activities of the universe always dwells in the heart of man as
the supreme soul. Those who realise him through the immediate
perception of the heart attain immortality._ [Footnote: Ēsha
dēvō vishvakarmā mahātmā sadā janānām hridayē sannivishtah.
Hridā manīsha manasābhiklriptō ya ētad viduramritāstē bhavanti.]
He is _Vishvakarma_; that is, in a multiplicity of forms and
forces lies his outward manifestation in nature; but his inner
manifestation in our soul is that which exists in unity. Our
pursuit of truth in the domain of nature therefore is through
analysis and the gradual methods of science, but our apprehension
of truth in our soul is immediate and through direct intuition.
We cannot attain the supreme soul by successive additions of
knowledge acquired bit by bit even through all eternity, because
he is one, he is not made up of parts; we can only know him as
heart of our hearts and soul of our soul; we can only know him in
the love and joy we feel when we give up our self and stand
before him face to face.
The deepest and the most earnest prayer that has ever risen from
the human heart has been uttered in our ancient tongue: _O thou
self-revealing one, reveal thyself in me._ [Footnote:
Āvirāvīrmayēdhi.] We are in misery because we are creatures of
self--the self that is unyielding and narrow, that reflects no
light, that is blind to the infinite. Our self is loud with its
own discordant clamour--it is not the tuned harp whose chords
vibrate with the music of the eternal. Sighs of discontent and
weariness of failure, idle regrets for the past and anxieties for
the future are troubling our shallow hearts because we have not
found our souls, and the self-revealing spirit has not been
manifest within us. Hence our cry, _O thou awful one, save me
with thy smile of grace ever and evermore._ [Footnote: Rudra
yat tē dakshinam mukham tēna mām pāhi nityam.] It is a stifling
shroud of death, this self-gratification, this insatiable greed,
this pride of possession, this insolent alienation of heart.
_Rudra, O thou awful one, rend this dark cover in twain and let
the saving beam of thy smile of grace strike through this night
of gloom and waken my soul._
_From unreality lead me to the real, from darkness to the light,
from death to immortality._ [Footnote: Asatōmā sadgamaya,
tamasōmā jyōtirgamaya, mrityōrma mritangamaya.] But how can one
hope to have this prayer granted? For infinite is the distance
that lies between truth and untruth, between death and
deathlessness. Yet this measureless gulf is bridged in a moment
when the self revealing one reveals himself in the soul. There
the miracle happens, for there is the meeting-ground of the
finite and infinite. _Father, completely sweep away all my
sins!_ [Footnote: Vishvānidēva savitar duratāni parāsuva.] For
in sin man takes part with the finite against the infinite that
is in him. It is the defeat of his soul by his self. It is a
perilously losing game, in which man stakes his all to gain a
part. Sin is the blurring of truth which clouds the purity of
our consciousness. In sin we lust after pleasures, not because
they are truly desirable, but because the red light of our
passions makes them appear desirable; we long for things not
because they are great in themselves, but because our greed
exaggerates them and makes them appear great. These
exaggerations, these falsifications of the perspective of things,
break the harmony of our life at every step; we lose the true
standard of values and are distracted by the false claims of the
varied interests of life contending with one another. It is this
failure to bring all the elements of his nature under the unity
and control of the Supreme One that makes man feel the pang of
his separation from God and gives rise to the earnest prayer,
_O God, O Father, completely sweep away all our sins._
[Footnote: Vishvāni dēva savitar duritāni parāsuva.] _Give
unto us that which is good_ [Footnote: Yad bhadram tanna
āsuva.], the good which is the daily bread of our souls. In our
pleasures we are confined to ourselves, in the good we are freed
and we belong to all. As the child in its mother's womb gets its
sustenance through the union of its life with the larger life of
its mother, so our soul is nourished only through the good which
is the recognition of its inner kinship, the channel of its
communication with the infinite by which it is surrounded and
fed. Hence it is said, "Blessed are they which do hunger and
thirst after righteousness: for they shall be filled." For
righteousness is the divine food of the soul; nothing but this
can fill him, can make him live the life of the infinite, can
help him in his growth towards the eternal. _We bow to thee
from whom come the enjoyments of our life._ [Footnote: Namah
sambhavāya.] _We bow also to thee from whom comes the good of
our soul._ [Footnote: Namah çankarāyacha.] _We bow to thee
who art good, the highest good [Footnote: Namah çivāyacha,
çivatarāya cha.], in whom we are united with everything, that is,
in peace and harmony, in goodness and love.
