|
CHAPTER
XIX
Life
Pranic energy
is the life of creatures; for that is said to be the universal
principle of life.
Taittiriya Upanishad.¹
We perceive, then, what Mind is in its divine origin and how it is related to the Truth-Consciousness,—Mind, the highest of
the three lower principles which constitute our human existence. It is a special action of the divine consciousness or rather,
it is the final strand of its whole creative action. It enables the Purusha to hold apart the relations of different forms and
forces of himself to each other; it creates phenomenal differences which to the individual soul fallen from the
Truth-Consciousness take the appearance of radical divisions, and is by that original perversion the parent of all the resultant
perversions which impress us as the contrary dualities and oppositions proper to the life of the Soul in the Ignorance. But so
long as it is not separated from the Supermind, it supports, not perversions and falsehoods, but the various working of the
universal Truth.
Mind thus appears as a
creative cosmic agency. This is not the impression which we normally
have of our mentality;
rather we regard it primarily as a perceptive organ, perceptive of
things already created by Force working in Matter, and the
only origination we allow to it is a secondary creation of new combined
forms from those already developed by Force in
Matter. But the knowledge we are now recovering, aided by the last
discoveries of Science, begins to show us that in this
Force and in this Matter there is a subconscious Mind at work which is
certainly responsible for its own emergence, first in
the forms of life and secondly in the forms of mind itself, first in
the nervous consciousness of plant-life and the primitive
animal, secondly in the ever-developing mentality of the evolved animal
and of man. And as we have already discovered
that Matter is only substance-form of Force, so we shall discover that
material Force is only
¹
II. 3.
Page-173
energy-form of Mind. Material force is, in fact, a
subconscious operation of Will; Will that works in us in what seems to
be
light, though it is in truth no more than a half-light, and material
Force that works in what to us seems to be a darkness of
unintelligence, are yet really and in essence the same, as
materialistic thought has always instinctively felt from the wrong or
lower end of things and as spiritual knowledge working from the summit
had long ago discovered. We may say, therefore,
that it is a subconscious Mind or Intelligence which, manifesting Force
as its driving-power, its executive Nature, its Prakriti,
has created this material world.
But since, as we have now
found, Mind is no independent and original entity but only a final
operation of the
Truth-Consciousness or Supermind, therefore wherever Mind is, there
Supermind must be. Supermind or the
Truth-Consciousness is the real creative agency of the universal
Existence. Even when Mind is in its own darkened
consciousness separated from its source, yet is that larger movement
always there in the workings of Mind; forcing them to
preserve their right relation, evolving from them the inevitable
results they bear in themselves, producing the right tree from
the right seed, it compels even the operations of so brute, inert and
darkened a thing as material Force to result in a world of
Law, of order, of right relation and not, as it would otherwise be, of
hurtling chance and chaos. Obviously, this order and
right relation can only be relative and not the supreme order and
supreme right which would reign if Mind were not in its
own consciousness separated from Supermind; it is an arrangement, an
order of the results right and proper to the action of
dividing Mind and its creation of separative oppositions, its dual
contrary sides of the one Truth. The Divine Consciousness,
having conceived and thrown into operation the Idea of this dual or
divided representation of itself, deduces from it in
real-idea and educes practically from it in substance of life, by the
governing action of the whole Truth-Consciousness
behind it, its own inferior truth or inevitable result of various
relation. For this is the nature of Law or Truth in the world that
it is the just working and bringing out of that which is contained in
being, implied in the essence and nature of the thing itself,
latent in its
Page-174
self-being and self-law, svabhāva and
svadharma, as seen by the divine Knowledge. To use one of those wonderful
formulas of the Upanishad¹
which contain a world of knowledge in a few revealing words, it is the Self-existent who as the seer and thinker becoming
everywhere has arranged in Himself all things rightly from years eternal according to the truth of that which they are.
