the picture of the mind of the ape. That its mind has gained precision and accuracy' by having "sized a new situation. perceived it, and solved the problem presented, cannot be refuted. The learning process, ie understanding a problem situation, has, in this instance, become complete, and, is suggestive of the presence of an "intent and an insight' ie a fuller and complete understanding of the situation as a whole. The mind of the ape has enabled it to grasp and comprehend and visualize problem situations and discover solutions for them: assume an appropriate stance: a life's pose.
B. F. Skinner. has done extensive research in what he has termed “operant conditioning'. The term connotes that the organism operates, ie, goes into action in its environment to generate consequences. If the consequences are rewarding, then the response will be repeated, and will grow in strength. Operannt conditioning' is also called "instrumental conditioning" since the organism's response is instrumental in providing a reward.
Here is Skinner's experiment. A laboratory rat is kept in a box called the "Skinner's Box'. The rat roams as it likes in the box. It is free to move about and press a bar. This act results in the delivery of a food pellet or a drop of water. At first the rat presses the bar by sheer chance. But in the performanc of this act the animal is rewarded with food and water. After gaining this rewarde
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the rat presses the lever once again and gets the reward. The lever-pressing is now repeated more frequently and the reward obtained. The rat has now learnt to obtain a reward by pressing the lever. The intent has deepened; and the act has now become “intentional. This intentional action is suggestive of an insight in the animal. It is capable of associating the response with the reward; and this insight is in all certainty no other than the germ of the mind. Presumably, the laboratory rat is not an imbecile. It has its own conceptual frame. It thinks in a sense. And paradoxically, the thought processes in man and in animals differ only in degree, not in kind. Life, as it is lived, has its situations and its stances.
Intent: purpose to attain a clearly defined goal.
Insight: Awareness of the relevance of behaviour to
some end.
Creative visualization: Self-instigated thought synthesis where the mental product is not a mere summation but an integrated whole. It is an intuition.
Although apes and rats and birds like the pigeon and ducks have borne evidenee of the power of insight, a capacity to contemplate and comprehend problem situations and organize an ensemble of actions, a stance to discover solutions for them, yet, it has to be admitted, that man's capacity to apprehend problem situations and arrive at organized solutions for them, with the minimum expenditure of energy-flow, to discover relations between any two events with militant earnestness, and to eomprehend a corretive character when confronted with any character together with any relation, is of an entirey different order. Isn't there a biological preordination in every plant, in every animal-not a mere flying shuttle of chance and will - but a pre-ordained endeavour, a striving to understand, to figure out the mystical record encoded in that vast tome that goes by the name of DNA? That striving. that endeavour is the mind.
Professor Spearman has given prominence to this
ability of man to feel, to know, to think, to retain the elements of his thoughts in his “Principles of Noegenesis'.
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His five principles which lead to the knowing process in man, apart from the first two principles already mentioned, namely the eduction of relations and the eduction of correlates, may be briefly stated thus:
1. Principle of canstancy: that is; every mind maintains
a constant simultaneous output.
2. Principle of retentivity: that is; mental items experienced are retained and experienced together.
3. Principle of fatigue: that is; as a result of mental fatigue items once experienced tend to occur again.
4. Principle of conative control : that is; by our will we are in a position to alter our knowing' and its intensity.
5. Principle of primordial potencies: that is; the original
individual differences exist between man and man.
All these diverse mental processes are made possible in man by the presence of a perfectly evolved central and peripheral nervous system and a coordinating system of muscles and sense organs and endocrine system. The energy needed for the process of thinking is provided by the nervous system and is contained in the R. N. A. molecules; whereas the engine that is propelled may be deemed to be the entire body with its muscles. bones, tendons and ligaments, the endocrine glands, internal organs and the vascular system. The evidence in favous of the presence of a well - organized and highly evolved mind in man, when it comes to the crunch, is thus preponderant and overbearing. There is also ample evidence in favour of the presence of an intent in animals, which, again, points unerringly to the presence of the rudiment of a mind in them. In so far as mans, behaviour, and, to a lesser extent even animal behaviour, is concerned, the maxim: “same cause, same effect' does not hold good. The mechanical rigidity characteristic of physical phenomena and their apparent, deterministic cause - effect link is markedly absent in animal and chiefly in human behaviour. Hasn't man a wayward will? His situations and their related stances vary from moment to moment. His ways are neither static nor precise nor mechanical.
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We are now constrained to hold the view that what makes a person tick, and what involves a mere rick, even the slightest twitching movements of the body, though they might be considered to be reflexes, involve a tacit intent and a silent thought in the core of the "being'. Every one of them is - that suggestion, whose horrid image doth unfix my hair. And make my seated heart knock at my ribs against the use of nature'. Shakespeare.
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DISCOURSE - Ix
EMANCIPATION OF MIND
WHEN we contemplate matter in its manifold aspects wears confronted with the titanic task of discovering in it a trend to liberate itself, to unfold its true form and assume the dimensions of the mind. It might be assumed that there is manifest in all nature a motion and a spirit that impels all thinking things'. Turn to any philosophic system: be it the God is Nature' concept of Spinoza, the epistomology of Kant, be it the pantheism of Fiohte, Sehelling and Hegel, be it the "will to be' of Schopenhaeur or Nietzsche's "will to power' or Bergson's "elan vital', one is confronted with the one inescapable notion of a power: a motion and a rest: a pull and a push: that pervades the entirety of existence. It would appear as though the totality of nature has in it a hidden force, a latent 'craving to be', a lurking yet smouldering design, an erupting and effervescing, actualizing trend, a boiling over of energy: that is all out to manifest itself in the fullest mode attainable. When its ambient bonds are annulled, when it attenuates, matter might appear to be free to express itself in its true configuration. To all intents and purposes matter appears to be dead, to be inert, passive; to be in repose, to be in chains; and to be even clamouring for fulfilment, for expansion, for manifestation; and, to be in motion. Matter does aspire towards the attainment of that perfect and attendant form and stuff which may be called “mind'. There is inherent in matter a teleological trend, a far - away end in view, a hidden urge to break away from its bonds, and to attain to emancipation and perfection and an awakening awareness in the mind in conciousness. Says H. Bergson : “Movement and coasciousness sleep in the plant'. It would appear that at this stage of our inquiry we have to set store on the doctrine of Heraclitus : “Everything is in a state of flux”.
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It has to be admitted that man, thinking and reflecting animal that he is, has, willy nilly, to pay considerable attention to this rare and seemingly bizarre obsolescent notion of the mind emancipating itself from matter, both inert and animate. Every activity in nature, every event, every phenomenon, however insignificant it might be, is amply and loudly suggestive of an unending and unceasing endeavour on the part of the mind of nature to free itself from the bonds - the umpteen laws that govern natural phenomena. Matter appears to be inert, to be slumering, to be energyless and powerless. The 'anaan' of the, Vedic Rishis is no other then the “matter' which we contemplate: the matter of the modern physicist. But it appeared to the ancients to be something inert, supine, listless; to be lacking in the energizing vibration of active and animated existencesakti - which they designated the “prana” - “vibrant breath of being”. These two aspects of existence, namely “annam” and prana' (later figured as 'siva' and “sakti") were, to the rishis, complementary entities, that had got bonded and formed the ground, the gigantic dimension of existence : the inscrutable, venerable mystery - the profound imponderable. A lethargic element, in a condition of torpor (Muyalahan appeared to them to have caught and imprisoned in its iron grip an energizing and eruptive elemental energy. That is how the ancients viewed matter and energy. They gave them a name and a form : Syllable and image.
In later years when matter came under the searching scrutiny of the philosopher - scientist, he hypothesized, conjectured and arrived at, what might appear to be, the ground of matter: the basic factors of existence: the fact end of matter, to wit: the electron and the proton: up till now, the twin forces of nature. In this search too man was confronted with the two fundancental phases of matter: its passivity and its activity; its lull and its storm : the obverse and reverse of the one and the same indivisible existence : the wholeness of being: “poornam' - 'eham. From singularity to plurality it is a far cry, a formidable leap that the substance or the essence of nature has attempted to take; and the outcome appears to be a dual existence: matter and mind. Nevertheless we seldom discover reality existing in these two garbs. It is plurality: the many that
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we truly perceive : Cats and puppy dogs, sealing wax and stones and trees. That's what common sense reality, that existence, is. We seldom or never see it single.
Inhering in matter is action, ceaseless action kriya'; and it has always been tending to find expression to free itself and body forth as the mind. The term 'KARMA used by the ancients in Hindustan might refer to this 'activity trend in matter. The universe or all - that - which - is would have ceased to be, when "Karma' ceased to be. As such Karma' is no other than never-ending eternal action. This eternity of movement in the cosmos keeps the cosmos an eternally going concern, not suffering it to run to seed; to rush and riot and revolt at its will; and motility is essentially inherent in it. When matter vibrates - it is no other than "vibration' - it finds expression as the mind, that is “motion' in a conserved form: Ianubhavaj. It becomes the ever - enduring, the ever-persistent, the ever - guiding, the ever - driving principle in nature, The ancient seers in their effort to figure this very subtle phenamenon in nature, in the cosmos, have designated it "leela': the 'divine cosmic play”, and figured it in human mould and called it : Natarajah - the king of dancers.
Hasn't the modern physicist hypothesized this phenomenon as the nuclear energy: the vibration of the protons and the electons? The emanation of the mind aspect of existence is ceaseless - 'going - on'. It is felt in the immediate present: the eternity of existence. The pulsatiou in the core of the atom, (sara) the ebullience in it, is, like unto a tiny spark in a dying ember that has in it the potent to increase and expand and swell into a mighty conflagration. Once the mind effect diminishes in its rate of vibration in a being, the being appears to cease to be : in other words it undergoes a thorough change. It appears to be no more what it was in that particular state of being. Nevertheless it persists in other ambient circumstances. The mind is willing to move on and on ; though the flesh be weak, yet it has the mind in its stranglehold. The flesh has been transmuted into the mind. "No bolt can bar, no bond can bind'. Such is the human mind.
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What an unending catena of events intervenes between the state of existence and that of non-existence And then between matter and mind Between existence and nullity there pervades eternity; and between matter and mind there is an endless chain of events - infinity - leading from matter to miud ; from passivity to activity: from a state of calm to a state of storm. Says Pascal : “Our nature is movement. Absolute stillness is death'. Matter has inhering in it an unending dynamic urge, an insatiable desire, an indefinable necessity, an irresistible craving to hold the mind in its grip. It has imprisoned and ensnared mind which, in its turn, has an intrinsic craving to free itself from the grip of matter; and this urge on the part of matter to grip and that on the part of mind to free itself from the grip of matter, find expression in multitudinous forms. Says Jean Paul Sartre: “Man is a useless passion:’ “mere sound and fury signifying nothing.' All his achievements and hopes : scientific, literary, religious, social and cultural are no other than mere beggars' baggage. Most of them appear to have been blasted in the bud the ordering of human life.
Here we see the amoeba bulging and swelling, protruding and flowing and retracting and withdrawing itself; now creeping in one direction, now in another; everpulsating with a primal motion, ever-vibrating with an effort to find expression : at one instance feeling its way towards food, at another fighting shy of intense light and lethal elements; at one moment swelling and puffing up with power, at another shrinking and withdrawing and collapsing into itself and assuming the form of a cyst to be in repose and to replicate and refuel. Haven't we watched a chick develop, gestate and grow out of the matter in the egg? And what a marvellous change has been wrought in its contents. Now it assumes the figure of a fish; now that of a tadpole; and now it is almost a lizard, and finally emerges the fluffy living form which we call the chick. Then it pecks at its shell, breaks its prison wail and gets liberated. What a miracle? And what the poet has said of the tiger comes true : what dread hand, and what dread feet what the hammer ? and what the chain? In what furnace was thy brain what the anvil? what dread grasp, Dare its deadly terrors grasp? IW. Blakel “The giant cells of the caterpillar's
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body die and the dormant cell - clusters suddanly begin to divide rapidly, nourishing themselves on the soup of the disintegrated caterpillar body. The insect, in effect, is eating itself. Slowly it builds a new body of a completely different
form. David Attenborough.
The power in these forms tends to persist, to continue, to procreate, to proliferate, to move on from one perfection to another, and go closer and closer to eternity Whatare all these modes of behaviour but meaningful expressions unerringly symptomatic of the presence of a directing, guiding. moulding and propelling principle; a conscious purpose which we, for want of a better terminology, have called “creative craving'. It is an urge to actualize, a will to be.
Mind, caught in the hard core of matter, has been making an interminable and inveterate effort to release itself from the shranglehold of matter, to escape it, and find expression, and thus realise fulfilment. This urge, this meaningful strife in the inner core of matter to awake, to achieve awareness, to realize fulfilment, to attain 'one', we have designated the "mind'.
Life is no more no less than a phase of thc expression of the effort made by the mind to rescue itself from matter, to assume an upright stance. The mind of the atom is thus in no wise different from the mind of an amoeba or of an Einstein. The difference is one of degree only, not of kind. The dying spark in a burnt paper has the same potent as the mighty con flagation of a sunspot thousands of miles high. Their essential quality is the same despite the fact their magnitudes differ. The urge or craving for emancipation, to acquire a meaning, is the vital factor in all existenee. Although there are some that hurry and others that dawdle, some that are torpid others explosive, yet, no existence ever remains static. It has in it the potential to stir, to quake, to shudder, to move forward towards an infinite progression. Never shall regresion be a trend in existence: the trend is always forward, seldom backward. Every event in Nature, is, therefore, an advance, seldom a retreat, tending towards the attainment of the highest form - morphe - in the huddling and hedging circumstances that enshroud it.
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A germinating ficus sced has in it the potency, the viability and the urproar and fanfare needed for the birth and the unfolding of th: fully developed, full - grown umbrageous growth that a mature ficus tree is. Every bud forming on its twigs burgeoning, blowing and bursting and and unfolding into tender twigs and leaves, flowers and fruits, is, definitely the expression of an inborn urge to propagate : a mental turmoil made to preserve the species, to move forward on a never-ending march of the mind in progress. Every event in nature attains its fulfilment in a consummatory configuration, that is, the perfection that can possibly be attained under the circumstances. In the chlorophyll of the leaf the rudiment of a nervous system is in evidence." "And movement and consciousness sleep in the plant, says H. Bergson.
The mind feels its way out, breaks the confining doors and windows, and makes its utmost endeavour to free itself, and attain to greater and more precise and more meaningful form, to more accurate and exact configuration, greater perfection and greater glory. It sees to it that its effort is good, and appropriate, and precise, and satisfactory.
Have we not watched a seed sprout, a bud unfold, a butterfly bursting out of its pupal shell, a snowflake forming on the window-pane, a crystal of candy coming into form in a concentrated solution of sugar, a new-born baby growing and maturing into an adult, going through the seven stages described by the immortal poet? Have we not heard of the tender hare-bell raising its head responsive to her airy tread? The gentle tread of a virtuous woman? gyasir gig L6535 slaid FQpth sya (5th. Has not the nutrition supplied to the plants you tend in yur garden been readily selected, and seized, and absorbed by a thousand root - hairs and pushed up in an unbroken stream to the leaves and buds? Why is it that out of several hundred million sperms produced in the animal bodies, for instance an oyster, only one or two succeed in finding their destination, the egg cell, and indenting it and coalescing with it, fecundating it and awakening the life in it and making it grow into a definite shape and sssume a definite pattern? Isn't there a teleological and deterministic trend, a preordained or an unfolding
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purpose, an information, and design and a dictation discernible in all these phenomena? And aren't they unmistakably suggestive of the presence of a life - force, an “elan vital' a desire and a craving that has assumed the figure of an "energy - flow that springs, supplies, feeds, directs and energizes? A marvel and a surveillance? They have all been triggered by the mind, and monitored by it; controlled and directed and overseen by it. Matter has unfolded, matter has bloomed, and the manacles and chains it has imposed on the mind and the mystery shrouding it have been put aside, and unravelled, and an effort has been made by the mind to liberate itself from the smothering burden of matter, to get awakened from a condition of thraldom to one of freedom. Isn't Nature like unto a strip - tease maiden who by her tantalizing performance only attempts to strip herself of all her manifold garments and bring into palpable image all her inner nature? Her hidden charms
The process of building up and breaking down, of evolution and devolution, of structuring and dismantling taking place in organisms, that has been designated metabolism is an effort to nourish, to build them up and maintain them at the highest and most tonic level of existence obtainable in their form of existence placed as they are in their anbience. In fact the various, yet closely coordinated physiological processes that go on in organisms, however highly or lowly organized the organisms might be, are expressions of gross matter releasing step by step, progressively, its hold on mind, and getting - transmuted into mind.
Here is an instance. The chlorophyll in the green plant is a marvellous device to grasp from the inert substance in nature: cabon dioxide and the sunlight - that amount of energy that is needed for its growth and development, Isn't there in this operation of converting inorganic matter into organized energy the inkling of a state of consciousness in the green cell that has bloomed forth and matured into the active tendency that has at a higher state of evolutionary process become patent as animal consciousness? In the sensitivity of the chlorophyll to sun-light, isn't there the silent and persistent and insistent echo of a nervous impulse? A block
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buster device? And inst there a silent and overt expression of a nerve impulse in the irritability of plants as observed by Charles Darwin, J. C. Bose and others? And haven't the forms of flowers been evolved to accommodate their insect visitors? C. K. Sprengel, Dr. H. Muller, and Charles Darwin have borne ample evidence to the marvellous adaptability in the “morphe' and structure of flowers to accommodate their insect visitors. And aren't these suggestive of the presence of a hidden 'cosmic mind' that is pervasive in nature?
Every physiological process, be it absorption, assimilation. translocation of nutrients and nutrition, synthesis of food, breaking down of food etc. resulting in the evolution of energy, circulation of blood, transmitting of impulses: these are all various aspects of the being and becoming concern of life in which there is supremely present the effort and the expression, the strive on the part of the mind to get out of the clutches of matter. Once the mind has evolved it becomes the directing, self-sustaining and the guiding principle in all Nature's activities in all her varied poses. It is a self-evolving, self-generating, self-directing and self-maintaining principle that is found inhering in all forms of matter. "The same impetus that has led the animal to give itself nerve centres must have ended, in the chlorophyllian function”. - H. Bergson. The caterpillars of certain Lepidoptera under the influence of light, fix the carbon of the carbonic acid contained in the atmosphere, says Maria von Linden. What marvellous adaptation !
Once a grain of sugar or of table-salt gets into our stomach it is either accepted or rejected. Once it is accepted it gets assimilated and b comes part and parcel of the body's metabolic system. This process of absorption and assimilation is an expression of the process of mind slipping out of the grip of matter. In other words: Matter has so transformed, nay transmuted itself as to become the mind. In the process of absorption, adsorption and assimilation, has not matter made a formidable leap, an upsurge to move from an inert to an active state? To move from the unconscious to the conscious state; to break its bonds and evolve from a static to a dynamic state? What was slum
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bering has been awakened: what was passive has become active: a passive creative will has become an active creative will. In the ordering and ordaining of nature there can never be flaws and imperfections. The principle of precision whereby things tend to become as perfect as prevailing conditions permit, holds water in the process of the emancipation of the mind from the damping and crippling from the damping and crippling grip of matter. All things tend to assumeperfection in relation to the prevailing ambient conditions. Every object is no other than the finished product of the multitudinous factors that have been impinging om it and indenting it, interpenetrating it through time immemorial. Blow upon blow dealt on the shapeless chunk of clay, the pat aud the thind bludgeoned, and the push and the pull dealt by the potter have conspired to bring it into form and given it a name and a singular constant and coherent status: the carthen goblet. So have blows, the battering and the buffeting been brought into shape; thus have they been bodied forth and given a form, a motion and a spirit: a "something more' than what they appear to be.
Temporal and spatial relations and internal influences and effects have had their fullest share in the moulding and structuring of an object when it is brought under their influence. And what about the encoded message contained in the chromosomes sf the reproductive cells of living organisms? And isn't the ancient cellular information: the DNA, a hidden tome? An unread volume? A mystic symbol?
Little does the potter know of the pain, the anguish, the throbbing pangs and the throttling spasms felt in the lump of clay beaten and moulded into form; and little does man know of the illimitable effects, influences and forces, stresses and strains, that press on objects and help fashion them, tone them up, and bring them up to that precise state of perfection to which they have been exalted. And is all this bludgeoning, if anything, dementedly dealt?
“One first nature all, Indued with various forms, various degrees Of substance, and, in things that live of life; But more refined, more spirituous and pure."
- John Milton.
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Here has mind been liberated and raised to the status ef the spirit.
Rescued from the suffocating and throttling strangle hold of matter, mind has come to those limits which it could possibly have attained under the prevailing circumstances, and has manifested itself in a multitude of effects: no two effects being identically the same. This conclusion points to the cardinal notion that no two things can be alike, for caught in a particular quantum of time and of space every object has its inherent individuality: a speciality characteristic of it. This is its precision'. Although mind appears to have the same inhering trends on the surface, its stages of evolution are multifarious, endless, varied, fantastic, and sundry. The principle of precision is, in a way, akin to the principle of “necessity' whereby things have been determined to exist, and that at a characteristic level of attainment and perfection, at a characteristis moment. Furthermore the "principle of precision' demands that with the minimal expenditure of energy the highest and the most optimum result shall have been obtained And that achievement is a form of awakening and an awareness that matter has the potency to achieve. It grows from strength to strength with an ever-increasing quantum of success. The architect - the cosmic force - Indwells in a particle of matter; and this, in essence, is the mind. It is a wideawake status attained to by matter, in which, matter placed in its ambient conditions would have attained to its highest in the process of the liberation of the mind. Doesn't the first sip titillate your palate and excite your curiosity ? And does not matter get awakened in every one of our perceptive images : visual, auditory, gustatory, olfactory and kinaesthetic?
At this stage it must be emphasized that there is no incompatibility or contrariety or repugnance subsisting between mind and matter, since the one is, in essence, the effect of the other. Matter is the living tissue of everyday existence. And Chuang-Tze has it : “The art of preserving life consists in being able to keep all in One'. Matter is nowise opposed to mind. Matter and mind are complementary and evolutionary in their trends. They are inter
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changeable. Matter tends to cvolve into mind. It is the grist of the mill of life; and all is grist that comes to the mill. It is meaningful.
Hence, in every event particle' of the philosopher (A. N. Whitehead), the infinitesimally small existential reality, there is matter and there is mind involved as in the Kundalani' of the Vedic seers. The thought-force of man, according to the Vedic rishis which is supposed to ascend from the solar plexus to the cerebral part of the brain along the central nervous system - the spinal chordmay be likened to the process of mind evolving from matter. The sex-based procreative-matter-trend: the imperious carnal impulse: the raw sex-craving, blooms into the crystal clear intellect. Sex energy more often prurient than sublime, having been sublimated, gives way to unalloyed pure reasoning energy. From the state of being entangled in the primal craving, namely lust, the being and becoming concern has risen to the kindled state of a reasoning mind, freed from the death-grip of passion's oonsuming fire. But it must be known that passion (craving), in no sense, assumes a stance in opposition to reasoning, and that it goes counter to it. There is no room for conflicts in Nature's designs. Passion, in the form of primal craving, provides the energy, the warmth and the zest, the motility and "e-motion": in short the fuel needed for the kindling of the flame of greater awakening to a truly understanding sense of existence. Passion does not necessarily clog one's progress. What is aimed at in nature's evolutionary process is a state of impassioned, hard-headed, clear vision : energized thinking that will not remain merely passive and eternally slumbering, but will act with a clarity of vision leading the being to greater progress and greater awareness, and greater awakening. Nature has so designed her totality of matter as to enable it to yield the pent up energizing force in it which blooms into the marvellous awakened and kindled entity that it ultimately evolves into. And this is the mind,
The supreme entity is thus the mind, and, willy millv, through sheer necessity, matter shall have to transform itself into the mind. But within our short life - span of a hundred or Cven some more years, as we age and grow
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feeble, as senescenice and ennui and prosiness set in, we become apathetic and pedestrian, our memory becomes treacherous and a light and a hope seem to go out of our lves. “But yet I know," says the poet of nature. 'wher'er I go that there hath past away a glory from the earth.' This slumbrous and sluggish feeling of ennui and tiredness, this beleaguered and forlorn mood, this harsh crunch on the outer margin of existence, is a true indication of the dying spark of the life-spirit, the visionary quality. the descent of the "nous' in man; and of the dire necessity of a rejuvenated and inspirited mind. Does not the true delineation of man reveal more of filth than beauty of form Hence: Life has to be constantly fed and nourished; and, fed with the best of motions, thoughts and ideas, so that, despite the deterioration of the body, mind might be maintained at the highest pitch of efficiency. This is the cardinal theme of an aging world, namely a "psycho-physical feedback'. This subject merits theattention of all sane teachers and thinkers. The human community has to be maintained at the highest level of efficiency in clear thinking; and, this is the only way to true progress. Mind development and growth: mind culture "sinmaya' education, has to supersede the evolution of matter. Mind has to be rescued from the deadly grip of warped and wobbly, matter. There is a wealth of truth in the expression : word made truth: 'spirit had chosen to inhabit matter”. E. W. F. Tomlin.
MAN - WOMAN CONFLICT: What appears to be the eternal and crucial conflict between the male and the female of the human species: between man and woman, is, the apparent contrariety and incompatibility that subsists between mind and matter. Objectively viewed, woman is essentially materialistic though artistic in her passionate trends and targes, her desires and her attachments, her likes and her dislikes, her mawkish loves, her sneaking hatreds and glutting jealousies. She is more selfc-entred than man. Her needs are seldom immediate. They are vagaries of her imagination : mere figments; the outcome of her false premisses and her equally false conclusions and decisions. She can never be constant and consistent in her needs, and her bottomless cravings. Her material needs outweigh her mental needs. She is in the grip of the surface gloss of matter, the tinsel and
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the flash: the outward show of things much amore than man. In the books of wisdom of the ancient Hebrews and the Hindus, hasn't woman been represented as an entity boiling over with strange primal desires, arcane cravings, deep-seated passions and corrosive yearnings? Her lusting urges, her unfulfilled desires, her fast - fading, thoughtless, feminine charm, her putrid vanity, her mercurial temperament, her maudlin tenderness, her wealth of whims and fancies, her inordinate greed and guile, her petty jealousies and envy, her clinging to cosmetics, baim and ambergris, amomum and musk and civet and cutex and gold and diamonds : all these enormities point to the fact of her inherent weakness: her having been caught in the wiles of matter rather than being brought to the state of the awakening of the "nous' [nous : spirit J. In the words of Schopenhauer: “Neither for music nor for poetry nor for the fine arts has she really, truly any sense of susceptibility'. She has no subjective deep-seated interest in anything, except perhaps in the field of mother craft. Even in this field modern woman has developed a feeling of ennui and of noncooperation and nonchalance. She is much more easily bored with life than her partner in life. And so she ages much
faster and matures, shrinks and shrives into a cantankerous shrew. Nietzhe is perhaps a little too hectic and harsh on
woman when he says: “Thou goest to woman? Do not
forget the whip'. Seldom has woman achieved anything great except in her home : as a loving mother or a devoted nurse. In the mojority of worldly involvements she has proved herself to be a necessary evil. Eve was that, and so was Delilah. She has succeeded in deluding, misguiding and misdirecting man, and taken him to the very brink of hell. She has resolved the notion that man's business is to dig and delve; to sweat, to toil and to earn; and hers to spend his earnings thoughtlessly. Woman's credulity, especially in relation to superstitious beliefs is to be derided and abhorred. That's the lot.
Man's intellect, is, more frequently than otherwise, clouded and befuddled by the cardinal and ruling impulse of sex. Sex assumes primacy over all other interests in man. And woman is more a clog and a let than an aid to man's intellectual advancement. He has been drawn to woman
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much more for the gratification of his short-lived, yet very powerful, sexual urge than woman to man. And thus contends Shakespeare : "But, boy, however we do praise ourselves,
Our fancie are more giddy and unfirm, More longing, wavering, sooner lost and worn Than woman's are'.
Although woman is in no sense fairer and better symmetrically figured han man, he has called her the “fair sex. The abnormal width of her hips, the fanciful bulge of her bosom, her lumpy callipygous ham, the bumpy hunch of her back, through any stretch of imagination cannot help to attribute to her the charm that she is erroneously said to possess. Hence wherein lies the charm in woman: the philosopher asks. Only girls in their height of adolescence beget for a decade or so a tant a lizingly striking coquettish and flirtatious effect which entices young men to them and endows a pride in them by the fact of the delusion of the exclusive possession of them. She is mine own : that is the foolish bumptious and fanciful notion that the infatuated Romeo in his peculiar yet chracteristic climacteric entertains about his Juliet for a brief spell of time, till her bewitching charm fades and her ens naring beauty withers. The man clings on to her as his exclusive property and remains closely bonded for a short while. Then comes the fertility-rites phase of human existence in which nature has vested the first and foremost aspect of the fulfilment of her designs. Woman, at this stage, has become the urn of gestation. She has turned out to be the fertile ground in which the sower has sowed his seed. The species has been ensured of a continued existence. It has been helped to take a step forward in the grand procession of the evalution of the mind. It is ageless in continuity and infinite in variety' - T. H. Jukes.
At this point in the evolutionary history of man, the general trend on the part of man is to throw away the flower after its beauty has faded, very little realizing there follows an age of mellow fruitfulness when his partner's sex-based charm matures into the mind; when the life of woman becomes supernally indispensable in the development of the mind of man. Says Mahatma Gandhi: “Woman is the
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embodiment of sacrifice, silent suffering. humility, faith, and knowledge. Woman's intuition has often proved truer than man's arrogant assumption of knowledge'. This is the second phase of the evolution of the mind that Nature has entrenched in her design. Here mind takes man far above sexuality; and woman becomes his helpmate : his divine mother and partner in life.
And here comes the nub. Woman being fully aware of the withering bloom of her youthfulness, goes all out to preserve it, little knowing that it can never be preserved by the use of the make-ups of modern cosmetics. But, despite all her efforts, sooner or later, there comes a time when she ceases to be the attractively sexy thing she pretended to be. Then reason dawns upon her mental horizon, and she gets closely bonded under the guise of motherhood. The pity of it all is that at this stage of woman's maturity her partner hasn't outgrown his sex urge. He has turned out to be a chartered libertine. He is at war with himself. The flesh in man lusteth rather too long, and puts him in chains even past his three score years and ten, while woman's warmth and glow has faded away at two score and five. It is high time that man begins to reflect, to get a clear intellect, to get imbued with a social sense and beget a social conscience; to coordinate and collate his notions, and to design for himself a sound philosophy and get a clear prevision of a unified existence. It is the mind of man that has to get emancipated, and rise upon a new life, a new struggle, a new phase of existence: a rebirth, a grand victory of mind over matter.
Man has to get the truer vision of the total design subsisting in existence. He has to be awakened from his deep slumber, and reborn; and then mind would have been liberated and matter transmuted into mind. His earthbound notions, his pragmatic practicality would then have reached a staggering height: a meaningful sublimity, namely, the one inimitable, sublime, vedic notion: That the self here and the world there : both are perfections: the self and the divine ground of existence - the mind. 'Purnamadah purnamidam”.
