There lacked the last transcendent power
Aswapati’s yoga-tapasya has climbed to the superlative heights. His will has become one with the Supreme’s Will. In that will he has established the new creation in the House of the Spirit. It is a creation in which prevail perfect perfection and harmony and love and beauty and strength and wisdom and joy, truth in the dynamism of things that are and things that shall be. In the annals of the evolutionary unfoldment a very major step has been taken, a decisive advance made. If this new creation with its perfection and harmony and all those wonderful possibilities can be projected in the evolutionary process, then will God’s desire be fulfilled in it. indeed, Rose of God in its intensities, as Rose of Bliss must leap up in our heart of humanhood, as Rose of Light illumine our mind, as Rose of Power pierce the night and work out its immortality in us, as Rose of Life bring to our thousand discordances the magic of its rhyme and its happy sweetness, as Rose of Love it must make the earth the home of the Wonderful. The perfections of the transcendental must express themselves in the earthly. Aswapati’s yoga-tapasya has been towards this, a long tireless and unremitting, determined, yoga-tapasya which can be done by a supreme yogi alone. Sri Aurobindo describes his threefold yoga-tapasya in a letter as follows:

First, he is achieving his own spiritual self-fulfilment as the individual and this is described as the Yoga of the King. Next, he makes the ascent as a typical representative of the race to win the possibility of discovery and possession of all the planes of consciousness and this is described in the Second Book: but this too is as yet an individual victory. Finally, he aspires no longer for himself but for all, for a universal realisation and new creation. This is described in the Book of the Divine Mother.

Aswapati’s concern is universal realisation and new creation. In fact, there cannot be rest for him until the dusk from man’s soul is lifted. Lifting up his yoga-tapasya to the highest possibility, he turned to her for whom he willed to be. He offered his heart to her because, she is the one who can make that new creation manifest upon earth. Aswapati saw this necessity, of making this new creation manifest upon earth, even as he saw the deeply fundamental oppositions between the higher and the lower, the harsh incompatibility of the perfect stepping into the flawed and the distorted, the double denial working in a rigid and inveterate incorrigible way, a discouraging situation in this death-bound world which one day must become the home of the true and the immortal.

Yes, there are glorious spiritual states in the House of the Spirit; but they have to meet two negations before they can be brought down here upon earth. Here is a world which knows not its inhabiting self, there is the spirit that is ignorant of the world that it itself has created, obscured by Matter and travestied by Life it struggles to emerge to be free, to know, to reign. What ties these two negations together is nothing but one disharmony.

But why this disharmony, why this irrational course, what powers, be they of the helpless lower nature or of the proud celestial gods, preventing them to come together? The spectacle we witness is of the unknowing Force in the beginning, of the embodied soul in the middle and, at the end, of a silent spirit denying life. The gloomy inconscient origins of ours, perhaps with the great seeds of glory present in them, have to be reckoned with and the problem occult-yogically tackled in the Will of the Supreme. This is exactly what Aswapati does, first as an individual and then taking it at the cosmic level, carrying its will to the Divine.

Even in the beginning of his yoga-tapasya Aswapati experienced the difficulty, as an individual: (Savitri, pp. 34-35)

Out of that stillness mind new-born arose
And woke to truths once inexpressible,
And forms appeared, dumbly significant,
A seeing thought, a self-revealing voice.
He knew the source from which his spirit came:
Movement was married to the immobile Vast;
He plunged his roots into the Infinite,
He based his life upon eternity.

But

Only awhile at first these heavenlier states,
These large wide-poised upliftings could endure.
The high and luminous tension breaks too soon,
The body's stone stillness and the life's hushed trance,
The breathless might and calm of silent mind;
Or slowly they fail as sets a golden day.
The restless nether members tire of peace;
A nostalgia of old little works and joys,
A need to call back small familiar selves,
To tread the accustomed and inferior way,
The need to rest in a natural pose of fall,
As a child who learns to walk can walk not long,
Replace the titan will for ever to climb,
On the heart's altar dim the sacred fire.
An old pull of subconscious cords renews;
It draws the unwilling spirit from the heights,
Or a dull gravitation drags us down
To the blind driven inertia of our base.
This too the supreme Diplomat can use,
He makes our fall a means for greater rise.
For into ignorant Nature's gusty field,
Into the half-ordered chaos of mortal life
The formless Power, the Self of eternal light
Follow in the shadow of the spirit's descent;
The twin duality for ever one
Chooses its home mid the tumults of the sense.
He comes unseen into our darker parts
And, curtained by the darkness, does his work,
A subtle and all-knowing guest and guide,
Till they too feel the need and will to change.
All here must learn to obey a higher law,
Our body's cells must hold the Immortal's flame.
Else would the spirit reach alone its source
Leaving a half-saved world to its dubious fate.
Nature would ever labour unredeemed;
Our earth would ever spin unhelped in Space,
And this immense creation's purpose fail
Till at last the frustrate universe sank undone.
Even his godlike strength to rise must fall:
His greater consciousness withdrew behind;
Dim and eclipsed, his human outside strove
To feel again the old sublimities,
Bring the high saving touch, the ethereal flame,
Call back to its dire need the divine Force.

Young and overwhelmed Satyavan, while making advances towards Savitri within minutes of their first meeting, speaks of the difficulty, of Matter refusing Spirit and Spirit disdaining Matter. He also knows that in the coming of Savitri this shall be no more there, the dichotomy shall be dissolved and that there will be harmony in every respect. He is a Veda-knower and grew up under the tapasya of the great Rishis of the forest hermitage. He tells in an eloquent soul-charged speech that she is there to resolve all these contradictions: (pp. 405-06)

In men I met strange portions of a Self
That sought for fragments and in fragments lived:
Each lived in himself and for himself alone
And with the rest joined only fleeting ties;
Each passioned over his surface joy and grief,
Nor saw the Eternal in his secret house.
I conversed with Nature, mused with the changeless stars,
God's watch-fires burning in the ignorant Night,
And saw upon her mighty visage fall
A ray prophetic of the Eternal's sun.
I sat with the forest sages in their trance:
There poured awakening streams of diamond light,
I glimpsed the presence of the One in all.
But still there lacked the last transcendent power
And Matter still slept empty of its Lord.
The Spirit was saved, the body lost and mute
Lived still with Death and ancient Ignorance;
The Inconscient was its base, the Void its fate.
But thou hast come and all will surely change:
I shall feel the World-Mother in thy golden limbs
And hear her wisdom in thy sacred voice.
The child of the Void shall be reborn in God,
My Matter shall evade the Inconscient's trance.
My body like my spirit shall be free.
It shall escape from Death and Ignorance.

This knowledge about the capability of Savitri accomplishing the difficult miracle comes to Satyavan not only from his spiritual upbringing in the company of the sages of the woods but more from the power of love that suddenly got awakened in him. If only we live in such a love!

RYD

The Two Negations
If spirit is the storehouse of possibilities, possibilities in their moving dynamism, and matter is all locked in its modes of expression, it admitting no change, then this situation will imply a fundamental incompatibility between the two, incompatibility even to the extent of they becoming antagonistic to each other. One is freedom and the other fixity, freedom for growth, expansion, and fixity to give stability to what is, support that things do not collapse. The Cartesian dichotomy thus gets badly hardened in our mental formulations. Even as form had to endure itself against the great onslaught of the all-swallowing void from which it came, this mind of matter had to see that it is not destroyed by the invading powers of the spirit. Even as the spirit found it more and more difficult to enter into the forms of matter, it started disclaiming it as incapable of holding what it was bringing. The opposition between the two is not just in the mind, at the mental level, of an abstract kind, it is not just a cerebral-conceptual formulation; the battle is in the deep occult. Thus when Life entered into Matter, she was stunned by Death and decay-disintegration-death became her law of existence. Such helplessness happens at every stage, whenever the higher tries to enter into the lower.