Consequently, the triple world that we live in, the world of
Mind-Life-Body, is triple only in its actual accomplished
evolution. Life involved in Matter has emerged in the form of thinking
and mentally conscious life. But with Mind, involved
in it and therefore in Life and Matter, is the Supermind, which is the
origin and ruler of the other three, and this also must
emerge. We seek for an intelligence at the root of the world, because
intelligence is the highest principle of which we are
aware and that which seems to us to govern and explain all our own
action and creation and, therefore, if there is a
Consciousness at all in the universe, we presume that it must be an
Intelligence, a mental Consciousness. But intelligence
only perceives, reflects and uses within the measure of its capacity
the work of a Truth of being superior to itself; the power
behind that works must therefore be another and superior form of
Consciousness proper to that Truth. We have,
accordingly, to mend our conception and affirm that not a subconscious
Mind or Intelligence, but an involved Supermind,
which puts Mind in front of it as the immediately active special form
of its knowledge-will subconscious in Force and uses
material Force or Will subconscious in substance of being as its
executive Nature or Prakriti, has created this material
universe.
But we see
that here Mind is manifested in a specialisation of Force to which we
give the name of Life. What then is
Life? and what relation has it to Supermind, to this supreme trinity of
Sachchidananda active in creation by means of the
Real-Idea or Truth-Consciousness? From what principle in the Trinity
does it take its birth? or by what necessity, divine or
undivine, of the Truth or the illusion, does it come into being? Life
is an evil, rings down the centuries the ancient cry, a
delusion, a delirium, an
¹ Kavir manīīsī
paribhūh svayambhūr
yāthātathyato'rthān
vyadadhāt śaśvatībhyah
samābhyah.—Isha Upanishad,
Verse 8.
Page-175
insanity from which we have to flee into the repose of eternal being. Is it so? and why then is it so? Why has the Eternal
wantonly inflicted this evil, brought this delirium or insanity upon Himself or else upon the creatures brought into being by
His terrible all-deluding Maya? Or is it rather some divine principle that thus expresses itself, some power of the Delight of
eternal being that had to express and has thus thrown itself into Time and Space in this constant outburst of the million and
million forms of life which people the countless worlds of the universe?
When we study this Life as
it manifests itself upon earth with Matter as its basis, we observe
that essentially it is a
form of the one cosmic Energy, a dynamic movement or current of it
positive and negative, a constant act or play of the
Force which builds up forms, energises them by a continual stream of
stimulation and maintains them by an unceasing
process of disintegration and renewal of their substance. This would
tend to show that the natural opposition we make
between death and life is an error of our mentality, one of those false
oppositions—false to inner truth though valid in
surface practical experience—which, deceived by appearances, it is
constantly bringing into the universal unity. Death has
no reality except as a process of life. Disintegration of substance and
renewal of substance, maintenance of form and
change of form are the constant process of life; death is merely a
rapid disintegration subservient to life's necessity of
change and variation of formal experience. Even in the death of the
body there is no cessation of Life, only the material of
one form of life is broken up to serve as material for other forms of
life. Similarly we may be sure, in the uniform law of
Nature, that if there is in the bodily form a mental or psychic energy,
that also is not destroyed but only breaks out from one
form to assume others by some process of metempsychosis or new
ensouling of body. All renews itself, nothing perishes.
It could be affirmed as a
consequence that there is one all-pervading Life or dynamic energy—the material
aspect being only its outermost movement—that creates all these forms of the
physical universe, Life imperishable and eternal which, even if the whole figure
of the universe were quite abolished, would itself still go on existing and be
capable of producing a new
uni-
Page-176
verse in its place, must indeed, unless it be held
back in a state of rest by some higher Power or hold itself back,
inevitably go on creating. In that case Life is nothing else than the
Force that builds and maintains and destroys forms in the
world; it is Life that manifests itself in the form of the earth as
much as in the plant that grows upon the earth and the
animals that support their existence by devouring the life-force of the
plant or of each other. All existence here is a universal
Life that takes form of Matter. It might for that purpose hide
life-process in physical process before it emerges as submental
sensitivity and mentalised vitality, but still it would be throughout
the same creative Life-principle.