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While nature intended woman to discover the liberation of her mind in motherhood and its attendant noble sentiments of altruism and an ever-expanding, allembracing maternal love, and an endearing, deep-seated family bond and filial piety, man has to discover it in the way of blessedness, in the mellowing wisdom of his clear understanding, in the truest vision he ever had of the being process, in the earnest to see into the life of things, in the Sense sublime of something far more deeply interfused, whose dwelling is the light of setting suns, And the round ocean, and the living air, And the blue sky, and the mind of man, A motion and a spirit that impels, All thinking things, all objects of all thought, And rolls through all thoughts' in the noble sentiment that life has to be lived and its cup quaffed and emptied to its dregs. Here is the emancipation of the mind from the deadly and paralysing grip of matter: the awakening of the unregenerate life. The logos', Easwara, Yahve, Elohim, Allah: call it what you will: the creative principle inherent in man has to be awakened from its listless lassitude, rekindled and brought to its truer senses. The dormant "Kundalani" – the nascent nerve Onergy - has to be roused, and matter mortised and annexed to the pituitary: the mind-matter in the brain: the hypothalamus. Mind has to transcend matter and go beyond", seeking wider and nobler dimensions. How far? None knows.
The dimensions of matter have to be correctly figured out, est matter mishandled by man results in the uncorking of the demon - matter, in its explosive, lethargic, manic-depressive and destructive form. In nature matter has to mature and evolve all on its own: free, at sweet speed and “will'. The maturing process, ie the process of the tempering of the mind, should not be inordinately and indecently hastened by any form of yoga' system - a strained existence marked by a life of undue austerity and self-denial, self-annihilation, and self-estrangement. There should be profundity, leave alone urbanity, in man's art of thinking; a staggering depth and a sombre seriousness and earnestness; a sweet reasonableness, a 'maat' and a righteousness, a “maithri' trend, a truly 'dharma' urge, a ruling
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passion for the maintenance of what is true and just. This kingly passion feeds and nourishes his mind, and is patent in all his thoughts and in all his actions.
Quite contrary to this dharmic trend there is a trend with a difference in the affairs of modern scientists to act unguided by the dictates of the mind: creative intelligence. They are governed by and imbued with the idea that the world is maintained by a nexts of atoms. In an age when all circumstance of misery and public execration have to be annulled, when mind should dominate matter and bring about the peaceful co-existence of all nations on a par with the prevalence of mental peace and communal and racial harmony, it is starkly tragic that man has been attempting to mishandle matter, to evert it, and misuse the eruptive and destructive forces in nature, thereby unleashing them and endangering humanity and subjecting it to what might be considered to be a global holocaust. Man, in the more advanced countries, is definitely on the wrong track. He is not on the true path of progress. He is on the path of 'shankaaram'- total destruction. He is all out to be radiated and wiped out of the face of the earth, lock, stock and barrel.
Man has to withdraw himself from the caldera of death that he has approached intoxicated with power. Modern man has tapped matter at the wrong end, everted it, and has stirred the Frankinstein monster locked in it, instead of permitting it to mature into the mellow mental state, that imperial mood which should govern every one of his actions. Scientific orthodoxy is as dangerous, as eruptive as religious orthodoxy since both are productive of social torpor and decadence. Both lead to technical accuracy, appropriateness and skill, but seldom to wisdom. Humanity is still a toddler in swaddling-bands; and human life is a life of dodges and escapes. It is still young and youthful; still in the "lustihood' of its irresponsible adolescence. The mind of man has still a long way to go. What is evident before us in the shape of civilization is the outcome of a secret pact between flesh and flesh. Caught in the trammels of matter, in the 'linga' and 'yooni' (sex) craving, in shifts and wiles, in superstitious egotism, in the
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Eros cult and an earth-bound oircumstance, and life's tedium, man can never hope to determine his own trajectory in action, just as much as no stone thrown can determine its path and destiny. Under the pressure of his inner, inborn, intrinsic urges and impulses and cravings man acts. And act he must. He is destined to act. He is in noway free to act; for, the essence of his being, his urge to persist in the being process, his emotional bulges and bubbles and his inherent desires become the springs of his action, and dotermine the pattern of his behaviour. He acts through pre-destined necessity - “pra-rap-tha karma.” A particular quantum of craving in him, at a given point of time and space, impels him to act. But it would appear that the essence of existence is the urge to persist in existence: to Crave to be:
“To bear all naked truths
And to envisage circumstance, all calm: That is the top of sovereignty.' (Keats)
THE MIND OF MAN SHROUDED N MATTER
Human society of the present day is in possession of vast vistas of theories: eeonomic theories, political theories, educational theories ethical modes, psychological theories, social cort tract theories etc. It is rich in technical skills, and inventions, and mechanical appliances. It is inextricably involved in a plastic age. All that it has, that it thinks of, that it reflects upon, is all plastics. There would come a time when man would have devised not only a plastic heart but a plastic brain as well. He himself would have turned out to be a robot. Life, in short, would have been computerized with all sorts of plastic contraptions. And human society would have been richer in technical skills than ever before, though painfully lacking in plain dealing, sheer common sense and is native wisdom, and contemplation.
As it is, human society has no individuality; it appears to be lacking in a social mind and a social
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conscience : a mutualism: a social ethics. It has no tangible personality, and is, therefore, incapable of any form of solicitude or concern of a truly social nature, based on social welfare. It is almost a myth: a mere name, "a dream dreamt by an idiot." It does not exist, since it does not care for you, your welfare and your happiness. And if it does, it seldom fails to have an axe to grind and a nest to feather. The service that it is supposed to render you is mere empty lip service. It is so up till now. Fortunately the future is open-ended and full of promise: pronaise of the evolution of a magnanimous nature.
Although Nature has as her cardinal aim the evolution of a group mind: a matured human document, not "falsely sentimental and greenly youthful' man, modern civilized man, especially in his craving for the welfare of his narrow individual self, has become avidly and abjectly selfish and bigotted in his attitudes and parochial in his interests, his aspirations and conatus. Says H. G. Wells : “Nature, I take it, is impartial and inexorable. Man is no favoured child. If he adopt he passes on to a new phase in the story of life; if he fail to solve the riddle he faces now he may differentiate, he may degenerate, he may die out altogether. One thing nature will not endure of him : that he stay as he is.' The modern social trend appears to be disintegration, not unification; and the inherent targe in all the established religions of the world is multiplicity, plurality, and diversity. To talk of unity in diversity is utter rot. The established religions of the world have proved to be a curse, not a blessing, since their stock-in-trade, their stockpile, is hatred, jealousy, greed, downright rivalry and cut-throat competition. They are mere sound and fury, hundrum propaganda, cheap clap-trap, and outright mockery. All orthodox religionists are tied down fundamentalists governed by a strait-jacket, cast-iron dogma, and formal in their behaviour and ritualistic divine office. The man of religion has painted pictures, made dolls and wax forms,
moulded images, called them his gods and saints and worshipped them. Never did the kindled light of truth ever beam through the minutest chink in any established religious edifice. Says Bertrand Russell:
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"Christianity, in its ethical doctrines, was not free from this defect, although in practice belief in the importance of spreading the Christian faith gave a practicable object for moral activity, which was no longer confined to the perfecting of self.'
Infinite love cannot be expressed in finite terms. True Religion is only a way of life hedged in on all sides by truth and truth alone, that would enable the mind of man to be properly mobilized and appropriately formulated. Says Lucretius:
Prostrate upon earth lay human life,
Visibly trampled down. and fouly crushed Beneath Religion's cruelty.
Every aspect of the human body, every organ in it, has been the outcome of the hidden desire-to-be, that is inherent in man. The deep-seated intent has brought forth every one of them. The same may be said of any other form of existence. Each and every one of them: be they big, be they small : has been the outcome of an intrinsic urge-to-be : an intense and insistent and inexorable “will-to-be. - a will to break the bonds of matter and be.
If man were to exercise his brain seriously and solidly, contributing towards the evolution cf the human mind in all its purity, he has to bring about a complete change in his way of life, in his pattern of behaviour, his Tao - his titha; he has to sever all existing religious, racial, caste and traditional trends; his place and his social bonds. He has to be unconditioned; he has to pool all his brain power: his resources of good sense, good feelings, altruistic bents, his benign accessory qualities, and build up and evolve a genuine community feeling, a feeling of oneness with such degree of intensity as will serve to bind the entire human race in a bond of love, concern and solicitude for the others. "The art of preserving life,' says, Chiang-Tze, "consists in being able to keep all in One, to lose nothing, to estimate good and evill without divination, to know when to stop and how much is enough, to leave others alone and attend to one-self, to be without cares
ritha = harmonious whole of existence.
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and without knowledge - to be in fact as a child.' The word “knowledge' in this context refers to inaccurate, inadequate, inappropriate information - inept lumber. We
must give all we have'. 'The contemplative man is the happiest and the best."
A mind that has been burdened with inadequate, disintegrated, shattered, fragmentary, false notions, frequently truckles to magic, astrology, sorcery, demonology and blind faith, superstitious egotism, and other antique nonsense. And being in a neonatal state enshrouded in the baser instincts, may exact fearful reprisals. It gets enslaved in the events of the past and those of the future. It gets caught in the trammels of imagination and of idle fancy. Such a mind is that of a thorough - going egotist. It puts very scant premium on the concern for the other man. It detracts, if somewhat, from all that goes by the name of benignity, and is a long way from truth.
It has been encumbered with doctrines and dogmas, smothered in rites and rituals, mantras', spells, charms and “tantras' and cluttered with fear-based faiths. It is incapable of making any headway in the direction of the formation of a universal mind. The main trend is divisive; seldom integrated, and never closely bonded. Says Bertrand Russell: “No virtue which has its roots in fear is much to be admired'. All fear-based faiths are “full of decaying and excremental elements'. Imperialist religions of conformity backed by the accumulated wealth of centuries and organizational power have enthralled penurious races of humanity, hoodwinked them, and blinded them, and kept them in chains. The motive is the maintenance of absolute mental slavery, and imperialistic control over them.
LOVE In the process of the integration of the awakened mind; love enters as the primal ruling passion. And when love enters into the process of the organization of the universal mind, nothing is disrupted; nothing lost. Love is like unto a ferment. It is a profit-making, profit - sharing concern. 'Genuine lovers not merely lose themselves in one another," says Prof. E. W. F. Tomlin, “they find themselves in one another'. Loving is a process of building;
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seldom one of breaking down. Mind builds up strength, it gathers momentum; it does not degenerate, neither does it disintegrate when it is fully governed by the over-ruling passion of contemplative love. It helps to form the cosmic mind-the unifying principle inherent in all nature's events.
“In the beginning was the word, and the word was with God, and the word was God'. - whoever must have conceived this notion, one fact obtrudes itself upon our consciousness, and that is, that it is intended for those who are more concerned with a sublime way of life than those interested in a jealous and personal divinity. We may vary this noble utterance so as to bring out its meaning more in tone with Nature's. This is how it would run: In the beginning was "creative craving and "creative craving was with the spirit, and creative craving' was the spirit. It is in essence a vedic thought, and is in perfect consonance with this utterance of Jesus: “I and my Father are ond'. The notion of 'craving to be' is the primal thought that gave origin to what may be styled as the primal beginning. The “hiraniya garba', primal being of the vedic thought; and the “Nous” of Plotinus, perhaps refer to such a beginning - a beginningless beginning - to wit: caught in time it has beginning, and beyond the time slot it has neither a beginning nor an end And, out of this notion of a "time slot, that grand punctum in time - time scale - unfold the universe in all its glory, in an awakening awareness: its complication and complexity inf natural forms. The dinosaurus and ichthiosaurus, the pterodactyles and sabre - toothed tigers, the mastodons and toxodons, the pariasaurus and the mammoth, and the thousands of extinct and extant animals, illogicalities of Nature, as they may seem, had been summoned on to this carthly stage by the "creative craving - the "will - to - be' - inherent in every one of their body cells: the D. N. A. It would seem that it is the sole task of the “creative intent' to mould, to structure, to body forth the self- renewing, self-proliferating, self - adapting, self - realizing, self - fulfilling and potentially everlasting organisms that once peopled the earth and that people it at the present time. The creatures are the thoughts.
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The matter, that obstructs and has, in a sense, become an impediment to the formation of the 'mind of man' - the oneness of being - that today has assumed the form of the mind of the nuclear scientist, that has resulted in the evolution of a race of people who are tending to take the wrong path in the noble task of working out the evolution of the mind of man, and who are overburdened with materialistic trends in their mode of behaviour and way of thinking, will have to succumb to the overall will, the "creative craving to be', the ancient tacit intent. And all modern man's trends in his peculiar and promaterialistic turn of behaviour, his inordinate attachment to matter and his earth - bound trend in his civilization, are unerringly indicative of the close proximity of a disastrous end to man's aspirations. In other words, his life of gilded idleness is bound to lead him and take him towards his own annihilation: the complete wiping out of Homo Sapiens from the face of the earth. Just as the mammoth and the giant prehistoric reptiles and ponderous mammals have got wiped out as the result of their having begotten cumbersome and obstructive impedimenta and massive bodily structures not in harmony with their environment wherein matter, massive lethargic matter, overburdened and smothered the mind in its evolutionary progress; so will man. the present matter - bound man, be wiped out by his own materialistic progress, his under - exercised brain, his infantile impulses, and his brass hat buffoonery in his piddling, stupid, machiavellian statecraft.
All this is by the way. Wherein then lies the redemption? Man will have to re - think, to reflect, to exercise his brain, to clarify issues and organize a permanent ensemble of eternal values, and learn to act in consonance with the dictates of his conscience. He will have to be reborn with a clear and long range of vision and with proper blinkers that would help to keep away from the sweep of his eyes all those sights and sounds that would serve as impediments to his progress and to the evolution of the true and genuine group - mind of man. Man should be in a position to distinguish “the substance' from mere “moonshine'.
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This truth has to be borne in mind: that man, constituted as he is, has two aspects, namely, the actual and the potential. Man, in his externality is only a mere burlesque, a cheap imitation of the essence of the genuine manhood in him. He is but the shadow of the “rita' - the harmonious and unifying universal principle in him - his organic wholeness by which he is bonded with the totality of existence. He has a potential which is hidden and works from within him; whereas his outer form, the 'shadow' or what is popularly known as the 'actual' works on him. His mind - the principle divine - more often than not, works without words, which are mere conventional signs, not natural, and most inadequate as vehicles or even symbols of thought. Yt works in silence, in the slumbering abyss of matter, and it renders incalculable service to humanity by redeeming it. In the language of Wordsworth: “It is not lawful to inquire from whence this vision sprang as it were a thing subject to place and motion, for it neither approached hithor, nor again departs from hence to some other place; but it either appears to us or it does not. The poet is here adverting to the power of intuition: the inner, deep-seated power of the mind. All intuitions are immediate in their origin; and they have their lodgement in the imaginative faculty of the mind. They "flash upon our inward eye' without the assistance of any mediate form. They are the para - consciousness which, in a sense, is transcendental; that is, residing beyond the reach of time and space and circumstance where there is neither before for after, and where eternity reigns supreme. They are of a world where thoughts subsist divested of words, and they may be qualified by the use of the terminology, immediacy: that is to say, they are notions Iconcepts formed without the intervention of any media. Hence : imagination, immediacy, intuition, original image: this is the order in which original configurations, that is, notions, appear. And all that we put down on paper and image for instance as a streak or a stroke to represent a line, is, only a "shadow' of a line - the “substance' or reality being an “ideal or “potent' or concept subsisting in the imagination. It tends to elude.
Thus we are impelled to hold this assumption that all that we see and taste ars the “images”, the ‘percepts“ of
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the originals that reside in our inner being - the innermost depth of our mind -as concepts. It is, therefore, to be conceded that for every outward or “actual' image we picture in our mind's eye, there is a corresponding "immediacy' or "intuitional form', an essential replica that has its lodgement in our inner being. The immediacy or original intuitional form is the outcome of an act of perfect freedom. It is unconditioned, detached and freo. It is our primacy or original idea. Every primacy in its actual or shadowy form has a form and quantity and quality which we might call its attributes
And attributes beget notions or ideas. It would appear, therefore, that our idea of a thing is no other than the sum total of its attributes. It is unsubstantial and ethereal. When a thing is free, unconditioned and is grounded for its certitude on itself, and has a potential for a total notion of itself, then, it is fully qualified to its status of “oneness'; and, since it has no second, the entirety of the universe or "all - that - which - is' subsists in it.
A “thought' as distinguished from an "idea is a form of “motion. Tin it, action trots from subject to object; it hops from a subjective situation to an objective situation. When it is in this state we call it a “motive'. All of us, so long as we are in existence - and we are fortunately comforted by the notion that we are eternally in existencehave a motive or other which persists froin moment to moment. A motive has a link in a sequence of moments; and when a man does something he is not necessarily governed by a single motive. He is governed by a chain if expansive motives; and no man does anything from a single motive. Thus, our behaviour, and for a matter of that, all animate behaviour, is motivated action. Our thoughts, our mental stirs, even our mental aberrations, our ancient urges, our impulses, supply the motive force, the final energy - follow surfacing in the form of behaviours in living ebjects. All our behaviours, all our actions, are thought - motivated. Each and every one of them has the green - light of a 'thought' - an “intent' -- as its nucleus. It is an ancient event. In the absence of an ancient intent, a primal inherent urge, an inner swell and an upsurge, it is almost impossible to conceive of an action or a behaviour. It has to be assumed that every action,
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every behaviour, every stir in the protoplasmic depths of a being, is grounded, through sheer necessity, on an "intent' - the nucleus of a meaningful quantum of thought. We are, in a sense, a thought-ridden existence. And what a gulf exists between an 'ancient, primal intent' and the 'eternal mind'
The son of man', the “avatar, the “re - incarnation' is the process of the formation of the 'eternal mind'. The mind that sees is no other than the one that has realized the existence of the 'One'. In this process of being, the lower 'craving-to-be' self has evolved into the higher self divested of the 'craving to be'.
A characteristic feeling of separation and utter aloofness prevails in an egotist - a self-centred person. Why is this? He is in a sense a solipsist', for he labours under the mistaken Saotion that he and he alone exists; that the entire world exists for him : to serve him, to please him, to praise him and to extol him. He has no concern with the second person, and he disdains to waste a thought on another person. When a man gets such a feeling, he tends to get himself cut away from the rest of existence. He gets isolated, and is left alone in this world. He persists in maintaining his own singularity and particularity; his own uniqueness. Such a man sports a spurious and presumptuous yogic personality and deceives the world of devotees, who are no other than the deceived and the credulous. Modern civilized man is a lonely wandering star. He tracks himself all aloae in his life's sojourn. He is governed by an expectant mood. His life is open-ended, and craves for experience.
He earns and he spends, he eats, he bibs, and he bowses; and he drinks and he makes merry; he indulges in the linga cult : his carnality; he worships at the altar of downright materialism: he labours, he saves, he hoards, he raves his possessions: his ill-gotten wealth. All of these he does on his own behalf, solely for his own behalf, for his own well-being, for gratifying his own senses. He is a regular bagnio - goer. He is divested of any form of altruism; he lovcs not; his sensations are idle titillations and aberrations of his lower impulses : mere sentimental gushes. He hates; he is a misanthrope. . He is at several removes from nature. I le has his own characteristic shapes of things:
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his dream - world punctuated by his dreamtime : his goldenage. His values have gone awry. The majority of mankind has this egotistic trend in them in some degree or othere The tenor of such a trend may be low, may be high. But whatever the degree may be. it leads to despondence and despair, to inner turmoil and outer restlessness, to depravity and degeneration and frustration. He has become a mindless poltroon. He shall not hope to tread the primrose path of a sweetly mellowing life. He is destined to be all forlorn. Born alone, having suffered the pangs of birth all alone, he goes through life's rough and tumble, coquettes with its ups and downs, thorns and thistles, ruts and bumps, all, all alone, and reaches the end of life, the journey's end with a far - away feeling of remoteness and loneliness, and of having been forsaken. Such a man hasn't a fully evolved mind. He hasn't the fortitude to take life in the rough, in the lust of nature. Having squandered all his youthful energy sowing his wild oats, he is not in a fit condition of mind to face life in the raw. Old age, decrepitude and death greet such as he in all their nakedness and rawness of features, with none to mourn for him when he drops, to shed a tear of anguish and to cast a handful of earth into his grave. How can such a man be redeemed ? The world has turned pale with the sickness of this man. This is the centrat theme that warrants our attention.
Let a man, therefore, seek his salvation through the group mind' rather than all alone. He has to work out his own salvation diligently through the group mind' undergoing in the process severe discipline, spiritual purgation, thereby attaining to the status of whole-ness of nature' : the 'cosmic mind'. Man has to take a decisive step in the right direction. In the words of Bertrand Russel The world needs wisdom as it never needed before. If man should attain it. his new power over nature would offer him prospects of happiness and well-being such as he has never experienced and could probably hardly imagine. But if he fails to attain it, every increase in skill will only throw him further into irreparable misery'.
The venerable experiences of Lord Tennyson are worth being pondered over: “... for more than once
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When I sat all alone, revolving in myself, That word which is the limit of the sclf was loosed, And past into Nameles, as a cloud, Melts into the Heaven. I touched my lumbs, í he
limbs were strange, not mine - and yet no shadow of
doubt But with clearness and through loss of self The gain of such large life as matched with ours When Sun to spark unshadowable in words, Themselves but shadows of the shadow world.’
To free himself from what he called this hundrum existence the Buddha said: let me be thought free. He longed to go out of thought - governed existence : into a state of 'nothingness'. where intent is not, there “nothingness’ is.
THE SUBLIME AND THE RIDCULOUS
THE MIND - EFFECT is most keenly and deeply felt, and surfaces in human beings in two main forms, namely, the fublime and the ridiculous. Sublimity has everything to do with the great and eternal values of life : truth and beauty, love, compassion, and justice. And the ridiculous is no other than the burlesque and cheap imitation gewgaws that we see in life's designs often degenerating to the level of sadism and masochism, stupidity, hatred, envy born of utter ignorance, and murderous and marauding trends, and hard - boiled idiocy, and planned genocide and mass murder - a crazy trend to wade through blood, and to be steeped in a blood bath. Here we are confronted with the ugly aspect and seamy side of the mind - effect of the human species.
Fortunately for Nature, she appears to have given scant prominence to these two aspects of human conduct. In the behaviour of the higher mammals, the anthropoid apes, and of our domestic pets, our cats and dogs, we seldom observe these trends of an opposing nature surfacing to a noticeable degree.
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Taste, as such, which, is the basic element in appreciation, is lamentably and markedly lacking in animal behaviour; at least it appears to be so. Animals are not capable of doing one thing in preference to another. Either it is completely in abeyance in the animals or subsists in them in a very rudimentary form. It has not surfaced to such an appreciable extent as to be observable, measurable and quantifiable by human standards. Admittedly a monkey or a cat or a dog is able to distinguish between the pleasant and the unpleasant; the agrecable and the disagreeable, the bland and the obnoxious. But there is no question of taste involved; it is intrinsically instinctive behaviour, A tiger behaves in a wild and ferocious manner when it sees its prey. Its fury" is not the "anger of the human being. It is instinctive and immediate; not emotional behaviour; whereas man's anger is emotional. There is soline judgement, "re-cognition', and a good deal of passion's low-based stain in it. It is mediate; it is revengeful. And the distinction is noticeable not only in degree but in kind also. But, so far as the humans are concerned, there are distinctions in the kinds of taste, even in the gustatory and olfactory area depending on the nature, intensity and frequeney of the conditioning circumstances. The bitter and the sweet, the sour and the acrid, the caustic and the astringent, the mild and the strong, the agreeable and the offensive are some of the terminologies that man uses to describe the tastes, that he cognizes. Apart from these, there is n multitude of intermediate tastes which the gastronomes are capable of distinguishing. These men are the tasters and testers and “connoisseurs of food, of new products : from chocolate to cigar; fron wine to bubble gum.
In as much as there is a variety of tastes in the gustatory field, there has proliferated a multitude of tastes in modern sex, in fashions in dress, in the status insignia that man flaunts, and a rich variety in food and drinks and inhalations. Volumes have been written on the subject of cuisine, that is the art of cooking. Some of the nations of the world like, for instance, the French and the Chinese, have specialized in the art of selecting and preparing the food to suit a variety of palates. Gourmets have probed into the empire of tastes, and have established kingdoms
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where they reign. On their gustatory qualities they have made pronouncements with an aromatic, often disastrous fanfare blaze of the following type: 'bitter deception'-'offending dishes' - 'a disaster meal' - "controversial gastronomics - a rare exercise in gourmandize’ – la nouvelle cuisine’ – "gargantuan taste'-'appaling concoctions'-'abysmal failures'- bruised wine'-and 'good strong brew'-: All these flagrant, flashy phrases have been used by French gourmets to give forthright expression to the variety of gustatory tastes.
Taste is an expression of the mind - a two - way traffic - an intake and an output. It comprises a perception resulting in a judgement and a re-cognition. The outcome is a gustatory and sense image: a multiple image: like overlapping snapshots. And it needs a good deal of apperception, that is to say, a capacity to judge, to appraise and to appreciate, to “re - cognize' the different shades of taste. The smack of ginger is not the smack of wine; hence the vast range of human gustatory tastes: from the bitter sweet of caramel to the inebriating spirituous fancy breath of pot arrack.
Despite the whole gamut of tastes that have been registered by man's taste buds, and the permutations and
combinations of odours that assail our nose, and the sounds and the sensations that reach our cars, and impinge on our skin, we are not in a position to evaluate our true life's values that are capable of being distilled by
man's higher reflictive faculty. Man's tastes -- gustatory, auditory, visual, olfactory, tactile and kinaesthetic - enable him to pick and choose his food and his drinks and his narcotic weeds - tobacco and canabis, marijuana and opiumin as much as he is in a position to indulge in his sexbased titillations for the satiation of his carnal cravings. Ali of that he calls his enjoyments; and his pleasures are no other than experiences that generally have a low, mean, squalid and mawkish flavour. These experiences are fanciful, and, in the ultimate analysis, they lead but to the ridiculous. Not to anything higher. Some of them are irremediably chimerical. They have helped to prostitute his natural talent: to taste and to understand nature's gifts; and thus they bring about his moral collapse.
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What a vast domain does sex occupy in our religious observances, practices and exercises? Very few of us are aware of this fact. A good deal of our religious austerity, abnegation, self — abasement, self -- castegation, “thapas” and sacrifice, is sadistic and masochistic, and has much to do with the fertility cult and virgin cult aspect of religion. In fact some aspects of our chartered religious organizations have a smattering of faith, a good deal of superstitious egotism, expectation - belief, inaccurate and inappropriate knowledge and faulty understanding. They are sunk in abject carnality, piggish sexuality and a scintillating and piddling social flare. It is a form of “will-to-power' effort on the part of some sects to own harems in the same way as cow-boy capitalists own herds of cattle. It is the stud morality and bordello mentality that stints and reigns Supreme in some people. And even in the name of religion this sort of putrid morality has been sanctioned, cordoned, and has earned the approval of the prophets, divines, yogies, and god-men. And herein come the ridiculous, - the abject, the low and the mean - all perverted tastes: avid tastes galore - into the domain of religion. As for morality and true spirituality there isn't much to speak of in these religions, however powerful and however dominant their adherents may be numerically. There isn't much difference between them and a swarm of marauding ants. Religious organizations that condone the "ridiculous' have been fully divested of their spiritual veneer: their excellence of mind, and their spiritual essence. They have a flare and a penchant for material prosperity and the ensuing happiness and sensuality not only in this world but also in the world to come. They have a framework of religious observances: regular prayers, pilgrimage to places of religious significance, belief in an Almighty God, a sex-based otherworldliness, and charitable deeds which, if they faithfully observe, they think, they have paved their way to heaven and to everlasting life. These religions have a hold on the idiotic, credulous, superstitious and faithful, and make them adhere to them blindly; and thus they deny them the power to see beyond the tip of their nose. More frequently than ever before they lead to the ridiculous rather than to the sublime reasoning power. Thus
ignorance, ferocity and carnality, pride and conceit have had
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their sway in controlling the lives of men. And the tragedy of it all is this, that all this has been done in the name of tradition, and religion, and custom. Their spiritual powers have been proved to be exiguous, tenuous, inadequate and limited; inaccurate, and inappropriate.
The essence of good life, to wit spiritual life, is the recognition of the cardinal values of life, namely: truth, beauty, compassion, love and justice. These are signposts that point to the royal road of the state of sublimity: a state of unconditioted and free existence, unbounded, unt rammeiled, unembroiled and unenthralled. It will have to be posited and accepted in all earnest that when a person gets entangled in any of the prophetic utterances and has an expectant belief' in them, he ceases to be a free man - a rational being; and he fails miserably in his search for that state of sublimitv, that, under normal circumstances, resides in him. It has therefore, to be conceded that a person in a state of nature, free of any religious, caste, cultural, racial allegiances, alliances, bonds and ties, is well on his way to the sublime. And to attain to the 'state sublime' one should necessarily free oneself from the craving to happiness or to find happiness in this world and the world beyond. Man wants to enjoy life with high tension sexuality and excitement. This appears to be his chief concern in life. Having set the goal of life as the securing of happiness and of obtaining the maximum of sexual enjoyment and sense titillations and aberrations of the flesh in all the possible worlds imaginable, man, governed by these idiotic notions and his vanity, goes on winding the snare of desire around himself. And the more he weaves this snare of erotic urges, his intoxicating fleshly tickles, his will - to - possess status symbols, the more he loses sight of the true vision of his sublime existence that all the while indwells indrawn in his inner being, and the more he develops an inveterate prejudice to all things reasonable and just, and gets embroiled in a servile tradition. In short he becomes a slave to cireumsta:ces; and circumstances have outwitted him. Hence he needs extraordinarily be alert. He has a lot to work and catch up on.
In vain have we sought for a meaning in life's design through our high - flying metaphysics, our high -
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faluting age - old, dead moral codes; in vain have we sought for a solution to our lascivious trends, our insatiable greed for, and will to power and endless hankering after possession, in our religious teachings, our dogmatic assertions and doctrines; in vain have we sought for peace and the lodgement of goodwill ln onr hearts - all these efforts we have made in vain, for the mind - effect and matter - effect in us have been rendered disparate and have become sundered; our existence and entity and the oneness of existence have gone out of focus. And the thing we have to do is simply this: we have to learn to lead a detached existencce, that is, to sever our mind so inextricably involved, from the bewitching and bewildering “leela' - the play and burlesque of our senees: our sense - dominated existence; our life dominated by an overruling and overpowering philosophy of sensationalism. And most religions are that. They aim at conformity, regidity, and orthodoxy; hence there is bound to be a taint of “slave morality in them. They deceive, and they get deceived. Deceivers deceive when the occasion is ripe for deception. And priests and politicos have such occasions in plenty. They have always succeeded as deceptors. Honest, they think they need not be, but they should seem to be; religious they need not be, but they should seem to be; they need not be virtuous, but they should appear to be. Dissembling has become their way of life. How often have they shut their hearts against the poor, the needy, the down - trodden and the underprivileged, the waifs and strays, the maimed and the handicapped?
