sacred books are full of it. They showed themselves continually among
men, they carried on their work, as it were, in the full blaze of day.
But now no longer do they show themselves to men at large, and many have
forgotten even their existence, and very many people, even in India,
materialised by the thought in which they have been trained, are half
ashamed to say that they believe in the existence and the working of the
Devas. The unbelief makes no difference, save to those who disbelieve.
The working of the Gods remains ever the same. They are ever busy in
carrying out the Supreme Will. Only they do not show themselves, and to
those alone who recognise their existence and their work will they
manifest themselves. If in the old days they showed themselves as they
do not now, it was because men then had reverence and love and were
willing to bow down to those who were wiser and greater than themselves;
because then democracy was not reigning; because then the ignorant did
not think themselves equal to the learned, nor did man deem himself
equal to the Gods. In those days, because they could help they came to
the helping; but they will never come visibly again to earth until men
have learnt to reverence once more what is above them, and to understand
their place in the Kosmos, to worship as well as to command. The Gods
work all the same. They are not deprived of their functions by our
folly, by our conceit, by our ignorance. Only they work unseen, and we
forfeit the sweet comfort of their visible presence, the strength and
joy of the old heroic days, the dignity of conscious companionship with
the Immortals, the ever-renewed assurance of super-physical life. Not
one death that happens on our earth, but a God has struck away that body
whose work is over; not one "natural catastrophe," but a God has guided
it to the happening; not one help given to a man in need, but a God is
the agent behind the visible helper; not one answer to the cry of man in
his distress, that is not the response of a God to human sorrow.
Everywhere they are working. Everywhere they are bringing about what we
see as dead mechanical nature. Every phenomenon is the veil of a God,
and there is nothing done in which an Intelligence does not take part.
Seven are the great Gods below the Trinity, below the Trimûrti. Every
religion, again, acknowledges these Seven. The Christian speaks of the
"Seven Spirits that are before the throne of God." The Zoroastrian
tells us of the seven Ameshaspendas who rule the world. The Chaldean
spoke of the seven great Gods. Five only are working and two are
concealed, for the universe is in process of evolution and only five
stages of it have been reached. Therefore only with regard to five can
we definitely speak as to working. The two concealed are beyond our
knowing; they are related to future stages of the evolution of the
Kosmos. But the five we will now consider. Their names in connection
with their functions you know well enough. They are connected with the
tattvas of which we were speaking yesterday--the Lord of A'kâsha, Indra;
the Lord of Air, Vâyu; the Lord of Fire, Agni; the Lord of Water,
Varuna; the Lord of Earth, sometimes called Kshiti (various names are
used for him); each of these great Gods has what we may call one region
marked out for his working. The matter of that region is the matter in
which he works; but in addition to that, each one is represented in the
realms of the others by a sub-division on which his impression is
especially made. These are the great kosmic planes that I have spoken of
marked off from each other by the tattvas. But if we come down to the
physical plane, dealing only with Prithivî Tattva, we shall then find
that that is also seven-fold in division and that we have physical
solid, physical earth or Prithivî, physical water or Apas, physical fire
or Agni, physical air or Vâyu, physical ether or A'kâsha. Each of these
great Gods works on each plane through the medium that corresponds to
the region which belongs to him in the Kosmos as a whole. How often we
see those correspondences as it were printed in physical nature. We have
light with its seven sub-divisions as seen in the solar spectrums
showing the seven colours, and the scale with its seven notes. Colours
and notes alike result from vibrations, and are determined by the number
of vibrations occurring in a unit of time. As the universe is built by
vibrations, colour and sound are factors of the universe at large, and
every region is said to have its own colour; the God of that region has
his colour--dependent on his vibratory force--which he imprints on the
region over which he rules; so that if a Ṛishi looks at the solar system
from a higher plane, he not only hears the seven fundamental notes of
music, making "the harmony of the spheres," but he sees a gorgeous
display of colours, as the sphere of every great Deva with his own
colour interpenetrates the others, yielding an iridescent splendour of
interfering radiances, the marvellous "rainbow that is round the throne
of God." Such mystic expressions have lost their meaning for the
majority, because the sight of those who wrote them is but little
developed in these days, and few are they who can see as the seer saw of
old.