The problem is, because of the very nature of things as they are, inherently as they are. From a philosophical point of view the situation is well summed as two negations in The Life Divine, the materialist denial and the refusal of the ascetic. It has to be first recognised that any talk about the divine life upon earth, of the immortal sense in mortal existence, can have no contents until the inhabiting Spirit accepts Matter as something worthy for its dwelling, that Matter too is Brahman, and Matter knows that the prospects of its own growth are in the Spirit, in the Truth-substance from which it came. God or Nature—it is in that cleft we are caught. If we assert only pure Spirit, the inevitable end will be that we shall either deny God or else turn away from Nature. Based on the premises of physical senses Matter alone will prevail; based on the incapacity of Matter to respond to the call of the Spirit the conclusion will be either it is an illusion or else incapable of change and the only way out will be to escape from its hold.

“The touch of Earth is always reinvigorating to the son of Earth,” explains The Life Divine the two positions we encounter, “even when he seeks a supraphysical Knowledge. It may even be said that the supraphysical can only be really mastered in its fullness—to its heights we can always reach—when we keep our feet firmly on the physical. ‘Earth is His footing’, says the Upanishad whenever it images the Self that manifests in the universe. And it is certainly the fact that the wider we extend and the surer we make our knowledge of the physical world, the wider and surer becomes our foundation for the higher knowledge, even for the highest, even for the Brahmavidya.”

And then: “And still there is a beyond.” It is that which supports the universal activity. The Sannyasin, enamoured of that Beyond, justifies pure Spirit as the sole reality, free from change, birth, death. There is content in the findings of the supraphysical realities, they having discovered the working of the subtle senses which indeed do exist.

In this difficult state only by an extension of the field of our consciousness or an unhoped-for increase in our instruments of knowledge can the ancient quarrel be decided. This must necessarily be an inner enlargement from the individual into the cosmic existence… It is the conscious Being which is the truth of the infinite supermind, more than the universe and which lives independently in Its own inexpressible infinity as well as in the cosmic harmonies. World lives by That; That does not live by the world.

Let us read the following passage from The Life Divine: (pp. 47-48)

Awakened to a profounder self-knowledge than his first mental idea of himself, Man begins to conceive some formula and to perceive some appearance of the thing that he has to affirm. But it appears to him as if poised between two negations of itself. If, beyond his present attainment, he perceives or is touched by the power, light, bliss of a self-conscious infinite existence and translates his thought or his experience of it into terms convenient for his mentality,—Infinity, Omniscience, Omnipotence, Immortality, Freedom, Love, Beatitude, God,—yet does this sun of his seeing appear to shine between a double Night,—a darkness below, a mightier darkness beyond. For when he strives to know it utterly, it seems to pass into something which neither any one of these terms nor the sum of them can at all represent. His mind at last negates God for a Beyond, or at least it seems to find God transcending Himself, denying Himself to the conception. Here also, in the world, in himself, and around himself, he is met always by the opposites of his affirmation. Death is ever with him, limitation invests his being and his experience, error, inconscience, weakness, inertia, grief, pain, evil are constant oppressors of his effort. Here also he is driven to deny God, or at least the Divine seems to negate or to hide itself in some appearance or outcome which is other than its true and eternal reality. And the terms of this denial are not, like that other and remoter negation, inconceivable and therefore naturally mysterious, unknowable to his mind, but appear to be knowable, known, definite,—and still mysterious. He knows not what they are, why they exist, how they came into being. He sees their processes as they affect and appear to him; he cannot fathom their essential reality. Perhaps they are unfathomable, perhaps they also are really unknowable in their essence? Or, it may be, they have no essential reality,—are an illusion, Asat, non-being. The superior Negation appears to us sometimes as a Nihil, a Non-Existence; this inferior negation may also be, in its essence, a Nihil, a non-existence. But as we have already put away from us this evasion of the difficulty with regard to that higher, so also we discard it for this inferior Asat. To deny entirely its reality or to seek an escape from it as a mere disastrous illusion is to put away from us the problem and to shun our work. For Life, these things that seem to deny God, to be the opposites of Sachchidananda, are real, even if they turn out to be temporary. They and their opposites, good, knowledge, joy, pleasure, life, survival, strength, power, increase, are the very material of her workings.

RYD

A new creation from the old shall rise, but…
The new creation has been made ready in the House of the Spirit and it has to manifest-materialize upon this earth, manifest with its law of perfect perfection in the aspects of several divine intensities. But presently this cannot happen; it will not accept the conditions of this suffocating repulsive mortality of ours. Across the path of this divine Event, of its manifestation upon earth, is standing the huge foreboding mind of Night, the mind that gave form and fixity to the substance of the void; unless this mind becomes capable of receiving the higher light and power, there is just no chance of its materialisation. That is the situation, and Aswapati is deeply concerned with it. Yet this dark night is charged with a meaning and a purpose, and it is that meaning and that purpose which must be grasped, and worked out, in its essential details, the mechanism, the formula for the transformative action discovered. Any exclusive stress on the spiritual will leave the phenomenal in the lurch, even as the non-receptivity of the old and the material will repel the singular and the wonderful, the new and the luminous. Aswapati is aware that if one were to go only by the small questioning Mind driven by the ignorant Power, then the riddle of being born from the Night cannot be solved. He has seen that there is a vaster surer truth hidden behind the working of this ignorant Power and it is as if designedly, with a purpose, that this ignorant Power prevents the aspiring spirit to escape from her oppressive clutch: (Savitri, p. 330)

This darkness hides our nobler destiny.
A chrysalis of a great and glorious truth,
It stifles the winged marvel in its sheath
Lest from the prison of Matter it escape
And, wasting its beauty on the formless Vast,
Merged into the Unknowable's mystery,
Leave unfulfilled the world's miraculous fate.
As yet thought only some high spirit's dream
Or a vexed illusion in man's toiling mind,
A new creation from the old shall rise,
A Knowledge inarticulate find speech,
Beauty suppressed burst into paradise bloom,
Pleasure and pain dive into absolute bliss.
A tongueless oracle shall speak at last,
The Superconscient conscious grow on earth,
The Eternal's wonders join the dance of Time.

There are these two queer paths, of the ascetics and of the materialists both standing poles apart from each other, at the extreme antipodes. One is a narrow and vanishing path of the one who denies and dismisses this present material creation; it is a one-way path of getting lost in the high indefinable mystery of the Unknowable, a Cave from where no footprints of the people returning from it are seen. It cannot be a happy welcome path for the Eternal’s wonders if they are to step into the process of Time, in fact there is no provision for that to happen. The other path is prepared step by small step, and that itself does not know where it is going to lead itself; it has no marked destination, it is all unknown unfoldment for it, another kind of blind abyss trusted only by reason and nothing else, no intuition, no perceptive sense, except a sort of horse-sense of the nearby and the immediate. For it the question of a new creation being present elsewhere does not arise, for it whatever has to emerge must emerge from within itself, from its own potential. Whether that potential is held by it within itself or is new-created cannot be ascertained by anyone. The strange thing is that, it is not aware if its contents, of its own known or knowable potential, its scope and its limits, its functional boundaries. The mathematised Langrangian extrapolation does not reach far beyond a few quick stadia, assuming further that the function is continuous, that there are no singularities in between, anywhere,—a big, an unproven assumption, the unfounded faith of the reasoning mind.