If there be an overruling, over - seeing, monitoring providence, isn't it fooling all of us all the time? Now exalting us to the highest acme of glory, now hurling us headlong into the deepest depth of misery and despondency, degradation. disease, decrepitude and death? How can we proffer our judgements on a thing which we are not conversant with ? On this subject we are constrained to think obscurely and confusedly, and when we attempt to deliberate our understanding gets clouded and befouled.
Man has to search for the mighty potential within
himself: The "purnamidam.' He has to plumb the total situation that he is: to understand the heirloom of the
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totality of existence. He has to have a perfect understanding of his creative will : the mighty potent that it is. As long as he breathes so long shall he cultivate in himself a true sense of appreciation of the marvels of existence by making an idependent, unconditioned and unabashed search for the truth and the beauty, the 'ritha' and the 'satyam, and the truth and harmony and morality and justice that reside in things that surround him and constitute his life's divine circumstance - its milieu. In other words, he has to discover and establish that supreme pre - ordained harmony that through necessity prevails in the entirety of existence.
Despite the fact we are many and existence is plural, in actuality we are one in our potentiality. Says Robindranath Tagore.
“He is the one, luminous creator of all, Mahatma,
Always in the hearts of people enshrined,
Revealed through love, intuition and thought,
Whoever knows him, Immortal becomes.
In the history of the cvolution of human reason. and human thought, and human understanding the subject of "plurality' and “singularity, of existence has proved to be the main watershed. And on this adamantinc and unrelenting ridge have religions got split up into: religions with a plural divinity and those with a singular divinity - both being no other than two diffent ways of viewing the same thing: the “actual aspect' and the "potential aspect. And all the ritualized, established religions of the world, governed by hardboiled bigotry and crippling superstition, have to own through sheer desperation the inadequacy of their cosmology in the light of present-day scientific knowledge and give due recognition not to form and configuration only but to clear, accurate, appropriate and adequate thought, and the sublime truth of existence as well. In the light of this truth, all our petty articles of faith and even our expectant - beliefs and the resultant bigotry have turned out to be colossal failures. Our popular and accepted notions of this life and life beyond, of reward and punishment, of heaven and hell, of Satan and the world of devils, of transubstantiation, of miracles, of happiness and eternal suffering etc. which are brimming over with flashy, picturesque, grotesque and fanciful
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chimeras, and which spawned as they have been by inadequate and inaccurate thinking and notions of the true essence of nature, are, no other than fairy tales and droll stories. The articles of faith, revelations, puranic encumbrances, embroitments and age - old "ahamas' and prophetic utterances and embroilments, fanfares, and spineless morality have to be given a fresh, reasonable, rational and meaningful reappraisal, and, in the light of pure reason and clear understanding, they have to be sorted out and winnowed and the chaff separated from the grain and cast aside. And then in that happy and fortunate circumstance Truth, and TRUTH alone, in all its sublimity shall prevail and Truth's coadjutors shall be BEAUTY and LOVE and JUSTICE. These noble values - Dharmas - alone shall prevail in all main's dealings: neither names nor forms. And the more we adhere to names and forms, ritualism and cffices and institutions, the more we get involved, in puerile notions, in "avidya' and pigheaded ignorance. The greatness of the Buddha, for instance, rests not so much on his person as on the clarity and accuracy and appropriateness of his notions. Neither does, the greatness of the 'sangha' that he founded rest so much on the organization as on its purity and on the purity of
the 'dharma' - the righteous laws that it upheld and ought to uphold.
You are inside your own thought; you cannot get out of it. Says Henri Bergson: “A man who swims will have to build up a resistance in the fluid medium equal to that to which his limbs would have to be accustomed to on land; similarly a man who contemplates and thinks can't afford to remain idle and lethargic without making any efforts at wiful thinking. Should he wish to outgrow his instinctive level of thinking - his hog - tied sensing of his environment - he will have to undo his ties, make a leap, risk his all by force of will, and think out of the ordinary; and it is then that truth will come within his grip. Then he sees; and then he understands the whole truth. And the notion that existence in a state of actuality is-many, and that in a state of potentiality is one has to be fully apprehended. The totality of existence, all - that - which - is", reveals itself in these two aspects to thinking man whose main concern in life is to think, meditate,
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discourse, resolve, conclude and to analyse and clarify life's issues and designs; and whose main instrument of understanding is his capacity to reflect, to sort out ideas, to relate, to correlate, to put thought upon thought, to enable them to cohere and to cognize them; and then to arrive at the heart of the true meaning of existence.
In the emancipation of the mind from the stranglehold of matter it is in this order that the events choose to occur: imagination, fancy, actuality, fact, potentiality, Truth, the whole Truth. It must be conceded that all truths whether they be actual, factual, fancy or potential have their genesis in the image - forming, that is, the image - registering power or imaginative capacity of man: the first entity to be spawned in the mind of man. It often appears in the shape of fancy:a baseless, random, imageless chimera. It has no factual base; - the only factual base is "this' and "that and not the “other' - and it engenders the brood of phantoms and phantasies, illusions, delusions and hallucinations and day - dreams : all airy nothings that dwell in the brain that has gone awry, and become deranged, and whose reasoning powers have been unhinged. In other words it is, in a sense, a temporary state of being abnormal and insano: A condition of suspended intellection, and 'of an attenuated, or dormant, or intercepted or sustained consciousness." A person who dwells too long in mere fancy becomes a fancy's breed, and may be said to have lost his normalcy. Fancy endows upon one a far - away feeling of being transported to worlds other than those which may be considered to be the "actual': the beyond. Coming in the immediats wake of the "fanciful' is the “actual'. This is the world of everyday, common sense experience as it appears to our powers of perception. It is the world of things of which we are able to perceive only the shell or the outer canfiguration. In other words, in normal life, we see only the shadows of things: a fraction of their true intrinsic form: a mangled and flayed, often distorted form. And this is from Kant
By means of sense, objects are given to us, and sense alone provides us with perceptions; by means of understanding objects are thought, and from it there arise concepts.'
When we go a little deeper into the why and the wherefore : the meaning of existence, we get at the factual
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- the forms and entities that the scientist investigates and discovers: his sense data: his "this' and his "that': as revealed to his senses through his instrumental and hypothetical aids. The factual is again only the fag - end, a partial aspect of the totality of things: the true total aspect being the potential: that is the “all - that - which - is, the universality of the universal : the totality of existence : the fulness of being: the perfection that dwells in existence: “purnamadha’. This aspect of things, namely the "factual helps to mortise and annex the "actual' with the "potential'. Both these states, namely the many or plural state and the singular' or 'oneness' state coalesce; and in the ultimate inquiry and analysis and finding what is left is a state of nothingness'. This state is that which was conceived by the ishis of all ages and all climes, and named the "Nirguna' state – the attributeless, the unrelated and the absolute: the immeasurable, the impenetrable, the incomprehensible, the unquantifiable the "not this "not this' and the infinite. Merely paying lip service to the "oneness' of existence by saying it is the one adorable Almighty may not be of any avail. One will have to live the 'life of oneness': integrated existence; and in one's words, deeds and thoughts this noble notion will have to permeate; and it is with temerity that one will have to make oneself bold to pose this notion.
Hence when mind gets liberated from the grip of matter, and matter gets outwitted, it appears to cease to be, and, then, the outcome is an indescribable, attributeless soonya’ - zero state of Nothingness. But yet there persists the total potential in it: an involved and involuted sublime existence 3 perhaps the 'Nirvana' of the Buddha, and the 'Ananda' of the earlier rishis. These are the fruits of contemplation. You may believe them or not.
In the evolution of man's faiths and beliefs, his devoutest piety, - the “bakti” way - these aspects may be noted: myths, superstitions, actuality, facts, hypotheses, scientifically verified data or evidence and potentiality. The mojority of the faithful - and there are far too many of them - ie believers in any faith or creed are content to remain in the first two states, namely the mythical and the
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superstitious. They wallow in fancy and are baktas' that is, they are quite content to have their faith pinned on to the bizarre products of the imagination. They are mostly imaginary forms, and chimeras that infest puranic literature in the form of mythical epic tales, astrological ineptitudes, innocent lies and fairy tales. Hell and heaven, paradise and purgatory, Vykuntham and Kailasam, creator and his creation, Adam and Eve, Satan and his compeers, the last judgement day, rebirth, the person - tainted soul, the gods who are believed to people the celestial orbs: these do admittedly have no factual or even a remotely shadowy base. And all the religions of the world at one stage or another had been or have been steeped in an unshakable faith in these absurdities and enormities. It is through no fault of theirs that they have blundered; and no one is to be blamed for this messy situation. They justly and truly indicate the manner in which man's mind has been hog - tied and sluggishly evolving over the years. Having been ensnared in the inadequate, fanciful, yet poetic notions of the "mighty power' - the "cosmic mind', that Nature in essence is, - mankind came to be steeped in avidya’: downright ignorance. Says Rabelais : “The rabble ef squintminded fellows, dissembling counterfeit saints, demure lookers, hypocrites, pretended zealots, rough friars, buskin - monks, and other such sects of men who disguise themselves like maskersto deceive the world : these mislead the world. And in
their honour the drums shall not be beaten; and trumpets shall not blare.”
Even the so-called worldly-minded men, those with a materialistic trend of life have been dwelling in the world of make - believe created solely by their fancy; and, skilled artisans, though we may conceive them to be, their mind has had matter and matter alone, that is to say material prosperity as its frontier. They are epicures: men who prefer sensual pleasures and are out to taste life in the raw: to lead a life of gilded idleness, to satisfy their sense and sex-based aberrations of the , flesh, to lavish their all on woman and her fleeting charms, on man's youthful yigour, his piddling status and his silly notions of things: his status insignia: cars and wrist watches, and scintillating
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glass of liquor. They are, in no way different from the swine that swill in hog - wash, and wallow in mud, and squelch in mire,
'Those human beings who have a scientific attitude of mind: our Darwins and Wallaces, our Pasteurs, and Newtons, our Guides and Einsteins, our Galileos and Kepiers, have confined themselves to the factual and hypothetical. It is the scientist-philosopher, the seer and the fishi that ha attempted, in true earnest, to penetrate the sheil of existence and has gbne into the domain of the potential to chalk it out, and to stoutly maintain the truth. It is they who have a balanced and integrated and sane view of things. They swerve not from their chalked out path; they stray not. The so-called prophet, the sage, the yogi, the statesman and the saint have plunged themseives into the gloom peopled by chimeras and fancies. Never can they pretend to presage. Their utterances, seldom meaningful, have to be consigned to the maidden. Much more than by any one of his mentors and his preceptors - there are heaps of them these days: political, social and religious - man has to be guided by the rishis' or “scientist - philosophers whose chief concern is the integration of all available facts into a "meaningful whole."
In our preceptors and mentors, their will and their fancy, their inordinate thirst for power and religious fanaticism have superseded their understanding. Insurmountable doubts have encumbered their power of thinking and their deliberations. Their actions are seldom governed by clear, rational ideas, and adequate and accurate notions. In other words, confused notions have peopled and encumbered their thought processes. They have, as it were, been fed on fancy's bread: on outright lies and wicked mental opiates. Whatever I know clearly and distinctly is true,' says Descartes, and his only certitute of existenee is his grand proposition : “I think, therefore I am.” There is much in what he says for thought (mind) has the highest survival value. Since the mind is often times encumbered with the images of physical things, vague and wayward opinions, it is prone to error. “Then there comes to roost falsehood” in it. Sut when mind resorts to unalloyed solid reasoning and seeks for certitude and irrefutable evidence, then it would have
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attained to the state of pure reason, that is to say, tha state in which the mind assimilates to absolute reason. But so far as our normal thinking is concerned, pure or absolute reason is seldom or never current. Its attainment is dependent on the cónsistent and self-subsistent exercise of one's brain : an unconditioned, unceasing mental endeavour, mental exercise - a relentless effort to work, to catch up on: to be seized by an overpowering thought to see, to feel, and to understand. When the veil of Maya is lifted a man sees the One. The world's suffering is his. That is a Hindu thought; and it dominates Christian thinking.
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DISCOURSE - X
MIND EFFECT AND MATTER EFFECT
SINCE there is no better proof of existence than one's realization of one's own existence grounded on the notion: “I am"; and since one is becoming increasingly and progressively aware of it, through self-actualization, the existence of the totality of existence' is centred in one's being' (sathyam) or existence. In other words the centre of all existence is one's awareness of oneself. It is the pivotal point on which revolves the whole of what is often called Nature or the Universe or the totality of - existence. The realization of one's existence, that is, the fact of increasingly and progressively knowing that one is. that is “minding' is a supremely creative act. It is the tentacular projection of the ever-widening, ever-wakening "greater awareness' that inheres in man who is of a piece with nature. We are intuitively and introspectively, though not demonstrably, aware of our existence. We just have a feeling' that we exist. Hence this intrinsic artist's feeling has been designated “creative realization' for, the more man comes to know of the rest of Nature, the more he creates his own 'cosmos'; and, the more he creates his own cosmos; the more his knowledge of the universe and the "totalityof-existence' grows. This is an evolutionary process: a process involving eternal progress resulting in the harmonious emerging and unfolding of the immediate and the ultimate. There subsists a soul-satisfying harmony in Nature, (rtam) - a "sara asara visva roopin,' (the moving and the unmoving universal form) - a deeply felt motion and a rest. Admittedly "minding is a vast thought, a novel notion, often tantalizingly enigmatic, eminently satisfying, but tre- ? mendously difficult to catch on. It is this: The birth of the creative moment is the 'cause' : expectation of all
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creative artefacts. The creative moment is the "minding process. It is a comminging of feeling, thinking and willing: to wit acting. It is action in progress.
In relation to time, minding' - the awakening process - has neither the past nor the future. It is in the process of becoming and seldom having become'. It just is; and is rooted in eternity where time does neither rise nor set. Governed by the universal law of uncontrollable necessity, mind has earned the predication: “being : the eternally continuing present. Hence, it is not prudent to ask such questions as these : When and where did mind begin? Who created it? Why was it created? Who sustains it? When will it, cease to be? Aren't these mere irrelevant idle interrogatories? A habit of asking questions?
It is the act of the “will to exist that replicates the 'I' and converts it into the state of “I am." Then the it has relative existence. Then it exists in time and in space, and is grounded on itself. It is oriented in time and set in space. In other words; it has time relationship, and space relationship. It is an emergence, an immanence and a progression. In time and space reside. 'annam' and prana"-- matter and motion. (prana: breath of being: motion) What the great Greek father of science, Archimedes, has asserted is perfectly true : “Give me natter and motion and I will design for you the universe.’ And Descartes has bodied forth the very same notion. Matter and motion are the welft and the warp of that master design that goes by the same of the universe or "all-that-which-is”.
In the fundamental notion: "I am, an act inheres, and that is the “will' - the "will to be' - the sith: the “minding process;' that is the process of , becoming mind." In this notion what is implied is this: the subject: the primary existence, objectifies itself, and becomes a disparate existence. The primary existence : the fundamental truth is "I". Ontologically it is no other than the unrelated “I’. Since it has no related existence it has all-that-is implied in it; and it is in a sense "nothingness.' For, in our everyday language and pragmatic matter of fact treatment of things, a thing exists so long as it has another
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thing in existence to relate it with. And, so long as a thing exists in itself” and is un related, disjointed, unconditioned, “windowless', unfathomable and absolute, and has no other thing to relate its existence with, and bear witness to its presence, it is something similar to "nothingness: no existence." : "nirguna' state. Even in our attempt to explain its unique position, and in our use of the word similar', we have related the thing, and, in consequence, the thing has lost its uniqueness. To all inteats and purposes, in terms of the world of practical values, which is a world of relationships, it, ie, the unrelated thing, is almost next to "nothingness.' What the sage has said is O contradiction in terms: "gâ6 gill Drtti, d.6itat gildrful' - that which is “non-existent and that which is “existent. Both aspects, though they appear to be contra, are inherent in existence. What Hume has said is meaningful: “There is an internal and an external world' - a subjective and an objective way of viewing existence : ie viewing things with a subjective reference and an objective reference.
Mind, dwelling in the untainted, unindented and unpunctuated, slotless and scaleless present, bas no problems, no involvements of any kind. It is pure, unsullied and free. But, when “minding' gets involved in the dead past of existence in its memories, in its unborn future trends, and even in its possessiveness and its craving for power, it loses its purity; it loses its freedom, and it gets ensnared in what are called worldy problems, that is to say, life's kinks, knots and attachments. In such a state the mind becomes tainted, and may be designated as the “mind of man. It would follow, therefore, that the 'mind of man” is intrinsically mind in bondage, and has an instability of purpose, and is ever-changing. In this stage it has lost its pristine and intrinsic purity, neutrality and freedom. In other words, it has been conditioned. It has been clinging to life voluptuously. Its ancient, eternal nature has been completely marred. It has no other choice, but like a silkworm, it has got entangled and imprisoned, ensnared and enmeshed in its own cocoon of the past and the future; its apparent successes and failures, its apparent hopes and imaginary fears, its dream-like expectations and aspirations: in brief: in time's embroilments. These 8e Käe9
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passing phases of the mind that has swerved away from its path of the eternal present. In this condition of the entanglement of the mind in the past and the future it is in a state of 'sin', for which there appears to be no palliation. He, who repents of an action is doubly wretched or infirm." (Spinoza.) The only undeniable, crystalclear fact of existence being the present, wherein all our past is stored and the future nascent, and not yet a reality, it passes one's understanding why the generality of mankind has got caught to the messy situation of the past that is dead and the future that is yet to be born, having paid scant attention to the living present. Having hitched his waggon of human existence to the past on its aft, and to the future on its fore, or, to vary the metaphor and make it more effective: having been caught between the anvil of the past and the hammer of the future, man has invited upon his head, what might appear to be, many a crushing blow, many an insoluble problem. Man's behaviour and his mode of thinking have been governed by inveterate, formidable prejudices, and oceanic feelings. “A free man thinks of nothing less than death; and his wisdom is a meditation not of death, but of life." (Spinoza) He has no beliefs. His past and his future are grounded in his beliefs. The ground of belief is contained, so thinks Hume, in one's constant association of impressions, and perhaps fancies.
Although it has been assumed, and conclusively proved that mind and matter are two aspects of the one and the same entity, and that they are destined and intended to lead to the state of spirituality, yet, in their effects, that is to say, in their manifestations, they appear to be two distinct phenomena of nature. The "matter effect appears to the mind of an untrained and an unscientific observer to be passive, “thamasic', and static, slumbrous and torpid, the mind effect is, no more no less. than unceasing motion and action : "rajasvic' - karmic. It is the process of minding. Chemicals appears to act and react on one another producing the numerous changes that we observe taking place in nature; and physical effects like heat, light and sound, magnetism and electricity, x-rays, gamma rays, gravity and other numerous forces in nature, are, again
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suggestive of an unending and unceasing, ever-propagating, ever, progressing mode. There is motion in nature: a ceaseless harmony: incessant motion. And, matter, whether animate or inanimate, is rich in motion: a motion that appears to have no beginning and no end. It is the eternal vibration: animation, : minding, that inheres in all nature: in all objects of all thought. "goSilo Git 65g Liga).LD 5rcio aligos'. S. Barathi. It inheres in the atom; it inheres in the entire totality of effects - the universe. Is it possible to rebut this grand notion? But here arises a very important question: Why is this motion? And how did it originate? This “minding' has to be cognized. It is in all probability resurgent matter-emerging in “something more' : in creativity.
And one thing must be clear in our mind. It is this:- the "motion that is the matter effect" is distinct (so it appears) from the motion that is the mind effect. The mind of man' appears to differ from the "mind of the animals' in that it possesses, or at its best, it seems to possess the urge and the craving to know, and to under. stand. It seems to be as different as chalk from cheese. It wills, it wants, it decides, it prefers. In short, it creates. Nature in her effort to realize her true potency, the power of her being, becoming and having become' process, has come to a stage where all her efforts have resulted in the thinking or reflecting capacity of the mind of man. speech a d reflection separate man from the brute."
And then the question poses : What next 2 How will the mind of man, gifted if anything with the property of refection, ie cogitation, continue to evolve? In the process of the evolution ie harmonization and consonance of the “mind of man', nature has perhaps achieved a perfection which is destined to lead to a still higher state of perfection through the awakening process of selfactualization: human understanding, human reasoning, and human intellect. The Zen view is that enlightenment or realization is sudden and absolute, and may assume the form of an ecstatic breakthrough or calm awareness. When a condition of "wholeness' prevails in the eternal movement that the mind intrinsically is, then there emerges a new notion.
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Since the process of human understanding is a formidable poser, a thorough analysis of the mental process of knowing and understanding will help man to put to right his behaviour in relation to other human beings and the other existences found in nature: the minerals, the trees, the animals and the stars. What we see and feel and smell and taste are only our sense percepts: our sensibilities. And our sensations, constituted as they are of our habits, our expectations and interpretations and primary and proximate sense impressions, our feelings of relief and hope help form our fuzzy, faint, fugacious, autistic thoughts and fluid impressions. They form the ground of our sense impressions. They are “floating images' or “sense-data' that pause, as it were, in the focus of our consciousness for one moment, and go out of it at the next. We will call them "floating notions' or impermanent concepts. Such imperfect notions, vague, nascent and ill-formed, must have peopled the mind of Homo habilis - the certifiable human.
Of course such fleeting confused notions: fuzzy and fluffy, fanciful and faint, have not become full-fledged concepts that carry a fuller meaning and a deepar significance to the experiencer. They are evanescent, mere flimflam, and have no solid base. They help to feed our imagination and form the images and the repertoire of our sense impressions : “impression constellation' ie group of impressions. These form the raw materials or the basic elements of the mind-stuff. They are the immature, ‘inadequate or false ideas” of Spinoza. They are mere incoherent, inapposite, floating images. They are vague and disjointed, and as meaningless as a 'dream dreamt by an idiot.' Our emotions and passions, our feelings and sentiments, our belief in an ultimate cause, and in acts of will, our notions of an uncaused cause, our autistic morbidity: these are all of this category of "inadequate ideas,' that mask our pure intellect: our instinctive capacity to know. In toto, they may be likened to a house of honour that has been dismantled and is waiting to be restructured, or has been restructured into a disjunctive penthouse.
Our language is replete with tardy words and phrases that signify these false notions: the outcome of
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our raw, incomplete and ill-organized and ill-conceived thinking. Mind' is one such bungled thought. It is no other than effects and actions. It is compounded of “deeds,' Meditations and Intuitions. All our supertitious ideas and faiths and beliefs are bizarre, blurred, bungled and inadequate montal images that oftentimes cling on to the outer fringe of our totality of well-thought out, closely knit, reasoned, ratiocinative notions, and form a mask of inadequate ideas. They are adsorbent, seldom absorbent. They seldom commingle; and they fuse not. They come not within our chemistry of thinking. They are the outcome of our habits, assorted beliefs, and convictions. They hang like motes in the sun beam. They impede our thinking process and very frequently plunge us into the depths of melancholia, mental depression, despondency, and morbidity, that are characteristic of tille experiences of those who aro burdened with borrowed faiths and beliefs and inadequate and disjoined, mystical and fragmentary notions. They are not “false" in the true sense of the word. They are there as psychic events, but they fail to cohere in our reasoning complex: our Gestalt. They fail to harmonize: they mortise not. They fuse not into a "whole' - a meaningful notion. They are hazy and fuzzy, and vague; and they lie outside the pale of our adequate or "consonant notions." They are incosistent and sporadic and are the bases of our morbid experiences and actions: like illusions, delusions, hallucinations, dreams, “sopanas', phantoms, imaginary fears, chimeras; and morbid emotional states of mind such as: anger, jealousy, envy; and negative emotional states: like malice, short temper; itates of dejection and depression, mental oppression; unreasonable, inappropriate behaviour, delinquencies and indecent conduct, biased notions, selfish motives, petty and narrow sentimentalism, fanaticism, inordinate pride in one's caste, creed, racial heritage; meaningless hatred of other ethnic groups, narrow nationalism, crude parochial notion of racial purity and racial superiority, notions of a true or false god, inordinate pride in one's language, literature, social heritage, place and social status. All these are emotion-tainted images, unwholesome aberrations of the mind. They invade our inner fortress, and assail our inner being': our true self. They are all violent prejudices; 2-lungsgir. They form the rock-bottom of our
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pseudo-sciences and bastard arts, like astrology and necromancy, palmistry and numerology, divining and soothsaving. our sorcery and our taboo." (See J. G. Frazer's “Golden Bough”)
More frequently than not our inadequate notions have a nucleus of unfulfilled desire, unsatiated titillation or will to power, and they sink into our self, and, in fact, form the subconscious "minding'. These unfulfilled desires, urges and itchings of the flash become the seed of all our neurotic states of mind. Disconnected as they are from our wide-awake consciousness and clear intelligence: the totality of our well-organized, well-bonded, rational, consistent and reasoned notions: they become the ground of all our morbid states of mind: our neuroses, our manias, our manic depressions, our phoebias, our madnesses and our meaningless behaviour. Most of us are distraught in one sense or another; at one stage of existence or another. In our everyday life we exhibit some peculiar craze-trend of behaviour which is an indication of the presence of some undigested cranky notion, or an unfulfilled desire, that has become part and parcel of our subliminal self: the unconscious.
All our efforts relating to a state of mind whereby we seek for the causes of our troubles in external events like the stars and the planets, the fates, the “moving-finger that writes and having writ moves on,' in evil portends, in the uncaused cause, in evil spirits etc. are all tainted with superstition; and they entail an unhealthy and confused state of mind. In such a state of confusion our stock of well-bonded adequate ideas may be said to have dwindled to a minimum, and we might be said to be at the mercy of a "wayward fancy' that misleads us.
Despite the fact we have a rare capacity to adapt means to ends, to relate and correlate events, these abnormalities have tended to make our life apparently insecure, and, have, of necessity, turned into an engine for the promotion and advancement of ecclesiastical power and yogic stunts such as transcendental meditation, clairvoyance, levitation, transmigration, telepathy, thought-reading, astroiogy, and numerology. It might be said without any shadow of
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doubt that inadequate and fragmentary notions form the stock-in-trade of our spurious yogis, brim-full of pretences, our god-men, our miracle-mongers, our kaddadiyas", our “shamans', our ostentatious teachers of religion and of the “vedas", our poltergeists and our self-styled "gurus." These men who are the curse of a well-ordered, sane, human society, have not only laid siege to the mental stage of their followers, but have taken them along the path of confused and improper thinking, illusion and outright deception : the outcome of shoals of fluctuations of the mind-stuff.” Patanjali.
How much of our everyday language is suggestive of our inadequate, confused and frivolous thinking At every turn of our life's sinuous path we are confronted with expressions denoting these inadequate notions: our raffish knowledge of the lnfinite. Our chemistry of animate matter and that of human understanding have to be sorted out and revised. Some such instances are : free will, divine will, “thy will be done", fate, destiny, “what has to happen will happen”, bad times, “the stars willed it”, “born unde an evil star', the fault is in our stars, there is nothing that one can do', 'it is all His will" etc. Every one of our successes and failures, our sufferings and sorrows, our misfortunes and mischances we attribute to some external unknown, unfelt, unidentified, supernatural cause or other. It may be a distant star, or a planet, or a constellation, or a zodiac; it may be the divine will; it may be one's baneful times; it may, even be, an evil spirit or one's neighbour and his supposed evil designs, incubuses, and intentions, and evil eyes; it may be some charm, some evil incantations, some creature of evil omen: an owl, or a crow, or a halcyon, or a lizard, or a black cat; it may be the birth of one's child under a certain zodiac: an ill-starred new arrival. What are all these but the outcome of disconnected, disjunctive thinking? Of constant association with fools and dupes? Of defective reasoning? Of habit and of being constantly conjoined with some belief or faith?
SUPERSTITIONS generally have had their genesis in fears and feelings of insecurity, caused by surrounding
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circumstances such as epidemics, famines, inclement vicissitudes of weather and climate; ravages of pestilence, cyclones, volcanic eruptions, earth tremors, floods, unforeseen future, and other similar natural calamities which have been given a supernatural twist: a mystical significance, by wicked
man governed by a wicked intent to subdue and lord it over others.
Even educated persons, university dons and professors, our leaders of nations, our yogis, our mentors, our heads of religious organizations, our priests, and our rulers, persecuted by what they consider a relentless fate, have made common cause with superstition, and are no other than layer upon layer of mere sense. impressions and incoherent ideas. They are all sandwiched with alternate layers of sense and nonsense. They are miserably lacking in a wholesome life's vision: a coherent philosophy of life, and a clear prevision. They are truly partisan thinkers; self- complacent beings. They have a formidable collection of tales concerning ghosts and goblins, fairies and witches, brownies, will - ofthe - whisps, jack-o-lanterns, warlocks, and spunkies, wraiths and elf candles, apparitions and giants, ogres and cantrips, haunted houses and sacrificial "homas', where wicked ginii appear; widow sacrifice, child sacrifice, buckmunas' 'sakumundams, poochandies', 'hoonyams', and other idle terrors. It is no wonder why those who were supposed to hold commerce with these Cerie notions of the idle imagination were dubbed witches and medicine men, and caught and burnt alive by others who were plunged in superstitious and religious beliefs.
Instead of seeking within himself the true ground of his troubles and calamitics, man tends lazily to shift the entire blame on these supposed external agencies which are, most of them, mere figments of his imagination, and idle fancies engendered by stale - grown custom. This is a sure indication of the fact, that in his way of thinking he has gone awry and has been burdened with a heavy load of superstitious notions, the main source being his ill-conceived religion, his caste and his class, his stupid idea of aCC and nation. He has got caught to this mely mire of inadequate, incipient, idolatrous ideas: and, ideas, in the
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mojority of cases, are confused perceptions: a medley of mental events, that mislead and misguide. From childhood upwards," Says Bertrand Russel, "everything is done to make the minds of men and women conventional and sterile." Creativity, originality and initiative have been Scotched and cauterized, and innovation botched.
Placed as he is in this perilous predicament of losing the best that Nature intended man, and in fact the entirety of Nature to evolve into, man has an awsome responsibility to run the risk of incurring the odium of the populace and seek to discover the Truth for it is nonpartisan and untainted by prejudice, and has to seek to rid himself of this smothering burden of the past and the crunching burden of the future. Hasn't man eaten his corn while it was grass? And doesn't he, more often than not, suffer from a griping colic? Hence what man is in need of, is, pure reason - he should be guided by it. That is the remedy: the only efficacious remedy: to be led by rationality And man seldom, if ever, accepts this remedy.
Take a simple instance: a common occurrence Sucha as a funeral. Let man, when he dies, be given a simple funeral. Dig a grave, lower his corpse into it, and consign it to mother earth just as you would do with the carcass of a dog or a cat or any other animal. Cramp not the occasion with your stupid funeral rites, and empty funeral orations, and don't follow it up with your hollow tommyrot obsequies. Sing not his praise in your empty boast. Your verbal utterances, in however well-formed a prose or decorative verse they be, can never hope to match the mvriad tongues and voices that tril) aod chirp their eternal dirge in Nature's forms, in honour of the dear departed. Your dirges and your odes can never come anywhere neaf the word of wisdom that has already been designed by nature to be spouted on Buch a solemn occasion. Hence weep not that your dear one has departed this life, andf wail. not that the event has left a void in the plenitute of your being. The "existence' remains perfection well rounded off in its rotundity despite the fact that something appears to have been wrenched out of it. Why then demur. On such a demure occasion let this be your true wish and
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sincere prayer. Let perfection and harmony prevail, for: “poornam : idha : - poornam " adham’ - the invisible is the 'whole', the visible too is the “whole'.