Man's cry is to reach his fullest expression. It is this desire
for self-expression that leads him to seek wealth and power. But
he has to discover that accumulation is not realisation. It is
the inner light that reveals him, not outer things. When this
light is lighted, then in a moment he knows that Man's highest
revelation is God's own revelation in him. And his cry is for
this--the manifestation of his soul, which is the manifestation
of God in his soul. Man becomes perfect man, he attains his
fullest expression, when his soul realises itself in the Infinite
being who is _Āvih_ whose very essence is expression.
The real misery of man is in the fact that he has not fully come
out, that he is self-obscured, lost in the midst of his own
desires. He cannot feel himself beyond his personal
surroundings, his greater self is blotted out, his truth is
unrealised. The prayer that rises up from his whole being is
therefore, _Thou, who art the spirit of manifestation, manifest
thyself in me._ [Footnote: Āvirāvīrmayēdhi.] This longing for
the perfect expression of his self is more deeply inherent in
man than his hunger and thirst for bodily sustenance, his lust
for wealth and distinction. This prayer is not merely one born
individually of him; it is in depth of all things, it is the
ceaseless urging in him of the _Āvih_, of the spirit of eternal
manifestation. The revealment of the infinite in the finite,
which is the motive of all creation, is not seen in its
perfection in the starry heavens, in the beauty of flowers. It
is in the soul of man. For there will seeks its manifestation in
will, and freedom turns to win its final prize in the freedom of
surrender.
Therefore, it is the self of man which the great King of the
universe has not shadowed with his throne--he has left it free.
In his physical and mental organism, where man is related with
nature, he has to acknowledge the rule of his King, but in his
self he is free to disown him. There our God must win his
entrance. There he comes as a guest, not as a king, and
therefore he has to wait till he is invited. It is the man's
self from which God has withdrawn his commands, for there he
comes to court our love. His armed force, the laws of nature,
stand outside its gate, and only beauty, the messenger of his
love, finds admission within its precincts.
It is only in this region of will that anarchy is permitted; only
in man's self that the discord of untruth and unrighteousness
hold its reign; and things can come to such a pass that we may
cry out in our anguish, "Such utter lawlessness could never
prevail if there were a God!" Indeed, God has stood aside from
our self, where his watchful patience knows no bounds, and where
he never forces open the doors if shut against him. For this
self of ours has to attain its ultimate meaning, which is the
soul, not through the compulsion of God's power but through love,
and thus become united with God in freedom.
He whose spirit has been made one with God stands before man as
the supreme flower of humanity. There man finds in truth what he
is; for there the _Āvih_ is revealed to him in the soul of man as
the most perfect revelation for him of God; for there we see the
union of the supreme will with our will, our love with the love
everlasting.
Therefore, in our country he who truly loves God receives such
homage from men as would be considered almost sacrilegious in the
west. We see in him God's wish fulfilled, the most difficult of
all obstacles to his revealment removed, and God's own perfect
joy fully blossoming in humanity. Through him we find the whole
world of man overspread with a divine homeliness. His life,
burning with God's love, makes all our earthly love resplendent.
All the intimate associations of our life, all its experience of
pleasure and pain, group themselves around this display of the
divine love, and from the drama that we witness in him. The
touch of an infinite mystery passes over the trivial and the
familiar, making it break out into ineffable music. The trees
and the stars and the blue hills appear to us as symbols aching
with a meaning which can never be uttered in words. We seem to
watch the Master in the very act of creation of a new world when
a man's soul draws her heavy curtain of self aside, when her veil
is lifted and she is face to face with her eternal lover.
