The Unseen Power
A WAR has ended, a world has perished
in the realm of thought and begun to disappear in the order of outward Nature.
The war that has ended, was fought in physical trenches, with shel1 and shot,
with machine-gun and tank and aeroplane, with mangling of limbs and crash of
physical edifices and rude uptearing of the bosom of our mother earth; the new
war, or the old continued in another form, that is already beginning, will be
fought more with mental trenches and bomb- proof shelters, with reconnaissances
and batteries and moving machines of thought and word, propaganda and parties
and programmes, with mangling of the desire-souls of men and of nations, crash
of many kinds of thrones and high-built institutions and strong uptearing of
the old earth of custom which man has formed as a layer over the restless
molten forces of evolutionary Nature. The old world that is shaken outwardly in
its bases and already crumbling in some of its parts, is the economical and
materialistic civilisation which mankind has been forming for the last few
centuries from once new materials now growing rapidly effete pieced out with
broken remnants of antiquity and the middle ages. The period of military
conflict just at an end came to breach that which thought had already been
sapping, an era of revolutions has opened which is likely to complete the ruin
and prepare the building of a new structure. In this struggle the question arises
to the thinking man, what Power or what Powers are expressing their will or
their strivings in this upheaval? and we, what power or powers shall we serve?
to what thing inward or superhuman, since outward thrones and systems are but
as leaves driven before the storm-wind of the breath of Time, shall we owe
allegiance? what or whom is it that we shall fight to enthrone?
Men fight
for their personal or communal or national interests or for ideas and
principles of which they make watchwords and battle-cries. But the largest
human interests are only means
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and instruments which some Force greater than
themselves breaks or uses in its inconscient impulse or else for its conscious
purposes; ideas and principles are births of our minds which are born, reign
and pass away and they are mere
words unless they express some power of our being and of world-being which
finds in them a mental self-expression. Something there is greater than our
thoughts and desires, something more constant and insistent which lasts and
grows beyond and yet by their changings. If no such thing were, then all this
human effort would be a vain perturbation, the life of man only the busy
instinctive routine of the hive and the ant-hill on a little higher scale, but
with more useless suffering in it and less economy and wisdom, and our thought
a vain glittering of imaginations weaving out involuntarily a web like that of
old legend that is spun and respun only to be undone and again undone and of
reasonings that build a series of intellectual and practical conventions which
we represent to ourselves as the truth and the right, making the fallacies of
our minds a substitute for wisdom:' and the fallacies of our social living a
substitute for happiness. For this is certain that nothing we form and no
outward system we create can last beyond its appointed or else its possible
time. As this great materialistic civilisation of Europe to which the high
glowing dawn of the Renaissance gave its brilliant birth and the dry brazen afternoon
of nineteenth- century rationalism its hard maturity, is passing away and the
bosom of earth and the soul of man heave a sigh of relief at its going, so
whatever new civilisation we construct after this evening of the cycle, yuga-sandhyä,
on which we are entering, - for those are surely mistaken who think it is
already the true dawn, - will
also live its time and collapse fiercely or decay dully, - unless indeed there
is that eternal Spirit in things and he should have found in its key-note the
first sounds of the strain of his real harmony, in which case it may be the
first of an ascending series of changes to the creation of a greater humanity.
Otherwise, all this vast clash and onset of peoples and world-wide bloodshed
would be only a fortuitous nightmare, and the happiest known age of nation or
mankind only the pleasant dream of a moment. Then the old-world gospel which
bade us look upon human life as a vanity of vanities, would be the only wisdom.