The tragedy of adult human behaviour in relation to the children, of today who are to become the sane - thinking and reflecting citizens of tomorrow, is, that the adults, whosoever they be; be they parents or be they preceptors, be they administrators or ruders, be they politicos or demagogues, be they "gurus' or 'sadhus' or mentors; in whatever capacity they act, they foist their own brand of outmoded or even newfangled notions, unbaked, mouldy thoughts, their fiddle - faddle, ill-formed opinions: groundless, impractical beliefs and faiths, convictions and professions, and customs the fruit of indolence, blindness and deliberate chicanery on the plastic minds of their children; and in their tender age, lay siege to their mode of thinking and behaving, and thus condition, them very early in life, and give then very little opportunity in life to reflect and to think clearly, to act reasonably and rationally under self-imposed ethical constraint - not, niggling religious restraints, - to understand in the way that mother Nature intended them, to and get to a prevision of life. Thus the human race : in whatever clime, in whatever environment: whether it be the scientifically advanced West or the so-called spiritually advanced East, which it certainly is not; whether it be the deepest depths of the jungles of the Dark Continent, or of New Guinea or Tierra del Fugo or the frozen vastes of the Antarctic or of the Arctic Tundras: has been totally besieged, machine-made, murdered, enslaved, oppressed by layer upon layer, stratum upon stratum of muddled notions dished up in the form of obsolescent rituals by self-seeking priestcraft. Man's reasoning powers, his clear understanding and his pure intellect have been smothered and strangled by heaps and heaps of reflexes, by his subsistence level anxieties of getting sufficient food, clothing and adequate shelter; by carelessness, lethargy and in attention by custom - burdened feelings, and habits; his progress retarded and the even flow of the si clear current of human - thought most pathetically impeded. Is there no hope of man over getting out of this sad, pickle? Can't he swim into the ocean of benignity and talent? ... Enough of this fidding.
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All his life, man tends to go madly in quest of occasions when he can just jabber and chat and gossip and be in possession of fragmented ideas. Seldom has he the chance to reflect, to analyse, to sort out his ideas, to collate them, and make them cohere and form the body of confirmed scientific knowledge that shall help to lay all his turbulent passions at rest," to form his attitude to Nature, to Society, to his own existence. This will form the core of his intellect. Whether it be a pauptial or a funeral, a mourning or a festival: the attainment of puberty of his daughter, a jubilee or a Jayanthi, a religious occasion or the inauguration of a business concern, the annual celebration of an institution: the occasions are generally and invariably marked by a good deal of cackling and cajoling and cacophony - empty profitless gossip, and the maiming of the spirit, and the befuddling of the senses with liquor. Man has got so much accustomed to this ill - organised, splintered and disorderly pattern of life that he has lost sight of the sublime glories that he ought to have known and seen, and the "imperial palace" he is destined to reach - the domain of pure and serene thought. Man is no more 'a fallen angel but a risen animal." R. Robertson. Isn't it high time that he orders his way of life in a manner that he might work wholeheartedly towards getting to a truer and more meaningful vision of life; that he abandons his narrow religious and racial interests, other - worldly opium and zeal which are necessarily divergent and are mutually hostile?
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DISCOURSE-XI
MAN'S DEAS OF FREE WILL AND OF MORALTY
MAN'S ideas of “free will' and of “morality" are time and time again bound and wrapped up and concealed in beliefs, faiths, prosy pedantry, superstition and idolatry. So long as man is caught in the entanglements of time and circumstance, the notion of “free will is a myth. Governed as he is both mentally and physically by the innumerable laws of nature, his existential tellationships and references, and affinities, propensities and impulses, mainly his instinctive drives; and, since he is of a piece with Nature, he might not be said to possess that faculty called “free will'. His deliberate actions, his behaviour and his deliberations have all been invincibly and irrevocably determined by, and are deducible from Nature's laws and life's circumstances. There are the internal psychic laws, physiological laws, laws of heredity and genetics, his personal morality, his private excellence, his 'engrams' - memory-traces -, his autisms, and the numerous external physical laws and civic morality that determine man's pattern of behaviour and his mode of thinking. These are the laws of internal determinism and those of external determinism. And man is, in no sense, perfectly free to have acted otherwise, placed and conditioned as he is in a particular set of ambient circumstances. Like Gulliver in Lilliput he has been physically besieged and pinned down to actuality. Paradoxically, though born free, yet he is in chains.
Let us take an instance. The lightning has struck a person and killed him. It would be improper to construe it as an act of the Divinity. If we do so we are equating Nature and Divinity. It is a physical event just as much
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as this: When you put a piece of cotton wool near a flame, it catches fire. It is not a mere chance. It has happened through necessity.
Governed as we are in our mode of thinking, by our "stockpile' of floating ideas, by our habit of dove - tailing causes into effects, we are prone to assign causes not necessarily related td an immediate contiguous event - a proximate cause - but to a thing distant, blurred, fuzzy and hazy: never known, never knowable, seldom inferred; never felt, and, probably never in existence. Our 'fate' and destiny, and “divinewill' 'Dongp6&or', 'divine flow” are of this category of flashy notions and groundless beliefs.
Even in our law caurts the usual inclination of the learned judges, the dispensers of justice, is, to take the path of least resistance, and to give grand - fatherly admonition to the unfortunate offender in the hackneyed, empty formula: "You could have, and ought to have, averted that ugly situation; and, in that case you would not have committed that dastardly act.' It will have to be admitted, that in most cases, the judge would have been woefully ignorant of the psychic state of the offender, He would not have been aware of the internal circumstances, the deeply embedded trends, “engrams', the instinctive and impulsive urges and motives that had determined the offender's act. In fact, the offender could not have acted otherwise. In short, he could not have planned a vigorous onslaught on his innate impulses and trends, and have escaped the situation and acted differently. Thus the inadequacy of the knowledge of a judge in respect to the inner urges of a person indicted, is, more often than not, appaling; for his ignorance of the surrounding correlated circumstances, both internal and external, in relation to the offender, is profound. That is how it is. It could not possibly have been helped. This does not mean that every offence has to be condoned, and every offender pardoned, absolved of his erime and set free. The ideal way in which the offender ought to have been dealt with is, that he should have been made to understand the true nature of the situation in which he was placed, when he committed the crime, so that he might have a clear rational and well-reasoned idea of it.
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What are the necessary ingredien's required for proper human understanding? Or knowledge of the established laws of the land, of our orthodox moral laws like the laws of the Talmud, the Torah, of the Old and the New Testaments, of Mani, Manu and Confucius is not going to make us normal human beings. A sound knowledge of the laws of Nature, that govern our thinking process and our behaviour, a totality of wellthought out clear notlons, in short, a clear intellect, intelloction, an untrammelld attitude to existence is, our prime need. We are sadly lacking in scientific knowledge, in judgement existence, that is to say, of the explanation of events as deducible from the laws of nature. We may be rich in 'unwarranted metaphysical deductions' wrapped up in mystery: in judgement of values, but yet we may have poverty of thought : Only an assortment of felings. Our ordinary hates and loves, our desires and aversions, our possessiveness and craving for power, have o logical and scientific nexus with our body of well thoughtout clear notions which forms our intellect. We talk of self-improvement, self-evolvement, individual excellence, pargs of conscience, and, in our effort to be better men and women, we make an emotional appeal to the sentiment that attaches to our parentage, our birth, our heritage, our land of birth, our rank, our social standir g, our Status, our family tradition, our religious persuasion, our school tie, and so on and so forth. But, these, so long as they have an emotional smear, and a sentimental base, are inadequate notions, and hocus-pocus, and lead to crass ignorance, darkling superstition, and blinding idolatry. Our persona problem can only be solved through a clear understanding of our true nature, our infinite totality, our temperamental idiosyncracies, our living hopes, our dying fears, - ou limitations - the nature of our surrounding, and of Nature in her manifold forms in which they influence us: the evocative COSMOS and its manifold vexations.
The main concerns of man, or for a matter of that, of any living entity, are : self preservation, self-maintenance and self-expansion, to wit, self-actualization: (swa-vrtti): selfemergence. Man has to preserve himself and his five wits, his artist's impulses, his creative craving, his creative impulse, so that Nature may work out her destiny through
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him, and seek to move on and on to a never-ending catena of adequate meaningful events, perfect in the circumstance to which they appear to be related. It is Nature's tacit unfulfilled intention that man should go on progressing, moving from what might appear to be a condition of lesser “well-being' to a condition of greater well-being'. This condition of progression (virtti) takes man, to the state of 'self-maintenance' and 'self-expansion, and self-realization, for which purpose man needs laws. Says St. Thomas Aquinas: "Every law framed by man bears the character of a law exactly to that extent to which it is derived from the law of nature. But if on any point it is in conflict with the law of nature, it at once ceases to be a law; it is mere perversion, of law". It has to be caustically trounced.
Só far as man’s activities are concerned, he has become far too ambitious, and has more or less moved in the wrong direction. Egged on by a fool-hardy spirit of adventure, he should not have invaded the icy wastes and the parching deserts, dived into the abyssal depths, conquered the topmost crests of mountain ranges, penetrated the tangled Tropical rain forests, set his foot on the moon, and sent missiles to the reighbouring planets, and thereby increased his knowledge of not only his earthly environment, but also of the neighbouring satellites and planets, and explored the earth's environmental conditions so that he might live comfortably and in affluence, and preserve himself, not his wits and his wisdom, and propagate his species far in excess of what his natural environment can afford to maintain. By the turn of the present century his numbers might get doubled, and, then, having exploited Nature in a short-sighted and selfish manner with the aid of his malformed knowledge, he would have dug his grave and brought to an inglorious close the story of man on earth. From the cradle to the grave man's story appears to bs one of gnashing of teeth, of unceasing grumbling, and of endless lamentation, and eroding frustration. The law of Malthus will certainly operate. It is high time that man made a reasoned study of the external laws of Nature that have conditioned his life, and his internal laws: his interiority, i.e. his inward: his own maxims and ethical constraints. His knowledge of science in itself inadequate
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has, in a way, become an obsession and a hindrance to his true progress. Nature intended man to understand her laws if existenoe, her intrinsic unfulfilled tacit intentions and designs; and not to blindly exploit her wealth, encroach upon her preserves, even if the methods employed are of a scientific nature. Main has made all possible efforts to preserve his species and to maintain it against very heavy odds. But, he has failed miserably to preserve his species, in that he has almost failed to work towards “self-expansion', selk-improvement and self-realization. He has become imprudent and inconsiderate. He is on the retrogressive move from the status of Homo sapiens to that of H. Habilis : from wisdom to skill.
The time has now come for man to recede, to cry halt to all forms of destructive exploitation, to put a stop to his fast increasing population; and to expand in the direction of the true evolution of the mind of man: that is, towards an awakening understanding of himself and his relationship with the rest of his environment, to wit, his gthics of existence. Don't 75% of the world's people live in squalor and povertv ?
Among the numerous phenomena of Nature man has the greatest and the most complex and individually constituted of impulses, propensities, emotions, sentiments; percepts and concepts and intellect. There comes into his experience a very wide variety of external circumstances that influence his behaviour. They enrich his life. They are his “anubhavas'. "From experience all our knowledge is founded, and from that it ultimately derives itself. (Locke) Locke rejects innate ideas. Man is rich in feelings, rich in action, rich in thought. He is conscious of his mind-power. He is high-minded. He has his judgement of existence and his judgement of value. Not so the animals. Their social life is mechanical, precise and static'. The fabric of MAN'S body is a very intricate and complex structure. "Passion is that which dwells upon pleasure', says Patanjali. It tends to mislead. Not so pure reason. Man can get impulsive ideas which have sense-data and an imagination base. They are confused, fragmentary and false notions. They are generally disjointed; superstitious in their effect and idolatrous
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in their aspirations; seldom or never deep-based, and efficacious. They are in a state of disarray. They do not contribute to thO evolution of an ever-widening, everawakening state of well-being. His energy and his accumulated power get frittered away when he indulges in low, sordid, mean and worthless predatory activities. His impulsive and emotional behaviour patterns or modes and his scientific obsessions are the curse of his life. They tend to lead him astray and take him away from the path of total wellbeing : benignity and sublimity. Sadly lacking in prevision and true reason (dharsan); he is like unto a sheep that has strayed away from the flock and has been deprived of the guidance and protection of the shepherd. And now to Man's knowledge: Where does it dwell ? His past is forgotten. The present is mere perception-nothing else. His future is open-ended and he has to stake it on a gamble. If that be so, wherein resides his knowledge 2 How far is it valid? He knows next to nothing. He knows only one thing with certitude. And that is : that he is. He has a vague consciousness of his being'. Of course common sense he has; and "science is no other than extended common sense'
Man’s faiths, beliefs, convictions; his religious professions, opinions, impressions; his obsessions, concealed dogmas, his pedantry and dry-as-dust metaphysical ineptitudes and preachment are, mostly matters that come under the category of "inadquate' and confused and borrowed ideas with an imaginative, seldom a deep-seated, coherent base. When we are under the overall influence of these floating ideas we lack woefully in indepth understanding We hear voices; and we are insane. Our public and private judgements have been put into disarray; our sensorium completely muddled and messy. They are mere accretions and disjecta membra : false fragmentary notions. They form one’s mental lumbor. They are disjointed, and they seldom cohere, since they are not deducible from the laws of nature. In brief, they are not the ou'come of a sincere effort and exercise on our part to sort them out logically, and classify them scientifically. They are not scientifically deduced notions; and they form the rubbish heap of our being'. Most of our faiths and beliefs, the traditional and cultural base of our nationhood come under this category of unvarified,
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untested, borrowed knowledge. They form the body of our incomplete, uninvestigated, readily and haphazardly accepted notions that have been foisted on us by our elders, our religious teachers, our school masters, out obsessed scientists, and in short our under-developed, idiotic society. What is popularly known as our social ethics i.e. heritage, is nothing but disorderly, discordant, niggling impedimenta, that every so often mislead us and misguide us. They have to be treated with lenity, and kept out of our 'wholeness of being' -- our 'One'.
All these inept notions have made undue and unlawful incursions into our being'. They are the accumulated opiate of ages; the lethal venom that lying on the periphery of the aura of clear thinking have sought entrance into our “Being and impeded its progress. They are, in a sense, indoctrinations and impregnations which we have assimilated and ingested quite unconsciously. They have thus retarded the evolution of our mind. Most of, in fact, all of our human ills and problems, are the emergence of these unwanted, flimsy notions, that unfortunately have complete control of our normal conscious behaviour, and determine it. Haven't we been enthralled by authority and superstition? And aren't we in the tight grip of idolatry? Aren't our religions largely bundles of superstitions? False ideas, and false notions, and inept beliefs? - largely myths? And isn't our standard of life and of morality : our ethic, largely governed by mere mass media advertisements, and tinsel splendour in talk and behaviour - mere: pretence?
Hence what is wanted in human life is a clear, unsullied knowledge of one's "being process' as an object in nature. On the one hand one should have a relatively thorough and scientific knowledge of Nature in its varied aspects as a single cohering system, and a scientific, that is systematic knowledge of one's own “nature' : that is of one's inherent impulses, sensations, one's fleshly limitations, appetitive inclinations, instinctive drives, cognition and conation; of willing and wanting and desiring; of the energyflow in nature and in man; of one's primeval propensities, of one's intellectual capacity; a knowledge of the baneful influence of one's stock beliefs, professions, faiths, superstitious
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beliefs; of idolatrous trends in one's aspirations; of the multitude of factors that condition man's behaviour, and of man's mode of thinking and reflecting. Since our inadequate understanding of Nature's man foid phenomena is mainly due to our indolence and lethargy and langour, our lazyminded conformity to opinions favoured by the Church and priestly authority, and pedantry, and state power, our blindness and inattention to the laws of Nature, to wit, our carelessness, it is incumbent on us to unlearn all that we have learnt, to re-examine, to question the validity of the sum total of our faiths and beliefs and convictions, to sort them out in the light of our true reasoning powers and reconstitute our stock of rationally acceptable ideas. In short we have to put the house of our “being' in order. In other words, we have to be prepared to make a bonfire of all our stock ideas, our beliefs, and our cherished faiths and preformed litter of notions currently all in a shambles, on the altar fire of right reason, and make a completely new start, on a completely new, solid and firmer ground: namely scientific evidence; not based on arbitrary authority and on intuition. Even our scientific method of induction by simple enumeration and descriptive evidence is not capable of taking us on this side the truth. And even the dialectic of Plato is ineffective. We swim in a pool of probabilities, and conformities.
It is only when we make a bonfire of our prejudices: our superstitions and groundless faiths and beliefs, to wit, infant, inept notions, and petty piffling convictions, that our intellect would get clarified, and our true natural self would assume sufficient dignity and strength and courage to be free of the cumbersome, brutal circumstances that have enslaved it smoothered it, and hindlered tts progress. Our actions and every one of our thoughts shall be governed by a deep sense of the homeliness of home: our naive thinking. Our scales have to be weighted in favour of a reasoned, rational existence.
Man shall know that his being' has been designed not in vain. It has so designed so actualized itself as to preserve his supreme identity as a human being and as a thinking intellectual Phenomenon: the enlightened Homo :
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the artist : the creator: i.e. entity that is well on the way to greater well-being, greater expansion and greater progressic n: that can maintain its status as a being possessed of the rare gift of mental reflection; that can acquire the power to think clearly, to b3 unprejudiced, to be enlarged and consistent in thinking, to contemplate, to prehend, to act rationally and nobly, to trace the correct order of eventsthe 'constant conjunction'-in nature. Man should know that life is unceasing progress, unceasing creation; that he has the potency to think out the ends and means of existence, the initiative to distil his ethical values, his own maxims and to design his life and fashion it after Nature's inteat, and in perfect harmony with it. Man deprived of true knowledge, homely in its origin, and direct in its method of approach, is, in error : in sin. He would have b-come, a gadfly.
To know, therefore, to kinaw with understanding vigour, to elicit truth, to sort out values, is to be in possession of the permanent well-being not only of oneself but of the infinite totality of existence. It is perfection in true power: 'sampoornam': power to know and to understand and contemplate oneself in relation to nature of which one is of a piece; and each of them contains all within itself.' It is not the power acquired bv being muddle - headed and obsessed with the unbaked, raw, unrelated, incoherent scientific hypotheses and debilitating obsolete political theories, by moving away from the total coalesced well-being of human progress; and in consequence, having the urge and the craving to possess more and more atom and neutron bombs and other dehumanizing, brutalizing inventions. This at - daggers – drawn, testy trend in human behaviour is in evidence at the present time, Man has - and this is a fortunate turn of events - the inherent capacity to search and discover the right 'gene-pool' that would mutate for the betterment of mankind and take it to the goal of a fully awakened, enlightened hominid. “Human nature is fluent," says W. K. Clifford; it is constantly though slowly changing, and the universe of human action is changing also.' And human action will have to be meaningful; and to be meaningful it has to be governed by human values. Hasn't Man, in regard to his actions, and in relation to his entourage, to Strike a conciliatory mean between
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boredom and utter destruction; and a harmonious and peaceful adjustment - rta ? Why should he continue to acquiesce in Savagery? Should his oombative impulse be suffered to take the upper hand? Every moment ought to
have a savour of greatness. He should get out of the twin snares of power and property.
A person who knows best himself is precisely the one who has a perfect understanding of the totality of events that Nature is. He understands fully the principle of precision' whereby he is able to maintain a harmonious relationship with every one of his ambient circumstances. And he can buckle his alliances more intimately and meaningfully with Nature, and thus contemplate. He is able to understand not only his own 'qualitative changes but also the changes in his qualities." He can bring an end to the horrors without end and a catalogue of disasters and catastrophes' envisaged by Mark Brake.
ENRICHING OF EXPERIENCE : “ANUBHAVA”
MAN IS SOPPOSED to enrich his experience by various means: by establishing contacts with other persons, by discussing matters with them, by undergoing training in educational institutions, by the learning process, by pursuing a course of studies in a University or any similar seat of learning for higher studies, by making observations of natura phenomena, by carrying out experiments and doing research of a scientific nature in some specialized field of knowledge or other, by foreign travel, by making explorations and voyages of discovery; by participating in community prayers, in meditations, in hypnotic and spiritualistic trances, and by practising religious and yogic sadhanas' of a sort. By participating in activities of the above nature is man actually gaining in, and enriching his experience, or is he just being deluded into the false belief that he is gaining in experience? Or are all his activities of the ebove category mere pretences?
Man is said to gain in experience and enrich it not merely by perceiving things, getting sense data regis
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tered, forming concepts and working himself up frantically to a state of excitement and ecstasy. All that he gains by the ablve maeans is a scum of floating notions and a muddled feeling of excitement, of levitation and remoteness that seldom do cohere and become one with his sum total of well-reasoned, well-reflected and well-knit ideas. In other words, to borrow Spinoza's term, they are inadequate ideas: the floatsam and jetsam of muddled thinking. They have not become part and parcel of his totality of tight-knit, well-reasoned, carefully sorted out, clear, solid, relevant, and accurate knowledge that passes muster as the "intellect': the supreme effort of the human mind wherein his values, his maxims, that is the body of principles that guide his actions, are enshrined. The prime functions of the intellect is reasoning, that is educing relations and educing correlates : tracing the right link between one event and another; and the outcome of the funtion of reasoning is understanding or the formulation of adequate genuine, appropriate, interrelated, and correlated ideas. When a person has adequate ideas he can never be in error; never be giddy-brained. Whether those things that are supposed to enrich a person's experience, namely, his huddling layer upon layer of Sense impressions and sense data, his habit memory, his memory of events, his images, his emotion - winged occurrences and incidents, his memory-traces or engrams, and even his intuitions and inspirations and ecstasies, his mystic absorption into the Deity, help to form his totality of closely cohering adequate ideas, and thus aid in the formation of his intellect and reasoning powers, it is very difficult to concede. They are mere husks and shells of knowledge. In the ordinary sense of the term, "events; when merely experienced, that is perceived, conceived and felt, they seldom go to enrich one's experience and become one's true wisdom, unless and until they are well-reasoned, well-reflicted upon, and mature impulsively 1 n to cohering notions, and have become a unique intellectual entity of the mind. It is only when they have become a closely bonded “meaningful whole' that they might be designated as "pure reason. Most of us live and move and have our being in a clutter of words, phrases, notions; faiths and beliefs; seldom in wisdom. Often we turn out to be monsters of iniquity: muddle
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headed and confused and confounded; and we look daggers at our neighbour. Here in Poe's “Farewell to Barth' we come upon the man of wisdom.
“Gifted with a sense of seeing,
Far beyond my earthly being, I can feel I have not suffered, loved, and hoped, and feared in vain; Every earthly sin and sorrow I can only count 空_、钟
as galin, And this is what wisdom has brought him. He has exercised his judgement of value impelled by his genuine
impulses.
Pure reason, is, in essence, not necessarily the outcome of a person's experiences of a casual nature which fesult in confused ideas: mere phantasies and phantasmagorias. When an experience is subjected to the crucial test of inductive thinking and scientific deduction and drawn into the ambit of one’s totality of well-bonded ideas and made to cohere and thus rendered meaningful, it attains the status of an 'adequate idea' or “pure notion, and thereby promotes the evolution of the mind of man. Says Kant : Man should learn to think for himself, to think from the standpoint of everyone else, always to think consistently“” It was Protagoras who made this discovery, namely that there are two sides to every question. And to have learnt to look into these two sides is indeed a great achievement. It is only in such a situation that a person's experiences might be said to be free from error, and that they help to form the ground of his pure reason; otherwise his experiences are largerly of an empirical nature, of practical significance, and, though confused and jumbled, may be considered to be of some use in his everyday life, and as often as not, they lead to error and not to true understanding, for we are all of common clay; composed of a chunk of the brute and a wee bit of rationality: that is true judgement-judgement ef value. All man's Worldly problems and earthly confrontations are due to this: his mistaking mere experiences of an empirical and often of an emotional and passionate nature for those leading to right understanding. And as the philosopher has
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said: “Men fear thought as they ga nothing else då earth.' All of us have our TENDER SPArs emotiontainted opinions, beliefs and faiths “ፕd convictions and prejudices which we dare not subject to scientific investigation, disputation, polimic and metho ical analysis. We haven't the courage to do so. We are \l Secure in Ο cowardliness. Mere action, and acti n alone, however specious it might be, however cleverly and and pragmatically executed need not ಆಕ್ಟಿ lead to the evolution of an intelligent and true Gerstanding in man and the emergence of pure reason. "The is nothing ဒacred in man; for there is nothing in him. 'red to our prying eye. Isn't he full of intrigue, infirmity, and iniquity? And hasn't he made a solitude and called peace?" (Tacitus) This is somewhat pessimistic an attitudy to take; but, yet the indictment is too true to be rebutts s
It is only when pure reason e happiness and perfect understanding commisgled experiences of a vಳ್ವ hಳ್ಗೆ order of the human mind. Then, 1n such a happy an "unate circumstance, the mind of man’ SSU the *\me status of the Mind of the Universe' - the 'Universa Vmmanent Force' of Herbert Spencer. We have in mind a
herfectly comprehending state of comprehension. (poor na vidy) p
Merges that genuine cohere as connate,
In this connection, it must b\ known, that the 'conception of an object is no more than the conception of its possible practical effects.' This considered to be
rri i OS the cardinal theme of ಜ್ಷ, 器 phy, is not capable of leading one to the notion o tiga hiversal mind”, since
4.
the conception stops with its practica effects, and since it is fully embroiled in mere bone-dry Eacticalities, and does not take one to a creative notion ca able of expansion and of leading a person to the attainÄ of the status of the Universal Mind.
MIND IN THE GRIP OF THE BODY
Although Mr. Aldous Huxley
* in his Those Barren Leaves' makes Mr. Cardan treat body" "
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separate existences, the one influencing the other, and affecting it, yet the view, that the body and the mind are one and the same, and that both of them are in extricably locked in each other's embrace like two infatuated lovers gains dominance. The human spirit, is, according to Mr. Cardan, no other than the working of the human body. The state and posture of the body colours the State and posture of the mind and those of the spirit. Thus Speculates Mr. Cardan : "The greatest tragedy of spirit is that SOOS or later it succumbs to the flesh. Sooner or later every soul is stified by the sick body; sooner or later there 8蟹C no more thoughts but only pain and vomiting and stupor.
The tragedies of the spirit are mere Struttings and posturings on the margin of life, and the spirit itself is only an accidental exuberance, the product of spare vital energy.
The spirit has no significance; there is only the body. When it is young the body is beautiful and strong. It grows old, its joints creak, it becomes dry and smelly; it breaks down, the life goes out of it and it rots away...... at the end of everything the flesh gets hold of the spirit and squeezes the life out of it, so that a man turns into something that's no better than a whining sick animal. And as the fish sickens the spirit sickent manifestly. Finally the flesh dies and putrifies, and the spirit presumably putrifies too. And there is an end of your omphalokepsis with all its by-products, God and justice and salvation and all the rest of them.'
This view of an epicure gives dominance to flesh over spirit. This is the traditional giddy goat mode of thinking. Most human beings are governed by this mode. Their behaviour and their attitude to existence betray them. They are most of the time, involved in the eternal triangle. But quite contrary to this, Nature, in her magnanimity, has clearly indicated, that these notions are mere aberrations of a neurotic mind; a mind in the strangle hold of a stale tradition, a mind conditioned by, and caught in a thousand, nay a hundred thousand life's distorted circumstances such as the preponderant notions of intuition and revelation, and mysticism. Every moment of one's existence one is weaving
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round one's self this web of a silly notion: that the flesh acts, contrary to the spirit. But in Nature's order of events blossoming and rotting are one and the same process. They are two different aspects of the selfsame event. The flesh neither blooms nor does it rot, Evolution and dissolution are mere surface aspects of the "essence' of things. Variation is being produced every moment continuously and insensibly in every living being. At every moment life is creating something” H. Bergson. And we are the sum and the resultantof all our past, The attenuated past clings to the present, though it appears to be dead.
“But och ! I backward cast mye’s !
On prospects dreaf, And forward tho” I cannot see
guess and fear. - R. Burns.
The mind does neither enjoy, nor does it suffer. It Just reflects pain and pleasure. And the spirit does seldom carry any of these impressions. It is not tainted by them. It does just exist in all its pristine purity: divested of dross, unaffected by putrefaction of any sort. Neither burns nor bruises nor broken bones can affect it. The spirit is no other than the flesh that has filtered through the mind (being and achieved its goal of unsullied contemplation : pure consciousness : pure reasoning: creative intelligence.
This apparent state of rotting and rotting; smelling and smelling, deterioration, and decay; decadence and decrepitude and death has had a very significant start, and has an equally significant close. Neither is the beginning noble, nor is the end mean; but Time has the trick of hallowing gossip; and "we admire in the past that which we deprecate in the present." Despite the fact that there is neither a start nor a finis, neither cause nor effect, but a mere tandem of events, the pictures presented by life of its varied aspects in its endsavour to find expression and awareness, are really striking, and they bespeak a state of flux and change: a “constant conjunction', and a continuity, an eternal progression that can never be negatived.
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Here we have to uphold the view of Leibniz: That things and beings merely realize a programme previously arranged. This is the doctrine of teleology; but we do not claim it in full. There is patent in every being an unfolding, a selfactualizing, an emerging of the inherent being process At least one thing is certain; and we have sifted it and found it; and, that is that: "all its parts conspire for the greatest of the whole,” [its : being’s] - Bergson.
Once again, let us resort to Aldous Huxley's graphic presentation of this chain of life which is of everyday experience in human existence. Thus spake Aldous Huxley: 'Something that had been a single cell, a cluster of cells, a little sac of tissue, a kind of worm, a potential fish with gills, stirred in her womb, one day beeame man - a grown man, suffering and enjoying, loving and hating. thinking, remembering, imagining, And what had been a blob of jelly within her body would invent a god and worship; what had been a kind of fish would create, and having created would become the battlegronnd of disputing good and evil; what had blindly lived in her as a parasitio worm would look at the stars, would listen to music, would read poetry. A thing would grow into a person, a tiny lump of stuff become a human body, a human mind."
We are, in no way, less inspired by these thoights: these scintillating sparks, that twinkle in Pattanathadiga’s immortal verse : '6è(b (é56ùLDnt glib' etc., grand, grandiose and sublime : the notion of what might appear to be an insig, nificant and incipient start, growing and developing; en larging, expanding, emerging, and encompassing the entire universe, the infinite totelity in one single sweeping thought : a single mode : the consciousness: the primal deed: the mind of man. It is admittedly a miraculous event, namely, the conception of the thing, its growth and development; the awakening and emergence of the mind. The idea that insistently impinges on our mind is that inhering in the body of man: his brain and his nervous eystem is the mind of man, and emergent in the mind is the spirit. Is it possible to disentagle this totality? This “One'? I am jiggered. The life of man: 'solitary, poor, nasty. brutish and short' I Hobbes) is fortunately cempouded of one and the same stuff: Consciousness
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his awakening being'. It is a thought that goes beyond the vista of one's intelligence, and far beyond one's intellectual grasp. What the philosoper has said in true earnest is brimming over with meaning: “Give me matter and motion, and I will construct you the universe.’ This simulates the vedic thought where the word “matter' is represented by the word 'annam', and where prana' stands for "motion'. Strangsly enough in “matter” are ingrained the Heraclitean “flux” and the Parmenidean 'constancy': motion and rest: Deed: “Mind'
as such is seldom perceptible; only its effects i.e. its actions and motivations are.