It will be said, however, that this is not what we mean by life; we
mean a particular result of universal force with which
we are familiar and which manifests itself only in the animal and the
plant, but not in the metal, the stone, the gas, operates
in the animal cell but not in the pure physical atom. We must,
therefore, in order to be sure of our ground, examine in what
precisely consists this particular result of the play of Force which we
call life and how it differs from that other result of the
play of Force in inanimate things which, we say, is not life. We see at
once that there are here on earth three realms of the
play of Force, the animal kingdom of the old classification to which we
belong, the vegetable, and lastly the mere material
void, as we pretend, of life. How does life in ourselves differ from
the life of the plant, and the life of the plant from the
not-life, say, of the metal, the mineral kingdom of the old
phraseology, or that new chemical kingdom which Science has
discovered?
Ordinarily, when we speak of life, we have meant animal life, that which moves, breathes, eats, feels, desires, and, if
we speak of the life of plants, it has been almost as a metaphor rather than a reality, for plant life was regarded as a purely
material process rather than a biological phenomenon. Especially we have associated life with breathing; the breath is life, it
was said in every language, and the formula is true if we change our conception of what we mean by the Breath of Life.
But it is evident that spontaneous motion or locomotion, breathing, eating are only processes of life and not life itself; they
are means for the generation
Page-177
or release of that constantly stimulating energy which is our vitality and for that process of disintegration and renewal by
which it supports our substantial existence; but these processes of our vitality can be maintained in other ways than by our
respiration and our means of sustenance. It is a proved fact that even human life can remain in the body and can remain in
full consciousness when breathing and the beating of the heart and other conditions formerly deemed essential to it have
been temporarily suspended. And new evidence of phenomena has been brought forward to establish that the plant, to
which we can still deny any conscious reaction, has at least a physical life identical with our own and even organised
essentially like our own though different in its apparent organisation. If that is proved true, we will have to make a clean
sweep of our old facile and false conceptions and get beyond symptoms and externalities to the root of the matter.
In some recent discoveries¹
which, if their conclusions are accepted, must throw an
intense light on the problem of Life in Matter, a great Indian
physicist has pointed attention to the response to stimulus as an
infallible sign of the existence of life. It is especially the
phenomenon of plant-life that has been illumined by his data and
illustrated in all its subtle functionings; but we must not
forget that in the essential point the same proof of vitality, the
response to stimulus, the positive state of life and its negative
state which we call death, have been affirmed by him in metals as in
the plant. Not indeed with the same abundance, not
indeed so as to show an essentially identical organisation of life; but
it is possible that, could instruments of the right nature
and sufficient delicacy be invented, more points of similarity between
the metal and plant life could be discovered; and even
if it prove
¹These considerations drawn from recent scientific researches are brought in here as illustrative, not probative
of the nature and process of Life in Matter as they are developed here. Science and metaphysics (whether
founded on pure intellectual speculation or, as in India, ultimately on a spiritual vision of things and spiritual
experience) have each its own province and method of inquiry. Science cannot dictate its conclusions to
metaphysics any more than metaphysics can impose its conclusions on Science. Still if we accept the
reasonable belief that Being and Nature in all their states have a system of correspondences expressive of a
common Truth underlying them, it is permissible to suppose that truths of the physical universe can throw some
light on the nature as well as the process of the Force that is active in the universe—not a complete light, for
physical Science is necessarily incomplete in the range of its inquiry and has no clue to the occult movements
of the Force.
Page-178
not to be so, this might mean that the same or any
life organisation is absent, but the beginnings of vitality could still
be there.