However, the presiding deity over the state of affairs as they are now is none but the “deluded Energy” and on her foundation to think of the new creation to arise from the old will be unrealistic. The conditions as they prevail are so starkly opposite to its nature that it just cannot live here upon earth. The world as is, when seen from the world that must be, from the new world established by Aswapati in the House of the Spirit, the world governed by the Perfection’s Law, the World of the Divine Rose, the unfading Rose, is so different that it will be a bad dream even to imagine it becoming real; it cannot fulfil itself in it. Both all things vain, and all who in vain things build their fond hopes of glory or lasting fame, or happiness in this life, to use Milton, will only meet disappointment and frustration. (Paradise Lost, Book III) To think of the world waiting to be born, that it can take birth in a world that is governed by the law of imperfection, in a world in which life is viciously subject to death, in which immortality cannot live in the conditions of mortality, is altogether unlikely, impracticable, not viable, contradictory to the nature of things,—simply because that will defeat its own purpose. The only alternative is to forget about the new world as something alien and totally incompatible with the stuff of things as are here; or else think of a power that can change the present world and make it more and more receptive to the other. The other world is not going to oblige and hence change this one must.

Aswapati has to do something in that direction if he is really keen to bring down his new and marvellous creation here upon earth. But, indeed, Aswapati is already aware of it.

RYD

Beautifully stated RY. I admire your cogent juxtaposition of rationalistic metaphysics/jargon with potently poetic critique; e.g.:

...The mathematised Lagrangian extrapolation does not reach far beyond a few quick stadia, assuming further that the function is continuous, that there are no singularities in between, anywhere,—a big, an unproven assumption, the unfounded faith of the reasoning mind. ... The world as is, when seen from the world that must be, from the new world established by Aswapati in the House of the Spirit, the world governed by the Perfection’s Law, the World of the Divine Rose, the unfading Rose, is so different that it will be a bad dream even to imagine it becoming real; it cannot fulfill itself in it. Both all things vain, and all who in vain things build their fond hopes of glory or lasting fame, or happiness in this life, to use Milton, will only meet disappointment and frustration. (Paradise Lost, Book III)...

Your keen use of these two often incompatible modes of thought is, imho, an elegant demonstration of IY in action. And your ongoing comments on Savitri continue to be, for me, a wonderful aide to understanding Sri Aurobindo's profound message.

Warmly,

~ ron

Thanks, Ron, for the compliments. It is so encouraging. But I am also getting somewhat embarrassed, that I continue to do the posting and none else from the sciy is coming forward with other themes. It will be wonderful if DB can open a series on The Life Divine, even as he is conducting sessions via skype. May I request him to consider it. So also if Vladimir can start a series on the Vedic lore. Thanks to you and to them all.

RYD

Dear RY,

Your inspired development on Savitri is a most wonderful gift to and through sciy. At this time, I must take a backseat due to other pressing concerns, but hope to return to more active participation in some time. In the meantime, sciy readers are welcome to participate in the Life Divine skype studies conducted by me on Thursdays at 7:30 pm Pacific Standard Time and these studies will continue to be archived on sciy.

DB

Dear Deba

Thanks, but about your Life Divine sessions: your timings are rather inconvenient for us here, for live participation. But I have a suggestion. It will be good if you can post a summary, say in about 800-1000 words, every week, covering the topic and the discussion of that Thursday. For these postings you can supply the skype/sciy link also. These postings as Arguments can come in the category of articles which will be easy to track and follow later on. Please consider, and thanks.

RYD

Better still, if someone could transcribe the LD sessions and put the text on sciy along with the source passages. Any volunteers?

DB

I've now updated the recordings of Debashish's online LD classes available here on SCIY. You can listen to them at:

Recordings of Debashish's Life Divine Classes

Each recording includes the beginning and end of each LD quote being discussed, and a link to an online version of the text graciously provided by the Sri Aurobindo Ashram.

I've also added a permanent link to these recordings in the "PRIORITY" frame in the lefthand blue column, beneath the "Recent Visitors" list.

Enjoy ...

~ ron

Having just returned from the AUM and the emphasis of a wider community. I think it essential to open more themes such as suggested by RYD for SCIY and open the forum up for a greater audience participation. We may all do a skype call to discuss this as I think we can do a conference call via skype. One problem I know is that some folks are either not comfortable or dislike the virtual environment, if not immediately then over time it happens.
While there is nothing specific we can do to address this issue
We should be aware of this aspect of virtual environments. However, that said there is simply no other way to open this up regularly to a larger audience but via the web.
Since there are some other integral yoga related blogs out there, it may also be a consideration to network conversations, and posting among us


rich

Rich

What about posting some of the really important technical highlights of the aum? These will be intersting, if you are not already planning. and thanks

RYD

The problem is occult-yogic in nature
The problem of bringing down the new creation is more occult-yogic in nature than spiritual; in that respect, and without doubt, metaphysical considerations, howsoever profound and concerned these be, will avail hardly anything, in fact these need not come in the reckoning. Operationally, it is a problem at the foundational level, to deal with the negation as if planted at the base of the things, perhaps with a purpose, a worthwhile rewarding purpose. But it must be appreciated that the origin of things is in that way; it is the given, and nothing can be done about it, i.e. we have to just accept what is, and figure the way out. We must recognise what is, and do the best that we can do; that is the pragmatics—unless one is a supreme Yogi, the Incarnate, the son of Strength, Aswapati who can go to the root of the matter, matter where the problem lies.

The truth, the fact, the reality is that by rather a strange Mystery’s process the Opposite was created, the inconscient Nothing in which the Sachchidanda-Being became his own contrary, the terrible and dark Non-Being; this Sachchidanda-Being in his great exploit, carrying the “triple mystic cross”, plunged into the all-negating void: (Savitri, pp. 140-41)

In the enigma of the darkened Vasts,
In the passion and self-loss of the Infinite
When all was plunged in the negating Void,
Non-Being’s night could never have been saved
If Being had not plunged into the dark
Carrying with it its triple mystic cross.
Invoking in world-time the timeless truth,
Bliss changed to sorrow, knowledge made ignorant,
God’s force turned into a child’s helplessness
Can bring down heaven by their sacrifice.
A contradiction founds the base of life:
The eternal, the divine Reality
Has faced itself with its own contraries;
Being became the Void and Conscious-Force
Nescience and walk of a blind Energy
And Ecstasy took the figure of world-pain.
In a mysterious dispensation’s law
A Wisdom that prepares its far-off ends
Planned so to start her slow aeonic game.
A blindfold search and wrestle and fumbling clasp
Of a half-seen Nature and a hidden Soul,
A game of hide-and-seek in twilit rooms,
A play of love and hate and fear and hope
Continues in the nursery of mind
Its hard and heavy romp of self-born twins.
At last the struggling Energy can emerge
And meet the voiceless Being in wider fields;
Then can they see and speak and, breast to breast,
In a larger consciousness, a clearer light,
The Two embrace and strive and each know each
Regarding closer now the playmate’s face.
Even in these formless coilings he could feel
Matter’s response to an infant stir of soul.
In Nature he saw the mighty Spirit concealed,
Watched the weak birth of a tremendous Force,
Pursued the riddle of Godhead's tentative pace,
Heard the faint rhythms of a great unborn Muse.