But what is this state? It is like a morning of spring, varied
in its life and beauty, yet one and entire. When a man's life
rescued from distractions finds its unity in the soul, then the
consciousness of the infinite becomes at once direct and natural
to it as the light is to the flame. All the conflicts and
contradictions of life are reconciled; knowledge, love and action
harmonized; pleasure and pain become one in beauty, enjoyment and
renunciation equal in goodness; the breach between the finite and
the infinite fills with love and overflows; every moment carries
its message of the eternal; the formless appears to us in the
form of the flower, of the fruit; the boundless takes us up in
his arms as a father and walks by our side as a friend. It is
only the soul, the One in man which by its very nature can
overcome all limits, and finds its affinity with the Supreme One.
While yet we have not attained the internal harmony, and the
wholeness of our being, our life remains a life of habits. The
world still appears to us as a machine, to be mastered where it
is useful, to be guarded against where it is dangerous, and never
to be known in its full fellowship with us, alike in its physical
nature and in its spiritual life and beauty.
III
THE PROBLEM OF EVIL
The question why there is evil in existence is the same as why
there is imperfection, or, in other words, why there is creation
at all. We must take it for granted that it could not be
otherwise; that creation must be imperfect, must be gradual, and
that it is futile to ask the question, Why we are?
But this is the real question we ought to ask: Is this
imperfection the final truth, is evil absolute and ultimate? The
river has its boundaries, its banks, but is a river all banks? or
are the banks the final facts about the river? Do not these
obstructions themselves give its water an onward motion? The
towing rope binds a boat, but is the bondage its meaning? Does
it not at the same time draw the boat forward?
The current of the world has its boundaries, otherwise it could
have no existence, but its purpose is not shown in the boundaries
which restrain it, but in its movement, which is towards
perfection. The wonder is not that there should be obstacles and
sufferings in this world, but that there should be law and order,
beauty and joy, goodness and love. The idea of God that man has
in his being is the wonder of all wonders. He has felt in the
depths of his life that what appears as imperfect is the
manifestation of the perfect; just as a man who has an ear for
music realises the perfection of a song, while in fact he is only
listening to a succession of notes. Man has found out the great
paradox that what is limited is not imprisoned within its limits;
it is ever moving, and therewith shedding its finitude every
moment. In fact, imperfection is not a negation of perfectness;
finitude is not contradictory to infinity: they are but
completeness manifested in parts, infinity revealed within
bounds.
Pain, which is the feeling of our finiteness, is not a fixture in
our life. It is not an end in itself, as joy is. To meet with
it is to know that it has no part in the true permanence of
creation. It is what error is in our intellectual life. To go
through the history of the development of science is to go
through the maze of mistakes it made current at different times.
Yet no one really believes that science is the one perfect mode
of disseminating mistakes. The progressive ascertainment of
truth is the important thing to remember in the history of
science, not its innumerable mistakes. Error, by its nature,
cannot be stationary; it cannot remain with truth; like a tramp,
it must quit its lodging as soon as it fails to pay its score to
the full.
As in intellectual error, so in evil of any other form, its
essence is impermanence, for it cannot accord with the whole.
Every moment it is being corrected by the totality of things and
keeps changing its aspect. We exaggerate its importance by
imagining it as a standstill. Could we collect the statistics of
the immense amount of death and putrefaction happening every
moment in this earth, they would appal us. But evil is ever
moving; with all its incalculable immensity it does not
effectually clog the current of our life; and we find that the
earth, water, and air remain sweet and pure for living beings.
All statistics consist of our attempts to represent statistically
what is in motion; and in the process things assume a weight in
our mind which they have not in reality. For this reason a man,
who by his profession is concerned with any particular aspect of
life, is apt to magnify its proportions; in laying undue stress
upon facts he loses his hold upon truth. A detective may have
the opportunity of studying crimes in detail, but he loses his
sense of their relative places in the whole social economy. When
science collects facts to illustrate the struggle for existence
that is going on in the kingdom of life, it raises a picture in
our minds of "nature red in tooth and claw." But in these mental
pictures we give a fixity to colours and forms which are really
evanescent. It is like calculating the weight of the air on each
square inch of our body to prove that it must be crushingly heavy
for us. With every weight, however, there is an adjustment, and
we lightly bear our burden. With the struggle for existence in
nature there is reciprocity. There is the love for children and
for comrades; there is the sacrifice of self, which springs from
love; and this love is the positive element in life.