But if life, however rudimentary in its symptoms, exists in the metal,
it must be admitted as present, involved perhaps or
elementary and elemental in the earth or other material existences akin
to the metal. If we can pursue our inquiries farther,
not obliged to stop short where our immediate means of investigation
fail us, we may be sure from our unvarying experience
of Nature that investigations thus pursued will in the end prove to us
that there is no break, no rigid line of demarcation
between the earth and the metal formed in it or between the metal and
the plant and, pursuing the synthesis farther, that
there is none either between the elements and atoms that constitute the
earth or metal and the metal or earth that they
constitute. Each step of this graded existence prepares the next, holds
in itself what appears in that which follows it. Life is
everywhere, secret or manifest, organised or elemental, involved or
evolved, but universal, all-pervading, imperishable; only
its forms and organisings differ.
We must remember that the
physical response to stimulus is only an outward sign of life, even as
are breathing and
locomotion in ourselves. An exceptional stimulus is applied by the
experimenter and vivid responses are given which we can
at once recognise as indices of vitality in the object of the
experiment. But during its whole existence the plant is responding
constantly to a constant mass of stimulation from its environment; that
is to say, there is a constantly maintained force in it
which is capable of responding to the application of force from its
surroundings. It is said that the idea of a vital force in the
plant or other living organism has been destroyed by these experiments.
But when we say that a stimulus has been applied
to the plant, we mean that an energised force, a force in dynamic
movement has been directed on that object, and when we
say that a response is given, we mean that an energised force capable
of dynamic movement and of sensitive vibration
answers to the shock. There is a vibrant reception and reply, as well
as a will to grow and be, indicative of a submental, a
vital-physical organisation of consciousness-force hidden in the form
of being. The fact would seem to be, then, that as there
is a constant dynamic energy in
move-
Page-179
ment in the universe which takes various material forms more or less subtle or gross, so in each physical body or
object, plant or animal or metal, there is stored and active the same constant dynamic force; a certain interchange of these
two gives us the phenomena which we associate with the idea of life. It is this action that we recognise as the action of
Life-Energy and that which so energises itself is the Life-Force. Mind-Energy, Life-Energy, material Energy are different
dynamisms of one World-Force.
Even when a form appears to
us to be dead, this force still exists in it in potentiality although
its familiar operations of
vitality are suspended and about to be permanently ended. Within
certain limits that which is dead can be revived; the
habitual operations, the response, the circulation of active energy can
be restored; and this proves that what we call life was
still there in the body, latent, that is to say, not active in its
usual habits, its habits of ordinary physical functioning, its habits
of
nervous play and response, its habits in the animal of conscious mental
response. It is difficult to suppose that there is a
distinct entity called life which has gone entirely out of the body and
gets into it again when it feels—how, since there is
nothing to connect it with the body?—that somebody is stimulating the
form. In certain cases, such as catalepsy, we see that
the outward physical signs and operations of life are suspended, but
the mentality is there self-possessed and conscious
although unable to compel the usual physical responses. Certainly, it
is not the fact that the man is physically dead but
mentally alive or that life has gone out of the body while mind still
inhabits it, but only that the ordinary physical functioning is
suspended, while the mental is still active.
So also, in certain forms of trance, both the physical functionings and the outward mental are suspended, but afterwards
resume their operation, in some cases by external stimulation, but more normally by a spontaneous return to activity from
within. What has really happened is that the surface mind-force has been withdrawn into subconscious mind and the surface
life-force into sub-active life and either the whole man has lapsed into the subconscious existence or else he has withdrawn
his outer life into the subconscious while his inner being has been lifted
Page-180
into the superconscient. But the main point for us at present is that the Force, whatever it be, that maintains dynamic energy
of life in the body, has indeed suspended its outer operations, but still informs the organised substance. A point comes,
however, at which it is no longer possible to restore the suspended activities; and this occurs when either such a lesion has
been inflicted on the body as makes it useless or incapable of the habitual functionings or, in the absence of such lesion,
when the process of disintegration has begun, that is to say, when the Force that should renew the life-action becomes
entirely inert to the pressure of the environing forces with whose mass of stimulation it was wont to keep up a constant
interchange. Even then there is Life in the body, but a Life that is busy only with the process of disintegrating the formed
substance so that it may escape in its elements and constitute with them new forms. The Will in the universal force that held
the form together, now withdraws from constitution and supports instead a process of dispersion. Not till then is there the
real death of the body.