Each of these great Gods has under him a host of subordinate Gods who
carry out his decrees. The constitution of an ordinary state will give
you a very good picture of the government of the solar system. We have
at the head an Emperor or an Empress; then the officers who represent
that supreme authority in separate divisions of the realm; there is the
one central authority over the whole, and the officers who wield it in
different areas of the Empire. Then these officers are graded in rank,
and we have higher and subordinate Ministers, Judges, Magistrates,
in descending order, each with a smaller and smaller district to
administer, the functions of each becoming more limited as you descend
the official ladder; and each responsible to his official superior. That
is really a very good picture of the government of the solar system; the
head of all is Íshvara Himself; His Viceroys are the great Gods, each
with his own vast area over which he rules, and each with his official
hierarchy under him, until you come down to the lowest Devas, who carry
on the work in the limited area of a village of the solar system.
Such is the outline, then, of the functions. The next thing to grasp
is, that, when we see on this plane in which our consciousness is
working--the physical plane--any one of these fundamental forms of
manifestation, we should try to realise the presence of the God behind
the material phenomenon. Not a fire that burns upon the earth, whether
the fire of the volcanic mountain, whether the fire ranging through the
vast forest, whether the fire burning on the household hearth, or on the
sacrificial altar, that is not Agni in manifestation, with the
possibility of his powers coming into visibility. They were not
dreamers, they who bade you of old keep safe the fire, the household
fire which husband and wife at the bridal kindled, and which, when the
life of the married was over in the home, they still carried out into
the forest; they carried with them the fire, and it took with them the
presence of the God, who through the household life had blessed, had
guided, had given prosperity and made the final withdrawal from the
household life possible and desirable. That is one of the many truths
which modern India is losing.
But when these things were believed in, and the ceremonies connected with
them were carried on, then nature worked in a definite order, and there
were not the same continual irregularities that we have in our modern
days. By that harmonious working between man and the Gods, nature answered
to man as man answered to nature; while man did his duty, nature in her
turn did her duty also; the failure of rain, the failure of crops, the
failure of sunshine, the presence of plague, or of any other form of human
misery, was seen as having its root in the failure of humanity; and man
turned dutifully to that which he had neglected, and thus readjusted the
balance which his irregularity had displaced. Let us try and see, as an
example, one concrete working in what we call natural evolution. We will
turn to the great God Varuna. He works through water; every manifestation
of water is his, whether on the physical or on any other plane, in any of
the forms that it may take, for what we call "water" is naturally the
lowest, coarsest manifestation, his physical body, as it were. He works
with it in nature in endless ways--to dissolve, to combine, to dissociate.
When we take the greater workings, how very grand is the conception we may
gain of the might of the God. Come back with me, far back, into the past,
ere humanity had taken form; there see the world as it then was; see how,
as fire and water, Agni and Varuna are working on every material to fit
the world to be the birthplace of the yet unborn humanity. See how Varuna
is working in order to prepare what is wanted of mountain and of valley,
of river and of plain; see the might of his work as well as that of his
brother Agni, in apparent clash but really in harmony; fire and water
meet, explode, and toss up a mountain-chain where before there was none;
see how he gathers snow on the mountain peaks, and gradually fills with
masses of this snow, frozen into ice, the mountain ravines made by the
combined volcanic action; see how the slow ploughing begins; ploughing,
ploughing and ploughing again, as the mighty God works onward in the form
of glaciers, grinding his furrow through the earth, and preparing for the
future; see, ages later, how the channel cut out by the glacier is filled
by the tumbling cataracts from melted snow, and a turbulent torrent rolls
downwards, and against its resistless waves nothing is able to stand; the
valley dug out by the plough of the ice is filled with water, and from it
the soil is gradually deposited, which in the future will make fertile
land for crops in order that man may live. Then Varuna binds his waters
into a narrower and narrower channel, until there is mountain range and
valley and a river flowing through it: and he carries his river downwards
and pours it into the sea and his brother Agni draws it up again to form
the clouds. There has come by that mighty action, destructive as it seems
in appearance, the building of the plain and the valley where men shall
live and love, where children shall be playing, where horses shall graze,
where corn shall grow and ripen in the sunshine, and where, on the
peaceful banks of the river, men shall worship the God who made possible
their happy life.