There is one more essential thing that the philosopher may be said to have failed to mention apart from "matter' and "motion'; and, that is the freedom to fashion the universe after one's own heart's desire. This is the vital factor of Nature and of life: the "creative intent' in the true sense: the creative potency, “the unfulfilled intention to be' the pre-ordained harmony: “hrniya garba'; the divine will - the will that has willed it well. The vedic term “akasa' perhaps embraces the notions of freedom and creation, : the creative impulse. In its absence nothing can grow and develop and evolve into what it is intended to be. We want to be free, we want to be independent, we want to assert the freedom that inheres in us. In fact, this is how we can conceive it: Every existence has grounded in it an “efficient cause' which is no other than the freedom to grow, to develop and to fashion itself:
the “swadharma: to break the bond, and to be free, and to innovate.
So far as man is concerned, when his emotional independence gets baulked, and his 'self gets botched, bungled and buffeted and becomes frantic, he gets into states of emotional tension which may outlive his childhood, and getting bogged into his unconscious self, upset his internal balance in his adult life. Hence, whatever oppression, suppression or restraints he might have had in his childhood and early adult life and period of adolescence, would necessarily tend to become obsessions and complexes and mental stresses and engrams' (memory traces) in his adult life. These become his lunatic fringe:
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neurotic frayings. Nature appears to have so designed us, our willing and wanting, and our varied emotional trends as to make us perfectly free beings liberated from and void of all our social, cultural, conventional and traditional lies and bonds, and piffling ties and attachments and restrictions; that is to say our notional, e-motional and matter-bound life's snares and entanglements, and encumbrances. They are our stumbling-blocks and tubs. The freer we are of these impedimenta the greater the quantum of Truth we would have acquired.
And here is one such stumbling-block that has baulked man's thinking power.
“And what had been a blob of jelly within her body would invent a god and worship." Man is seldom governed by pure reason: by creative intelligence; but more often than not, he is governed by what might be called "pretensions of reason'. Among such pretenders, that is, persons governed by pretensions of reason, are, those who dabble in theological ineptitudes and transcendental conceptions They are the theosophists who have conspired to confuse reason. Then, there are those who have attempted to represent the Divine will in human forms and other similar shapes. They have assigned illimitable human attributes to the divinity: attributes such as : omnipotence, omnipresence and omniscience: the all - powerful, the ever - present and the all - knowing. these presons who may be said to belong to the frenzied fringe of society, are a mere hoax. They have deludədi themselves and their followers. They have plunged themselves in demonology, i.e. falsehood, "ajnana'. Hasn't "man's dominion broken Nature's Social union? There are again some others who pretend to be affected and even possessed by the “holy spirit? Persons of this category have been deluded by the notion that the "supersensible being' has descended upon them in various forms such as tongues of fire, doves etc. They are the ghost - believers. They think, they are the "avatars'- the descendod spirits-; and to testify to the presence of the “holy spirit’ in them they shout and howl, they whine and whinny and "speak in tongues' and make all sorts of genuflections, and have turned out to be idolators and exorcists and faith healers, and have adopted witchcraft and nostrums
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and miracle - mongering as, their stock in trade, They are no more no less than cheats and profiteers in spirit - mongering.
Despite the fact so glaringly patent that there is a code and a legislation immanent in nature, in the reasoning powers of man: "a natural law": a deep sense of Imorality, an unrecorded ethical eode - a 'constraint, - that governs all reasonable, reflecting human beings; man has not made any efforts to evolve, to develop, to expand, to merge into the master law' - the supreme event designed to govern the conduct and behaviour of man. We, according to Spinoza, are a part of universal nature and we have to follow her order. Instead, the monster-law prevails. This is the general rule. There are exceptions, of course.
Formal religions of mere conformity have been divorced from morality - from pure morality: from neutrality and impartiality - and have been so perverted as to achieve their own material ends: that is to say, to grow into organizations for the maintenance of a hierarchy exclusively for their own benefit and glory. Hasn't it been said in the Good book: Forget all about the morrow; Then will fear and greed and strife cease; predatory and marauding trends vanish; and there will be no more wars and the rumours of wars? Conventional religion seeks to destroy individulism and initiative, and renders existence sterile. In true natural religion there is very little room for faith, belief and opinions. In the field of human conduct, in the domain of human morality, there can be, and should e, only conformity of behaviour, since human behaviour is based on equity and good feeling. Says Helvetius: “Actions are either useful or harmful to society.” There is neither absolute good Dor absolute evil; neither are they true nor false. Perhaps some of them may have better ends than others : better consequences. There is no necessity for any one to believe, to bave faith in a supra – and eXtrauniversal existence: a receptacle of absolute good, and to be convinced of the efficacy of a certain course of ritualistic offices as that which would lead to goodness. Ritualistic office is not the essential concomitance of a mora mode of life or of benignity. It is mere cobweb and moonshine. There is no "warranted assertability in it. It is all formulary code.
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Why faith? Why belief? And why cling on to opinions? Things not your own: mere borrowed triakets. Either you cognize something or you do not; either you know a thing or you know not. Your opinions of, or faith or belief "in or claim on the Infinite and Eternal as the sole basis of true miorality, in the sense of a benign and orderly life, is utterly absurd; for, thousands who have had this faith, this belief, and this claim had gone on piddling, marauding, rooking their neighbours and extorting them to the very marrow of their bones, sowing their wild oats wherever the chance became propitious. And what have we done? We have palliated and condoned their vices and follies and pardoned them and dubbed them saints, sages, sadhus and yogis and Mahdis, and Mahatmas. Hence your convictions, your faith and your belief in an extra-universal efficient cause need not necessarily be the ground of your morality. Your actions and your intentions may be good or bad depending on your capacity to have a perfect understanding of your neighbour's ways and your harmonious relationship with, and adaptability to ambient social circumstances. The 'something hmore in you - call it your conscience, call it the still small voice': the Divine Mind within: the perfectly and infinitely free will: “the little man': the benign impulse-tells you that your actions or the courses of action that you are going to adopt are either good or bad. You need not ground your faith in a supreme dispenser of the laws of good-living. Either your actions are intrinsically bad or intrinsically good; they aro either socially useful or harmful; their consequences socially benignant or malignant, or they are neutral. This is how you feel about it. You discern them in that form. Man can never hope to beget “a graven image and a marble intelligence. He is great as man; for every man is his efficient cause - his emergent being.
We become men of straight dealing, honest and honourable men, men of upright character, not in virtue of our endeavour to conform to any religious doctrine or dogma, but by being men of clear understanding and by being true to ourselves, endowed as it were with the “innate imponderable' - the mighty unknown: the power that stirs and guides, and is seldom seen, but is often
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felt. “We know too much, and feel too little.' We are powerful and active over trivialities." - Russell. It is, in other words, a true sensibility to what is just and what might be considered lawful and reasonable. No amount of church - and temple-going, no regularity of attendance at places of worship and participation in mere ritualistic offices, and due conformity to accepted norms of religious conduct would make a person good and honest. “Ostentatious Piety' is a hindrance to progress and moral probity and a dangerous robe to don, since it serves the purpose of a false garb for concealing one's foibles. Only good under
standing and steadfast discernment would enable a person to be good.
Beyond the world of sense one cannot have any sensible contact; any notion, unless one's awareness' expanda and evolves into something higher, something keener, something self-actualized. Man came into this world a blob of jelly turned into a chunk of flesh, and Nature has intended him to leave it as an expansive, emergent, immanence - mind. Although in animate nature like tends to beget like, and Nature tends to repeat; yet, she does so with a difference. Variability appears to be the prevailing genre. And the trend is always progressive: a move forwards and upwards.
So, how can caste and creed and birth make a difference between man and man. But, be it known, that man is the centre and omphalos of the world-wide empire of existence. It is through masa that the spirit has to evolve. Perhaps there are other worlds where man dwells - a mere guess. V−
There can never be probabilities or even possibilities in the world of the super-sensible. If there be such, they are all idle fancies of the logician and the dialectician. There cannot be any room for certainty; not even for doubt in the domain of the super-sensible. It is a shut volume; and we are on forbidden ground. Then why this gabble? And why this cacophony? Why this empty noising about
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All man's efforts at estimating and evaluating the great potent, the Sublime power that Nature is in its totality of existence, have had their effects. More frequently than not the Qutcome is a mere grace-begging and vain adulation which is none other than the blindfolded, superstitious apprehension of the mighty potency that resides in Nature. A sense of sublimity resides in our mind. It should be guided by sweet reason and not suffered by conceit to mar the purity, nay sublimity, that is evolving in our mind and unfolding into the 'greater awareness'. With this noble end in view we have to emancipate ourselves from the camping influences that have come to us under the guise of the various religious modes: theology and theosophy, transcendental yoga, *ananda marga' bakti vedanta' and the vast body of religious dogmas and doctrines and “ahamas.' All these are based on mere myth, falsehood, superstition and delusion. The world is pale with the sickness of such stuff." - (Shelley) The moment man liberates his mind from these “superstitious trends' in his refection, in his pattern of thinking into which he has been led by his mentors, gurus', preceptors, kaddadiyas’, shamans and even his own parents and other elders who are supposed to guide him, he gets his enlightenment, his true vision of the intrinsic prevision “dharsan' that indwells. The "inevitable pain of living', 'dhukka' has thus to be escaped; and the joy of unt rammelled existence 'ananda' discovered. “And so began short love and long decay, Sorrow that bides and joy that fleets away." (William Morris) When man's mask of "avidya'-ignorance - has been removed, his gloom of mava' dispelled, he begins to see; he gets into the four sublime states so clearly propounded by the Buddha, namely: loving kindness (metta), compassion (karuna), sympathetic joy (mudita) and equanimity (upekkha). Man has to outgrow his social, racial and religious prejudices; the 'tyranny of traditional words' which he bandies when he is faced with the genuine met a hysical problems; and then he would have evolved and enlarged his mind and would have reached a point of vantage from which he would be
able to view things in their true perspective, having assumed a universal standpoint.
Then his thoughts and his words and his deeds would have become consistent and consolidated, and the
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final outcome would be a harmonious and rhythmical whole, the "pre-ordained harmony": a passionate and powerful ray that is penetrative and enlightening : " gigglidifu DigiT gy 600ria. Man won't then be assailed by such a puzzling thought as the Ultimate end of existence.’ This is neither more nor less than a moral issue and would discover its own solution once man becomes enlightened, and when he begins to know, and to feel i.e. when the being evolves into the "knowing: when “sath' evolves into 'sith' - when the kindly light' beams. What Bertrand Russell has said becomes meaningful. “Those who have a relatively direct vision of facts are often incapable of translating their vision into words, while those who possess the words have usually lost the vision.'
Let us face the common-sense reality: the tangible facts of existence. Here, right before us is the sensible world, and here is a quantum of materialistic sensible certainty. It is “all that we can be certain of." There can't be another world either of certainty or of probability or even of possibility. There can't exist another quantum of certainty in the supersensible world, for a thing can't partly be possible and partly be impossible: that is to say, that which we can partly be certain of and which can partly be unauthentic. Since the ground of certainty is no other than that of the sensible, it is impossible to think of certainty residing in the region of the supersensible, for man's understanding cannot penetrate the supersensible even if any such state does exist. The majority of mankind is like little children of three or four years of age in the makebelieve stage of thinking, in which state their "fring0. of understanding is frayed and indistinct and fades off into darkness.' (Bergson) They fail to reflect or they seldora do reflect. Hence all man's efforts to cognize and construe the existence of the supersensible have not been fruitful. Experience alone is the surest judge of the fact of existence. We see the body; we see the animations of the body : movements, behaviours and the expressions of the emotions. And then we infer that animal bodies are stirred by an unseen, invisible entity: the mind, the instrument that thinks. Mind is thus an inferred subject or event, just as value is. It is not anything palpable, anything concrete.
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It would, however, have to be asserted that some events are the outcome of direct perception ; of seeing, touching, smelling etc., and that in course of time they become correlated into concepts, ideas and notions: all mean the same thing. Some events, ostensibly, are the outcome of inferences and of introspection, that is the putting of a thought upon a thought. Our thoughts have to be eked out by further thoughts. Values - eternal valueslike love, beauty, justice, and truth, belong to this category of inferred abstractions that have much to do in formulating and shaping our sentiments, our ideals, our vision of a life of perfection. They are private knowledge, mostly arbitrary. One should not, therefore, dabble in the transcendental, since the sensible and the Supersensible can never be mortised: there is no valid linking nexus that leads from the sensible to the supersensible ground of existence. If there be any such it must necessarily be very tenuous. Empty fictions of the imagination can never gain the validity of the facts of existence. And why worry about imaginary nullities when there is a vast range of realities to he concerned with? Is it possible to imagine the existence of a point in absolute, infinite space?
In religion, as it is understood today: as in theosophy, in demonology, in the various cults, there is a good deal of 'empty fictions' and fumes and "fluctuations' (Patanjali) of the brain They are pure and simple superstiin aberrations of the human brain. And man from his birth has been so disastrously and mercilessly indoctrinated and brainwashed as to impel him to ground his faith and belief in them. His convictions are mostly groundless conjectures and surmises They are mere borrowed plumes: mere moonshine. "By "constant conjunction,' that is, by dint of the habit of a person's being constantly associated with certain silly ideas, he begets his belief and even his faith, and convictions. The first often serves as a working hypothesis; whereas the last two are myths.
Since it is impossible to grant the existence of a super-sensible, extra-universal being that can be conceived of by positive cognition, the existence of a 'causeless cause' or "first cause' or an original supreme deity can never be
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cognized, conjectured, established and proved by empirical considerations. But, based on empirical data we may form quite palpable hypotheses, which although they may not be based on the solid ground of experiential certainty, yet they form a working basis for conveniently proceeding with our investigations into the mysterious and hidden aspects of Nature, that is to say, into the lurking certitudes: natural
laws, that reside in Nature as they appear to us in their multitudinous forms.
Let me instance. We can safely entertain the notion of a progressive organic evolution operating in the organic world from known data: from our observations of the morphology of organisms, their embryological phases of development, from paleontological data etc. But 'a belief in the existence of "unembodied thinking beings' is mere romancing.' (KANT) One should, therefore, be absolutely and intellectually honest, and own, that one, in the present state of development of one's sense of perception, hasn't the power to see into what may be known as the world of disembodied and dissembled spirits, of ghosts, of gods and goddesses, angels, and of a Supreme Deity and fateful trends': IagIIb). Relative to man's powers of perception and even of contemplation these do not come under the category of known and knowable existences. They are in the region of surmise and of doubtful existence and of nullity. Astrology is one such area of belief. Revelation - revealed truth - another. A propos this subject Spinoza says: "The less men know of nature, the more easily they can fein things; as that trees speak, that men are turned in a moment into stones, that ghosts appear in mirrors, that of nothing something is made', (that the dead come to life) etc. et C.
It might be conjectured that in the remote future, if not in the near future, ma , the highest evolved being known to be in existence, might with the assistance of "allthat-is' in the universe, evolve ino a better being endowed with greater and p. rer psychic po vers. Since it is not prudent to lay down a principle such as 'the ultimate end of existence' - for such a notion 1s tyrannical and lays siege to the perfect freedom, that to all intents appears to inhere in Nature - we can only guess the possibility of the
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evolution of the state of greater awareness' with much greater piwers of understanding (enlightenment) than those which we are in possession of at the present state of our evolutionary progress. It is, an avowed principle of Upanishadic thinking that existence (Nature) is an ever-present, self-evolving truth (satyam), and a perfect order of events (rta), wberein freedom is not curtailed. When man begets a clearer and more consistent and congenial and steadfast understanding of things and related circumstances, of life's designs and death's puzzlements, he would be able to exist in perfect harmony with all his ambient circumstances free from any form of conflicts or psychical confrontations. On the subject of prehending human nature Stuart Hampshire is very, very definitive. Says he: “If we would improve human beings, we must study the natural laws of their behaviour S dispassionately as we would study the behaviour of tree and horses.' Hence experiment shall replace speculation and make the latter otiose.
Man has through sheer ignorance, misunderstanding and messy thinking represented the progressive emergent will', the will to be' intrinsic in Nature, anthropomorphically, i.e. in human form. That is to say, he has fashioned it after his own heart's desire. He has rigged it in full, imparted it a form and a bulge, a tubercle and a notch, attributed to it such supernatural and supernal powers as omnipotence, omnipresence arid omniscience, and so bent its inclination and its will as to enable them to be in keeping with man's inordinate desires, his soaring ambitions; his mounting aspirations and crimping limitations; and thus rendered it moonshiny and monstrous. Isn't his divinity - the god that he has created with a capital 'G' - a monstrocity and a ridiculous effigy? Hasn't he endowed it with all the negative passions and emotions that he is oapable of summoning within himself: anger and rage, jealousy and hatred, greed and intrigue, malice and guile, duplicity and dishonesty, arrogance and conceit. partiality and aelfishness: to wit, his turbulent passions? He expects what he has estimated to be his virtues' to yield rewards; his transgressions' to result in punishments. He has not realized tnat whether he act with equity or with violence, with noble intentions or malignant motives, the harvest is Oʻt:
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from a “super-power', but it accords with his own inner sense of justice: a justiciable sense of justice, that inheres in all nature's existences. This notion is fundamental to man's existence. It is one that rewards or punishes oneself; for, one's acts of equity or of violence are one's own; and the reward and punishment too are of one's W seeking. The maker' of the law and the dispenser of justice
are one and the same : the 'small inner voice' - the emergent will.
It is therefore imperative that man has to be awakened from his pristine lethargy, his native ignorance, his dogmatic, doctrinal and faith - bound slumber, to a state of noble humanism whereby man aspires towards the emancipation of Man. The emancipated man is the so of man." - the higher ego. Man has to and ought to, and is bound to perceive the “voice' within him, which has the germ of discretion in it, for it certainly has the capacity to say : this is right, and this is wrong; this is just and this is unjust. It is the inhering moral sense intrinsic in nature and in the being of man, that is, the ground of this judgement. There is a supreme law ruling the world from within it which is ever growing with an expansive sense of equity and ever resolving with a neverending progressive "unfulfilled intention": an ebullience to be neutral, urge to be reasonable and sweetly sane. Man contemplating nature has rendered nature an object of contemplation, despite the fact that he himself is of a piece with nature. Man's own maxims are the guidelines of his own conduct. In other words, nature has so evolved its 'allthat-which-is' - its true ground of existence - as to beget a Being with an infinite capacity to reflect, to beget a singleness-in-intent, to think of itself in a detached manner, and sit in judgement over its own actious. That, in brief, is the man of virtue: the just man : the prudent man: the man of creative action: the Githa Purusha.
Says Sinoza: "As all things whereof a man is the efficient cause are necessarily good, no evil can befall a man except through external causes." Man's actions motivated by external causes are mostly of the defensive or offensive kind; those that spring from one's initiative are of the creative kind. And the latter does matter in life.
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If there be such a thing as the universal cause of existence, that cause is intrinsically Nature's, and it resides in a maze of intractable circumstances. It is immanent in the "totality of being.' It repudiates the notion of something other than nature; to wit, it abhors the notion of a “transcendental existence' - an independent universal intelligence. Says A. R. Wallace : But to claim the Infinite and Eternal Being as the one and only direct agent in every detail of the universe seems to me absurd." (World of Life) And these rare notions from Plotinus are worth being pondered over: Creation implies a beginning in eternity; “a changeful being who turns from this to that'; a desire and an unfulfilled urge to be; a state of imperfection with a craving to be perfect. The Universe is a life organized, effective, complex, all-comprehensive, displaying an unfathomable wisdom.' And this noble feeling one has to beget. One has to feel one with everything else in one's entourage.
To put it plainly, the question may be posed: Is it possible to conceive of a being governing the totality of Nature's multitudinous forms and effects, existing apart from the totality of existence? Is an extra-universal existence conceivable? It is not plausible to conceive of the totality of Nature as a viable 'good will'? A vibration, a summum bonum, a benign neutral force that binds all existence into one single whole, that has the potent even to shatter itself and resolve into a state of nullity? This benign, vibrant energyflow, this “emergent will' is immanent in all nature. Any one can feel it and experience it. It is the most perfect piece of legislation enacted and encoded in Nature's being; The notion of a "supreme force' - the supernally eternal - subsists in man a priori.
Again the questions Grop up most insistently : Can there be a Deity ? Do we feel its presence? Do we experience it objectively? Subjectively? Or, is there a multiplicity of forces? Of powers like what the ancients conceived the forces of Nature to be? The rishis of oldthe seers - were intellectually honest blokes. They pictured the various forces of Nature, called them into being, gave them such names as Mithra, Varuna, Aryaman, Indra, Prahaspathi, Wishnu and Vayu. They are prakthi-yab sham'-
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plainly perceptible, - they said. That is to say: they are all phenomenal, cummon-sense, objective reality that came into close conjunction with man. And man discovers himself solidary with each and every one of them. That is, his “swadharma' - essential self - is, as it were, closely tenoned with the 'swadharma of every one of them. Man experiences their presence in a variety of ways. The seer has clear notions of them. They are forces to reckon with in man's everyday dealings, despite the fact his notions of them are often appalingly fragmentary and besmirched. They served in the dim past as the nexus for linking up the seen with the unseen aspects of the reality that they were. In no way did the notions of the vedic rishis differ from the “MONADS' of Leibniz and the finite centres of F. H. Bradley. They inferred the presence of a multiplicity of forces; and, their notions of things were in perfect accord with the entirety of existence. But they connected then all up with a hypothetical supreme and immanent presence which they have designated as the supreme Brahman: “thath Sath’ : “that' of the rishis of old, the 'eternal Mind" of George Berkeley, and icvara' of Patanjali. But it must be owned with thc due sincerity that these, so far as man's powers of perception are concerned, are absurdities. “Let every soul be in subj}ction to the higher powers : for there is no power but God;... ' Romans XIII (1-5). Here again is another uncertifiable assertion, namely: “there is no power
but God.' Otherwise we have to accept the view of Spinoza : "God is Nature'; and the Vedic view: “All existences
exist in Thee", so succinctly expressed by E. Bronte. If there be no power but God then Nature will not be capable of evolving into far-reaching innovations of the type of man. Hence things natural will have to grow, and not be decreed. And “what has grown' says B. Russell, "is always more living than what has been decreed. For the Vedic rishis, just as much as it is for any thinking group of persons like A. R. Wallace, Leibniz and Bradley of our times, it was very difficult to posit a single "supreme Causeless Cause' or Ultimate Cause', for the simple reason the rishis including the Buddha, despite the clarity of their vision, found it rather difficult to assign the multiplicity of forces in nature, nay of the universe itself, the totality of existences, to a 'Supreme Design' or a pre-existing
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frame, for they were confronted with the stupendous task of discovering a proper nexus, between phenomenal existence and a 'causeless cause', that may be considered as its “ultimate cause'. Apart from this difficulty it was impossible to pósit an existence, however supreme it might be in its effects, beyond the totality of existence’ which goes by the name of “Nature. In other words beyond the “totality of existence', that is, the Universe', there is no possibility of any other existence: be it the demon, be it the almighty deity.
Nature couldn't help but exist. It exists spontaneously
and harmoniously; it exists through necessity. To be frank, it cannot be explained why it exists. In every hedge “existence wakes and pipes into a bird. (Norman Gole) It is not seemly; nay, it would be pig-like stubbornness to seek for a cause of existence of Nature. But one thing is quite patent on the face of the multiplicity of forms and configurations that are observable in Nature, and, that is, that Nature is not acting haphazardly like a scatter-brain; it is acting designedly. It has an emergent design and an emergent purpose which will have to be discovered by man as he goes sounding out the noble sentiments of his being and becoming;' probing and prodding his way with the aid of his : contemplation; pure reason. As for the existence of an Ultimate Reality: a final cause residing solely outside the Universe, it is very difficult, almost impossible, to imagine such an event, for it has to be assigned a station byond phenomenality, and there can't exist any other reality than that which is the “infinite totality of nature, and that which is immanent in nature.
Despite the fact, most allegedly religious minded persons, most truly pious souls, and avowedly saintly beings may be so disposed as to regard this view of existence as highly dangerous, blatantly he retical, deleterious to the faith of the faithful, cnaotic, revolutionary and deplorably impious and designedly subversive and shatteringly sceptic in its far-flung iufluence on humanity, and dreadfully degrading and undermining in its effects on established faiths of conformity; a bit of sane thinking, an ounce of liberalism on the part of liberated, unconditioned man,
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would eaable him to realize that as pious, holy and saintly beings they have made a filthy bog and a hopeless mess of their life for if a scientific hypothesis is proved wrong it becomes ridiculous; but if a religious doctrin or a dogma or even an article of faith is proved false it becomes highly dangerous, often disastrous.' Hence all falsehood shall be obviated. And, shouldn't they, the pious, the holy and the saintly lift themselves above their petty ignorancebound, chaotic selves? Their faith has been grounded in holy dread, their piety in gripping and strangling superstition, their talents have become atrophied, their vision blurred and blinded, their notions bizarre and chimerous. Haven't they, and all of us, to re-educate ourselves and to re-think our views and weigh up our values? A glib uniformity in education, a strait-laced discipline, is a thing to be discounted, for it annuls originality, creativity and true initiative, and an urge to innovate, and make new. departures. Shouldn't their articles of faith be revised, expurgated, and reviewed and re-moulded since they have duped us and fooled us by their way of life, their set of values — so mos erably ill-considered and inordinately heavilyweighted - by their vast savannahs of words and selvas of metaphors and most absurd, silly articles of faith. The cardinal question confronting humanity at this juncture is this : Why have these god-men perpetrated these gargantuan monstrosities? Monstrosities such as divination, augury, magic, miracle-mongering and a belief and a faith grounded in chaos? When man fails to know he begins to divine. And then he becomes a prophet, for love of power has actuated him. It is beyond man's capacity to enumerate his follies and vices; and yet he has gained recognition as a mentor,
a yogi and a prophet. Hasn't he fed himself on frenzied fancy?
A broken chair shall be mended; so shall a broken “soul." Go into thyself and shrive thyself unto thy inner self, the true spring of creative action, and thou shalt be whole. Tease out and disentangle thy chaotic thoughts, for TRUTH resides in thought, and in thought alone. And nothing abides but action in thought; and the “supremest' and sublimest of thoughts is the word I'm; and the Deed “I exist.' Existence is all deeds - creative deed.
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DISCOURSE - XI
MAN THE FINITE MODE AND MAN THE INFINITE MODE
N NATURE.
IN THIS short discourse I am concerned with the feeling of the finite' and the "infinite' in man.
There are patent two principal modes in the existence of man: man as an animal governed by his animality, and man in his status as the measure of all existence; that is, Dan as a thinking being. One is the finite mode and the other is the infinite mode. In the former state man is entangled in his "painful' and gruesome emotions, and compelled to endure his mental and bodilys. pains. “All is pain” — so contemplated Pathanjali. (Bk. II — 14) And Buddha equated life with “dukkha, and In any others called life on earth a vale of tears'. And man cannot afford to repine at what may be considered to be the pitfalls in Nature's order of events, for he is, in the true sense, the prime moulder of his "seif'. Those emotions of the painful and corroding type such as jealousy and (envy, fear and hatred, arrogance and puffed-up pride, make man weak, and plunge him into a condition of utter servitude. His stark ignorance and utter lack of reason stand in the way of his evolution to the status of the “wise man' - the sapient species. When man gets involved in actions governed by the painful emotions; passion's consuming fire, his motives become sinister, his reasoning powers get befouled, and fuzzy and bizarre, and he is caught in the inextricable grip of servitude. And it will not be a miss to dwell on this point. His thinking has been baulked, botched and bungled." He is no more no less than a slave. This mode in his status is the finite mode. While he persists to be in this state, his nexus with the infinite mode
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has been virtually severed. But quite contrary to this status, that is to say, when he is free, and freedom reigns supreme in his style of life; when he extricates himself from the clutches of the painful emotions; when sweet reason and discrimination and rationality (viveka) become the preponderant mode of his being; when his life style has assumed the status of the ponderable fact of existence; then, in that congenial circumstance, servitude ceases, and he attains to the status of a free man - the “mukta'. In this state he has evolved into the infinite mode, and has attained to life everlasting and has evolved the inner directing principle: his initiative and his urge to create. Says Thomas Traherne: Infinite love must be infinitely expressed in the smallest moment.' And that is possible only through the exercise of one's creative emotion; and life has to be freed from stagnation, boredom, and chaos. Drab and monotonous it should not be suffered to be. bmotion has to be calmed in tranquillity.
This swing of the pendulum from the finite mode of existence to the infinite mode, from death to immortality', from the amoral to the moral and vice versa goes on indefinitely in the life of man so long as he continues to exist from moment to moment, and as long as he is caught in duration's relentless grip and clings to, and endures, in time : past; and tine : expectant.
This discourse sets forth a simple theory. It is this. The final measure of all existence, the infinite totality. of existence, i.e. “all-that-which-is', is clear unsullied thoughtpure reason. It is the organizing and cohering of all clear thinking : the highest good: the highest and supremest benign influence; and it can be made to prevail only by “shraddha”- sheer genuine effort : a true conatus, a just and conscious strife and supreme endeavour and exercise on the part of man.
Bodily pain and bodily suffering, every human, being in his wideawake mode of existence, is likely to be subjected to. In as much as man is of a piece with nature, and so long as man fails to live a life in perfect harmony with nature, he is destined to have in consequence bodily,
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and mental suffering. Man born in ignorance of nature's designs, bred in ignorance in the midst of an ignorant social set up, and being thus caught up in moral turpitude and turmoil and servitude, and predatory and sordid cravings for power and pelf, is, not only bound to be steeped in gross ignorance ajnana, but is also bound to suffer both mentally and bodily. In this state “Bestial fantasies shall fill his dull head'; and his ancient ferocity shall be awakened into criminality. It is the height of folly to discriminate between mental and bodily suffering. “Suffering is one long moment' (O. Wilde), “All is pain', and man being entangled in Time's mesh, his suffering tends to persist; at least so it appears; and would even persist to, appear to be the only tangible reality.