Life then is the dynamic
play of a universal Force, a Force in which mental consciousness and
nervous vitality are in
some form or at least in their principle always inherent and therefore
they appear and organise themselves in our world in
the forms of Matter. The life-play of this Force manifests itself as an
interchange of stimulation and response to stimulation
between the different forms it has built up and in which it keeps up
its constant dynamic pulsation; each form is constantly
taking into itself and giving out again the breath and energy of the
common Force; each form feeds upon that and nourishes
itself with it by various means, whether indirectly by taking in other
forms in which the energy is stored or directly by
absorbing the dynamic discharges it receives from outside. All this is
the play of Life; but it is chiefly recognisable to us
where the organisation of it is sufficient for us to perceive its more
outward and complex movements and especially where
it partakes of the nervous type of vital energy which belongs to our
own organisation. It is for this reason that we are ready
enough to admit life in the plant because obvious phenomena of life are
there,—and this becomes still easier if it can be
shown that it manifests symptoms of
Page-181
nervosity and has a vital system not very different from our own,—but are unwilling to recognise it in the metal and the
earth and the chemical atom where these phenomenal developments can with difficulty be detected or do not apparently at
all exist.
Is there any justification
for elevating this distinction into an essential difference? What, for
instance, is the difference
between life in ourselves and life in the plant? We see that they
differ, first, in our possession of the power of locomotion
which has evidently nothing to do with the essence of vitality, and,
secondly, in our possession of conscious sensation which
is, so far as we know, not yet evolved in the plant. Our nervous
responses are largely, though by no means always or in their
entirety, attended with the mental response of conscious sensation;
they have a value to the mind as well as to the
nerve-system and the body agitated by the nervous action. In the plant
it would seem that there are symptoms of nervous
sensation, including those which would be in us rendered as pleasure
and pain, waking and sleep, exhilaration, dullness and
fatigue, and the body is inwardly agitated by the nervous action, but
there is no sign of the actual presence of mentally
conscious sensation. But sensation is sensation whether mentally
conscious or vitally sensitive, and sensation is a form of
consciousness. When the sensitive plant shrinks from a contact, it
appears that it is nervously affected, that something in it
dislikes the contact and tries to draw away from it; there is, in a
word, a subconscious sensation in the plant, just as there
are, as we have seen, subconscious operations of the same kind in
ourselves. In the human system it is quite possible to
bring these subconscious perceptions and sensations to the surface long
after they have happened and have ceased to affect
the nervous system; and an ever-increasing mass of evidence has
irrefutably established the existence of a subconscious
mentality in us much vaster than the conscious. The mere fact that the
plant has no superficially vigilant mind which can be
awakened to the valuation of its subconscious sensations, makes no
difference to the essential identity of the phenomena.
The phenomena being the same, the thing they manifest must be the same,
and that thing is a subconscious mind. And it is
quite possible that there is a more rudimentary life operation of the
Page-182
subconscious sense-mind in the metal, although in the metal there is no bodily agitation corresponding to the nervous
response; but the absence of bodily agitation makes no essential difference to the presence of vitality in the metal any more
than the absence of bodily locomotion makes an essential difference to the presence of vitality in the plant.
