down to the physical plane, we find an atom showing a wall of denser
matter, within it the involved life and without it the magnetic field,
made up of the higher tanmâtras and their atomic sheaths. The Prithivî
atom hence consists of its own tanmâtra plus the matter and the life of
Apas; the matter and life of Agni; the matter and life of Vâyu; the
matter and life of A'kâsha: so that on the physical plane, the physical
atom is a mass of five interpenetrating spheres in which is present as
life the whole of the matter and the life of the worlds above it, the
envelope, or wall, of the physical atom alone showing forth any
characteristics of the physical world--a fact inexpressibly important
for evolution. For, each of those sheaths or koshas--as the student of
Vedânta calls them, and there is no better word--every one of them is
latent in and around the physical atom; and in the upward evolution,
every one of them becomes active and strong as evolution proceeds,
sheath after sheath being vitalised. How could these koshas, or sheaths,
of ours learn to respond to the vibrations of the evolving life, unless
every one of them was latently present in us, waiting to be brought into
activity? The root of that possibility lies in the atom itself, with all
its interpenetrating spheres of life and matter, the sheaths that are
within it and around it. That is not the only thing which we understand;
as this conception grows clear, we understand a phrase that had often
puzzled us in the old days, that "the spirit is senseless on the plane
of matter." What does that mean? The spirit, the very essence of
consciousness, senseless and helpless on the plane of matter! Why?
Because if you take spirit as pure spirit, the intermediate sheaths are
not there by which the matter-vibrations are able to reach it, and
without these sheaths it is unable to receive and respond to the
vibrations of physical matter. It remains unconscious of their very
existence, there being no bridge by which they can pass over and affect
that life. This is really a perfectly simple statement of Madame
Blavatsky's, but it is one that I have heard challenged over and over
again as entirely meaningless, as conveying no idea, for how could
consciousness be unconscious in any region? A little more knowledge
would make us less rapid in our condemnation of our betters. That idea,
then, we will take to help us in the first conception of how evolution
can take place.
Now let us look how, in the downward arc that we spoke of, Íshvara is
imparting qualities. According to the nature of the vibrations that He
sends and of the matter that answers to them will be the quality imparted.
As to the idea that difference of vibrations implies a difference of
manifestation, let me buttress myself on the great reputation of Sir
William Crookes. He issued, two or three years ago, I don't remember the
exact date, in 1896 I think, a table of vibrations, confined of course to
the physical world; a very interesting table, giving a series of
classified vibrations and pointing out which were known to science, and
gave rise to what we call sound, light, electricity, and so on, the
difference of vibratory frequency, and the subtlety of the matter in which
the vibration was set up, giving rise to a particular impression, received
and answered by a sensation in us.
That is the principle which I am now applying to our system as a whole.
According to the density of the matter will be the rapidity of the
vibrations which that matter is capable of expressing; Íshvara sends out
vibrations, and the mânasic matter, we will say, is thrown into
corresponding vibrations or waves of a frequency identical with those of
the life-impulse sent out from Him, so far as it is capable of
responding, a limit being set by its fineness on the one side and by its
density on the other. Its limit of fineness is the atom of the plane.
Its limit of density is the coarsest aggregation of these atoms in the
densest solid of the plane. If we take the physical plane for a moment,
we have solid, liquid, gas, ether, finer ether, finest ether, and atoms.
The lower five are related to the five senses in man as they are at
present developed on the physical plane. These five correspond to the
sense-organs and the senses that work through them, as is suggested in
the names of the tanmâtras. The Solid is related to the sense of Smell;
Liquid to the sense of Taste; Fire to the sense of Sight; Air to the
sense of Touch; and A'kâsha to the sense of Sound. Nov these are not
stated in the order given by the western scientist, but I have no time
to go into the reason for the difference and to show you where his outer
observation fails, because he is not able to trace beyond the limits of
his senses into a finer working; in dealing with our Vâyu and A'kâsha,
he classes them together, and his air is our Agni. These senses and
their evolution belong to the upward arc. Coming downwards, Íshvara
only gives the power to matter to respond to these particular vibrations,
and these vibrations are connected on the physical plane with the
sub-divisions that I have just mentioned, the different sub-divisions of
matter, solid, liquid, gas, and so on, corresponding in the sense-organs
to the senses.