If we kept the search-light of our observation turned upon the
fact of death, the world would appear to us like a huge
charnel-house; but in the world of life the thought of death has, we
find, the least possible hold upon our minds. Not because it is
the least apparent, but because it is the negative aspect of
life; just as, in spite of the fact that we shut our eyelids
every second, it is the openings of the eye that count. Life as
a whole never takes death seriously. It laughs, dances and
plays, it builds, hoards and loves in death's face. Only when we
detach one individual fact of death do we see its blankness and
become dismayed. We lose sight of the wholeness of a life of
which death is part. It is like looking at a piece of cloth
through a microscope. It appears like a net; we gaze at the big
holes and shiver in imagination. But the truth is, death is not
the ultimate reality. It looks black, as the sky looks blue; but
it does not blacken existence, just as the sky does not leave its
stain upon the wings of the bird.
When we watch a child trying to walk, we see its countless
failures; its successes are but few. If we had to limit our
observation within a narrow space of time, the sight would be
cruel. But we find that in spite of its repeated failures there
is an impetus of joy in the child which sustains it in its
seemingly impossible task. We see it does not think of its falls
so much as of its power to keep its balance though for only a
moment.
Like these accidents in a child's attempts to walk, we meet with
sufferings in various forms in our life every day, showing the
imperfections in our knowledge and our available power, and in
the application of our will. But if these revealed our weakness
to us only, we should die of utter depression. When we select
for observation a limited area of our activities, our individual
failures and miseries loom large in our minds; but our life leads
us instinctively to take a wider view. It gives us an ideal of
perfection which ever carries us beyond our present limitations.
Within us we have a hope which always walks in front of our
present narrow experience; it is the undying faith in the
infinite in us; it will never accept any of our disabilities as a
permanent fact; it sets no limit to its own scope; it dares to
assert that man has oneness with God; and its wild dreams become
true every day.
We see the truth when we set our mind towards the infinite. The
ideal of truth is not in the narrow present, not in our immediate
sensations, but in the consciousness of the whole which give us a
taste of what we _should_ have in what we _do_ have. Consciously
or unconsciously we have in our life this feeling of Truth which
is ever larger than its appearance; for our life is facing the
infinite, and it is in movement. Its aspiration is therefore
infinitely more than its achievement, and as it goes on it finds
that no realisation of truth ever leaves it stranded on the
desert of finality, but carries it to a region beyond. Evil
cannot altogether arrest the course of life on the highway and
rob it of its possessions. For the evil has to pass on, it has
to grow into good; it cannot stand and give battle to the All.
If the least evil could stop anywhere indefinitely, it would sink
deep and cut into the very roots of existence. As it is, man
does not really believe in evil, just as he cannot believe that
violin strings have been purposely made to create the exquisite
torture of discordant notes, though by the aid of statistics it
can be mathematically proved that the probability of discord is
far greater than that of harmony, and for one who can play the
violin there are thousands who cannot. The potentiality of
perfection outweighs actual contradictions. No doubt there have
been people who asserted existence to be an absolute evil, but
man can never take them seriously. Their pessimism is a mere
pose, either intellectual or sentimental; but life itself is
optimistic: it wants to go on. Pessimism is a form of mental
dipsomania, it disdains healthy nourishment, indulges in the
strong drink of denunciation, and creates an artificial dejection
which thirsts for a stronger draught. If existence were an evil,
it would wait for no philosopher to prove it. It is like
convicting a man of suicide, while all the time he stands before
you in the flesh. Existence itself is here to prove that it
cannot be an evil.