That is the beginning of the adventure, the puzzling starting point, the foundation of the evolutionary creation, the funny and paradoxical foundation but charged with some secret or concealed divine Sense. The Mother speaks of it, in the manner of a story, as the separation of four Powers from their divine Origin. They went so far away from the divine Origin, the divine Source that they became their own opposites. At the cosmic scale this is the situation and it is this that has to be remedied. For that to be done, to happen, the seed-self of things should merge knowledge in the inconscient deeps and, accepting error, sorrow, death and pain, pay the ransom of the ignorant Night. (Savitri, p. 331) The redemption is in it. But more than the redemption, there has to be a new manifestation—or else the purpose of the Separation will be lost. Not just joining the divine Origin, going back to the Source but working out a new creation, establishing the new divinity through the path of the inconscient working—that is the triumph and the glory.

It all began with the Sacrifice of the Purusha, so gloriously hymned by the Veda. It is a sacrifice performed by the Gods, the Rishis and the Sadhyas, the celestial beings, a sacrifice in which the divine Purusha himself was made the fire-offering. The hymn says: “Purusha the Cosmic Being has a thousand heads, and he has a thousand eyes and a thousand feet to walk; he has chosen this bhūmi the Earth for his growth, for increase, to extend himself, to widen; while doing so, he stands apart by the width of ten fingers, far seeming yet close to this chosen place.” Similarly is proclaimed in the divine Tapas the birth of the One from the dark waters of Inconscience: “Darkness hidden by darkness in the beginning was this all, an ocean without mental consciousness… out of it the One was born by the greatness of Its energy. It first moved in it as desire which was the first seed of mind. The Masters of Wisdom found out in the non-existent that which builds up the existent; in the heart they found it by purposeful impulsion and by the thought-mind. Their ray was extended horizontally; there was something above, there was something below.” (The Secret of the Veda, p. 106) The gods are not aware of this creation, later as they were born in it. At that time there was neither death nor immortality then. [For further discussion reference may be made to
http://www.sciy.org/blog/_archives/2006/12/6/2554374.html]
The two key phrases for our present purpose are: even while he has chosen this Earth for growth, he stands apart by the width of ten fingers; that which in the non-existent builds up the existent.

How can the existent be built in the non-existent if he stands apart by the width of ten fingers? But then who knows him truly? Who knows whence this new creation has come into being? That it shall be here too? Whether it was there and just discovered, whether it was made or not, whether he in the highest heaven is its surveyor—who knows?—asks the Vedic Rishi. And he answers: Surely he knows, or perhaps he knows not.

RYD

The Prerequisites
By the Vedic Sarvahuta Yajna, the Sacrifice of the All in which the Purusha himself was made the fire-offering, was established the fourfold cosmic order. But this fourfold order is only a first necessary step, a very major step in the long evolutionary march of the soul of the earth. However, it has severe inadequacies and it cannot meet the demands of the new creation poised for manifestation, the creation established by Aswapati in the House of the Spirit; it cannot lead to the truer greater worlds of truth and light and awareness and knowledge and joy and the life divine. Surely, this fourfold order consisting of universal perfection and harmony and strength and wisdom has to be there, these as the tireless and foundational-basal powers for the collective working; but the other divine intensities with their powers of love and bliss and gnosis and those thousand things in the divine splendour cannot express themselves in it. It is by Tapas that a creation can be brought into existence, established in the World of Tapas, in Tapoloka; but it is only by the luminous and dynamic Yoga will its manifestation become possible. This entails recognising the conditions of the place where this manifestation has to happen. If the existent has to manifest in the non-existent, in the language of the Vedic Hymn of Creation, then that non-existent must get ready in an appropriate manner to receive it; also, it must be made safe that it does not swallow up or else deform and garble, does not corrupt the descending existent. “Divinity’s lapse” can become divinely fruitful only if certain prerequisites and provisions are assured.

But how is the non-existent going to assure them, if by the very sense or definition the non-existent is with no contents of any existence in it, is nil, is absolute zero? That is a deeper metaphysical question, but the answer to it does not lie in it, in the metaphysics. The occult fact is, the Divine’s Void, śūnya, is a pregnant Void, is a creative Void, is meant for the purposes of creation; the “Divinity’s lapse” is a well-intentioned lapse. The Void is charged with infinite possibilities, the Infinite’s possibilities, but possibilities all held back, are out of reach. They have to emerge by the process of the evolutionary unfoldment, a thing that can happen because it is the “Divinity’s lapse”, because of the Divinity’s plunge in it, what the Mother says the Plunge of the Divine’s Love, or he as the inconscient Vishnu of the Puranas, or, figuratively speaking, the Divine stationed in the Void, he in both the concealed aspects of Presence and Power, of Existence and Consciousness, of the Soul and Nature being foundationally present there, in the Void, he himself the Void. But this Void is the sombre Womb of all things, powers and potentialities in their negative aspects, in their antagonist aspects which can be quite horrifying. It is the blind somnambulist Power who does the work in it, she yet growing more and more aware in the whole process, in the long and tortuous course of evolving Time changing the quality of the Time itself. Indeed, the inconscient Vishnu is the permanent Avatar stationed in the Void and it is because of him that the evolution has become possible; the Presence and the Power in it are the dimensionless point of space and the dense powerhouse marking the beginning of time. Here we have the powerful space-time dot, the invisible bindu. Without the presence of this Vishnu or the permanent Avatar this mighty involution itself would have been otiose, meaningless, without any objective, would have been inconsequential. This inconscient Vishnu is the Mother’s Satyavan-Avatar and it is to free him from this deathful existence that Savitri takes the mortal birth. It is the personal role of the divine Executrix “to prepare the successive advents, of the Lord on earth. In the past history of earth it was she who manifested all the Incarnations of the Lord. In the future also it is she who will manifest the Supramental Avatar.” This way Satyavan-Avatar will make progress on earth, in evolution, even as he shall enter into the full divine possibilities. When the Supreme himself as the incarnate Yogi does the Yoga under these conditions that, a greater and brighter path opens out for the executive Nature to carry the evolution to newer heights. In response to that, the powers of the transcendental world start entering into the process of evolution.

When the conditions are not assured the fall is inevitable. Possibly, the supreme Diplomat can use this fall also for his purposes, but it never is indispensable; is not a planned accident. Therefore the question is: What is it that can make the new creation safe here? Assuming that it will come here, what is it that can make it grow more and more if it is a part of the evolutionary manifestation, grow from knowledge to knowledge, from life to greater life, from joy to unceasing joy?

As the Mother explains, “in the history of our universe there have been six consecutive periods which began by a creation, were prolonged by a force of preservation and ended by a disintegration, a destruction, a return to the Origin, which is called Pralaya…” What is necessary is that there should be a progressive creation, that is, “after the starting-point of the creation, instead of its being simply followed by a preservation, it should be followed by a progressive manifestation which would express the Divine more and more completely, so that no disintegration and return to the Origin would be necessary.” The Mother says that from every side she is asked, “What is going to happen?” There is only one reply: “If only man could consent to be spiritualised.” If only man becomes more and more a conscious instrument, lends himself more and more to the divine working.