When the “mind-body withdraws its tentacular benign conjunctions : accomplishments, with the rest of the ambient circumstances that nature is in its wholeness, then it is starved; then it is ill-nourished; then it detracts; then it feels pain; then it suffers; then it rots; then it smells; and then it perishes. As long as the being' i.e. the mindbody has established a lasting benign connection, a harmonious link (rita), a consonance with the rest of nature, so long would it persist in its supreme suave, complacent genial mood, i.e. in perfect happiness. Says Spinoza : “Happiness consists in man's being able to maintain his own being, Joy is man's passage to a greater perfection." (ananda). Thousands of yeats of human existence, disconnected from the kindly blessings of nature, dissociated from nature's well-being, distraught with worldly cravings: thought of the morrow, the entanglements of society, has taken man away from the epicentre of the true well-being of nature; and, in consequence, man's natural heritage appears to be carking pang, deep-seated anguish, biding sorrow and fleeting joy, and mental agony. In as much as man is the true measure of nature, there must evolve in him, through sheer necessity, his true and genuine nature. Man has, therefore, to think clearly, act dispassionately and justly in a detached manner so that he may win back all that he has staked and lost. His natural heritage being no other than 'goodness' and perfection' - pooram' - certainly not a personal survival after death - man, in his genuine
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search for the righteous way of life is bound to meet with undiminished success. He has to live bis life retrospectively. he has to retrace his steps several thousand years of disordered pantagruelian, coarse, casual and feckless life. unde as it were all the negative “karma”, and make a fresh start with a clear solidity of purpose in life's long journey. He has to lead "a life of unbroken diligence, kindlines and purity: simple, studious, even-tempered and kind." (M. Arnold). It is then, and, then only would he have attained the fit status to lead a happy life void of all mental and bodily pain. It is then that he would be bor a free man and a Supernally supreme moral being: an existence of natural beauty in whom sweet reason shall be the ruling motive force. And then shall he sing the paea of freedom. And then shall he be his own master, creator. (Mode: feature of reality)
In the celestial bodies of the universe there resides such a vast orderliness, in the immonsity of space such silent pre-decreed harmony, in the order of the sound such a rare rhapsody, in numbers such unique correspondence, and such useful logical fictions in geometrical firms, and such perfection and syn metry, in the movement and Te t of particles such a orderly commotion, turbulence, and a meaningful significance, that they all help inspire one with a sense of awe, reverence and wonderment and a state of ecstasy (standing outside one's self). And 'dull would he be of soul who could pass by events so touching in their majesty', without gathering a deeper, truer, fuller and sublimer sense: without attempting a 'sojourn in the divine. We have still a very long road to go. At this juncture these noble thoughts from John Donne are pregnant with meaning:
“Our creatures are our thoughts...... My thoughts
reach all, comprehend all.
I, their creator am in a close prison, in a sick bed, anywhere and any one of my creatures, my thoughts, is with the Sun, (beyond the Sun) overtakes the Sun, and overgoes the Sun in one pace one step everywhere.'
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DISCOURSE - XI
SPHERE OF SPRIT ... PURUSHA
“OUR spirit is a being of nature quite indestructible and its activity continues from eternity to eternity. It is like the sun which seems to set only to our earthly eyes, but which in reality, never sets, but shines on unceasing lly.” — Goethe.
Our knowledge of the “spirit-dominated mind.'
All that we have is knowledge; very little truth; and we come to know of truth by our “act of being.' Knowledge is based on relative and apparent reality : (All referred reality.) There is no such k now edge as 'pure knowledge’ except such knowledge as mathematical knowledge; for, the sensible knowledge of an object is not the object in itself. It is only a reference and an inference: personal and private. It is infinitely difficult to get out of the despotic control of our senses. All knowledge, even mathematical and scientific inferences are vitiated by our emotions, and tyrannically conditioned and limited by our prejudices. Even when we are in our mother’s womb, in the form of a foetus, we are considerably under the influence of our parental and hereditary factors, our genetic code; our mother's nutrition and anaerobic respiration, characteristic of very low forms of life. In addition, we are a bundle of prejudices that have clung to us like leeches. To rid oneself of this curse of “conditioned knowledge' and what is known as otr “cultural heritage', and our inherited propensities, our personal equation, (our "prarabdha karma): to disavow all of these and give the presiding status to “pure reason' is not an easy task; for here is a field brimming over with inexactitudes, inaccuracies, doubts, dawdling chimeras and paltry memorabilia; and it is a sojourn into - the unknown, the un verifiable, the immeasurable. And I, for one, do not want to be at
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odds with the great ones, for I am then on treacherous ground. The language that we use, the human community into which we have been born, the manner in which we think and reflect, the way in which we respond to our environment, our sense testimony, the very mode of our behaviour; all oth r mannerisms &nd idiosyncracies, out syndromic malaise, our peculiarities of temperament, our instinctive impulses inherent in the protoplasmic substance of our being, our outlook on life, our philosophic notion of existence, our family constellation; in brief our mode of state of existence, our social customs and manners, our total vision of life: all these effects and 'causes', is een and unseen, known and unknown and unfelt: forces and influences, latent and explicit, have been impinging on, and moulding our convictions and beliefs and pretensions, and vitiating the quality of our knowledge. There isn't a single human being, and there could never have been one, whose knowledge has been of an unadulterated, untainted, and unconditioned purity. Having reflected deeply on this subject of human understanding and knowledge in the serenity of one's mind (being) one is hound to bscome more and more confirmed in the notion that knowledge is seldom or never pure. And Patanjali has said with unerring accuracy: “The will - to live sweeping on (by the force of its own nature) exists in this form even in the wise.' (Yoga Sutras - Bk. 2-9) The will-to live does mar pure knowledge. Tt is an inordinate addiction to time : an insatiable longing to bc, a distre that cling to one's self.
In intellection the mind turns upon itself and contemplates. It reflects, it educes relations, establishes correlates, and forms "thought - wholes' i.e. meaningful judgements. And then inanity vanishes. The oily knowledge that one can be dead certain about is mathematical knowledge aud knowledge of pure science. The rest of even scientific information - hypotheses and theories - are all mere guesses: at best working frame works and guide-lines. They are probabilities and inferences : they may be either adequate
or inadequate, accurate or inaccurate, appropriate or inappropriate. Our knowledge of the universe, a very large part of it, is mere speculation. Our judgements in the realm of thought and reasoning are very tenuous and rarefied and are prone to error. For aught I know, almost all out
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knowledge, all our understanding of things around us, and happenings in which we are involved, either directly or indirectly belong to the category of relative knowledge: personal and prejudicial. They pander our judgements, And the criterion we have of knowledge that we possess, or presume we possess, is purely of a relative and inferred nature. We are, as it were, surrounded by an ambient field, a milieu of doubts and probabities. Hence, no one except perhaps a mathematician, in his field, can be certain of anything.
in a world of muddled thinking, warped reasoning, of confused notions, inadequate ideas and doubtful existence: so blurred, so hazy, so wobbly, so messy, so exiguous, so inane, : how can one be certain of anything? Certitude is a nullity, perception a deception. One's very existence anpears to be a dream, and a delusion, and at stake. It ought to appear that man, the acme of the evolutionary process, its summum bonum, its culmination, has got into a muddled state like Dr. Pancrace in Molier's play who was at a loss to discover the difference between 'form and figure.” “To break through the fast-bolted doors of nature,' to establish a point of contact between the natural world and the ideal : the physical and the metaphysical “is no easy task.” (Lucretius)
In spite of the hopeless pie in which man has put his finger, he has been making a ceaseless attempt to pull out a plum. And has he the courage to say: “What a good boy am I?’ Has he got at the reality ? The Truth? The “warranted assertability'? (J. Dewey) Well, one has to seek recourse to that no-man's land viz. one's imagination. And what, pray, is the criterion of Truth?
There is one admirable and intriguing thesis that man, the seeker after truth, should be concerned with, and, that is : the marvellous and challenging theme of a metaphysic nature, namely: “I and my father are one.' It does, in a way, corroborate another admirable notion, namely, that the flesh and spirit are one; matter and mind are one. In the flesh of man is the mind of man, and, in the mind of man is the spirit. All three, it would appear, are
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different phases of the self-same event. The essence of the stuff the “ultimate simple' is one and the saine, but the relative effects are different and multifarious. There is a niggardly economy, an aptness, a fitness, and an austerity in the objects of anature. Although in the sensory world they appear to be different entities, they are one in essence. All the rishis of the world : the seers and the sages, - in their moments of ecstasy and transport, intimations of the infinite: 'dharsan', (ultra-sense-testimony) that is the state when the duality, nay plurality of existence, has ceased and oneness and wholeness prevailed in their mind, when the lower ego (self) has coalesced with the upper ego - have borne ample evidence to this stupendous truth. In the words of Plotinus : “It is a nobler principle than anything we know as Being; fuller and greater; above reason, mind and feeling.' (Enneads) It is a matter of ineffable experience. When man attains to this sublime state, the summum bonum - the chief good — of human experience, his state of ecstasy, of being, he becomes the 'son-ofMan.' (ec-stacy: Standing outside one's body) He is all in one, and one in all. In this state he is not concerned in the mere summation and the mere conservation of values; but in the total evalution of values. For such as he, all worldly distinctions, relative existences, have ceased to be. The first, the second and the third parsons - the triritarian considerations of Plotinus : the One, the Spirit and the soul which later became Father : son : holy ghost, (Christian) and "pathi : pasu : pasam” (Saivite) – are no more. They have merged into Oneness of being: the “thing-initself,' that is, a thing that subsists in itself. For such a “One’ Nature in her manifolds is no more a reality, although to all intents and purposes it is a plurality of existence. This is the common-sense reality. The notion of “Oneness of existence spelled out by the rishis appears to lie beyond the bounds of the conjectural understanding of the average man - the man of the workaday world. It must be owned that all our religious faiths have been tainted by this worldly, workaday notion of “oneself and the 'otherself." There, we appear to be governed by this notion: tell a lie to find a truth.' And all that we have been telling our children about the creation are lies - and the creator, ut ter lies : mere guesses.
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The myriads of heavenly bodies, space itself in its vastness, the immense fluid void that stretches beyond and further beyond, the millions and millions of living and non-living forms, cease to be, when the state of “I and my father are one' is attained. Then at existences become infolded, devolved and exist in the totality of existence - the wholeness : the One. This state may be considered to be a state of “nothingness' (soonya), since there exists only 'One' (eham), and no second person to bear witness to its existence. It is a Being without parts that contains itself. It is shorn of its attributes and qualities. In this state of encompassing sublimity everything else has merged into a state which there is none other than the incomparable “self to see and feel and experience. In this state the thing experienced and the experiencer are one and the self-same existence. In this state, existence has become involuted. It has acquired an "inward', and an “interiority.' Here the quality and the causative factors have ceased to exist. Here time ceases, place ceases; circumstance and existence cease. Nirguna; the attributeless state persists.
Pain and pleasure are no more: love and hatred exist not; lust and greed and gluttony have dissolved. isn't this the state of Nirvana : where all desires and the 'craving to be', all relative references: this, that and the other, even the inevitability of pain, have ceased to be All worldly criteria - relative values and categories, all ambient circumstances have been annulled; only eternal values persist in the “One’; and peace awaits one not far off. Hence we have an over-riding need to preen our thoughts; to trim our convictions; to re-think and purify our beliefs and our faiths. In brief we have to excise all our appetites and be neutral. We have to replace our instinctive happiness with reflective happiness - a satisfaction that is the outcome of clear thinking, “moral purity, probity, and loftiness' and rectitude. Our emotions have to be becalmed in tranquillity. Have we not to beget stone-silent faces ܗܝ
And, how did suffering creep in, in man's existence? “Suffering in the words of Oscar Wilde, is one long moment; and that is the way and the true value of the
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flesh. And bliss (Ananda): liberation (mukthi) is eternal; and that is the way and the true value of the spirit. It passes belief that the one has begotten the other; and it confuses us, and confounds our understanding. But it is an inescapable fact a bland truth, and a matter for deep reflection: that the flesh begets the spirit; that in course of time, that is, when the sands of time have run their course, in the mellowing maturity of thought, when “dukkha' (pain) is escaped by deep contemplation, when we have merged out of our several frays : our economic fray, our power fray, our scramble for security and status, flesh does evolve into the spirit. Flesh and spirit tend to have dim and drif ing edges; they coalesce. And in this noble process of the evolution of the true spirit in man - “theson -of-man” – formal religion, i.e. thic religion of conformity has served as a deterrent, since it brims over with tinselled thinking, glossed over with a veneer of tinselled music, cluttered with tinselled rituals and tinselled, even gilded and scintillating forms and offices: all hollow, misleading, tinny deceptions, pretensions, hums and haws. Moreover in its mantras, spells, incantations and ritualistic utterances, there is a 'stinking savour of dark and obscure words. The clerics flaunt a conceited style, and masquarade before the faithful in ostentatious gown and er mine, mitre and periwig, matted hair and sacred beads. And yet they indulged their vices and pampered their appetites.' And, all their ritualistic mutterings are mere blah-blah. And man has to "plod. through hoodwinkings to light." C. E. M. Joad. Between man's accredited doctrines and dogmas, such as the notions of the trinity, blood-spilling sacrifice, vicarious suffering of the Divinity, and pagan beliefs, for example those of Plotinus and those of primitive savagery, there is a link. This fact Anthropology reveals. Have recourse to Frazer's “Golden Bough.”
This notion of flesh self-actualizing, and emerging, and evolving into the spirit, regarding which man ought to be in dead earnest, is epitomized in the life of Jesus. In the flesh he suffered; in the mind he reflected and resolved all life's issues; in the spirit he attained eternal bliss. (sat-sith-ananda). In his life, in his suffering and agony, on the cross, we are able to spell out a meaning
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for our worldly suffering, and in his capacity to endure it and transcend it, that is, in his final 'samadhi' - coalescence of the flesh and the mind and the spirit - we discover a meaning, namely, the transcendence of the spirit over the fiesh. It is the spirit that triumphs in a state of eternal bliss; in it the glow, the thrill of life pervades. The resurrection of Jesus is neither more nor less than a tacit expression of this sublime event : the ec-static liberation. Hasn't Jesus, the man, triumphed into the status of Christ : the spirit? And shouldn't this be the triumphal achievement of everyman?
CREATION AND SPRT
Ha a disquisition of this nature where an abstruce subject is abstrusively treated the word 'creation' has a special significance; a special interest attaches itself to this notion. It is the fact of drawing out i.e. bringing into relative being what is best in man, supreme in its effects. It is the abstraction of the grandest, the noblest and the sublimest in man. Paradoxically it is the birth of the flesh in the spirit : it is the blend of the flesh, the mind, and the spirit. They have, as it were, telescoped into one another. The final outcome is the state of 'cosmic consciousness', which is no other than the triumphal spirit. It has had its stirrings, its dynamism, its animation, its infinite progression, its source, in the geitle tremor felt in the protoplasmic substrate of the primal seas, when life was apparently not, but yet it stirred and swelled in the primal ooze. It has had its motion in the first rough-hewings of a cave dweller, in the chaotic, yet meaningful, movements of the limbs of a newly - born infant.
The first representation of the bison bull that tifie cave dweller drew on the wall of the cave is no other that his first creation: his notion of the bison but that he killedthe production of his imagination. It is not a mere representation; not an exact replica or prototype of a creature of Nature. Though an imperfect representation - it appears to be so - a counterfeit, it is much more than what
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it is in actuality. This 'something more' is essentially and wholly mysterious, and its true, intrinsic nature and worth incalculable. True it is that it hasn't the flash and the blood, the bones and the tendons, the nerves and the ligaments of the live animal. None the less it has “much more'. It has inherent in it a creative notion, aa aura of suggestion, an endless expansionism, a measureless potency, an inestimable value, to move and to elevate the mind and exalt the spirit. It is a thing of beauty, an artistic creation. It has an elusive urbanity, and a rare grace, and a fitness and sweetness and suavity characteristic of a thing of creation. It pleases the the inner self, it moves and excites the emotions; it also gratifies the senses. It satis fies without sating. It does not cloy the senses; nor does, it dull them. Ennui and boredom come not near it. It has in it the mind of man; the inherent power to create, to assess, to evaluate, appreciate, and to give expression to these capacities. It is the creative faculty It is if aught I say, the beginning of art, an effort, an urge, an upsurge, an emergence, and a turbulence in the inner being of man to project the inward, to draw out what appeared to him to be the essence of the thing seen and experienced, and to breathe into it his own 'self: (self; being). It is an attempt on the part of man to penetrate the thing-initself: to peek into its being'. Man has thus the ability to body it forth through a medium and breathe into it the spirit and make it an object of b auty: a creation: an object that is capable of delighting, moving and satisfying. That is how Aristotle and Longinus conceived of the purpos of Art.
Art is none other than the outcome of the drawing out of the essence or the spirit of things, and the breathing into it a life, and the investing it in a form, and the imparting to it an expression. It is in a sense the work of a despot who is all powerful in his own province. The very same primal stirring spurted out, and took shape, and assumed a form in her womb. The very same sensibility and infinite capacity to be moved, to be delighted, and to draw forth, to create, may be observed even in a child of three years of age. He is capable of drawing out and bodying forth a form. A couple of lines and a circle and dots scrawled on a slate or a sheet of paper suggest his notion of a man;
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his abstraction, his image of what appeared to him to be the essential components of man; the universal man: the spirit of man : man the proponent, man the eternal. When one looks at Nature, and ponders over and contemplates her in her various moods, in however small a measure, one gets a critical attitude to Nature and sure and certain, this attitude begets the spirit. The spirit is, in a way, a perfect “criticism of life' since a mode of action and state of being are inherent in it. Creation is an abstracting, a completing, an image - forming, ari enlivening, an animating and aa enkindling process. It is taking a bit of Nature, an intractable dingy clot, moulding it into a form, giving it an expression, and breathing into it a spirit, that is to say, a 'something more' that makes it live. It is complementary, fulfilling in character. In the language of Schelling: "Every single work of art represents infinity'. That is what the true artist in man does when he creates a thing of beauty. His mode of action be gets a state of infinite being. Art lives; and the artist in it. Often art outlives the artist; and “artless art is the greatest art of all.
The image - forming facility resides in man. Images are copies of past events. The senses help to form them. The brain helps to register them. There is a nich for every one of them. Accordingly there are the visual, auditory, olfactory, tactile, gustatory and kinaesthetic images. Man is a mighty potential. It is his image-forming capacity plus his understanding - the judgement-forming capacity - and his skill, and the complacent (contemplative) mood divested of any disturbing emotional upsurgeemotion becamed in a state of tranquillity'- that form the basic stuff, the grist of his aspirations. He sees a block of narble : an unyielding mass of hard matter - adamantine and solid, stolid and firm. He contemplates it: a thought has taken root it his brain; and under the strokes of his chisel and his mallet, and under the influence of his vigorous understanding and spirited treatment: the unwanted, obstructing, stubborn chips fly; and the intractable mass of hardened and compressed adamant, the granular limestone, takes a form, as eumes a unity, a wholeness and a fitness: a rare adequacy; and becomes alive, and evokes appropriate feelings of complacency and tranquillity in the
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heart of the creator and that of the connoisseur. The Venus of Medici has been created: an object of consummate beauty and of perfection. A rhapsody in marble has been borin, and has so eclipsed and effaced the artist that we are not aware of the author of the piece. The sculptor has breathed his whole spirit into it, and his body is the poorer for it, and has become a living corpse. What a deep indelible dent his vigour and his complacency, his empat hy and sympathy have formed in the formless block of recalcitrant marble, and bodied it forth into an organized being of sublimest beauty, brim-full of expression and suggesstion Here has matter subserved the spirit: and here has the spirit triumphed, and emanated, projected an appropriate ambience, and a point of contact established between the natural world and the paranormal.
A child looking at its new birthday frock with critical eyes exclaims: “what a pretty frock In this utterance it expresses an inspiration, draws an abstraction, makes an appropriate judgement, comes out with a bit of its placidity, its me lowed emotional self, its aesthetic sensibility, nixed up, as it were, with the essence of the freck : the spirit in it, its loveliness. In this act the child is evaluating and appreciating; it is drawing out the spirit of the frock What the creator has put into the frock the child has drawn out. The child's inner self and the essence of the frock have met half way. The frockmaker's creative mind and the receptive, but yet creative mind of the child, have met half way; and the child's exclamatory judgement has become an expression of beauty. A true critic is also a creator.
Man has the acumen to perceive the truth; the reality in things: the thing that 'is', and draw out the essence which is the in-dwelling, immanent spirit - the permelating pringiple, the “immediate” value in ail, existence. Drawing out the highest, the noblest, and the best in things depnds on the creative ability and capacity of the drawer - the artist. Rembrandt had the supreme genius to draw out the truest, the noblest and the best in him, his self-image, his spirit, when he painted his own portrait which is an object of consummate art. To draw is to pull,
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and a 'drawing is the outcome of a 'pulling out', of the abstracting of what is best in a being. In a sense it is artistry. It is the being', the total self, the over-self, the paranormal : that is being drawn out by the artist in his act of creation. The “being' is the spirit, the essence that indwells in “all objects or all thought and flows through all things."
Now it may be asked: What are the valid human experiences that belp human heings in the evolution of the spirit : the supraconscious state in them? How is it that we find delight in, and are overwhelmed and gratified and conquered by, the great works of art : poetry and drania, dance and music, painting and statuary and architecture? The simple fact is that the spirit, the cosmic conscious. ness, the regulating virtue that has emerged and that dwells in us, tends to establish a connection, a nexus, with the spirit that resides in the theme of true art. In these deliberations “the head will have to entertain the heart.' There is beauty, there is elegance, there is form, there is balance, there is truth, there is love, there is expression; there is justice and perfection; and there is suavity and precision and morality and urbanity, and continual triumphs and a rare grit in a supreme work of art. In short there is “something more something fresher than what Nature has gifted it with. The artist's task is a formidable one. He has to conquer the medium in which he works; he has to draw out the spirit in it, bring it into conjunction and irf consonance with his inner being, make it possible for his sririt to mix and mingle with the spirit in the subject, and create a thing sublime which is an expression of the spirit that is intrinsic in the medium and in the worker in it. It is the meeting and fusing into one single whole of the spirit: in things and the spirit in the artist. empathy - the cohering congeries of his images and impressions. The experiences in man lead to the evolution of his mind, which in turn, in the fitness of time and circumstance, leads, to the evolution of the spirit. “There is nothing on earth divine besides humanity, says W. S. Landor.
The Vedic terminology: ‘Neti, Neti’s Not this, Not this - is a rebuttal of a rebuttal: a denial of a denial:
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To say emphatically: “Not this, Not this' one has to have at least an inkling of the true nature of “This' - (the spirit). But is it possible? Has anybody known it? And felt it? And is that experience communicable and shareable? These are all vexed questions. And, for all I know, no definite answers can be got. And what will be the outcome of this ‘Neti neti” collation ? Can anyone pretend to know? To say that the “will of a Superior Artificer” is the Ultimate Cause', the Uncaused Cause of all existence is very bad logic, a groundless metaphysical assertion, and a complete denial of Common Sense. To me it seems that terminologies such as : “The will of a Superior Artificer”, "Uncaused Cause", "the Ultimate Cause, the prime moverare all linguistic conveniences, empty nothings, treacherous propositions, hollow and meaningless : the outcome of muddled thinking and inept imagining.
MAN’S EXPERIENCES
Man's experiences occur at four distinct levels: the instinctive level, the emotional level, the intellectual level and the intuitional level. Those of the instinctive level are purely of an impulsive nature. They are on the slant: mere incinations. They just animate; they stir; they excite; they titiilate. Those of an intuitive asature raise one to ecstatic heights. Often they appear to be short-cuts to temporary states of spirituality. They flash upon the inward eye, - Creative visualization - and awaken feelings of inexpressible joy. The springs of human intuition are lodged in the several cel is that constitute the body. They are lyrical upsurges, : unfulfilled appetitive intentions. They titillate, and they tingle the nerves; they stir and they awaken feelings and deep-seated yearnings and nostalgic longings. But, be it known that intuition is an area brimming over with inexactitudes, doubts and dawdling chimeras. They are immediate experiences. They appear to be at odds with practicable practicalities. Wordsworth baving been moved into a state of ecstasy by a host of golden daffodils', carried away the picture in his mind, and then on odd occasions which served as trigger devices, his heart with pleasure fills and dances with the daffodils.'
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Experiences begotten at the emotional level, when tempered with lyrical understanding, have a sweetening, mellowing, warming, tranquilizing, and immediate influence. They soothe the mind and lave the spirit, become a balm and an unguent; help the mind to mature into the mellowing fruitfulness of the spirit. These experiences result in inspired creative activity it which the spirit finds expression, and becomes palpably real and assumes the form of Jatural religion, devotion (bhakti), poetry, drama, music, sculpture, architecture and painting. Tkey move, they sweeten, they enliven, and they animate the mind of man and draw out the spirit - the immediate - in it. They are meant to delight, to move, to energize, to chasten, to teach, to conquer and to engross. In shart they overwhelm, they ennoble the mind, remove the dross in it, raise it to ecstatic heights, transfigure it into the all-pervading immaculate spirit. In that state, says Plotinus : “Everywhere there is all, and all is all and each is all, and infinite the glory. And that is the “life at ease' : life of reason: “rtham." Of the vedic rshis: “The Divine Mind within - the greater thing within the divinely possessed and inspired - a Being, fuller and greater, above reason, mind, and feeling.' - This is the "nous" of Plotinus. Wasn't the "nous' awake in Jesus when he went to the cross? (nous : spirit) And didn't the Father bulk huge in his mind?
Experiences at the intellectual level awaken the mind and broaded it 6 demain. Under this category come such braaches of knowledge as logic, dialectics, philosophy, mathematics, scientific analysis, and ethics. By clarity of thought these experiences awaken and even enlighten leading to the evolution, (ascent) of the spirit. There is no denying the fact that the unknown factor and mystery ingredient in life is the spirit. It is a reality; not an ideal, nor even a mere concept. It is instinct and solid. with meaning. It has to be sought after; and it can be attained to at one of the afore-mentioned four levels of experience.
What we call primitive religion has a purely intui tional ground, with an emotional colouring, and is in its pristine purity. Its basis is the uncanny and the weird as also the nouminous feeling, : feeling of remoteness, of an
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indefinable, ineffable nostalgic longing : an artless art : an amoebic impulse that lurks in the depths of man's being.' It... is different from fear; for, in course of time, as man becomes civilized it matures into respect and everent awe and reverence. It is a feeling of dependence on the mysterious, unknown, dour power in Nature. It is a power that is, more often than not, deeply felt, and inexpressibly experienced. It does not lend itself to utterance, and te description, for the moment one begins to feel it, one is rendered tongue-tied. That is the true nature of primitive religion. It is, to use T. S. Eliot's phraseology : "a selftranscendence of feeling' - a dauby sketch. And thus spake F. H. Bradley : "At every moment of my state, whatever else it is, is a whole of which I am immediately aware: When natural religion is left severely alone, untampered with in its pristine, unsullied purity, Solidary with Nature - as it was in the case of the Buddha, Jesus and Ramakrishna - it leads to the evolution of the spirit, to the establishment of a link with the sublime, subliminal self by way of intuition - immediacy. In this state we descend into ourselves for a sojourn in the divine.' Then we become "avatars'; we have secured dharsan' - total vision. Aren't we all babies born to be suckled for ever at mother Nature's bosom? Reading Nature's intentions is never so easy. Conventional religions and orthodoxy hedged in by conformity in their varied forms, encumbered with their smothering load of cult S and divine office, rites and rituals and sacraments, doctrinal and dogmatic entanglements; and decaying, put rifying and cramping tradition and vague humanitarianism, seldom lead man to spirituality, since they have been deprived of their original purity by bing tampered with by political, and conventional, religious conformity and orthodoxy and authority. The tyranny of the privileged few, especially in the field of religion, is a real danger to social progress. It often leads to fanaticism. It has become formal like the necktie one flaunts; orthodox and strait-jacketed like the blinkers on a bridle. Orthodoxy and official religions have no life, no spirit, no olympian status in the art of thinking, no maturity in spirituality. They have only form and formulary codes. They are :: the religions of the fundamentalists. They are characteristically formal, mechanical, authoritative and cadaverous, in form:
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For the majority of mankind the very idea of God is no other than a mental satisfaction, a social convenience, a stilling of the conscience, an appeasement of the frustrated self; an occasion for pampering one's self importance. It is seldom or rarely a living presence, never a benignity and a peaceful way of life. It neither nourishes our sense of Sublimity, nor is it a blissful nuance in our inner life.
The 'bakti" cult in Hinduism, as also the “faith cult' in Christianity and Islam baulks clear thinking and slays one's originality and yearning for understanding and pure knowledge. They involve the bakta' or votary or 'sadhaka' in avid ignorance and utter confusion-avidya.' And most of our bakti cults and faith cults are no other than religions or disciplines of concession. They reward you, they punish you, they frighten you into formal behaviour. They pave the way for you either to heaven or to hell, or to purgatory. They are a real danger to the promotion of free thought.
Aren't these notions outdated, false? And don't they breed folly and ineptitude, ignorarce and bigotry? Rabid intolerance and fanaticism? They are sheer vaprous nonsence: not solid achievements. They have as their basis faulty, slipshod reasoning.
The Semitic religions of conformity that took on the Smudge of Aristotelian thought, had, according to Bertrand Russell, helped in a very large measure to frozen the thinking process so peculiar to mankind, for well over two thousand years. And mankind in the Western World and even in the East took upon itself, in all good faith, whatever Aristotle and “adharvana vedists' had to say. There was no fresh ferment in thinking, no weeding, no winnowing, no trimming, no collation of facts, no true critical approach to the various problems of existence. They were shocked by their brilliance; and they swallowed wholesale all that they had to say. Shouldn't freedom, therefore, be the lynchpin of religion? In some religions, mostly of a tribal character, there is a barbaric and distorted abrogation of the rights of man. They lead to slavery and abject misery, to sati and human sacrifice.
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Art in its pure unsullied form, freed from the train
mels of convention, has served as the surest vehicle for raising the pyramid of the mind of man to spiritual heights. Andre Malraux has saiti : “Art escapes death.' All art leads to the ordaining of nature and the extrusion of the purest, sublimest and best in her. Perhaps the greatest artists of the world are its true saints and sages, its seers and its prophets. They saw the beauty and the harmony residing in nature, in nature’s forma and in human life. In thes barnacles that he observed Goethe saw 'sacred creatures whose curious shapes symbolize nature.' The wise ones discovered a meaning in human suffering, in human affliction and human misery. Suffering and sorrow, dejection and despondency, pain and agony are : "after all the shadow of His hand raised caressingly." - Francis Thomson.
Human suffering - the highest morality and the most tangible truth - comes to us in the shape of a protracted song, an inspired hymn, and an unending melody in the Rig Veda, in the “Book of Job', in "Gitanjali etc. What a world of meaning do we find in the lines:
Thy hands gave me shape and made me, And dost thou at once turn and destroy me?’ “Remember that thou didst knead me into clay, And wouldst thou turn me back into dust?” (Job)
In this artistic inquiry; this heart Searching, penetrating, rebellious and resurgent outburst - the greatest thought ever to be come upon in the Old Testament, we discover the true meaning of human existence. We are our own creators, and we are our own destroyers. We can mould just as much as we can shatter our own destiny. We have perfect freedom to extract whatever meaning that emerges, depending on the height of our inspiration. None can lead us; neither can we lead any. No rabii, no religious authority can arrogate to himself the peculiar and exclusive right and privilege to interpret it for us; no infallibility can subsist either in this or that side of a meridian. Thwam eva prathyaksham.: I see thee verily. This is immediate' experience : direct contact with the spirit. To live at ease,' says Plotinus, verily is mother and nurse,
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existence and sustenance. Where dictation holds sway truth seldom prevails. Our desires, our affections and our enjoyments bring us into closer contact with reality. We tbegin to feel and to know, that there indwells an expansive loving kindness, a rare gratitude in all Nature. This is primitive natural religion as seen and felt and conceived by the ancient seers.