An imperfection which is not all imperfection, but which has
perfection for its ideal, must go through a perpetual
realisation. Thus, it is the function of our intellect to
realise the truth through untruths, and knowledge is nothing but
the continually burning up of error to set free the light of
truth. Our will, our character, has to attain perfection by
continually overcoming evils, either inside or outside us, or
both; our physical life is consuming bodily materials every
moment to maintain the life fire; and our moral life too has its
fuel to burn. This life process is going on--we know it, we have
felt it; and we have a faith which no individual instances to the
contrary can shake, that the direction of humanity is from evil
to good. For we feel that good is the positive element in man's
nature, and in every age and every clime what man values most is
his ideals of goodness. We have known the good, we have loved
it, and we have paid our highest reverence to men who have shown
in their lives what goodness is.
The question will be asked, What is goodness; what does our moral
nature mean? My answer is, that when a man begins to have an
extended vision of his self, when he realises that he is much
more than at present he seems to be, he begins to get conscious
of his moral nature. Then he grows aware of that which he is yet
to be, and the state not yet experienced by him becomes more real
than that under his direct experience. Necessarily, his
perspective of life changes, and his will takes the place of his
wishes. For will is the supreme wish of the larger life, the
life whose greater portion is out of our present reach, most of
whose objects are not before our sight. Then comes the conflict
of our lesser man with our greater man, of our wishes with our
will, of the desire for things affecting our senses with the
purpose that is within our heart. Then we begin to distinguish
between what we immediately desire and what is good. For good is
that which is desirable for our greater self. Thus the sense of
goodness comes out of a truer view of our life, which is the
connected view of the wholeness of the field of life, and which
takes into account not only what is present before us but what is
not, and perhaps never humanly can be. Man, who is provident,
feels for that life of his which is not yet existent, feels much
more that than for the life that is with him; therefore he is
ready to sacrifice his present inclination for the unrealised
future. In this he becomes great, for he realises truth. Even
to be efficiently selfish one has to recognise this truth, and
has to curb his immediate impulses--in other words, has to be
moral. For our moral faculty is the faculty by which we know
that life is not made up of fragments, purposeless and
discontinuous. This moral sense of man not only gives him the
power to see that the self has a continuity in time, but it also
enables him to see that he is not true when he is only restricted
to his own self. He is more in truth than he is in fact. He
truly belongs to individuals who are not included in his own
individuality, and whom he is never even likely to know. As he
has a feeling for his future self which is outside his present
consciousness, so he has a feeling for his greater self which is
outside the limits of his personality. There is no man who has
not this feeling to some extent, who has never sacrificed his
selfish desire for the sake of some other person, who has never
felt a pleasure in undergoing some loss or trouble because it
pleased somebody else. It is a truth that man is not a detached
being, that he has a universal aspect; and when he recognises
this he becomes great. Even the most evilly-disposed selfishness
has to recognise this when it seeks the power to do evil; for it
cannot ignore truth and yet be strong. So in order to claim the
aid of truth, selfishness has to be unselfish to some extent. A
band of robbers must be moral in order to hold together as a
band; they may rob the whole world but not each other. To make
an immoral intention successful, some of its weapons must be
moral. In fact, very often it is our very moral strength which
gives us most effectively the power to do evil, to exploit other
individuals for our own benefit, to rob other people of their
rights. The life of an animal is unmoral, for it is aware only
of an immediate present; the life of a man can be immoral, but
that only means that it must have a moral basis. What is immoral
is imperfectly moral, just as what is false is true to a small
extent, or it cannot even be false. Not to see is to be blind,
but to see wrongly is to see only in an imperfect manner. Man's
selfishness is a beginning to see some connection, some purpose
in life; and to act in accordance with its dictates requires
self-restraint and regulation of conduct. A selfish man
willingly undergoes troubles for the sake of the self, he suffers
hardship and privation without a murmur, simply because he knows
that what is pain and trouble, looked at from the point of view
of a short space of time, are just the opposite when seen in a
larger perspective. Thus what is a loss to the smaller man is a
gain to the greater, and _vice versa_.