About the difficulty of the whole thing, she says: “We are at a moment of transition in the history of the earth. It is merely a moment in eternal time, but this moment is long compared to human life. Matter is changing in order to prepare itself for the new manifestation, but the human body is not plastic enough and offers resistance; this is why the number of incomprehensible disorders and even diseases is increasing and becoming a problem for medical science. The remedy lies in union with the divine forces that are at work and a receptivity full of trust and peace which makes the task easier.”

“The universe is an objectivisation of the Supreme,” explains the Mother on another occasion, “as if He had objectivised himself outside of himself in order to see himself, to live himself, to know himself, and so that there might be an existence and a consciousness capable of recognising him as their origin and uniting consciously with him to manifest him in the becoming. There is no other reason for the universe. The earth is a kind of symbolic crystallisation of universal life, a reduction, a concentration, so that the work of evolution may be easier to do and follow. And if we see the history of the earth, we can understand why the universe has been created. It is the Supreme growing aware of himself in an eternal Becoming; and the goal is the union of the created with the Creator, a union that is conscious, willing and free, in the Manifestation.”

One means, and the only means to reach the goal is to live in the new creation by calling it down upon earth. Aswapati has established it in the House of the Spirit and it must come down upon earth. Our endeavour should be lend ourselves to the process, to participate in it.

RYD

Progress or evolution or transformation becoming conscious of the original Unity
There were Pralayas, that is, there were creations which had to be dissolved; the purpose with which these creations were projected did not make it and therefore these were withdrawn. The ancient Indian Puranic tradition—and the Chaldean tradition, as the Mother says—speaks of them; Théon also had told to the Mother so. This dissolution of creations happened six times and we are now in the seventh creation. Earlier an attempt towards divine manifestation was made on Mars, perhaps leaving behind the traces of life on it; but it didn’t succeed. Now, in order to concentrate the effort, Earth has been formed, Earth as a “significant centre” to work out what could not be done on previous occasions. The psychic being of the Earth still carries the memory of the past attempts, which cause scare in her that this time also it might be so. From the point of view of evolution of consciousness and divine manifestation, Earth is the centre of the universe, with a loaded geo-centricity but of another kind that should not be mixed up with the mechanistic formulation of Astronomy in which the planet earth is a trivial and irrelevant speck of dust in the vastness of the material existence. And what wars in history were not fought in the ignorance of these things! If only the mind of man is open to the truths belonging to different orders! We have to go beyond faith and reason.

But the question is: what certainty that the present creation will succeed? The Mother says that this time it will not fail—because the divine Effort has seen that the Supermind shall descend upon earth and take care of all the contingencies, a defeatless power that can repel all opposition and all frustrating machinations will handle it. But let us read the Mother:

Creation means separation of all that constitutes this unity—one might call it the division of consciousness. The division of consciousness starts from the unity conscious of its unity, in order to arrive at the unity conscious of its multiplicity in the unity. And then it is this path which, because of its fragments, is translated for us by space and time. For us, such as we are, it is possible for each point of this consciousness to be conscious of itself and conscious of the original Unity. And that is the work which is being done; that is to say, each infinitesimal element of this consciousness, while keeping this state of consciousness, is in the process of rediscovering the state of the total original consciousness—and the result is the original Consciousness conscious of its unity and conscious of the whole play, conscious of the innumerable elements of this Unity. This for us is translated into the sense of time: moving from the Inconscient up to this state of Consciousness. And the Inconscient is the projection of the first Unity (if one can say it; all these words are altogether senseless), of the essential unity which is only conscious of its unity—yes, that is the Inconscient. And this Inconscient becomes more and more conscious in beings who are conscious of their infinitesimal existence and at the same time, through what we call progress or evolution or transformation, become conscious of the original Unity. …

And evil, what we call evil, has its indispensable place in the whole. It will not be felt as evil the moment one becomes conscious of That—necessarily. Evil is this infinitesimal element looking at its infinitesimal consciousness; but as consciousness is essentially one, it resumes, regains the Consciousness of the Unity—the two together. It is that, yes, it is that which has to be realised. …

It is really... this, I understand, it is a transformation. One is conscious in a golden vastness—it is wonderful—luminous, golden, peaceful, eternal, all-powerful.

The yogic work that has gone in establishing the new creation in the House of the Spirit also gets extended to the preparation of safe conditions for its manifestation upon the earth. This is particularly so, because of the yogic work having been done in the Will of the Supreme.

RYD

The evolutionary scale
In his notes on images recorded in March 1914, Sri Aurobindo proposes to see how the thought of God works itself out in Life. He writes: (Record of Yoga, pp. 1323-26)

The material world is first formed with the sun as centre, the Sun being itself only a subordinate star of the great Agni, Mahavishnu, in whom is centred the Bhu. Mahavishnu is the Virat Purusha who as Agni pours Himself out into the forms of sun and stars. He is Agni Twashta, Visvakarman, he is also Prajapati and Matariswan. These are the three primal Purushas of the earth life—Agni Twashta, Prajapati and Matariswan, all of them soul bodies of Mahavishnu. Agni Twashta having made the Sun out of the Apas or waters of being, Prajapati as Surya Savitri enters into the Sun and takes possession of it. He multiplies himself in the Suris or Solar Gods who are the souls of the flames of Surya, the Purushas of the female solar energies. Then he creates out of this solar body of Vishnu the planets each of which successively becomes the Bhumi or place of manifestation for Manu, the mental being, who is the nodus of manifest life-existence and the link between the life and the spirit. The present earth in its turn appears as the scene of life, Mars being its last theatre. In the Bhumi Agni Twashta is again the first principle, Matariswan the second, finally, Prajapati appears in the form of the four Manus, chatvāro manāvah. Not in the physical world at first, but in the mental which stands behind the earth-life, for earth has seven planes of being, the material of which the scenes and events are alone normally visible in the material senses, the vital of which man’s pranakosha is built and to which it is responsive, the mental to which his manahkosha is attached, the ideal governing his vijnanakosha, the beatific which supports his anandakosha, and the dynamic and essential to which he has not yet developed corresponding koshas, but only unformed nimbuses of concrete being. All the gods throw out their ling-rupas into these worlds of earth and through them carry on her affairs; for these lingas repeat there in the proper terms of life upon earth the conscious movements of the gods in their higher existences in the worlds above Bhu. The Manus manifested in the Manoloka of Bhu bring pressure to bear upon the earth for the manifestation of life and mind. Prajapati as Rudra then begins to form life upon earth, first in vegetable, then in animal forms. Man already exists but as a god or demigod in Bhuvarloka of Bhu, not as man upon earth. There he is Deva, Asura, Rakshasa, Pramatha, Pishacha, Pashu or as Deva he is Gandharva, Yaksha, Vidyadhara or any of the Karmadevas. For Man is a son of the Manu and is assigned his place in Div and Pradiv, in Heaven and in the Swargabhumis. Thence he descends to earth and thither from earth he returns. All that will be explained afterwards. When the human body is ready, then he descends upon earth and occupies it. He is not a native of earth, nor does he evolve out of the animal. His manifestation in animal form is always a partial incarnation, as will be seen hereafter.