Coming downwards, beginning on the mental plane with Intelligence--missing
the two higher ones of Existence and Love--He sends out vibrations to make
the matter of the mental plane answer, and the vibrations with which that
matter answers, that is, a certain range of vibrations, are called mental
or intelligent. You may say, Why? Just for the same reason that in Sir
William Crookes' tables definite names are given to the different classes
of vibrations, which produce sound, light, etc., names are given in order
to express a certain limit of vibratory force; within one set of limits
the vibrations affect the ether, give "light," and the eye receives them.
Similarly, vibrations that fall between certain limits of vibratory
frequency affect the matter of the third plane, and when they are
received by an organ fitted to focus them in a centre, thus giving rise to
self-consciousness, we call that organ Mind, and the action through that
Mind, Intelligence. The mere name is as arbitrary as any other name, and
we class these under mental, just as a certain range of etheric vibrations
is classed as light, is received by an organ fitted to focus them that we
call the eye, and the action through that eye is vision. If we are to talk
at all, we must have names to describe different classes of phenomena, and
we use the word mental or intelligent to describe the range of vibrations
working in the particular kind of matter of which, in the upward
evolution, an organ is builded that we call the Mind. So, again, to the
vibrations that He sends out into the next coarser form of matter, called
Apas, or astral, we give the name Sensory. He imparts to them the quality
of responding to pleasure and pain, and as He makes this downward sweep He
brings into renewed existence on each plane Devas, or beings which have as
their characteristic manifestation the quality of their own plane; thus
the Devas of the mental plane have the quality of intelligence as their
chief peculiarity, and the Devas of the next lower plane have as their
chief quality feeling, or the power of sensation, and those of the lowest
plane have as their chief quality action, activity. Each Deva class shows
out specially the quality of its plane, and inasmuch as these Devas draw
into their own bodies the matter of the plane in which they live, they
help on its evolution; for they draw it in, use it and thus develop it,
and throw it out again into the general reservoir, just as man draws in
physical matter, uses it in his body, and again throws it out into the
physical world. As that process goes on and on and on through the ages,
the whole of that kind of matter we call mental passes through the bodies
of these Devas, takes on to itself the habit of responding readily to the
vibrations of intelligence, and thus becomes ready for building into the
mental body of man. The matter of the astral plane is builded into the
bodies of the Devas of that plane until it takes up this habit of more and
more definitely responding to pleasure and pain, when impacts are made on
it, and thus can be used for the building up of the sensory bodies of the
lower world. On each plane this downward sweep brings into activity these
classes of Devas, making the intermediate links which are to work in the
building of forms. The essence of the building of forms by a Deva is that
he builds them of the matter of which his own body is composed. Prepared
by that earlier evolution, qualities being developed in the downward
sweep of the life of Íshvara, matter is, in the upward arc, gathered into
definite forms, the bodies of plant, animal and man: thus definite
vehicles are made, by which the highest consciousness can communicate
with, and receive vibrations from, the lowest world.
Let us now, having taken this very rapid sweep downwards, begin to climb
upwards. Each kind of matter is now seen to possess certain qualities.
Every physical atom has a number of sheaths interpenetrating and
surrounding it, the sheath of astral matter with its power of responding
to sensation, the sheath of mental matter with its power of responding
to intelligence, as well as the sheaths, if they may be called so, of
the two higher, Love and Existence, that will not be brought into
activity for a long, long time. All is there. Íshvara now begins the
great stage of brooding action that I spoke of the building up of a
centre, and it is His first work to build physical forms out of this
prepared material, all the Devas of the physical plane being ready to
act as His agents, working under His impulse and under the direction of
the Lord of the Devas of the physical plane. All these innumerable
intermediate agents are wanted; for innumerable are to be the forms, and
every one of them has to be builded.