What happens when the
conscious becomes subconscious in the body or the subconscious becomes
conscious? The
real difference lies in the absorption of the conscious energy in part
of its work, its more or less exclusive concentration. In
certain forms of concentration, what we call the mentality, that is to
say, the Prajnana or apprehensive consciousness almost
or quite ceases to act consciously, yet the work of the body and the
nerves and the sense-mind goes on unnoticed but
constant and perfect; it has all become subconscious and only in one
activity or chain of activities is the mind luminously
active. While I write, the physical act of writing is largely or
sometimes entirely done by the subconscious mind; the body
makes, unconsciously as we say, certain nervous movements; the mind is
awake only to the thought with which it is
occupied. The whole man indeed may sink into the subconscious, yet
habitual movements implying the action of mind may
continue, as in many phenomena of sleep; or he may rise into the
superconscient and yet be active with the subliminal mind
in the body, as in certain phenomena of samādhi or Yoga trance. It is evident, then, that the difference between plant
sensation and our sensation is simply that in the plant the conscious Force manifesting itself in the universe has not yet fully
emerged from the sleep of Matter, from the absorption which entirely divides the worker Force from its source of work in
the superconscient knowledge, and therefore does subconsciously what it will do
consciously when it emerges in man from its absorption and begins to wake,
though still indirectly, to its knowledge-self. It does exactly the same things
but in a different way and with a different value in terms of consciousness.
It is becoming possible now to
conceive that in the very atom there is something that becomes in us a will and
a desire, there is an attraction and repulsion which, though phenomenally other,
Page-183
are essentially the same thing as liking and disliking in ourselves, but are, as we say, inconscient or subconscient. This
essence of will and desire are evident everywhere in Nature and, though this is not yet sufficiently envisaged, they are
associated with and indeed the expression of a subconscient or, if you will, inconscient or quite involved sense and
intelligence which are equally pervasive. Present in every atom of Matter all this is necessarily present in everything which
is formed by the aggregation of those atoms; and they are present in the atom because they are present in the Force which
builds up and constitutes the atom. That Force is fundamentally the Chit-Tapas or Chit-Shakti of the Vedanta,
consciousness-force, inherent conscious force of conscious-being, which manifests itself as nervous energy full of
submental sensation in the plant, as desire-sense and desire-will in the primary animal forms, as self-conscious sense and
force in the developing animal, as mental will and knowledge topping all the rest in man. Life is a scale of the universal
Energy in which the transition from inconscience to consciousness is managed; it is an intermediary power of it latent or
submerged in Matter, delivered by its own force into submental being, delivered finally by the emergence of Mind into the
full possibility of its dynamis.
Apart from all other
considerations, this conclusion imposes itself as a logical necessity
if we observe even the surface
process of the emergence in the light of the evolutionary theme. It is
self-evident that Life in the plant, even if otherwise organised than
in the animal, is yet the same power, marked by birth and growth and
death, propagation by the seed, death
by decay or malady or violence, maintenance by indrawing of nourishing
elements from without, dependence on light and
heat, productiveness and sterility, even states of sleep and waking,
energy and depression of life-dynamism, passage from
infancy to maturity and age; the plant contains, moreover, the essences
of the force of life and is therefore the natural food
of animal existences. If it is conceded that it has a nervous system
and reaction to stimuli, a beginning or undercurrent of
submental or purely vital sensations, the identity becomes closer; but
still it remains evidently a stage of life evolution intermediate
between animal existence and “ inani-
Page-184
mate” Matter. This is precisely what must be
expected if Life is a force evolving out of Matter and culminating in
Mind, and, if it is that, then we are bound to suppose that it is
already there in Matter itself submerged or latent in the
material subconsciousness or inconscience. For from where else can it
emerge? Evolution of Life in matter supposes a
previous involution of it there, unless we suppose it to be a new
creation magically and unaccountably introduced into
Nature. If it is that, it must either be a creation out of nothing or a
result of material operations which is not accounted for by
anything in the operations themselves or by any element in them which
is of a kindred nature; or, conceivably, it may be a
descent from above, from some supraphysical plane above the material
universe. The two first suppositions can be
dismissed as arbitrary conceptions; the last explanation is possible