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But with
that creed the soul of man has never remained contented and still less can we
at the present day live in it, because this intuition of a greater Power than
our apparent selves in the workings of the world is now growing upon the race
and the vast sense of an unaccomplished aim in the urge of life is driving it
to an unprecedented effort of human thought and energy. In such a moment even
the hugest calamities cannot exhaust the life or discourage its impetus, but
rather impel it to a new élan of endeavour; for the flames of thought rise
higher than the flames of the conflagration that destroys and see in it a
meaning and the promise of a new creation. In the destruction that has been
effected, in the void that has been left, the mind sees only more room for hope
to grow and a wide space that the Spirit who builds in Time has cleared for his
new structure. For who that has eyes at all to see cannot see this, that in
what has happened, immense Powers have been at work which nourish a vaster
world- purpose than the egoistic mind of individual or nation could mete with
their yard-measure of narrow personal idea or communal interest and for which
the motives and passions of governments and peoples were only tools or
opportunities? When the autocrats and the war-lords of the east and the centre
resolved to dare this huge catastrophe in order to seize from it the crown of
their ambitions, when they drove madly to the precipice of an incalculable
world-conflict, they could have no inkling that within four years or less their
thrones would have fallen, themselves be slain or flee into exile and all for
which they stood be hastening into the night of the past; only that which
impelled them foresaw and intended it. Nor were the peoples who staggered
unwillingly over the brink of war, more enlightened of the secret purpose:
defence of what they were and possessed, wrath at a monstrous aggression which
was a menace to their ordered European civilisation, drove their will and
inflamed their resolution. Yet to convict that civilisation of error and prepare
another era of humanity was the intention of the Force that has given them
victory, its voice echoed confusedly in their thought and growing clearer in
the minds of those who entered later with a deliberate and conscious will into
the struggle.
Great has
been the havoc and ruin, immense the suffering,
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thick the blood-red cloud of darkness enveloping the
world, heavy the toll of life, bottomless the expenditure of treasure and human
resources, and all has not yet been worked out, the whole 'price has not yet
been paid; for the after-effects of the war are likely to be much greater than
its present effects, and much that by an effort of concentration has resisted
the full shock of the earthquake, will fall in the after-tremblings. Well might
the mind of a man during the calamity, aware of the Power that stood over the
world wrapped in this tempest, repeat the words of Arjuna on the field of
Kurukshetra, -
"When is seen this Thy fierce and astounding form,
the three worlds are all in pain and suffer, 0 Thou mighty Spirit…. Troubled
and in anguish is the soul within me as I look upon Thee and I find no peace or
gladness.. .. As is the speed of many rushing waters racing towards the ocean,
so all these heroes of the world of men are entering into Thy many mouths of
flame. As a swarm of
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moths with ever-increasing speed fall to their
destruction into a fire that someone has kindled, so now the nations with ever
- increasing speed are entering into Thy jaws of doom. Thou lickest the regions
all around with Thy tongues and Thou art swallowing up all the nations in Thy
mouths of burning; all the world is filled with the blaze of Thy energies;
fierce and terrible are Thy lustres and they burn us, 0 Vishnu. Declare to me
who art Thou that comest to us in this form of fierceness; salutation to Thee,
0 Thou great Godhead, turn Thy heart to grace. I would know who art Thou who
wast from the beginning, for I know not the will of Thy workings."
If the
first answer might seem to come in the same words that answered the appeal of
Arjuna, "I am the Time-Spirit, destroyer of the world, arisen
huge-statured for the destruction of the nations",
kālo'smi loka-ksaya-krt pravrddhah
lokān
samāhartum iha pravrttal,
and the voice the same to those who would shrink back hesitating from participation
in the devastating struggle and massacre, "Even without thee all these
shall cease to be who stand in the opposing hosts, for already have I slain
them in my foreseeing will; know thyself to be an instrument only of an end
predestined", - still in
the end it is the Friend of man, the Charioteer of his battle and his journey
who appears in the place of the form of destruction and the outcome of all the
ruin is the dharmarajya, the kingdom of the Dharma. To humanity as to
the warrior of Kurukshetra the concluding message has been uttered,
"Therefore arise, destroy the foe, enjoy a rich and happy kingdom."
But the kingdom of what Dharma? It is doubtful enough whether as the nations
were blind to the nature of the destruction that was coming, they may not be at
least purblind to the nature of the construction that is to be created. An
increase of mechanical freedom to be lavished or doled out according to the
needs, interests, hesitations of the old-world forces that still remain erect,
a union effected by a patchwork of the remnants of the past and the unshaped
materials of the future, a credit and debit account
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with fate writing off so much of the evil and error of
the past as can no longer be kept and writing up as good capital, - with some
diminutions by way of acquitment of conscience, part payment of overdue debts,
- all that has not been hopelessly destroyed, an acceptance of the change
already effected by the tempest or made immediately inevitable and a new system
of embankments to prevent the further encroachments of the flood, is not likely
to put a successful term to the cataclysm. Even if a short-sighted sagacity
could bring this about for a time by a combined effort of successful and
organised egoisms making terms with the powerful Idea-forces that are abroad as
the messengers of the Time-Spirit, still it would be only an artificial check
leading to a new upheaval in the not distant future. A liquidation of the old
bankrupt materialistic economism which will enable it to set up business again
under a new name with a reserve capital and a clean ledger, will be a futile
attempt to cheat destiny. Commercialism has no doubt its own Dharma, its ideal
of utilitarian justice and law and adjustment, its civilisation presided over
by the sign of the Balance, and its old measures being now annulled, it is
eager enough to start afresh with a new system of calculated values. But a dharmarājya
of the half-penitent Vaishya is not to be the final consummation of a time
like ours pregnant with new revelations of thought and spirit and new creations
in life, nor is a golden or rather a copper-gilt age of the sign of the Balance
to be the glorious reward of this anguish and travail of humanity. It is surely
the kingdom of another and higher Dharma that is in preparation.