Through man and the society of man the mind of man is able to attain its supreme goal, its apogee of achievement and action, namely cosmic consciousness. I finds perfect harmony in the cosmos and becomes, as it were, an ineffable and sublime melody - the “One."
Hunan Society, tight-knit in its texture, serves as a vehicle for man's attainment of spiritual heights. Without the mutual interaction of society upon man he will not be able to attain his goal of cosmic consciousness. Isolation . from society either by peculative motives or selfishness, leads to the pampering of the brute in man - the ego - and the degradation of the spirit in him. It neither leads to morality mor to sublimity. Marcus Aurelius, Pierre Cihardin, H. Bergson, William James, John Dewey and Kant entertained a similiar notion and formulated the aim of life as the social good of the entire human society : the “omega point of existence. Is one's way of thinking way of behaving expedient? And, expedient in the long run? - these are the questions uppermost in the minds of the pragmatist' and the “instrumentalist philosophers. Individual man, in his attempt to reach perfection, has to work in unison with human society and nature; the collective mind of man, and the universal mind; and find the true and universal fulfilment of his life in the well-being of his neighbours and of his neighbourhood. He will have to work towards the attainment of tine greatest good of the greatest number, and if possible, of all. He has to work towards the organization of a better, nobler and more benign society and a kindly environment, free from the usual stress and strain and neurotic trends of those who are said to have had immediate intercourse with the Deity, and of those entangled in the strifes of the world. Then, and then alone, will his life become sublime, and then only can he discover the
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golden bond of love: “prema yoga” so expansive and so pervasive : that binds the entire universe into one single whole: a supremely benign unity: a kindly monistic whole. “An Idea which thinks itself.” Hegel.
Hence it is that every act of man should be so planned, designed, and so performed as to be in harmony with the twin major laws of existence, namely: the law of the head and the law of the heart. In short, man should so fashion and mould his life, his faith, his convictions, and his affirmations; so roughhew them, chisel and shape them as to enable him to efface the lineaments of his several brands of communion and fellowship, and become one with the harmonious, luminous whole that society is destined to be. “Life surges and moves towards new forms.... and life finds full satisfaction only in society.' - H. Bergson. This inner urge, this longing to rekindle a common communion of absolute faith in each other's goodness and well-being is inherent in man. It is an urge to get together, to move forward, to be “one in all, and all in one.' Longinus has said: “From the first Nature poured into our souls a deathless longing for all that is great and diviner than ourselves.' Every being is alone', forsaken, "tragically alone, savs Sartre; hence it will have to evolve a joyful feeling of and thou.'
Natural objects become divine when they are most like unto Nature and come the closest to her, for Nature is, of necessity, neutral, good, and ethical in her essence, and attains ataraxia' in her manifold activities. This is a pagan notion, elegantly pantheistic, Supremely dignified and sublimely divine in its content; and the Vedic Rishis and St. Francis of Assisi held tha selfsame notion. “O Mithra O Varuna ! O Aryaman ! O Indra ! O Brahaspathi ! O Vishnu ! Namo Brahmane, Namasthe Vayo !”: exclaimed the rishis. Says St. Francis: “Praised be my Lord for our sister the Moon, and for the stars, the which he has set clear and lovely in heaven."
Praised be the Lord for our brother the wind, and
for air and cloud, calms and all weather, by the which thou upholdest in life all creatures.
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“Our sister the water; our brother the fire; our mother the earth; our sister the death of the body.'
Isn't there a pristine, naive simplicity, a paganistic sublimity, a brutal sincerity, an indubitable advantage, an unbounded freedom in these artless utterances? Semitic, religions have tended to be rigidly monotheistic, fanatical and rabidly intolerant. Polytheism uses “different expressions for the same influence. It is more in touch with nature than monotheism.... Combination of monotheism with polytheism is no more contradiction, but merely an intelligent variation of phrase to indicate various aspects of functions in physical and moral things'. (George Santayana) *யா தொரு தெய்வங் கண் டீ ர், அத்தெய்வமாகி ஆங்கே LDITG5ITO) unt SG)ii girlb Qu(56).jri. ' (He comes in the form you intend to see him.) In their ecstatic yet crystal clear thinking the rishis of old exclaimed: “rtham vadhishyami. Proclaim that which is right; uphold that which is true Justice and verity are, as it were, immanent in Nature. These values are universal; being shapeless, formless and indistinct, they have become magnificent and enormous, and surmount even time and space barriers. Immensity is profundity. Mount Kailash is immense, and the Ocean as viewed from the rock at Cape Comorin is suggestive of an everexpanding, ever-widening vastness. They are profound and are meaningful and suggestive of a universal presence; everexpanding, ever-widening pervasiveness that custom hasn't the power to corrupt and time the capacity to wither, whittle down and render stale. They reflect the face of the universe,' - eternity.
To see justice and goodness in things one should have the will to wade through the flood of suffering, sorrow and even of ignorance life has to proffer. To conceive of the "truth one has to ask one's heart, to sever connection with Kanchana' and “Kama' - greed for gold and carnal craving - the desire for the gratification of the grosser passions, greed for power and fleshly app tites; and one should also have and ought to be able to organize an ensemble of the energy which collects, combines, amplifies, animates, actualizes and spiritualizes. In other words, one should be capable of an exercise which should be wholly
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and completely designed and detached, and be all-consuming, engrossing and energizing. It should enable him to grapple with vice, and control his passions; for passions and diseases are linked. It should be moral; for morality is the greatest good, and therefore the most beautiful entity in the realm of values. And morality endows one with a rare and stupendous power, to cut away everything' (Enneads) - even revelation and intuition. These mislead. He must surmount (all) propositions, then he sees the world rightly. Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent. (Rudolf Wittgenstein) To hide one's ignorance one shall not resort to the employment of magniloquent terms: such as the “Absolute', Revelation' and “Mystic Symbol's e.g. “Amen”, “Om”, “Amiru”, “sadhu” etc. Don’t the vulgar still tremble before stocks and stones; and wiseacres superstitiously concerned about omens and rites and rituals; and inept doctrines and inane dogmas? Isn't this religion today? Sri Ramakrishna was justly obsessed with the lofty notion of detachment so was Jesus and Sakyamuni; Confucius and Plotinus, in no less degree, lagged behind them. Even a great thinker of old, Aristotle, was of the opinion that “Catharsis', i.e. purgation of the mind, was an essential adjunct to the attainment of perfection. Mind, being truly, delicately, elegantly and vividly communicative through the medium of the flesh, has, intrinsic in it, the power to draw out the best in the flesh and work towards the attainment of spirituality: a wholly smooth, peaceful and graceful aspect of a highly evolved mind. Although in Nature there is the suggestion of an epoch of "piralaya’ - of death and destruction and complete annihilation, - yet in the total aspect of her colossal endeavours, in her ceaseless striving, her savage lust, we are able to read between the lines, and discover. an immensity, an illimitable unboundedness, a plenitude of ponderable dignity, an infinity, and permanence that awes, inspires and liberates the spirit locked up in the inner core of matter. The spirit epitomises the good in matter. And if you take care of your mind and your body, your spirit will take care of itself. Says M. K. Gandhi : “There is an indefinable mysterious power that pervades everything.
feel it, though I do not see it.'
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Even in his most hopeless, disconsolate, and disjointed, and disjunctive state man has the hope for very high aspirations. Man has to be gently disciplined, and put through the disabilities of pity and fear, ignorance and his inevitable social heritage of superstitious trends before he attains spiritual heights. The poets Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides meant their tragic creations: Agamemnon, Orestes, Antigone, Hercules, Philoctetes; Medea, Alcestis, and Hecuba to move and to purge man of his ill-gotten emotions: to jettison his extravagances and out-breaks of temper, rage and revenge, envy and hatred, and other moral dirt; to nick the abscess and let out the pus, to open out his pent-up griefs and vengeance to disburden his carking anxieties, and supervening disappoin' ments, so that his mind may be purged and his spirit rendered wholesome. It would appear that the carnival of crime that a tragedy essentially is, simulates a thorn that serves to extract a thorn. Whenever man gave vent to his mean impulses and propensities, indulged in a plethora of low and sordid pleasures, and lost sight of the beauty and the truth and the justice in life and Nature, he has been stay put through the fire of suffering and agony, langour listlessness and menta) gloom; and thus, he has been purified and purged of the dross in him, his ill-humours, his baleful intentions; and converted into pure spirituality. Human history, which is no other than the surfacing of human activity, has to be, in a sense, disciplined, mailed to the cross, and strait-laced. We can see the drift in the protracted suffering and excruciating pain and unendurable agony that Jesus is said to have endured on the cross at Calvary. His suffering is Supremely and eloquently significant and symbolic of the necessity of suffering and self-denial, and self-abnegation in human existence and human progress. We find this notion underscored in the life of Sri Ramakrishna. In the flash they suffered and in the spirit they triumphed. When the spirit triumphs, DEATH, so dreadful and so mystical becomes a myth, and disease is no more the secry, dreaded nightmare that it is today; and life has to come to an end almost abruptly sans tears, sans rheum, sans complaints, sans suffering of any kind, sans waiting patiently for last words and unctions; in brief, sans grief. “Life will go to pieces all at once. Just as bubbles do
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when they burst.’ And it should. This will be the way of the world; and there will come total fulfillment. And that is the way of all life. And that is the surest and safest way to end this life of strife and stress; of frustration, irritation and ennui; of practical struggles and affections; of anxiety, of anguish and of agony. Isn't life like unto a marionette play? Depend on this medical slogan: Her anxiety lifted, her health improved.
“Greater love hath no man than this that he lay down his life for the sake of his fellow men.' This is, perhaps the highest teaching to be found in any one of the religious books, for it comes as the outcome of the prevision of Jesus's suffering on the cross. The theme, namely, the agony of Jesus on the cross, is a unique and perfectly apt demonstration of this truth. The theme appears to be the sum total of the suffering of the entire human race from its very inception as a blob of jelly to the hour of its attainment to spirituality.
How is it possible for man to attain to spirituality ? Is it absolutely necessary for him to do so? If so, why? Whether man will it or 1) be shall have to; and he is destined to attain to spirituality. This is Nature's dictation. It is governed by the law of necessity and the law of precision. The former is the logical and natural sequence of events leading from inert matter to animate matter, and then from animate matter to the mind of man, consummating in the ascension of the spirit. The att er is the law that governs the attainment of perfection of an object placed as it might be in its ambient circumstances. The natural corollary and the irresistible conclusion is this: that the final goal of man, if he may be assumed to have one to seek, and if it is worth seeking, is spirituality or the state of cosmic-consciousness. At this juncture it would appear that Abe Maslow's suggestion as regards the 'self" carries some nea aing. He suggests that growth takes piace when the next step forward is subjectively more delightful, more joyous, more intrinsically satisfying than the previous gratification with which we have become familiar and even bored; that the only way we can ever know what is right for us is that it feels better subjectively than any alternative.”
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The new experience validates itself rather than by any outside criterion. It is self-satisfying, self-validating. This is the way in which we discover the self and answer the
ultimate questions: Who am I? What am ? It is formu
lation of growth through delight - (self-actualization.) It would thus appear that the antecedent is inert matter and
the consequent is spirituality, and that there is a before
and an after, an apparent cause and an apparent effect, a catena : an in finite series of events in Nature caught up
in instants. Says Francis Quarles: “If thou remove I die.'
Separation from spirituality is death. To put it figuratively
and picturesquely: the finger of destiny points increasingly
in the direction of a spiritual existence: total bliss or
'ananda' - the isle of perfect tranquility in the samsara
of the turmoil of life i.e. Shanti in Samsara : a far-away
feeling, a remoteness and an exclusiveness: a feeling of abandon, of aplomb, of being perfectly free, unencumbered,
unenthralled and unconditioned: a feeling of “nothingness',
of nothing to worry about: an over-powering sense of
suspense and an overtone of awe, love and delight.
Let us strip ourselves of our garb of learning, our academic cap and gown, our inept knowledge of science, the glitter, the glow and the gloss of our much-vaunted civilization, our pedantry, our knowledge of conventional, official and orthodox conformity with its acknowledged depth and significance; its dignity, sublimity. and power; our belief and our long-cherished faith in our dying traditions, our crippling creeds, our smothering superstitions, our impenetrable garb of ignorance, our rude and rustic simplicity, our inability to comprehend and understand natural phenomena, our stupid dependence on our professors of legerdemain, on our so-called yogis and god-men skilled in sleight of hand, our slavish addiction to a fossilized system of philosophy, our immense system of institutions, our glut of stranging political credos, our antiquated social heritage, our established facts and our sour religion. When we do so we shall be "left with the genuine man in his pristine good sense, natural instincts, original impulses and intuitions, i.e. man in his bland naivety, in all his blessed nakedness. Man will then be in a fit state to establish a contact and forge a link with the inner latent spirit in
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him, to wit his subjective being, and to rate it justly and reasonably.
In such a state, freed as he is from any form of conditioning, from the paralyzing influence and hedging in of racial, religious, linguistic, caste, tribal and political pressure groups, there is not likely to be any difference between man and man. The inequalities would then have been planed down and smoothed over, the identities effaced and rendered featureless and the illogicalities in man's behaviour obliterated. Only the common "essence', the golden cord that binds man and man will come into prominencehis compassion and his love. V
The moment the external and acquired possessions and accretions cease to be, man, the genuine comes into prominence. He would then be pure and simple - human. And all human beings in their pristine natural impulses and propensities, inclinations and actions would be more alike than not. Mankind would then have crossed its barriers of colour and caste, race and criced, status and rank and got together and formed itself into one single human family with like urges and longings and allied aspirations and perhaps identical cravings. Says F. H. Bradley: "Spirit is the unity of the manifold in which the externality of the manifold has utterly ceased.’ And Hegel brims over with the same idea when he says: * Reason is the substance of the universe.'
Hence when spirit manifests itself materiality loses its garb of externality and ceases to be a mere appearance. Once illusion (Enaya, avidya), call it what vou will, ceases to be, reasoning love (prema vidya) reigns supreme, and a man like a Socrates or a Jesus, is capable of taking upon himself the suffering of others. But the tragedy of it all is that the majority of mankind has failed to understand this great law of suffering and its sublime purpose in life, for man is the most illogical of Nature's illogicalities. He changes much more rapidly physically and mentally than, any other thing in existence. He is mercurial in his feelings and in his thinking.
The surplus energy: in living things and the direction in which it tends to flow
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It was no mean or low-born creature which Nature chose when she brought man into the mighty assemblage of life and all the order of the universe.’ (Longinus) Life in its multitudinous forms blossoms mainly as the result of the surplus pent up creative energy that wells in them, and flows through them. The courtship of birds, the play of kittens, the frisking and gambolling of kids and lambs and other young animals, the sexual behaviour of animals, the amorous sex-based ardour of man, his interest in games and sports, his efforts at unravelling the mysteries of Nature, his insatiable thirst for adventure and creative activities, his ability to carve in stones, to arrange musical notes to form beautiful fugues in harmony and melody, his dexterity to daub colours and paints, to depict on canvas and walls, to produce some of the most exquisite paintings and murals of the world, his literary endeavours, his thought and action provoking notions, his spiritual exercises and rare spiritual heights: all these are suggestive of the surplus pent up energy finding expression in various ways.
Man's meatal ecoergy has immense possibilities. In every being there is a potential that activates it. It is creative energy that brings forth creative art. The creative energy in man, time after time, has given vent to some of the rare experiments in yoga - an ordered and methodical way of discipline. Lust, that is often the common outward expression of sexual urge in man : the erotic impulse, evolves into the tender love for a beloved partner in life, and the nellowing care a imother bestows om her child. Sex-based love having been ennobled i.e. rendered sublime and expansive by certain slick moods and benign circumstances blooms into the tender devotion that a parent has for his infant child, that a devotec has for his divine, lover. This is the bonding, reinforcing, fortifying, olympian. principle - prema dharma - tender feeling that is so patent in family ties; and it is this very same principle that leads to the immediate' in man.
The brain and the hands, the eyes and the ears, the entire body itself have combined in a unique co-ordination of activity which has rendered man's existence richer and nobler than ever before, improved on his collective
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mind and enabled it to go forward in the direction of the evolution of the spirit : one single collective mind and intent - a meaningful whole: a sufficiently reasoned existence. It is, in brief, an amplitude of being. Reality is one experience,' says F. H. Bradley. And feeling, thought and volition are all the materials of existence.
Man, from the early dawn of civilization as cave man, to the status (posturing) of a modern nuclear scientist and philosopher, poet and impressionist artist, sage and saint, has been displaying the expression of his surplus energy flow in a variety of forms in the shape of emotiongoverned, intellect-governed and wiil-governed activities. “Man is nothing else but the sum of his actions,' says Jean Paul Sartre. He adds: “Man is a series of undertakings; he is the sum, the organization, the set of relations that constitute these undertakings.’ Very soon, if not in the near future, in the remote future, this surplus energy, properly husbanded, will enable man to build up a collective mind and a collective intent : viz a serious, collated concern and a sublime purpose : the cosmic consciousness of the rishis and philosophers.
It is simply miraculous how the selfsame primal energy (-3 fig), stuff of existence, the will-to-be, clinging as it were, to every existence, intrinsic in the heart of the atom, the primal swell and urge in the amoeba, expands, emerges, and finds expression in various forms : from the display of courtship in the cock bird of paradise and the passionate ardour of a Romeo for a Juliet to the creative urge that resulted in the attainment of Nirvana of a Buddha and the spiritual upsurge that had the capacity the nobility, and the sublimity to transcend the sufferings on the cross of a Jesus. It even goes beyond the narrow precincts of the Lower Ego through the transcendental Ego: through the subtle self to the spirit, What remarkable powers has Homo Sapiens attained. The naked ape' has wormed its way to Nirvana - total liberation from all conditioning : spatial and temporal relations. Here is the condition of the complete annihilation of the Lower Ego. The sex-based lustful "Kundalani' - neuroendoctrine energyflow-rises and having attained to the status of pure
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thought' assumes the form of nirvana : ananda: unsullied neutral bliss. This is the 'sith maya' (sin maya) stage of existence: the status of perfect understanding: the knowing. The mind fluctuations having beeri removed, its hindrances annulled, by the three constraints of attention, contemplation and concentration; that is by discrimination, it assumes a stable stance. (Lower ego: Mind that has been formed and dominated by inadequate ideas. Higher ego: Mind, the outcome of adequate ideas. Will: Intent of the mind to be; to exist.)
In the conscious unification of the mind and will man has been able to ascend to the rare status of “the son of man'; the essence and the spirit of man. The achievements of the several sciences and the arts take man beyond his individual self: the personality cult, since they are the cumulative expression of the surplus energy-flow and energydrive - the will to wiser, juster and better being : finer, richer and more substantial and nobler being - that is inherent in man. The more matter assumes the forms of the mere highly evolved forms of iife, the more highly evolved their mind becomes, and the nearer they are to the goal of the collective mind and the collective will. The human mind aeither has an abrupt beginning nor does it have an abrupt end. It is not a haphazard emanation of Nature. Speaking broadly, it is quite germane to the broad issue immanent in Nature, namely, evolution: emergence. The mind-in-itself is aa exemplar of all truths. It goes on for ever and ever, seeking, as it were, a higher and yet higher plane of existence; an infinite aspiration which is designed to lead to a larger, all pervasive, immanent, comprehensive life : a synthetic supermind, a perfection of the cosmic soul. (Logos)
Every human being has entrenched in him an urge, an initiative and an appetite for creativity; hence overy action of man, his words, thoughts and deeds, have to be so planned, so collated and so organized, as to be productive of something good, something useful, something meaningful; something richer, nobler and fuller, something of lasting benefit to mankind in general: to the human milieu. In other words every effort of his shall be a social event: a social act: a beneficent "Karma': a creative endeavour.
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“A man can live in the world's memory only by what he has done," says M. de Chateaubriand. Obsessed and heavily burdened by a craving for pelf, and filthy lucre, and graft for earning it, acquiring it, and hoarding it, often squandering it, man has lost touch with his deep-seated, intrinsic sense of creativity - creative intellection - and has become a slave to his low, abject desires. It would seem that the apparent glories of existence - sath : sith : ananda - are just as much a deception and a cheat' as experienee itself is. And, time out of mind, hasn't man been deceived and misled? By whom ?
Right before us looms the immensity of the void of ignorance: the night of “avidya' : the accumulated ignorance of ages that has come down to us time and time again, covered us, crammed us, and smothered us under its ponderosity: the ignorance of religion-based superstitions, putrid and petrified traditions, caste, class, race and other considerations and fossilized social prejudices, and the obsession of money and a craving for power. These, of course die hard; but although they seem to exert a massive and decisive influence on us, die, they must. The bulk of our beliefs, faiths and convictions and tenets has been so settled in our mind by time and custom and made to appear as self-evident and of an unquestionable certainty and . . . . . . ; ; , t t it would be very difficult to dislodge them by arguments and authority, in which endeavour one has to act with, 'mutual charity and forbearance. J. Locke. We have to find a new charter for all our distorted, matter-bound thinking. We have to think in time and out of time. We have to think beyond our day to day involvements: our several life's situations. We can't afford to be chartered libertines. We must endeavour to live at ease' and be in peace. We have to comprehend fully the “appearance of separateness' - the world as inadequately perceived by us. We have to find certitude in our sciences. Says F. H. Bradley: "Outside of spirit there is not, and there cannot be any reality, and the more that anything is spiritual, so much the more is it veritably real." And spirit is endless life, action and freedom, and search after truth.
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But, beyond the void of "avidya' having cleaved it into twain, flows the clear stream of accumulated human understanding ; of sweetness and light: the sciences and the arts and the philosophies, the unsullied wisdom of the ancients and the modern tendency towards an ecumenical, understanding of the multifaceted problems of humanity as one single, indivisible and inviolable whole; for, "every being is lucid in every other.” (Plotinus)
Our interests shoald, therefore, be such as would bring us health of body and sanity of mind and perfect peace and happiness. They must be so instant in their service, so satisfying and so absorbing as to bring in their wake peace and mental harmony. Is it worth one's while gaining the whole world and losing one's own true worth ? - A question that was posed of yore and worth its weight in gold; nay in “something more.' We have to create ourselves, and in the process, we have to create our collective mindthe social sense: primal and benignant - and revalidate our. conscience : our inner voice.
Instinct and intuition, thought and feeling, intellect and will, knowing and undestanding and apperception; image and perception and memory, are the principal constituents of the mind of man; and in their varied capacities - and the creative energy flow of which they are expressions, lead to the evolution of the spirit. There is nothing lost, nothing wasted: there is perfect economy: perfect each is in its ambient circumstance. Every one of these elements - monad' of Leibniz - is in instant service, and contributes its mite to the evolution of the spirit: the total good : o sampoornam.” Spartial and tempora) relations go a great way in fashioning and determining each and every event. The external and the internal environments have in true earnest helped to mould the thing: whatever it be : plant or planet, man or monkey with due deliberation and contrivance. It cannot be let or hindered. We have to confess' our intellectual bankruptsy, and gird up our loins, fend off the danger of approaching "avidya' and meaningfully exercise our powers : both, brain and brawn.
In the functioning of the mind of man, thought and feeling go hand in hand, even as much as intellect and will,
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do. Both sets of combinations give rise to action: strife, stress a ind strain. But excessive emotion, when it assumes the dimensions of passion, inhibits thought, and it is productive of inaction. Then the mind gets debauched and turns out to be dissolute. Thoughts are clothed in action, and they tend to proliferate action. Emotive thinking and intuitive awakening have been the basis of all art, and even of science. Let us instance. If we were to interrogate Einstein as to how he chanced upon the theory of relatively he might venture to answer in perfect candour thus : It just dawned upon me one fine morning just as the notion of the law of gravity flashed across the mind of Newton and that of the law of the motion of the planets in elipses came to the minds of Tycho Brahe and of Kepler – not haphazardly of course, but in a certain definite, deliberate order. Excess of sentimentality leads to empty, barren, blurred and arid day dreams : mostly inadequate ideas, phantoms and illusions, as possessed by the astrologers. They are in short “phantom walls.' The astrologers are the “cobweb-spinning eclectic flea-crackers.' They strain at gnats. And all that they have is utter rot.
It may not be superfluous to mention that all the best qualities in human nature, and all the worst come to the view of the post, the prophet, the philosopher, the sage and the seer; and the residuum of human qualities beauty and truth, ugliness and falsehood, help to mould the ideal object of beauty as much as the most grotesque incongruity. Here we get our Orlando and there our Caliban; here a Sita and there a Soorpanaka; here a hero worthy of our worship and there a villain fit to be cast into the deepest gloom of the inferno. The poet is thus able to see the perfection in nature's objects as well as the incongruities in them. In his endeavour to see the excellence in things, he chances upon ugliness, and segregates it. In other words, ugliness is no other than the outcome of a genuine search for the beautiful. It is only a by-product, like all cvil, and not the main theme : an excretion, not a secretion. When the gods churned the ocean of amirtha' - immortalitydidn't they get the poison? It is a graphic allegory; and a meaningful one. And doesn't the path of wisdom lie through sorrow and pain and suffering. To reach up to
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shanti' - in ther peace and harmony - one has to wade knee deep in tears one has to have a fund of sympathy; suffer with the suffs rer. Aren't Buddha and Socrates and Jesus our examples? Men, who, in order to lighten the burden of the sorrow of others, took it upon themselves? Buddha was not happy so long as there was suffering among living things; so was Jesus. Are their teachings mere fear-based maunderings ? Scary musings?
Man's perfection is not merely organic; it is mindbody bonded. It is spiritual evolution.
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PDS. SLRP
THE EXISTENT (SATH)
The “existent is the “being' which has sought out and established a perfectly consistent and pre-ordained harmony with the rest of existence. You disturb one thing in existence, and you disturb the pre-ordained order of events that subsists in all Nature. This is a Leibnizian doctrine; not different from the Vedic notion of 'oneness' of existence. Existence and essence and mind are one and the same: the thing and “all-that-it-is.' They cannot be separated. They can never become disparate existences or entities, although they might appear to be so. The essence of being and its “existence', that is to say its being are so inextricably bonded as to form the process of “minding', or concerning or knowing. (SITH)
Perfection (“poornam') resides in existence; for existence is governed by Nature's principle of precision', and the law of precision is this; that things so adapt themselves as to be in perfect harmony with their ambience. This law permeates the totality and entirety of existence, from a particle of dust to the most distant nebula; from a bacteriophage to the most highly evolved hominid.
Mysticism: In mysticism we have a terminology, that mystifies; that is truly a puzzlement. It has conspired to put man in chains, chocked him and gagged him; kept him dazed and dazzled from the very dawn of civilization - that is from the time man learnt to reflect, to put a notion upon a notion, and to draw parallels and beget correlated new notions.
It is a vague conception.
The question may now be posed: Is mysticism something special, something exclusive, something new and jaunty, something that is the peculiar flavour, the divine experience of a favoured few ? This is what the Concise Oxford Dictionary has to say

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about it. It is: 'spiritually a legorical or symbolic; occult, esoteric, of hidden meaning. It is admittedly a word that has been bandied about, slayed, butchered, mangled and martyred and miserably misused as far as its meaning and usage are concerned. Is it the spurious divine power - gna na dhristi' - that is supposed to hedge a rishi, a yogi, a Mahdi, a gnani'? No one seems to know its true connotation. It is word tyranny. It appears to be the habit of consigning the inexplicable to the Limbo of the unknown.
In the course of the evolution of the "minding process' - the process of “being and becoming', of being progressively aware - this terminology "mysticism' appears to have snow-balled so far as its meaning is concerned, and accumulated a good deal of inadequate contradictory meanings and notions.
In the first place we should know that every experience i. e. Sense awareness in every event in existence is a mystery, a secret. It has an awareness, a state of consciousness and ideation which is exclusively and intrinsically its own. The "thing becomes aware of the thing-in-itself. And this experience can never be shared with another. It can never become commonsense knowledge. It is not communicable; seldom transferable. It has, so to say, all its windows closed, barred and bolted. It hasn't even the minutest chink through which it can hold communion. Then why pray brag about it and say: it is the exclusive property of the recognized god-men and sadhus and yogis? And how do we know it is obtaining union with or absorbing into the Deity, and that it is the spiritual apprehension of truths beyond the understanding 2 The most pertinent question of all is this: How can there be "spiritual understanding of truths beyond understanding'? It appears to be a contradiction in terms: an offensive suggestion.
So far as our understanding of things goes, we know for certain, that every experience is something exclusively the experiencer's own. Hence experience i. e. “anubhava' in itself is esse atially mystical, in that it is one’s own exclusive possession that can never be dispensed with, shared or communicated. It is, in a sense, an emergence. Honey tastes sweet, we say,
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But how do we know that we have identically the same experience of sweetness: the identical sensation?
In this sense of: “experiences are one's own' every
experience is mystical. It is a deep-based secret; and every event, whether it be a mystic, a maharishi, maha yogi or a divine or even a crystal of candy, has its own mystical anubhava', in which event, every one of them is a mystique,
for they have an experience; they are windowless and unshareable.
The notions of mystic symbols, mystic sound, mystic spells, intuitional and mystic experience, divine revelations, as
used in every day popular parlance, are utter bluff, ears
tickling pretences. They are shrill, they are frightful, and they are nasty. They are mere flash-in-the-pan, esoteric devices and tenor adopted by self - styled mystics - egoists - to enslave the innocent and the credulous. No free human being with even an iota of self- respect should pay any regard to these humdrum, hollow, chaotic, vacuous notions - all inanities of a sort - and style himself a devotee; a bhakta a sort of 'attache' of any saint
or yogi or “maharishi who has earned these designations through his supposed “mystical powers. It is abjectly degrading to ingratiate with, to lean against or cling on to, any one of them. It is despicable behaviour of a questionable sort, far beneath human dignity. Mind must be free, untainted by any faiths, devotion, or bhakti for the faithful, the devotee and the “bhakta' are slaves: conditioned and enthralled. And the majority of mankind has been slaves for generations: they have been ensnared and caught in the web of "avidya’ - ignorance. And history and tradition and faith are mere tangles. Caught in them you are ensnared, enslaved, enthralled. , Are you a bhakta' a creed leech? you are a slave,
The Existent is free; whereas a “bhakta's function is smothered in surmise.'' (Shakespeare)
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WHAT A World
Myself and my world! I am confronted with this puzzlement: this grand and consistent notion. I have my thisness'; my subjective self: all-that-I-am: all that I feel about myself; my being'. And I have my objective self, that is, all that I have projected as my phenomenal self: all that I think and feel; the otherness' that exists.
These: "thisness'and otherness constitute my world. My notion of myself subsists in my subjectivism, my immediacy: my immediate idea of myself. It is a self-evident truth: the 'cogito' of Descartes. Let me consider. No further proof of my existence is needed. When I make an effort to prove an existence, the proof goes a-begging, for existence can never be established or proved by syllogistic logic or by dialectics. 'Language is a mixture of logic and idiom' - usage When Descartes attempted to establish existence syllogistically the attempt turned out to be no other than begging the question. He said: “I think; therefore I am'. The very word 'I' involves and implies existence; for existence has been fully established in the “I-ness' of the "I". Thinking involves the '1'. Hence my existence needs no other certitude: no proof. There is an element of self-sufficiency in it: self-satisfaction. It is selfsufficient because I think, feel, I will, I wish, I want. All of these I do; therefore I endure' : I believe in my
thisness'. In brief: "I am what I am."