and it is quite conceivable and in the occult view of things
true that a pressure from some plane of Life above the material
universe has assisted the emergence of life here. But this
does not exclude the origin of life from Matter itself as a primary and
necessary movement; for the existence of a
Life-world or Life-plane above the material does not of itself lead to
the emergence of Life in matter unless that Life-plane
exists as a formative stage in a descent of Being through several
grades or powers of itself into the Inconscience with the
result of an involution of itself with all these powers in Matter for a
later evolution and emergence. Whether signs of this
submerged life are discoverable, unorganised yet or rudimentary, in
material things or there are no such signs, because this
involved Life is in a full sleep, is not a question of capital
importance. The material Energy that aggregates, forms and
disaggregates¹ is the same
Power in another grade of itself as that Life-Energy which expresses
itself in birth, growth and death, just as by
its doing
¹ Birth,
growth and death of life are in their outward aspect the same process
of aggregation, formation and disaggregation, though more than that in
their inner process and significance. Even the ensoulment of the body
by the psychic being follows, if the occult view of these things is
correct, a similar outward process, for the
soul as nucleus draws to itself for birth and aggregates the elements
of its mental, vital and physical sheaths
and their contents, increases these formations in life, and in its
departing drops and disaggregates again these
aggregates, drawing back into itself its inner powers, till in rebirth
it repeats the original process.
Page-185
of the works of Intelligence in a somnambulist
subconscience it betrays itself as the same Power that in yet another
grade
attains the status of Mind; its very character shows that it contains
in itself, though not yet in their characteristic organisation
or process, the yet undelivered powers of Mind and Life.
Life then reveals itself as
essentially the same everywhere from the atom to man, the atom
containing the subconscious
stuff and movement of being which are released into consciousness in
the animal, with plant life as a midway stage in the
evolution. Life is really a universal operation of Conscious-Force
acting subconsciously on and in Matter; it is the operation
that creates, maintains, destroys and re-creates forms or bodies and
attempts by play of nerve-force, that is to say, by
currents of interchange of stimulating energy to awake conscious
sensation in those bodies. In this operation there are three
stages; the lowest is that in which the vibration is still in the sleep
of Matter, entirely subconscious so as to seem wholly
mechanical; the middle stage is that in which it becomes capable of a
response still submental but on the verge of what we
know as consciousness; the highest is that in which life develops
conscious mentality in the form of a mentally perceptible
sensation which in this transition becomes the basis for the
development of sense-mind and intelligence. It is in the middle
stage that we catch the idea of Life as distinguished from Matter and
Mind, but in reality it is the same in all the stages and
always a middle term between Mind and Matter, constituent of the latter
and instinct with the former. It is an operation of
Conscious-Force which is neither the mere formation of substance nor
the operation of mind with substance and form as its
object of apprehension; it is rather an energising of conscious being
which is a cause and support of the formation of
substance and an intermediate source and support of conscious mental
apprehension. Life, as this intermediate energising of
conscious being, liberates into sensitive action and reaction a form of
the creative force of existence which was working
subconsciently or inconsciently, absorbed in its own substance; it
supports and liberates into action the apprehensive
consciousness of existence called mind and gives it a dynamic
instrumentation so that it can work not only on its own forms
but
Page-186
on forms of life and matter; it connects too, and supports, as a middle term between them, the mutual commerce of the two,
mind and matter. This means of commerce Life provides in the continual currents of her pulsating nerve-energy which carry
force of the form as a sensation to modify Mind and bring back force of Mind as will to modify Matter. It is therefore this
nerve-energy which we usually mean when we talk of Life; it is the Prana or Life-force of the Indian system. But
nerve-energy is only the form it takes in the animal being; the same Pranic energy is present in all forms down to the atom,
since everywhere it is the same in essence and everywhere it is the same operation of Conscious-Force,—Force supporting
and modifying the substantial existence of its own forms, Force with sense and mind secretly active but at first involved in
the form and preparing to emerge, then finally emerging from their involution. This is the whole significance of the
omnipresent Life that has manifested and inhabits the material universe.
Page-187
HOME
|