The building of the physical bodies begins with the formation of the
minerals. As a mineral body is formed, perhaps some crystal, the crystal
of an element or a salt, a definite form is built up by a Deva of the
physical plane. He takes up the material of his own body and such material
of the physical plane as is of similar nature to himself, and he begins
shaping these crystalline forms. He builds them on the lines of the
life-energy sent out by Íshvara Himself, those lines which Science calls
the axes of the crystal, "imaginary" lines; "imaginary"--aye; but they are
from the creative imagination of Íshvara, that is far more potent than the
lower matter in which He builds. That lower matter follows the creative
imagination of the Lord, and these imaginary lines govern the shaping of
that crystal that is builded by the Deva. Tyndall believed not in the
working of the Devas, yet when he was lecturing on crystals to a popular
audience in Manchester he declared that as he pictured to himself the
building of a crystal, he found himself imagining tiny architects at work,
placing every atom with exact precision, with all the intelligence and
skill of a human architect, employed in making a building. Tyndall was
speaking better than he knew. His imagination was answering to the truth
more keenly than he realised. For it is the privilege of the man of
genius who loves truth as Tyndall did--who was willing to break up every
fetter of dogma rather than be a traitor to his conception of truth--to
unconsciously intuit the truth that he seeks, so that his words give out a
higher meaning than he dreamed of. Tyndall was wise in recommending what
he called the scientific flight of the imagination, for that power of
imagination is a most useful thing. Never clip the wings of your
imagination when you are employed in your scientific work; for it may
often give you glimpses of truths that without its aid you would never
find. Thus the Devas work and build crystals, and those crystals have some
remarkable properties. Professor Japp tells us that some crystals turn a
polarised beam of light in a particular way; and he declares that in some
of these forms there is a power which is directive and somewhat akin to
the intelligence of man. Truly is it akin to human intelligence, inasmuch
as it is the parent of human intelligence, the latter being the child that
is developing the parental powers. This building goes on through stages on
which we must not tarry, through the whole of the mineral world, gradually
giving to matter the power to change shape between larger and larger
limits without losing cohesion. This is what is called plasticity, the
power of changing shape without disintegration. Matter also gains that
which science speaks of as elasticity. Now what is elasticity? Not, as
people generally think the mere power of elongation, calling a thing
elastic that can be pulled out like a piece of India-rubber. An elastic
body in the popular sense is not an elastic body from the scientific point
of view, and, strange as it may sound, glass is much more elastic than
India-rubber. Yet the glass does not elongate and is brittle. The proper
definition of elasticity is the power of recovering the original form
after distortion, and matter gradually acquires this power. As life
develops, the equilibrium of the compounds that make up the form becomes
more and more unstable, while at the same time the general cohesion of the
form increases; when we come to the higher forms, such as the body of man,
we find a power of maintaining the central position greater than we find
in any other form, together with an increased plasticity and elasticity;
so that a man can adapt himself to the cold of the polar regions, and to
the heat of the tropics and of the equatorial zone, without losing his
body, in a way that no lower animal can match, that is, he has the power
of adapting his physical body to surrounding conditions to a greater
extent than is the case with any other form. Coming back to the mineral
kingdom we left, let us take the next stage; Íshvara can now expand and
modify His material a little more than was originally possible without
breaking it up. He begins the moulding of the vegetable kingdom, and there
also he sets axes of growth, as "imaginary" and as real in their
controlling force as in the crystal, though they are not always quite as
easy to trace, they are nevertheless there. All the vegetable matter is
built in according to these axes, and the natural classification of plants
is largely determined by the numerical relations of the parts; thus the
law of number shapes the form. As the matter becomes more plastic and
yields more readily to the indwelling life, the higher members of that
kingdom begin to show the dawning of sensation. That is due to the
beginning of the vivification of the next sheath above the physical,
composed of what we call astral matter, that which goes to make part
of the manomaya kosha of the Vedântin. We see in that a growing
susceptibility, an increasing sensory power, very slight in the vegetable
world, but still present, and developed much more largely where the
vegetable has a long experience of separated life. Take for instance a
tree that has endured for centuries, and let me just trace the stages in
which the dawning sensation is found, and even a dawn, though I hardly
venture to use the word, a dawn of mental quality. That life in the tree
responds to the vibrations received from outside, of cold and heat, of
wind and rain, of sunshine and storm, and as the physical sheath is built
up and developed by the action of the Devas working upon it, the etheric
matter in it is continually thrown into vibration by the changes in
temperature, light, and electrical conditions. The vibrations in the
ethers that enter into the physical body are passed on to the atomic
sub-plane, and as the atoms of the physical plane have their spirals made
of the coarsest matter of the plane of Apas, or astral matter, a slight
quivering is caused in that coarsest matter of the astral plane, and that
sets up a little movement in the tree, responded to by the indwelling life
by sensation, a massive and general feeling of pleasure or pain.
Have you never walked through a forest, and felt as though all nature
were enjoying the sunshine? This sensation of pleasure is shown still
more strikingly when the hot season comes to its ending, and the first
rains fall on the thirsty ground, and the well-nigh withering vegetation
sends out a conscious thrill of joy and life renewed. The very trees and
bushes rejoice as the rain comes down upon them with its message of life
and of hope. At such moments we recognise that the vegetable world is
sensitive, although the sensation be widespread, that which is called
massive in character.