The animal proper is a lower type. Certain devas of the manasic plane in the Bhuvarloka descend in the higher type of animal. They are not mental beings proper, but only half-mental vital beings. They live in packs, tribe etc with a communal existence. They are individual souls, but the individuality is less vigorous than the type soul. If they were not individual, they would not be able to incarnate in individual forms. The body is only the physical type of the soul. The soul, if it were only a communal soul, would manifest in some complex body of which the conglomeration of the different parts would be the sole unity; say, a life like that of the human brain. The animal develops the tribe life, the pack or clan life, the family life. He develops chitta, manas, the rudiments of reason. Then only man appears.

How does he appear? Prajapati manifests as Vishnu Upendra incarnate in the animal or Pashu in whom the four Manus have already manifested themselves, and the first human creature who appears is, in this Kalpa, the Vanara, not the animal Ape, but man with the Ape nature. His satya yuga is the first Paradise, for man begins with the Satya Yuga, begins with a perfected type, not a rudimentary type. The animal forms a perfect type for the human Pashu and then only a Manuputra or Manu, a human, a true mental soul, enters into existence upon earth, with the full blaze of a perfect animal-human mentality in the animal form.

These are man’s beginnings. He rises by the descent of ever higher types of Manu from the Bhuvaloka—first he is Pashu then Pishacha, then Pramatha, then Rakshasa, then Asura, then Deva, then Siddha. So he ascends the ladder of his own being towards the Sat Purusha.

Manu, the first Prajapati, is a part of Mahavishnu Himself descended into the mental plane in order to conduct the destinies of the human race. He is different from the four Manus who are more than Prajapatis, they being the four Type-Souls from whom all human Purushas are born; they are Manus only for the purpose of humanity and in themselves are beyond this manifest universe and dwell for ever the being of the Para Purushas. They are not true Manomaya Purushas. But Manu Prajapati is a true manomaya Purusha. He by mental generation begets on his female Energies men in the mental and vital planes above earth, whence they descend into the material or rather the terrestrial body. On earth Manu incarnates fourteen times in each Kalpa and each of these fourteen incarnations is called a Manu. These fourteen Manus govern human destinies during the hundred chaturyugas of the Prati-Kalpa, each in turn taking charge of a particular stage of the human advance. While that stage lasts he directs it both from the mental world and by repeated incarnations upon earth. When Manu Prajapati wishes to incarnate in a fresh form, he has a mental body prepared for him by evolution of births by a human visbhuti, Suratha or another and takes possession of it at the beginning of his manvantara. Each manvantara is composed o a varying number of chaturyugas according to the importance and difficulty of the stage with which it is concerned. Once at least in each chaturyuga the Manu of the Manvantara incarnates as a man upon earth, but this never happens in the Kali Yuga. The seventh and the eighth Manus are the most important in each Prati-Kalpa and having the longest reigns, for in their Manvantaras the critical change is finally made from the type which is completed in the last Prati-Kalpa to the type which is to be perfected in the present Kalpa. For each of the ten Prati-Kalpas has its type. Man in the ten Prati-Kalpa progresses through the ten types which have been fixed for his evolution in the Kalpa. In this Kalpa the type, dashagu, are the ten forms of consciousness, called the Pashu, Vanara, Pishacha, Pramatha, Rakshasa, Asura, Deva, Saddhyadeva, Siddhadeva and the Satyadeva. The last three are known by other names which need not be written at present. The Pashu is mind concentrated entirely on the annam, the Vanara mind concentrated on the Prana, the Pishacha mind concentrated on the senses and the knowledge part of the chitta, the Pramath mind concentrated on the heart and the emotional and aesthetic part of the chitta, the Rakshasa is mind concentrated on the thinking manas proper and taking up all the other into the manas itself; the Asura is mind concentrated on the buddhi and in the Asura Rakshasa making it serve the manas and chitta; the Deva is mind concentrated in vijnanam, exceeded itself, but in the Asura Deva or Devasura it makes the vijnana serve the buddhi. The others raise mind successively to the Ananda. Tapas and Sat are, respectively, the supreme Rakshasa, the supreme Asura, the supreme Deva. We have here the complete scale by which mind ascends its own ladder from Matter to pure Being evolved by Man in the various types of which each of the ten principles is in its turn capable. To take the joy of these various types in their multifold play is the object of the Supreme Purusha in the human Lila.

In this connection, it is interesting to recall what Sri Aurobindo has written about the process of Avatarhood in the Essays on the Gita. While giving some details about it, he indicates that the body of the Avatar is prepared by the Manu of the Age. First he asserts that “the soul prepares its own body, the body is not prepared for it without any reference to the soul.” This could be illustrated by the parable of the ten Avatars of Vishnu, the Puranic series. One might suppose that an eternal or continual Avatar prepares his own fit mental and physical body according to the needs and pace of the human evolution and so appear from age to age, yuge yuge. Making his point further, Sri Aurobindo continues: (p. 166)

In some such spirit some would interpret the ten incarnations of Vishnu, first in animal forms, then in the animal man, then in the dwarf man-soul, Vamana, the violent Asuric man, Rama of the axe, the divinely-natured man, a greater Rama, the awakened spiritual man, Buddha, and, preceding him in time, but final in place, the complete divine manhood, Krishna,—for the last Avatar, Kalki, only accomplishes the work Krishna began,—he fulfils in power the great struggle which the previous Avatars prepared in all its potentialities. It is a difficult assumption to our modern mentality, but the language of the Gita seems to demand it. Or, since the Gita does not expressly solve the problem, we may solve it in some other way of our own, as that the body is prepared by the Jiva but assumed from birth by the Godhead or that it is prepared by one of the four Manus, catvāro manavah, of the Gita, the spiritual Fathers of every human mind and body. This is going far into the mystic field from which the modern reason is still averse; but once we admit Avatarhood, we have already entered into it and, once entered, may as well tread in it with firm footsteps.

We have another reference in the Essays regarding the role of the four eternal Manus, fathers of man: (p. 347)

…the active nature of the Godhead is fourfold and humanity expresses this nature in its fourfold character. These also, as their name implies, are mental beings. Creators of all this life that depends on manifest or latent mind for its action, from them are all these living creatures in the world; all are their children and offspring, yeşām loka imāh prajāh. And these great Rishis and these Manus are themselves perpetual mental becomings of the supreme Soul, madbhāvā mānasā jātāh, and born out of his spiritual transcendence into cosmic Nature,—originators, but he the origin of all that originates in the universe. Spirit of all spirits, Soul of all souls, Mind of all mind, Life of all life, Substance of all form, this transcendent Absolute is no complete opposite of all we are, but on the contrary the originating and illuminating Absolute of all the principles and powers of our and the world's being and nature.

About the animal connection of man, he descending from the ape as the quick evolutionists maintain, we read in the Record that, “Prajapati manifests as Vishnu Upendra incarnate in the animal or Pashu in whom the four Manus have already manifested themselves, and the first human creature who appears is, in this Kalpa, the Vanara, not the animal Ape, but man with the Ape nature.” We have an explicit mention of this in Savitri: (p. 485)

A mighty life-self with its inner powers
Supports the dwarfish modicum we call life;
It can graft upon our crawl two puissant wings.
Our body’s subtle self is throned within
In its viewless palace of veridical dreams
That are bright shadows of the thoughts of God.
In the prone obscure beginnings of the race
The human grew in the bowed apelike man.
He stood erect, a godlike form and force,
And a soul’s thoughts looked out from earthborn eyes;
Man stood erect, he wore the thinker’s brow:
He looked at heaven and saw his comrade stars;
A vision came of beauty and greater birth
Slowly emerging from the heart’s chapel of light
And moved in a white lucent air of dreams.
He saw his being’s unrealised vastnesses,
He aspired and housed the nascent demi-god.