What Sartre says is true: “Every being is alone — tragically alone, with no excuse behind us, or justification before us. And every being tracks himself through life - all, all alone'. Now, let me be stridently critical of “myself” and of what Sartre has said.
when I move out of "thisness', that is to say, this zone of self-hood or subjectivism of my own being process" - inner - my identity - my belief in myself begin to become'. I begin to acquire a deeper sense of ownership.
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I believe, I discover a 'satisfying purpose' in my life. It may be pleasing, it may not be; it may be satisfying, it may not be. I have to evolve an attitude of mind. I may suffer, I may enjoy life; I may be unconcerned. I feel I am, and that I have a sense of and mine I begin to acquire a sense of possession. I become event-oriented and possessive: that is to say: cling to time; cling to space; cling to events, I am confronted with situations, And at every one of those situations I assume a 'stance” - a pose, a status
and an expression. And so long as the poses hold sway over man's thinking and understanding he has his miffs, his huffing and his puffing. He fights like Kilkenny cats. And that is
how he registers his existence. He is at loggerheads with somebody or other; with something or other. So long as he persists in the “thisness' of his existence, the notion of 'otherness' gets established in his mind.
And since I have a feeling of “I and mine' my being' - “purusha” the tota consciousness of or un concerned - ness about or indifference to myself: enlarges, expands, extends its awareness of itself, and grows, and becomes pervasive and immanent. It acquires possession of a notion of its own identity; it acquires possessions. It has its sentiment-tainted acquisitions: its own self, its next of kin: the flesh of its flesh, the blood of its blood; its home, its movable and immovable possessions, its objects of interest; its knowledge of the external world, its sciences and its arts, its scientific discoveries, its art creations: its poetry and its drama, its inventions and its practicable practicalities; its mechanical contrivances, its fabrications: its vehicles, its motor cars, and aeroplanes, its trains and steam ships, its chopper bicycles, its scooters, its pins and its needles; its religious myths, its juicy scandals, its wobbly conduct, its master effort to climb into super status folds, its puppet-show life, to witt its getting engrossed in the actual business of just getting along; in sum, its complacent mood: complacency. In other words it plunges into an ocean of activities; its arts and its artifacts. In short: it acts, it creates, it owns itself; it comprehends. But the hold, though tight, and the grip though firm, yet it manacles and puts in chains the purusha,
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for it gets attached to things, to notions, to institutions, to organizations. It acquires notions, it even proffers services; it offers gifts, it blesses. Possessiveness is its curse. And had not existence this curse of possessiveness, this crazy. trend, this mad longing, it would have ceased to be.
Then come the detached conceptions: the self's being's) notion of numbers, its arithmetical enumerations, its geometrical measurements, and configurations, its abstractions, its inferences, its hypotheses, its perceptions, its concepts, its thought patterns. its images, its imagination-based chimeras, its illusions, its hallucinations, its delusions, its beliefs and faiths, its shadowy notions, its frayed 'sopanas' and its dreams: to wit its inadequate ideas. Thus, in this wise, the mind's horizon widens; but yet,
the margin of its known world is frayed and tattered, and tangled, and hazy, and is engulfed in the mist of the great unknown - the unknown universe - the beyond, the beyond, and the beyond From an aborigine to a divine, all have got enslaved.
And here is a tinely warning; Since Man's needs are very old, his urges ancient, impulsive and amoebic, let man proceed Step by step along the lines so clearly indicated and chalked out by plotinus: viz: intellection, reasoning, and a sojourn in the divine; and by Gabriel Marcel: incarnation, communion, and transcendence. Man must not fail to be a Man. This is the evolutionary process; and no other. This leads to "sweetness and light.'
With the coming of the rising sun of pure, unsullied knowledge, the mist on the horizon of my mind clears, and the horizon widens, but yet the mist, even thinner than ever before, has engulfed in it my hopes and fears, expectations and faiths, regrets and contritions, conceits, ambitions and aspirations. In such a muddled state of mind my meanings tend to plunge me more and more into “avidya’’ - ignorance. Then I begin to act. I become a fuss - pot; and yet with my action (krya) comes knowledge. I get a glimpse I vision of the total reality that my life is: 'dharsan'. And the more
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I act, that is, perform, Weave any meaningful kayma, she note the universe reveals itself to me. And then the mist of uncertainty lifts; and until I understand fully the unity that life is, and the total unity that the universe is - “visva rupa” -, I am in an unawakened and unenlightened state. The duality persists. The objective many: and you and they: God and the multiplicity of gods: possessions: the several objective existences, have complete control over my subjective, “I am' - the incomparable “ONE”. And the world remains for me a plural existence till the set of relations that constitutes the 'wholeness of being' - "encompassing - is fully and Solidly established in the adytum of my being: in transcendence." Then I realize the TRUTH; and not until then may I be said to be truly religious. Then the grand unity - the ONE - prevails. Then we become simultaneously one and many “Givg|Lo struiù LucavenyLDg5 mruů” “All in all, each all, and infinite the glory” (Plotinus). Then the subjective self may be said to have subined objective reality" Then I begin to feel that my body is not mine;
that my body and my mind are one and the same. Then I realize that I am body-mind bonded: the sefl-sufficing, the self-consistent, cohering, closely interrelated perfection'poornam: my “thisness'. Then have I got out of the stranglehold of spatio - temporal appearances: uncertainties of time and of space. Then: “I am that I am And then my genuineness gets established. I am fully entrenched in the awakening thought: I'. Then, even such a dreadful thing as "death' is no concern of mine, since I cannot outlive it to experience its stings, slings and taunts. Then I begin to "understand the great word which makes all things new." (R-Browning)
And the word, while it is nowhere, nowhere is it not.’ Plotinus). In terms of physical laws aren't we in a state of spirituality slipping slowly and steadily out into timelessness and spacelessness? And here does science merge into philosophy. It would look as though I carried the burden of existence of centuries, nay millinia, even aeons, upon me, and that I am as old as the hills; even older than the stars. And now that I have eased my burden, I tend to levitate into a condition of spacelessness and timelessness "அங்கு இங்கு எனுதபடி எங்கும்
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Sprintstort tit. -68 is figurra Not here not there: an all pervading effulgence of infinite blisso' You feel this, 1 fee this, and even the beetle feels this. And you are in no way greator than the minutest bacteriophage. You may think so; and you are free to do so.
Although you have fallen like a fluid into the mould
of the world, yet know ye this: 'There is a passage through space and time.' Frank Binder.
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EXISTENCE IS ONE
Existence is one. If that be so how do I exist? And how do the other things exist? Are the other things mere reflections in my being'? It would appear that even I may be a mere reflection in a greater, truer, solider mind or being process; but I mustn't be considered nonexistent. Do I not reflect? Don't I tend to reflect all that which is? And doesn't the universe serve as a reflection of a greater mind? In other words: Isn't the universe a reflection of the greater being
process"?
Isn't existence at one stage 'one'? At another many'? The most violent paradox of all is this: In the “oneness of existence 'I' exist; and the other multiplicity of forms too, exist. The “one could not have been the cause of the others. In other words, one existence cannot cause another. This is our experience. The notion of the one causing another cannot be established by any logical arguments or by scientific reasoning or experimentation or scientific data. This notion has been neatly posited by Hume, and the Buddha.
We accept in our day-to-day existence, the existence of numerous other things along with us. Don't we have our snakes and scorpions, and gold and silver and sealing wax? This acceptance is a matter of habit, of belief and of conviction. All things that exist, so far as we are concerned, are the chance reflections in our “being'. Every one of our several 'acts-of-being is governed by numerous natural laws; both internal and external: the physiological laws, chemical and physical laws. We have no choice of action, for we cannot perform any act on our own sweet will - conation. Willynilly we have to act, for we are nothing short of a constant succession of actions; that is motion made meaningful: motion interrelated and correlated and mandatory: motion governed by the laws of relativity, quantum mechanics, and other laws in nature.

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Here, Hume's view that “there is nothing in cause except in variable succession' appears to gain significance. Its validity improves. There surfaces this idea "an uncontrolled and absolute necessity in nature' to move and to be, permeates the totality of existence. All causal relations in our scientific observations and formulations - in the early stages of scientific inquiry and research - are mere 'crude suggestions made by the mind.' This is how Hume views causal relations in nature. And we have to admit that there is a good deal to commend in this view of the denial of cause and effect. His conclusions stand solidary with the conclusions held by most scientist philosophers, with perhaps the exception of the notion advanced by quantum mechanics scientists. Quantum theory gives ample room to the formulation of the theory of emergent evolution, and the “holist” philosophy propounded by General C. J. Smuts.
Buddha and Hume went in quest of the 'self. They went into themselves. Their sojourn was not very fruitful, and rewarding. So, it appears to us. They stumbled only on perception of one sort or another: they came upon the sensibilities of hot and cold, rough or smooth, pleasure and pain, light or shade, love or hatred: some sort of sensation, some feeling, some stir, some thrill; they met with “mind-in-action”. They perhaps felt the effects of the mind that was latent, Whatever it be, they failed to see the mind.
What an abrupt end! What barren findings! The Vedic thoughts so convincing and so clear, all of them went overboard. It would appear they were all mere bosh. And how about the over self of the yogis? What has happened to the "impregnable certainty'? - the I? It would appear that the bubble of the 'Ego', the mind, that has taken several hundred years to form, has got a pinprick, and has burst.
Then for some time it did appear that man's reflections yielded only barren sensations: bodily feelings and motor effects: mostly reflexes of a sort.

The oehaviourists - Watson and others - entertained the notion that man's behaviour is generally composed of reflexes. For some time behaviourism triumphed. Pavlov's experiments on dogs yielded material. They became classical. The outcome was: thought was nil, and mind was never mind, and self was relegated to the limbo of lost and forgotten things. And the meaning of life something more than a mad camp." (W. H. Auden) It was considered unfashionable to talk of the mind, since it had become obsolescent. Hence the predominant attitude was; forget all about the mind. Talk not of it. The Hormic school of psychologists came and completely annihilated the mind. They attributed human, even animal behaviour to the presence of internal secretions called the hormones and to the hereditary outfits of each. Mind was equal to zero. Isn't this way of thinking deleterious to faith? It was negation. Are religion and cuture the corner stones of social stability? Of course
they will have to be adequately defined
The Buddha and Hume were confirmed in their convictions. Their shades of colour, their feelings and their sensations and perceptions - even their emotions: their trigger devices - were, to them, the only palpable realities they came upon in their search for the 'I' - (self). Their “I-ness” was seldom or never a permanent feature. They were very, very sincere. They were certain of their uncertainties. And this style of pleonastic thinking has become the ground of reflection like the amalgam coating of a mirror. But all the same, quite contrary to the expectations of the behaviourists, and the h or m ic psychologists and geneticists this fact emerged. And that is: once the perceptions and sersations get piled up one upon another, they become coalesced, become 'gestalts': that is to say: organized wholes. They become impressions and reflections. Thought gets piled on thought. These are reflections. They are emergent - i. e. they emerge - not the outcome of causal relations. They have been evolved and are, in all certainty, "something more', something new: a thing or an event or an emanation that appears not to have had its existence before. At least it is reasonable to think it is in a nascent, unevolved state. Neither the deductive nor the inductive method of inquiry
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will help yield the 'something more in any event or existence. It has to be felt deeply, as also to be felt intuitively. It is, in the words of G. M. Hopkins: the thisness of the individual things. And thisness and "-ness’ are not very different.
Buddha's researches were never in vain. He came upon not mysticism, not transcendence, not revelation as did the Semitic prophets. He came upon some tremendous practicable practicalities: the great values gover n in g existence. They are part and parcel of empirical human conduct - the four - fold values and the eight - fold path. And Hume never got at his “self, leave alone the “soul and the "atman'. And every time he chanced upon something tangible, it was at its best, no other than perception'. Everyone, according to Hume, is a bundle or collection of different perceptions which succeed each other with inconceivable rapidity and are in a perpetual flux and movement'. It is a congeries of sensations: an assortment of feelings and impressions. Most of us are most of the time most effectively ineffective. Buddha and Hume were not so. They were all the time, at least most of the time, most effectively effective. They seldom or never went in search of effects. They went in quest of the facts of existence.
It would seem that Hume and Buddha with greater clearness of head and understanding and much less of muzziness and muddling have successfully repudiated the notion of "self". If that be so, did “self die of mere despite? And where, has retreated the “I-ness of the Vedic seers, the Semitic rishis and the “I am' of Descartes? Have they made a mess of their thinking? We have to admit this fact: That the highest philosophical thinking that the world has up to the present age - the Age of Enlightenment - been capable of conceiving, has come from the Buddha and Hume and J. Krishnamoorthy. They are unconditioned and free thinkers and rishis. And I don't like the last appellation, for it has enslaved us. We can't go behind the fact that the presence of the so called “absolute simple'. - thisness - cannot be proved by any logical or empirical
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means. Metaphysics is out of the question, for once you enter it you are on treacherous ground, and you dabble in arbitrary inexactitudes and enormities. And theology and theosophy are based on an unproved, "taken - for - granted exist - ence: the “Deo”. The solution to the problem of whence and whither is the mind sand the spirit) came, as it were, from an unexpected quarter - the quantum mechanics, and the philosophy of "emergent evolution - : holism.
For purposes of clearness the question may once again be posed: Whither has vanished the 'I am that I am and thath sath' (that - which - is) of the vedic rishis; and “I think. therefore I am of Descartes? A ren't they all in a pretty puzzlement? And aren't we who have reposed our faith in them and believed in their authenticity and authority, sunk almost neck - deep in the morass of probabilities chances and of inadequate knowledge? Aren't we imbued with the most decadent of ends and means? ... We have to re-think our values, for there is nothing naught or un necessary, or un important.
Admittedly Buddah and Hume are the most violent, vivid and almost insurmountable impedimenta to the believers, the faithful and the “bakti (devotion) cultists. Of course Jesus and others of his category cling to the “Father' and Mother' appellations. And the question once again goes begging: Where can the Father and Mother cling to? If reportedly they are 'sasvadha’ - ever existent - then "all - that - which - is is grounded in the ONE. And all things existent are no other than mere reflections of the One. And the one and the “many” are one and the same. Again an open-ended proposition! Isn't it?
Aren't we now lifted and left high and dry in the highest empyrean? At this juncture we have to make a compromise; and, in this effort we are constrained to resort to the doctrine of emergent evolution, that is the notion of something more that evolves or rather emerges as the outcome of the
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formation of "meaningful wholes' which are palpable, certifiable, impregnable existences. The Quantum Mechanics. of Max Planck and the philosophic system of “Holismo of General Smuts, come handy. Here is a matter of fact way of thinking: the empirical way. ' ' Matter and energy make up the universe; and these two components are interconvertible according to Einstein's theory of relativity which is expressed in the equation: Energy = MC where M equals the mass and C equals the speed of light.' (P. Hicksman). One thing that mathematical thinking fails to yield is the notion of "emergent evolution’ i. e. the evolution and emergence of "something more when primal energy - prakrti - gets converted into matter and energy. The terminology "primal energy conveys a notion beyond the reach of scientific and mathematical reasoning. Energy is what it is. Why call it primal energy'? Whence did it derive its ancientness? Isn't the terminology a mere bluff? No, it can't be, for aught I know, caught in the tangle of time it bears time slots. And one such slot is
“primal”.
In the process of the assembling and the crowding and concentration of "primal energy - prakrti - to form 'wholes' there emerge the 'something more'. Which occurs in constant conjunction with "prakrti'. These two grand notions, namely 'quantum mechanics' and “emergent evolution' might help to explain away the notion of the formation of the 'self, and the 'inner self - the “conscious' and, the 'sub-conscious mind, that the transcendental rishis posit. The “self" may be the 'something more' - the outcome of constant perception: the bundling, the coalescence of perceptions and sensations and sensibilities into impressions, ideas and notions, the physical ground being, so far as man is concerned, his brain, his spinal cord i. e. his nervous system and the sense organs - in short his neuro - motor organs of sensation and action. Every time a number of sensations i. e. feelings gets assembled, bundled up and organized and fused a notion emerges. We may call it an idea. It is a bunching, a reassembling of perceptions. It is the depersonalized neuter this' of the oriental mystics; the
knowing.
Χ1V

To be plain: Give up your sath - sith - ananda - your 'soul', your 'atman': all mere words. Scratch your skin: beneath it are the flesh and the blood; the bones, the tendons and the nerves. Inspiriting them all is the Mind of man. Where, in particular, does the mind dwell? Why this hue and cry, this ballyhoo about the 'self - the mind.? Aren't these: sensations, sensibilities, feelings, perceptions, concepts, impressions and notions, mere ridiculous categories? 'The power that informs the body informs the soul also'.
The mind Iself) has its germ in feelings and sensatons and their organizations viz perceptions, and notions. A true prehension please do not allow yourself to be bound, ensnared, conditioned of the Buddha's doctrine of Nirvana is an utter necessity for the proper understanding of the mind of man. Nirvana is not a state of complete nihility of existence. It is existence in its involved, nascent state, i. e. "self' in its state of nascence wherein sensations are all involuted; and a perfect condition of "interiority prevails. In this state no reflection is possible, for the windows have all been shut, and barred and barricaded. And the Buddha went in quest of a 'thukkaless' state wherewith suffering and sorrow, degradation and death resided not. And
thukka' is basically thought: concentrated, intensified feeling.
We are now concerned with two principal forms of existence: Pure existence and reflected existence. In pure existence all the other multiplicity of existences are reflected. In other words, in pure existence all the reflected existences exist. This notion perhaps comes the nearest to the Vedic concept of "poorna madha. pooramidam. The beyond; Yonder is the perfection, and so are the things reflected in it.
And here is another way of thinking. The shape of things to come: What will their forms be? In a million years when Man gets out of the grip of time and of space. will it not be possible to conjecture him as a being of quite a different order from what he is today? His emergent being - his something more - his “spirit in action: his rare complacency of spirit, might then have evolved into a being a timeless and spaceless dimension, where all our measurements of duration or of
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point; of body, figure, extensien and place will be of very little avail. We would then have learnt the art of thinking out of space - time. This appears to be the outcome of an idle fancy; but, be it as it may, it gathers momentum in value as we go on. Who knows, we might end up in the 'One' - the oneness of existence-, and then, how about the shapes of things yet to come? Can they be mere phantom walls? Once again in our cogitations we get caught to terminologies, o to appellations like 'shapes and "to come'. They denote space and time.
Isn't this the most fantastic puzzlement? Pardon me. I commenced with a bafflement' and I end up in puzzlement'. The defect, if there be aay, in my art of thinking, is intrinsic in my being' which is entangled in time-space and in native dispositions and in feelings. It is the way of all flesh - all matter. At any rate, there is one notion that impinges on our being; and that is: A thing in itself is a measure unto itself.
However much we struggle, we cannot avoid transcendentalism, for we are seeking to approximate to a universe of
quality with analogy for its most essential language through a universe of quantity with a language of identities.'
(J. Middleton Murry)
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THE ASCENT A NOVE TREND
Isn't there a novel trend observable in man's efforts, endeavours, hopes and aspirations? It is axiomatic that man is free to act, to achieve. for freedom of thought and action is the basic fact of existence. All these years man has gone on in quest of assurances, mandates, safeguards, insurances, securities, salves and safety Zones wherin he might rest, and find peace and comfort, and be smug and free from fears, anxieties; illusions and hallucinations; suffering and care; worry, concern and other life's problems and snares. Even man’s “divine intoxications’ in this world of caprice, of indeterminacy, are crazy disciplines.
These Securities have assumed the forms of his intellect, his faith, his ethics; his social, econmic and political status, his traditional mores and his convictions, his social conventions, his economic frays and his hard - boiled philistinism. And man has bartered his individual freedom for the security niches. In consequence man has become depersonalized, disintegrated, disestablished and estranged. He is no more his natural, normal self. The earth is no more his home: sweet home.
This new trend in thinking about man as a natural being and an individual with initiative and enterprise, has, of recent years, led him to think of his own existence in terms of "I" and 'you', and has thereby enabled him to go in quest of the true “over-self - the "something more' - the 'sweetness and light that is evolving in him, and emerging at every moment of his being process.' This search for the “over - self, bodhi has completely annulled his craving for securities, that is, his accredited values of place, tradition, religion, social status and his ethics of conformity, his great fuss about exercise, about eating, drinking, walking, dressing, and riding; and once again has thrown him on his own initiative. He has turned out to be a carefree hippie, having no thought for the morrow, no savings for the future. He is no more the Homo fabre - the labouring, working man - who has been all out to work, to
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sweat, to strive, to become a gilded fussy youth. Once again he has ventured all alone in search of the "holy grail' - the 'vision of truth, the total vision: the 'tharsan': the transcendental wisdom: the knowledge of the super sensible - that is the rightful inheritance of the Wise Homo - Homo sapiens. He is making an effort with his tentacular, yet tenuous senses and sensibilities, his perception and reflective faculty, i.e. his intellection, to reach out into the 'over-self'. I over - self: bodhi). And in this effort his intution is supposed to help him. And intuition is the immediate apprehension of the mind without reflection, without reasoning. "It means something beyond common sense and beyond explanation.' Arnold Bennet. When you say: I have a feeling; I am convinced, it is that. Buddha's was one such attempt. He discovered his 'otherness', his 'over-self' in a supposedly nihilistic existence, a "nirguna i.e. attributeless, excised state of having been involved in his sublime self - a condition of nothingness - of having cut away everything; to wit, a detached top - of-theworld existence.
There is a unique inwardness, an interiority, an inexpressible intention which the existentialists have designated as “intuition.” It is a state of immanence, a total unity that has got polarized into a condition of inwardness: an inner sense of complacency: a supreme satisfaction in one's existence.
Here, the subject and the object have got integrated into an all - encompassing global sense - a wideawake universal awareness: a universality. In this process the being' is engrossed in "being and “the authentic man strives after originality to be achieved by projecting himself into the future possibilities of a fuller existence, on the higher levels of self - integration and selfappropriation. (Fredrick Patka). when consciousness becomes timeless and spaceless and supercedes them. Then “I am what I I am?'
In our day to day existence, although we appear to be in the midst of overtones of a meaningless chaos, disarray and disorder, a deep sorrow and a deeper anguish of futility and frustration, of boredom and ennui and dullness: alone, alone in a dreadful world; yet on a closer, deeper and
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more consistent consideration of existence, there surfaces a meaningfulness, a tenor a t d a wholeness and a noble and sublime purpose that can never be denied, annulled, negatived, abrogated and blinked. Our past has clung to us, our place has bound us hand and foot, our surrounding has ensnared us. Our fellow brethren have staked and fastened us to this mundane tangle of existence; our death has left us a blank and closed the chapter of our life. Let us not shred the tatters. According to Jean Paul Sartre: all of them have proved to be obstacles to our progress. They are all our upadhis' - our physical, mental and moral ambience, our traps and our hidebound snares and tangles. That is what he means.
Despite these lets and hindrances, our existence is the meaningful world of being that we in essence are. We are each one of us brim-full of possibilities and potentialities of the being process. According to Heidegger: “Existence is the essence of man.' The "gunas' (moods) in a sense, are stances, states that help reveal the wholeness of being. They are the tentacular feelers of 'bing". They are a multitude, and they vary from moment to moment, and are a multeity of forms. They are ennui, lethargy, dullness, dread, keenness, anxiety, anguish, elation, allertness, feeling of non-being of nothingness. Of these nonbeing is the ante-room of the 'daily day feeling of the being process. “We are, and we are not”, says Heraclitus”. Man, the factual, the matter of fact, the prosaic, the secular, the common sense, tha pragmatic is often involved in the “otherness': the “over-self” of man. The “over-self” is the “son of man” - the transcendence of "being. There are moments in our life when the 'son' stands out of the “Man". Then we are "ecstatic: ex silentio: no contrariness. We are in a state of ectasy. From the "daily day existence man has, in the son of man' state, merged into his “otherness' - the transcendental: the bodhi. (perfect wisdom.) And thus life tends to become a sublime fact - a natty, "meaningful whole' : an Ascent. Thiruvalluvar is meaningful: “ey Libéou g56fis G5Irful Lil upfisii)Gap' - the slough cast, the bird has flown. And what Gabriel Marcel maintains appears to gather momentum. A new meaning surfaces. My total being is the totality of existence. "I am my body. I don't possess it.' I identify the Universe with timyself.
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And "love' is not passive. Love : Karuna: Compassion, involves action: the other - minding' action: a sharing of one's "being' with another's: a proffering of one's total self. The 'self and the other are one and the same. In the sublime state the "thisness' is all that persists; not the 'other'. The 'subject persists, not the “object." In all-embracing love, that is in “encompassing'; total accomplishment, there is the incomparable 'one': the infinite and the indivisible. The 'other vanishes, for love is 'encompassing'. There is no estrangement. Art kills the artist. And living is an art. Why then natter?
In life we meet with situations; and a situation involves the disintegration of the harmony, that, of necessity, persists in the “oneness of being. Our waking life: that of 'I', 'you' and "they' with a momentary meaning: a mere passing commentary, is no other than the disintegration of the total, harmony that pervades the totality of existence. We stand out of our self. and we stare. We, to be very, very frank, know nothing about it. A person is, in essence, an open communicating being with the “extra self - all that lies outside one's inner self. The “extra self is the wholeness-of-being, discoverable', when we gather into ourselves and plumb the depth of our being i. e., understand the significance of every one of our several life's situations that confront us at every moment of our existence.
When we discover the “one we cease to be, and fade into a state of “nothingness’. And 'nothingness', not being nihilistic, is “the guarantee of fulness, plenitude and transcendence.' (E. J. Fitzgerald). And even at the critical hour of the close of life, the thought ought to be this: If life has been meaningful all these long years, why shouldn't death? And so, if life is concise and pithy, why bother about death? Why the fear? Why the care? And why the gloom and the feigned mourning that come in its wake? And why do, more than you possibly can? And who is there to judge and to say: you are negligent? you are guilty of utter neglect?
Existence has, in the final analysis, turned out to be a
series of meaningful stances or posturings which we, in normal circumstances, consider situations; and every stance is a meaning
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ful life's posture, supreme and perfect in its ambience or surrounding; and there is no moment in life that has no significance of its own. Which posture is great, and which of lesser significance, it is very difficult to judge. Hence the notion upheld by Plato: The body fills us full of loves and lusts, and fears, and fancies of all kinds, and endless foolery," carries less weight. And St. Paul too was tainted with this same notion. He says: “For the flesh lusteth against the spirit eto. (Galatians: 6-17). In the plenitude of being, that is to say, in a state of transcendence of being, there can only be 'one'; and that is the voiceless, expressionless, formless, “neti neti" - "not this, not this" - state of being: the sprit. (And 'spirit is the most adequate of words to express the notion.)
DHARSAN
The terminology Dharsan' which is commonly in use in the Hindu Sastras, and, which we are concerned to note, is, amply and richly suggestive of a perception that is transcendental in nature, and in which the whole of it is present everywhere.' It is a suprasensible stance assumed by the being' when it gets involved and indrawn. It is purely subjective and is windowless’ and encompassing in its amplitude. In a state of Dharsan all externalities cease to be, and the being has a peep into the essence of being'. Then the being looks into its process of becoming', and endeavours to be awakeningly aware of the involuted whole of existence. It is the visva-rupa': the universal (i. e. total) vision, perhaps, mentioned in the “Gita'. In the “Gita' the rishi seeks to show how the individual bodily form (image) in its every detail has been so designed and so evolved as to attain to the status of the universal form. In this status the mind gets enthroned above matter'. T. H. Huxley) And the being has a peep into being'.
EMERGENT EVOLUTION
Here is perhaps the most recent view of existence. The quantum of energy that has gone to form the universe is an unlimited whole: I can't help employing this illustration. Neither does it decrease nor increase. There is neither ebb nor flow. Flux and reflux, possibly there are. It may seem to be a far cry from an atom to Sirius, from virus to man. Yet, the "wholeness' persists. It remains undisturbed: neither at the maximal nor at the minimal. Matter would appear to be one stance; life
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("purusha) another; mind another; and spirit, yet another. The one is involved in the next, and the next: and the next, and the next: energy, matter, life, mind and spirit. They may appear to be successive posturings assumed by the 'primal energy. They are apparent, advances in the “holistic primacy of energy. The holistic philosophy of General J, C. Smuts, is, perhaps, a closer and more realistic view of the total energy that goes by the name of the universe. Every time a “whole evolves, it has emergent in it a "something more', more than the sum total of its component parts. Isn't my body something more than all the things that went to constitute it? And isn't my 'self', mind much more than all the food and air and water and other things that have gone to nurture it?
This idea of existence as “an emergent evolutionary process appears to tally with the view held by Plotinus, that of the vedic and sufistic seers, and Spinoza. The 'whole' - a 'thingin sitself - has "something' - an indefinable quantum - more than
the sum total of its component events. It is an emergence'.
Perhaps the theory of 'quantum mechanism' of Max Planck bears some resemblance to this notion of “holism'. The summum bonum of holistic philosophy - i.e. the philosophy of emergent evolution - is free and harmonious self- realization.' A. Wolf.
The probability is that when things are assembled so as to form a “meaningful whole', a "something more' emerges. In this manner we can account for the several "wholes' that have emerged from the primal energy - prakrti. The black holes of Fred Hoyle are perhaps some such energy concentrations of an immensely powerful potential, through which our universe might vanish.
I am enamoured with the notion expressed by the Centaur in Maurice De Guerin's masterpiece. And this is what the Centaur says: “And soon shall I be mingled with the waters which flow in the vast bosom of earth.' And what Manikkavasgar has said brims over with meaning. "புல்லாகிப் பூடாகிப் பல்விருகமாகிப் பறவையாய்ப் பாம்பாகி . கல்லா மனிதராய் . எல்லாப்பிறப்பும் பிறந்திளைத்தேன்.”
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“I have gone through all the multifarious forms of the living and the non-living. I am weaty of them all.'
(Thiruvasagam) Doesn't he identify himself with the entirety of the universe ?
“I am the way, the truth, and the life; no man cometh unto the Father, but by ME” - Gunt Goo šā”: paras 5 au p50556). That is ME.
In a million, million years when time becomes a mere *zero and space a mere "speck’ what will happen to you and
me and the rest of the univcrse? Inadequate words, I admit.
And here is an apt end to all our thinking from no less a poet than Rupert Brook.
'When the white flame in us is gone, And we that lost the world's delight Stiffen in darkness, left alone To crumble to our separate night; “When your swift hair is quiet in death, And through the lips corruption thrust Has stilled the labour of my breath - When we are dust, when we are dust:- Not dead, not undesirous yet, Still sentient, still unsatisfied, We'll ride the air, and shine, and flit, Around the places where we died.'
Admittedly many faults and errors there are I crave your indulgence. Should you point them out they will not be perpetrated, but I should perfer your doing it with a bull - at - a - gate' courage.
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