Forgive me if for a moment I here digress, to say that this fact is one
of the reasons why we owe a duty to the vegetable world, not needlessly
to cause sensations of dawning suffering. We live too carelessly, my
brothers, in this world which is all-living, where there is no atom that
is dead, and especially is this sad here in India, where once there was
so strong a reverence for life. That is now, alas, beginning to pass
away. You are forgetting that all life is Íshvara, that according to the
stage of His lower self-evolution is the power of response that is given
to the form. In the old days, I remember how, when man took his food, he
met the food with gracious greeting because it was sacrificing its life
in order to build, through that sacrifice, his own. Though it did not
possess the higher powers of sensation as we find them in the animal,
but only the lesser sensation powers of the vegetable world, still, even
then, he met it with reverence, as a sacrifice which was being made to
him, and took it with gratitude and with love; that lower life was
yielding itself up to him for his up-building. But to-day, so lost is
that gentle grace in many of our Hindu people, that they not only
disregard the sacrificed lives of the vegetable kingdom, but also those
of the far more sentient forms which Íshvara has developed in the animal
kingdom of His world. We find men who wear the outer shape of the Hindu,
who have his colour, his form, his face, who boast themselves of their
descent from antiquity, who hold themselves therefore in thought above
the western nations, forgetting the life of the Self in this sentient
creation, and nourishing their bodies with the bodies of their lower
brethren, without showing any sense of the sacrifice made, or feeling
even a passing gratitude for the life which is given for them.
Let us come back to the tracing of our forms. Íshvara, brooding over the
evolving forms, continues His patient work--patient, that the form may
never be broken by an overstrain, but may be slowly developed into a
vehicle of the life that ensouls it. In every form He lives, evolving
it, but He limits with illimitable patience His manifestation of life to
the poor capacities of the form, that it may grow and not be destroyed.
Do you remember an old story of the ancient days, in which most of you
would be ashamed to acknowledge belief, for are you not graduates and
men of western knowledge? Though descendants from the old time, you have
naught to do with it, but I, who was trained in the West, I have no
feeling of shame in acknowledging my belief in the strange things that
come down to us from the times when truth was less veiled than it is
now. So I dare to recall the story to you, although you may think that
it is but a fable or legend. There was a boy who believed in Vishnu or
Hari, in whom his father believed not, Prahlâda he was named; and that
boy went through many trials, but in all his faith in the Supreme
defended him; at last his father, scoffing, said, turning to a pillar in
his room: "You tell me that Hari is everywhere: is He in that pillar?"
"O Hari, Hari!" cried the boy, and forth from the pillar in the form of
a Lion burst an avatâra of Vishnu and the pillar was shivered into
pieces. Truly is He everywhere, in every particle of matter; there is no
one particle from which He cannot come forth in all the might of His
Godhood, in all the majesty of His Deity. But He will not, because if He
did, the form could not bear that revealing, and would shiver into
pieces as the God appeared. A profound truth, even if you regard the
story as an allegory, a truth which teaches us what evolution means.
Thus Íshvara worked on age after age and æon after æon, with that
marvellous patience of which I spoke, until matter was made sufficiently
plastic to build it into the form in which His highest life was to begin
its development, the form of man; building that form, He begins also to
strengthen very much the centre which the form is for a while to
protect. Let me say in passing one thing that I have omitted, that
whenever a form has reached its highest possible point, its limit of
expansion, He breaks it, in order that, in a new form better adapted,
the ensouling life may continue to grow; for He knows when to break as
well as when to hold; He knows when to destroy as well as when to
preserve; and the moment that the limit of a form has been reached, and
its matter can yield no further, He bursts the form asunder, that its
materials may recombine themselves, under the impulse of life, into a
more plastic organism, and that the life may thus gain further
evolution, ensouling a higher form more fitted for the expression of its
increasing powers. We call this breaking of the form death, and we fear
and shrink from it, and if people talk to us of death, in the flush of
our life, it comes as a jar and a shock. But, as I told you in the
beginning, you may see very plainly that death is that beneficent aspect
of Íshvara, which breaks a form that has become a prison, in order to
give the life a new form in which it may continue to grow; He breaks the
rigid form when it can develop no further, and gives the life the
plastic form of a baby, that may be shaped more easily by the moulding
forces of the life within it, yielding itself to every impulse from
within. It seems then, that when we see things rightly, we should hail
death as birth rather than as death. For looked at from the side of
life, every death is a being born into the higher possibilities of a new
shape that will adapt itself to the growing life.