How rich indeed Savitri is! But let us exercise caution also, vis-à-vis our incapacity to see the subtle and the spiritual, not to have a broad and liberal mind that can perceive different nuances in different contexts. Mixing up of the occult-esoteric and the rational-scientific has caused great harm to us, without realising that their truths belong to different orders of understanding, different domains of approach, each having its own instruments of knowledge, they yielding corresponding results. The worst is the genuine and luminous occult has been hijacked by the fundamentalist dogma imposed on the credulous. It is imperative that these discoveries should be seen in the respective contexts and should not be taken out of them, nor can they be imposed on others. The operations of reason have their own merit, but in its own boundaries; the discoveries of faith belong to another category and it is a mistake to think that they can be universalised, being subjective in nature. Even today the Biblical ideas about the ancestry of man and the proposals of the biological sciences, always provisional in their character, are at war with each other even in progressive countries like the US where some of the States have legally banned them. This is unfortunate, particularly so when we neither know science nor religion. The hope lies in transcending both.

RYD

Flaw in creationists’ argument
It has been said that the conditions in nature were designed in such a precise way that man inevitably must appear because of them. He has been programmed into the scheme of things. True or not, this anthropomorphic view has been claimed to be the great understanding of science. Everything is tailored for man, but man who does not know what is next stored for him. The right gravity, the right masses of particles, the right universal constants are the new gods who have uploaded man into the system. “Like Baby Bear’s porridge in the story of Goldilocks,” says Paul Davies, “the universe seems to be just right for life.” But the strange thing is, all this talk is without knowing the origin of the laws of physics. In any case, man becomes the product of the laws of physics. Too daring a conclusion perhaps, to be proper or acceptable.

Are the laws of physics absolute and universal? But could it not be that this is just a hang-over of the philosophical monism of the past, the inertial mind sticking to the old in one manner or the other? And who can answer such a question when we don’t know their origin, notwithstanding the mighty Stephen Hawking? Add to that Martin Rees’s many universes. And perhaps we have a total mess as far as our concepts and ideas of the fundamentals are concerned? In fact, the question could be, can science really talk anything about it? Its success, an astounding success in one area does not entitle him to speak of things which do not fall in his domain. Einstein speaking of religion is quite equivalent to Tagore speaking of science—and the fact is, they both did it. In the Brief History of Time we have the poser, if the singularity of the Big Bang disappears in the formulation of the imaginary time, then what need of God? Universe had always been there and will continue to be there.

But let us get back to Davies who thinks that our lack of understanding of the universe can go back to religion and science. Both religion and science consider the cause of whatever is, is outside it, the physical universe as we can observe; that is, the laws come from elsewhere. “Just as classical Christianity presents God as upholding the natural order from beyond the universe, so physicists envisage their laws as inhabiting an abstract transcendent realm of perfect mathematical relationships.” But this is building up another theology. Paul Davies of the Arizona State University maintains that we must find the answer from within nature, and not beyond it. The universe cannot be fixed from outside.

There is however a problem. If we make the laws of physics extremely precise then, at the moment of Big Bang, there was so little available by way of determining factors that any precise formulation could rule out the kind of developments that took place later. Which means, the parameters required for man’s appearance could not be specified in any detail of the universe at the near-zero moment in the history of time.
“If a law is a truly exact mathematical relationship, it requires infinite information to specify it. In my opinion,” says Davies, “infinitely precise laws are an extreme idealisation with no shred of real world justification. In the first split second of cosmic existence, the laws must therefore have been seriously fuzzy. Then, as the information content of the universe climbed, the laws focused and homed in on the life-encouraging form we observe today. But the flaws in the laws left enough wiggle room for the universe to engineer its own bio-friendliness.”

Paul Davies article may be accessed at
http://www.hindu.com/2007/06/27/stories/2007062750531100.htm

In any case the upshot is, we live in a world that has grown out of fuzziness. Not a very edifying situation. This could be contrasted with the notings in the Record, for instance, as we have in the above.

RYD

Terrible agencies the spirit allows
God created Hell in his mood of infinite love and justice,—this is what the ancient lore says. But this same love has to also conquer the appalling Inane. There is the deep existential problem and it is the denial of all that is God’s. There are titans and maniac powers and giant cruel operators; allowed by the mighty Spirit there work determinedly the terrible agencies. Aswapati has created a new world in order that it be projected into the evolutionary process. But what guarantee that he will succeed, what guarantee that this new world will remain perfect here also, that it will not get distorted or disfigured by the active agents of Inconscience, by the powers of Hell, by the first mighty Asuras who separated themselves completely from the divine Source, cut themselves off from it, they standing for ever in bleak opposition to all that is godly, all that is divine, in opposition to God himself? Aswapati sees a hidden sun even in the depth of darkness, the primordial darkness, and his will has assumed superhuman dimensions, and in it is the strength that it can bring down a greater world. But he also discerns the gulf between what is and what is to be; he is aware that things can go awry, that such things did happen on earlier occasions which should not frustrate the present attempt. He had carried with him the “world’s desire” to the Supreme and it must receive an incontingent response which will not be defeated by the antagonist powers howsoever powerful they might be. Perfection must remain perfect here upon earth.

The long history of the evolutionary world is full of sad and disheartening stories, dismal stories, that whenever higher and superior powers entered into it they always met opposition, they were wrecked and ruined. Thus when Life entered into Matter, at the call of the material objects, she was overpowered by Death. Let us read Savitri: (pp. 222-23)

There in the heart of vain phenomenon,
In an enormous action's writhen core
He saw a Shape illimitable and vague
Sitting on Death who swallows all things born.
A chill fixed face with dire and motionless eyes,
Her dreadful trident in her shadowy hand
Outstretched, she pierced all creatures with one fate.
When nothing was save Matter without soul
And a spiritless hollow was the heart of Time,
Then Life first touched the insensible Abyss;
Awaking the stark Void to hope and grief
Her pallid beam smote the unfathomed Night
In which God hid himself from his own view.
In all things she sought their slumbering mystic truth,
The unspoken Word that inspires unconscious forms;
She groped in his deeps for an invisible Law,
Fumbled in the dim subconscient for his mind
And strove to find a way for spirit to be.
But from the Night another answer came.
A seed was in that nether matrix cast,
A dumb unprobed husk of perverted truth,
A cell of an insentient infinite.
A monstrous birth prepared its cosmic form
In Nature's titan embryo, Ignorance.
Then in a fatal and stupendous hour
Something that sprang from the stark Inconscient's sleep
Unwillingly begotten by the mute Void,
Lifted its ominous head against the stars;
Overshadowing earth with its huge body of Doom
It chilled the heavens with the menace of a face.
A nameless Power, a shadowy Will arose
Immense and alien to our universe.
In the inconceivable Purpose none can gauge
A vast Non-Being robed itself with shape,
The boundless Nescience of the unconscious depths
Covered eternity with nothingness.