What that
Dharma is we can only know if we know this Power whose being and whose thought
are at work behind all that we attempt and suffer, conceive and strive for. A
former humanity conceived of it as a creative Divinity or almighty Power high
above man and his being and his effort or of a pantheon or hierarchy of
universal Powers who looked upon and swayed the labour and passion and thought
of the race. But the system of cosmic deities lacked a base and a principle of
unity in their workings and above it the ancients were obliged to conceive of a
vague and ineffable Divinity, the unknown God to whom they built a nameless
altar, or a Necessity with face of sphinx and
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hands of bronze to whom the gods themselves had to give
an ignorant obedience, and it left the life of man at once the victim of an
inscrutable fate and the puppet of superhuman caprices. That to a great extent
he is, so long as he lives in his vital ego and is the servant of his own
personal ideas and passions. Later religions gave a name and some body of form
and quality to the one unknown Godhead and proclaimed an ideal law which they
gave out as his word and scripture. But the dogmatism of a partial and unlived
knowledge and the external tendencies of the human mind darkened the
illuminations of religion with the confusions or error and threw over its face
strange masks of childish and cruel superstitions. Religion too by putting God
far above in distant heavens made man too much of a worm of the earth, little
and vile before his Creator and admitted only by a caprice of his favour to a
doubtful salvation in superhuman worlds. Modern thought seeking to make a clear
riddance of these past conceptions had to substitute something else in its
place, and what it saw and put there was the material law of Nature and the
biological law of life of which human reason was to be the faithful exponent
and human science the productive utiliser and profiteer. But to apply the
mechanical blindness of the rule of physical Nature as the sole guide of
thinking and seeing man is to go against the diviner law of his being and maim
his higher potentiality. Material and vital Nature is only a first form of our
being and to overcome and rise beyond its formula is the very sense of a human
evolution. Another and greater Power than hers is the master of this effort,
and human reason or human science is not that Godhead, but can only be at best
one and not the greatest of its ministers. It is not human reason and human
science which have been working out their ends in or through the tempest that
has laid low so many of their constructions. A greater Spirit awaits a deeper
questioning to reveal his unseen form and his hidden purpose.
Something
of this truth we have begun to see dimly, in the return to more spiritual
notions and in the idea of a kingdom of God to be built in the life of
humanity. On the old sense of a Power in the universe of which the world that
we live in is the field, is supervening the nearer perception of a Godhead in
man,
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the unseen king of whom the outer man is the veil and
of whom, our mind and life can be the servants and living instruments and our
perfected souls the clear mirrors. But we have to see more lucidly and in the
whole before we can know this Godhead. There are three powers and forms in
which the Being who is at work in
things presents himself to our vision. There is first the form of him that we
behold in the universe, but that or at least what we see of it in the
appearances of things, is not the whole truth of him; it is indeed only a first
material shape and vital foundation which he has offered for the starting-point
of our growth, an initial sum of preliminary realisations from which we have to
proceed and to transcend them. The next form is that of which man alone here
has the secret, for in him it is progressively revealing itself in a partial
and always incomplete accomplishing and unfolding. His thoughts, his ideals,
his dreams, his attempts at a high self-exceeding are the clues by which he
attempts to discover the Spirit, the moulds in which he tries to seize the form
of the Divinity. But they too are only a partial light and not the whole form
of the Godhead. Something waits beyond which the human mind approaches in a
shapeless aspiration to an ineffable Perfection, an infinite Light, an infinite
Power, an infinite Love, a universal Good and Beauty. This is not something
that is not yet in perfect being, a God who is becoming or who has to be
created by man; it is the Eternal of whom this infinite ideal is a mental
reflection. It is beyond the form of the universe and these psychological
realisations of the human being and yet it is here too in man and subsists
surrounding him in all the powers of the world he lives in. It is both the
Spirit who is in the universe and the invisible king in man who is the master
of his works. It develops in the universe through laws which are not complete
here or not filled in in their sense and action until humanity shall have fully
evolved in its nature the potentialities of the mind and spirit. It works in
man, but through his individual and corporate ego so long as he dwells within
the knot of his present mentality. Only when his race knows God and lives in
the Divine, will the ideal sense of his strivings begin to unfold itself and
the kingdom be founded, riijyam samrddham.