We talk about the "cruelty of nature." Let us try and understand what
this cruelty means. The world now is inhabited. Crowds of men are here,
and lo! the river, that made the habitation of the valley possible and
keeps it fruitful, now overflows its banks and the mighty flood sweeps
away village and town, men, women, children, and cattle, and only
desolation is left behind. What is this? Is this horror a divine
working? What is this that Varuna has done? Varuna is working for
evolution. His thought is not fixed on the forms in which the life is
cabined, but on the life that is evolving within them, which can make
for itself new forms. When those men are swept away, it is only the
breaking of the forms that happens; the life up-springs uninjured and
set free; for the body is the prison-house of the evolving life, and if
the prison doors were never thrown open, we should be in jail all our
lives and make no progress for the future. The God to whom form is
nothing and life everything, to whom form is but a changing, convenient
vehicle, and the life that moulds the form is the one thing that is
worthy of thought, he strikes away the form when its purpose is
completed; to him such destruction is the act of mightiest charity; it
is the deed most helpful to evolution. We err, my brothers, when we look
on death with eyes that are full of tears, with hearts that are
breaking. Death is he who brings us to a higher birth, and who sets free
the imprisoned soul; it is the liberation of the bird confined within
the limits of a cage, enabling it to soar upwards into the heavens,
singing, as it goes, with joy at the freedom it has recovered. Does that
seem strange? Let us take an illustration from the _Mahâbhârata_:--
There was a council among the Gods in Svarga, how some of them would
take incarnation upon earth for the sake of helping men at a great
crisis in the world's history. Great men were needed, and the question
arose whether some of the Gods were willing to bind themselves within
the limits of human form, in order to give special help to human
progress; among those who were needed for the work that was coming was
the son of Soma Deva, Varchas, as he was called, and the Gods desired
that this Deva should be born on earth. Soma Deva hesitated. He was not
willing that his son should leave him and the heavenly life, and
although he finally consented that he should be born as Abhimanyu, the
son of Arjuna, it was only on the condition that he should live but for
sixteen years, and be killed in the great battle of Kurukshetra. You
say, what a strange view of life! What an extraordinary condition for
love to make, that this youth should die at the age of sixteen, in the
very flower of his dawning manhood, should die a death of violence. Yet
that was the will of the one who loved him best, for heaven sees with
different eyes from earth. Soma saw the life, and cared not for the
form; to a God the form is a prison, death is the gaoler that liberates;
hence the condition was made that only for sixteen years might the
divine youth live a human life, and then "my son of mighty arms shall
come back to me," and that from a battle field, dying gloriously in the
midst of the fight.
Do you know that sometimes the swamping of a civilisation by a natural
convulsion--such as the going down of Atlantis below the waves of the
ocean that we now call the Atlantic, the wiping out of the whole nation
or race--is the best proof of love that the Supreme Íshvara through
His intermediate agents can show to the lives therein embodied. For
there are stages in the world's story where man is so passionately set
on a line of action that is against his real progress, when he so
determinately sets his desires on objects that hold him back and delay
his evolution, that the only mercy that the Gods can show him is to
break his form in pieces, and give him as it were a new start for the
evolving of himself--the life. Sometimes I have felt, as I have gone
through some of the miseries of our great cities in the West, when, in
the pursuance of my duty, I have gone with breaking heart through the
slums of eastern and southern London, or through those of Glasgow, or
Edinburgh, or Sheffield, as I have noted the types of men and women
around me, as I have seen the human almost veiled by the brute, and
humanity degraded well-nigh beyond possibility of recognition, that no
appeal for help was fitting save one that would set free that imprisoned
life. I have felt that nothing save the destruction of the forms could
give any hope for those imprisoned within them; that for those men and
women, as they were, degraded, brutal, drunken, profligate, their very
forms with the impress of the animal, the best mercy that God could show
them would be an earthquake that would swallow the whole great city and
set free the lives pent hopeless within it. For not one life would be
lost, not one life would pass away, but they would be set free to go
into somewhat less unplastic forms and give scope for that divine
working towards evolution, which is in extreme cases only possible when
the forms, forms of evil, are gone. We speak sometimes of the training
of children being easier than that of grown-up people, because they are
more plastic. So also the Gods want oftentimes the child-ego in the
plastic form instead of in the prison-house grown rigid by age; and they
therefore break that environment in order that the young life may grow.