Similarly, when Mind entered into Life-in-Matter fragmentation began, infinite fragmentation reducing the single existent to the dust of non-being; the contact each had with the One was severed and remained only the knowledge of multiplicity without the knowledge of unity. Mind brought the light of reason, but that left the continents more dark than it illumined. Its method introduced cleavages rather than globality; it has neither the globality of approach nor application. Mind is basically an instrument of analysis and not of synthesis, and therefore it cannot have integral knowledge of things. It lost the contact with the source and landed into this not at all a happy situation. Even on the highest spiritual plane, the Overmental, though it has contact with the unitary source, it remains divisive.

But let us take the example of Paradise Lost vis-à-vis the danger the new world of the era faced, because of the deviltry of the Devil. In spite of all the precautions taken, it seems the fall could not have but happened. The new world was created in earthly paradise and, to protect it, angels were posted at the four quarters, to see that no intruders steps into it. But by them the Satanic designs could not be foiled. Uriel, literally the "fire" or "light" of God, unsuspectingly told what he should not have told to Satan, showed him the place, Earth, the seat of Man. To despoil God’s creation Satan set himself on the task methodically. Fight he cannot against God, but he can surely spoil God’s work: (Book III)

But first he casts to change his proper shape,
Which else might work him danger or delay:
And now a stripling Cherub he appears,
Not of the prime, yet such as in his face
Youth smiled Celestial, and to every Limb
Suitable grace diffused, so well he feigned;
Under a Coronet his flowing hair
In curls on either cheek plaid, wings he wore
Of many a coloured plume sprinkled with Gold,
His habit fit for speed succinct, and held
Before his decent steps a Silver wand.
He drew not nigh unheard, the Angel bright,
Ere he drew nigh, his radiant visage turnd,
Admonished by his ear, and strait was known
The Arch-Angel Uriel, one of the seven
Who in Gods presence, nearest to his Throne
Stand ready at command, and are his Eyes
That run through all the Heavens, or down to th' Earth
Bear his swift errands over moist and dry,
Ovre Sea and Land: him Satan thus accosts;
Uriel, for thou of those seven Spirits that stand
In sight of God's high Throne, gloriously bright,
The first art wont his great authentic will
Interpreter through highest Heav'n to bring,
Where all his Sons thy Embassy attend;
And here art likeliest by supreme decree
Like honour to obtain, and as his Eye
To visit oft this new Creation round;
Unspeakable desire to see, and know
All these his wondrous works, but chiefly Man,
His chief delight and favour, him for whom
All these his works so wondrous he ordained,
Hath brought me from the Quires of Cherubim
Alone thus wandering. Brightest Seraph tell
In which of all these shining Orbs hath Man
His fixed seat, or fixed seat hath none,
But all these shining Orbs his choice to dwell;
That I may find him, and with secret gaze,
Or open admiration him behold
On whom the great Creator hath bestowed
Worlds, and on whom hath all these graces powered;
That both in him and all things, as is meet,
The Universal Maker we may praise;
Who justly hath drivn out his Rebel Foes
To deepest Hell, and to repair that loss
Created this new happy Race of Men
To serve him better: wise are all his ways.
So spake the false dissembler unperceived;
For neither Man nor Angel can discern
Hypocrisy, the only evil that walks
Invisible, except to God alone,
By his permissive will, through Heav'n and Earth:
And oft though wisdom wake, suspicion sleeps
At wisdoms Gate, and to simplicity
Resigns her charge, while goodness thinks no ill
Where no ill seems: Which now for once beguiled
Uriel, though Regent of the Sun, and held
The sharpest sighted Spirit of all in Heav'n;
Who to the fraudulent Impostor foul
In his uprightness answer thus returned.
Faire Angel, thy desire which tends to know
The works of God, thereby to glorify
The great Work-Master, leads to no excess
That reaches blame, but rather merits praise
The more it seems excess, that led thee hither
From thy Empyreal Mansion thus alone,
To witness with thine eyes what some perhaps
Contented with report hear only in heaven:
For wonderful indeed are all his works,
Pleasant to know, and worthiest to be all
Had in remembrance always with delight;
But what created mind can comprehend
Their number, or the wisdom infinite
That brought them forth, but hid their causes deep.
I saw when at his Word the formless Mass,
This worlds material mould, came to a heap:
Confusion heard his voice, and wild uproar
Stood ruled, stood vast infinitude confined;
Till at his second bidding darkness fled,
Light shone, and order from disorder sprung:
Swift to their several Quarters hasted then
The cumbrous Elements, Earth, Flood, Air, Fire,
And this Ethereal quintessence of Heav'n
Flew upward, spirited with various forms,
That rolled orbicular, and turned to Stars
Numberless, as thou seest, and how they move;
Each had his place appointed, each his course,
The rest in circuit walls this Universe.
Look downward on that Globe whose hither side
With light from hence, though but reflected, shines;
That place is Earth the seat of Man, that light
His day, which else as the other Hemisphere
Night would invade, but there the neighbouring Moon
(So call that opposite fair Starr) her aide
Timely interposes, and her monthly round
Still ending, still renewing, through mid Heav'n;
With borrowed light her countenance triform
Hence fills and empties to enlighten the Earth,
And in her pale dominion checks the night.
That spot to which I point is Paradise,
Adams abode, those lofty shades his Bower.
Thy way thou canst not miss, me mine requires.
Thus said, he turned, and Satan bowing low,
As to superior Spirits is wont in Heaven,
Where honour due and reverence none neglects,
Took leave, and toward the coast of Earth beneath,
Down from the Ecliptic, sped with hoped success,
Throws his steep flight with many an Aerie wheel,
Nor staid, till on Niphates top he lights.

The deed was done. Uriel, the Arch-Angel, one of the seven who stands in God’s presence, nearest to his Throne, in sight of God's high Throne, who is gloriously bright, whose eyes run through all the heavens, or down to the Earth, got easily deceived by the flattery of the mischief-maker and gave the information which perhaps he should not have. This simply means that, Uriel is not a transcendental being with knowledge and power at his full command; he is an Overmental being. Overmental protection is fallible. The powers of the Overmind world, next to the transcendent, do not have that absoluteness, and they can be overmastered by the opposing powers springing from the Inconscience. So, if Aswapati has to protect his new creation projected here upon earth, see that it becomes a safe nucleus for activities in the divine manifestation, he must put the guards coming from the transcendent itself, the invincible guards of knowledge and power. He must invoke the insuperable transcendental Shakti to come down here upon earth and take charge of this wonderful creation. His task thus gets fixed.

RYD

Gathered into mystic sleep
Young Bhrigu approaches his father Varuna and requests to give him the Knowledge of the Eternal, Brahma Jnana. The Taittiriya Upanishad descries the fivefold knowledge and the first he received is as follows:

Bhrigu concentrated himself in thought and by the askesis of his brooding he knew food for the Eternal. When he had known this, he approached his father again. He said to him, “By askesis do thou seek to know the Eternal, for askesis is the Eternal.

This is the power of askesis or concentration in thought. But it has to go yet beyond concentration, manan; mind has to fall silent. It seems that the urge for physical transformation was already present in the ancient pursuit. But there was also the awareness that the attempt could be thwarted by the Asuric forces. In Kali Yuga it got weakened and Matter or Annam, food, assumed another character.

Matter is Brahman and yet Matter has to receive the Brahman, house the Eternal. The new creation established by Aswapati in the House of the Spirit can enter into the house of the earthly Matter only when it is open to Brahman, on