When we try
to build our outer life in obedience to our
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ego, our interests, our passions or our vital needs
only or else in a form of our vital needs served and enlarged by our intellect,
but not enlightened with a greater spiritual meaning, we are living within the
law of the first cosmic formulation. It is as insistent Rudra that the unseen
Power meets us there, the Master of the evolution, the Lord of Karma, the King
of justice and judgment, who is easily placated with sacrifice and effort, for
even to the Asura and Rakshasa, the Titan and the giant he gives the fruit of
their tapasya, but who is swift also to wrath and every time that man
offends against the law, even though it be in ignorance, or stands stiff in his
ego against the urge of the evolution or provokes the rebound of Karma, he
strikes without mercy; through strife and stumblings, through passioning and
yearning and fierce stress of will and giant endeavour, construction and
destruction, slow labour of evolution and rushing speed of revolution Rudra
works out the divine purpose. When on the contrary we seek to shape our life by
the Ideal, it is the severe Lord of Truth who meets us with his questioning.
Then in so far as we work in the sincerity of the inner truth, we shall live in
an increasing harmony of the result of a divine working. But if the measures of
our ideal are false or if we cast into the balance the unjust weight of our egoism
and hypocrisy and self-deceiving or if we misuse the truth for our narrower
ends, if we turn it into a lie or a convention or an outward machinery without
the living soul of the truth in it, then we must pay a heavy reckoning. For as
before we fell into the terrible hand of Rudra, so now we fall into the subtler
more dangerous noose of Varuna. Only if we can see the Truth and live in it,
shall our aspiration be satisfied. Then it is the Master of Freedom, the Lord
of Love, the Spirit of unity who shall inform the soul of the individual and
take up the world's endeavour. He is the great Liberator and the strong and
gentle founder of Perfection.
It is the
wrath of Rudra that has swept over the earth and the track of his foot-prints
can be seen in these ruins. There has come as a result upon the race the sense
of having lived in many falsehoods and the need of building according to an
ideal. Therefore we have now to meet the question of the Master of Truth. Two
great words of the divine Truth have forced themselves in-
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sistently on our minds through the crash of the ruin and
the breath of the tempest and are now the leading words of the hoped-for
reconstruction, - freedom and unity. But everything depends, first, upon the
truth of our vision of them, secondly, upon the sincerity with which we apply
it, last and especially on the inwardness of our realisation. Vain will be the
mechanical construction of unity, if unity is not in the heart of the race and
if it be made only a means for safeguarding and organising our interests; the
result will then be only, as it was in the immediate past, a fiercer strife and
new outbreaks of revolution and anarchy. No paltering mechanisms which have the
appearance but not the truth of freedom, will help us; the new structure,
however imposing, will only become another prison and compel a fresh struggle
for liberation. The one safety for man lies in learning to live from within
outward, not depending on institutions and machinery to perfect him, but out of
his growing inner perfection availing to shape a more perfect form and frame
of life; for by this inwardness we shall best be able both to see the truth of
the high things which we now only speak with our lips and form into outward
intellectual constructions, and to apply their truth sincerely to all our
outward living. If we are to found the kingdom of God in humanity, we must
first know God and see and live the diviner truth of our being in ourselves;
otherwise how shall a new manipulation of the constructions of the reason and
scientific systems of efficiency which have failed us in the past, avail to
establish it? It is because there are plenty of signs that the old error
continues and only a minority, leaders perhaps in light, but not yet in action,
are striving to see more clearly, inwardly and truly, that we must expect as
yet rather the last twilight which divides the dying from the unborn age than
the real dawning. For a time, since the mind of man is not yet ready, the old
spirit and method may yet be strong and seem for a short while to prosper; but
the future lies with the men and nations who first see beyond both the glare
and the dusk the gods of the morning and prepare themselves to be' fit
instruments of the Power that is pressing towards the light of a greater ideal.
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