Another great function of the Gods is the dealing with the karma of
nations, "collective karma," as it is sometimes called. Suppose a nation
is acting in its collective capacity--I am not now thinking of the
individuals brought into it by their individual karma but of the nation
acting as a unit--and suppose it commits a crime against another nation.
There has been one working of karma so tremendous during the last year,
that I will take it as an illustration--Spain. Some centuries ago Spain
was at the summit of her power; mighty was she among the western
nations. There was sent to her, in order to help her forward, the gift
of new knowledge. It came truly in a somewhat unacceptable guise, for it
came from Arabia, with the stamp of Muhammed upon it; it was brought by
the children of Islâm; they brought the light of science with them,
and, as they established themselves in southern Spain, they gave that
light to Spain. Universities were established. Large classes were
formed. From every part of Europe men come crowding to the Schools of
Cordova, and there they learnt the beginnings of the Science that has
since grown into so mighty a tree in western lands. What did Spain do?
Spain called up against these Moors, and against the Hebrews--who also
were learned in the learning of the East--the frightful weapons of the
Inquisition, the stake, the rack, the dungeon, the torture of exile. Who
can count the hundreds of thousands driven out from home, the broken
families, the miseries, the poverty and starvation intolerable, which
marked the expulsion of the Jews and of the Moors from Spain? Still her
karma of success was not complete. Across the Atlantic ocean she sped,
Italy lending one of her sons for the glory of the Spanish Empire. In
the wake of the ships of Columbus there followed the ships of the
conquerors of America, full of Spanish soldiers. I cannot dwell on the
story of the conquest of Mexico, and the still more terrible conquest of
Peru; I have no time to wring your hearts, as I might, with the tale of
the destruction of a great civilisation, of the killing out of the last
exquisite traces in Peru of one of the most perfect civilisations that
our world has ever known, of the crushing of the gentle Indian race
there by chains, by imprisonment, shut out from the glorious Sun whose
children their Incas were. Too gentle to struggle, accustomed only to a
life of flowers, of music, and of sunshine, they were crammed into caves
that they were made to dig in ancient cliffs, dying by thousands upon
thousands in the digging out of the gold and silver which their Spanish
conquerors demanded, until the very name of the ancient nation perished,
and only a few scattered Peruvian Indians remained to represent what was
one of the fairest civilisations of the world. Such was the karma made
by Spain in the days of her glory, and the horror of her conquests sank
into the oblivion of the past. But do the Gods forget? Nay, their memory
is perfect. They are the administrators of the divine law, and give the
harvest to the sowers. From the very country which they outraged, from
the very land that they conquered, a new nation springs up as the
centuries go on to take up the old struggle between the two hemispheres,
and to-day we have seen America and Spain closing again in the
death-grip, but the scale of balance is now weighed down on the other
side, and America becomes the karmic agent for working out the woes of
the Aztecs and the Peruvians, and for driving from the western
hemisphere the nation that there outraged humanity in the centuries
gone by. Thus the Gods are needed to bring nations together to balance
up these accounts between the races, and so to restore equilibrium once
again. Thus they work, using men as their agents, and they bring about
these national results. Partly they do it by bringing to birth, at a
particular time, men whose individual karma fits them to be the agents
of the collective karma of the nation. What was more striking in the
Spanish war which has just closed, than the absolute incapacity shown by
the men who were the rulers of Spain? Whence came they? They were men
who in the past by their individual karma had fitted themselves for the
sorry fate of incapable rulers, and they were guided by the Gods to take
birth in the families which give rulers to Spain, in order that, by
their weakness and ineptitude, by their cowardice and their want of
foresight, they might serve as men to lead their nation to destruction,
the fitting instruments for the working out of Spain's evil karma. See
also how at the fit time great men arise to lead a nation to victory.
These men are also chosen by the Gods beforehand because of their
individual karma, and they are brought to birth in the place and at the
time when they are wanted for the working out of the collective karma
of a nation. Not by chance is a man brought into the world, not by the
compulsion of a dead law, or of a blind necessity; the Gods are working
here with an intelligence that foresees and guides, and they choose for
the accomplishment of their ends the men whose own karma fits them to be
their agents for the work in hand, and then guide them to take birth at
the place where that karma can subserve the collective karma of their
people.
This also is true in a much more limited way with regard to the working
of individual karma. Sometimes you must have wondered how, with all the
interfering activities of men, the karmic law could work out with
undeviating justice; it is because the Gods are guiding the working. You
see somewhere a man who is starving and if you misunderstand karma--as
too many of you do, to the shame of India, in a land where this teaching
is of immemorial antiquity--you turn aside from that starving man and
say that it is his karma to starve and perish; in those hardened hearts
of yours you use the will of God as a cover for your own selfishness,
for your indifference and your lack of love. That man's karma to starve?
Aye, and therefore he is starving! But if a Deva guides you to the place
where your brother is starving, it is because he would make you the
agent of his beneficence to that man whose evil karma of the present
moment has been exhausted by his suffering; the Deva thus says to you:
"Man, your brother man is starving, give him the relief it is his karma
to receive, and be my agent in carrying out the law." But if you refuse
the God, if, blinded by ignorance or indifference, you turn aside and
will not carry his message to your brother, he will not for that be
thwarted, he will find some other agent, or, as a last resource, he will
do it himself by some act that may seem miraculous in the eyes of the
blind, for the purpose of the God may not be blocked; but for those who
have refused to act as his agents, who have refused to act as his
messengers, they have made for themselves the karma of being left
unassisted when the hour of their own need shall strike in the future.
For the administrators of the good law forget not; every debt is
collected, every creditor is paid in full. But you may say that it does
not follow that a man's karma is exhausted when you meet him; true, but
that is not your business, it is the business of the guiding God, and he
will frustrate the physical aid if the karma be still evil. If you have
that opportunity given you of making good karma, you have all the merit
of your willingness to act, you have all the virtue of your readiness to
sacrifice; but if it is not yet his time to be relieved, you will not
find the object of your charity; by circumstances, as you will say, he
will have been taken outside your reach. Leave you the Gods to do the
work of the Gods, the administration of the law; do you that charity,
that love and compassion, which it is ever their will that man should
show to man. We cannot break the law; we cannot change their purpose;
but we have the choice of co-working or refusing, and on that our
individual karma depends.
Then we find further that Devas bring people together and carry them
apart, always for the working out of their individual karmas; that men
are guided to places and positions at definite times, according to those
circumstances which, by their karma, they must meet.
Now men are related especially to one or other of the great Gods, by the
constitution of their bodies visible and invisible. That gives them a
special affinity for one Deva rather than for another. For instance, the
lower hosts of Devas who, we will say, belong to Agni, build into a
man's invisible and visible bodies, the kind of matter in which that God
normally works. That gives the man a relationship to that particular
God. Every man is connected with a special manifestation of God, to whom
by his constitution and evolution he should turn. Unhappily ignorance
has so widely taken the place of knowledge, that it is difficult for a
man to discover to which Deva he is thus related. I have not time to
work that out but you will see how thoroughly it supports the ancient
idea that men rightly worshipped different manifestations of the Divine,
and profited by such worship.
But we must hurry on with this outline, for we have yet to deal with the
more highly evolved souls, and on your understanding this last part of
our subject will depend your power to defend our sacred literature when
it is attacked by those who do not understand it. Therefore I will ask
you to follow it carefully, and you can apply the principles that I will
illustrate by special stories in a hundred other cases.