CHAPTER
XXI
The Order of the Worlds
Seven
are these worlds in which move the life-forces that are
hidden within the
secret heart as their dwelling-place seven
by
seven.
Mundaka Upanishad.¹ II. 1. 8.
May the Peoples of the five Births
accept my sacrifice, those who
are born of the Light and worthy of worship; may
Earth protect
us from earthly evil and the Mid-Region from calamity from the
gods. Follow the shining thread spun out across the mid-world,
protect the
luminous paths built by the thought; weave an in-
violate work, become the human
being, create the divine race....
Seers
of truth are you, sharpen the shining spears with which you
cut the way to that
which is Immortal; knowers of the secret
planes, form
them, the steps by which the gods attained to immortality
Rig Veda.2
X. 53. 5, 6, 10.
This is the eternal Tree with its root above and its
branches down-
ward; this is Brahman, this is the Immortal; in it are lodged all
the worlds and none goes beyond it. This and That are one.
Katha Upanishad.3 II. 3. 1.
If a spiritual evolution of
consciousness in the material world and a constant or repeated rebirth of the
individual into an earthly body are admitted, the next question that arises is
whether this evolutionary movement is something separate and complete in itself
or part of a larger universal totality of which the material world is only one
province. This question has already its answer implied in the gradations of the
involution which precede the evolution and make it possible; for, if that precedence
is a fact, there must be worlds or at least planes of higher being and they
must have some connection with the evolution which has been made possible by
their existence. It may be that all they do for us is by their effective
presence or pressure on the earth-consciousness to liberate the involved
principles of life and mind and spirit and enable them to manifest and assert
their reign in material Nature. But it would be in the highest degree
improbable that the connection and intervention should cease
1 II. 1. 8. 2 X. 53. 5, 6, 10. 3 II3.
1.
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there; there is likely to be a
sustained, if veiled, commerce between material life and the life of the other
planes of existence. It is necessary now to look more closely into this
problem, regard it in itself and determine the nature and limits of this connection
and intercommunication, in so far as it affects the theory of evolution and
rebirth in material Nature.
The descent of
the Soul into the Ignorance can be thought of as an abrupt precipitation or immediate
lapse of a pure spiritual being out of the superconscient
spiritual Reality into the first inconscience and the
subsequent evolving phenomenal life of material Nature. If that were so, there
might be the Absolute above and the Inconscient below,
with the material world created out of it, and the issue, the return back would
then be a similar abrupt or precipitous transit from a material embodied
world-being into the transcendent Silence. There would be no intermediate
powers or realities other than Matter and Spirit, no other planes than the
material, no other worlds than the world of Matter. But this idea is too
trenchant and simple a construction and cannot outlive a wider view of the
complex nature of existence.
There are, no
doubt, several possible originations of cosmic existence by which such an
extreme and rigid world-balancement could have
conceivably come into being. There could have been a conception of this kind
and a fiat in an All-Will, or an idea, a movement of the soul towards an
egoistic material life of the Ignorance. The eternal individual soul urged by
some inexplicable desire arising within it can be supposed to have sought the
adventure of the darkness and taken a plunge from its native Light into the
depths of a Nescience out of which arose this world of Ignorance; or a
collectivity of souls may have been so moved, the Many: for an individual being
cannot constitute a cosmos; a cosmos must be either impersonal or multipersonal or the creation or self-expression of a
universal or infinite Being. This desire may have drawn down an All-Soul with
it to build a world based upon the power of the Inconscient.
If not that, then the eternally omniscient All-Soul itself may have abruptly
plunged its self-knowledge into this darkness of the Inconscience,
carrying the individual souls within it to begin their upward evolution
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through an ascending scale of
life and consciousness. Or, if the individual is not pre-existent, if we are
only a creation of the All-consciousness or a fiction of the phenomenal
Ignorance, either creatrix may have conceived all
these myriads of individual beings by the evolution of names and forms out of
an original indiscriminate Prakriti; the soul would
be a temporary product of the indiscriminate stuff of inconscient
force-substance which is the first appearance of things in the material
universe.
On that
supposition, or on any of them, there could be only two planes of existence: on
one side there is the material universe created out of the Inconscient
by the blind nescience of Force or Nature obedient perhaps to some inner unfelt
Self which governs its somnambulist activities; on the other side there is the superconscient One to which we return out of the Inconscience and Ignorance. Or else we may imagine that
there is one plane only, the material existence; there is no superconscient apart from the Soul of the material
universe. If we find that there are other planes of conscious being and that
there already exist other worlds than the material universe, these ideas might
become difficult to substantiate; but we can escape from that annulment if we
suppose that these worlds have been subsequently created by or for the evolving
Soul in the course of its ascent out of the Inconscience.
In any of these views the whole cosmos would be an evolution out of the Inconscient, either with the material universe as its sole
and sufficient stage and scene or else with an ascending scale of worlds, one
evolving out of the other, helping to grade our return to the original Reality.
Our own view has been that the cosmos is a self-graded evolution out of the superconscient Sachchidananda;
but in this idea it would be nothing but an evolution of the Inconscience towards some kind of knowledge sufficient to
allow, by the annihilation of some primal ignorance or some originating desire,
the extinction of a misbegotten soul or an escape out of a mistaken
world-adventure.
But such
theories either imply a premier importance and originating power of mind or a premier
importance of the individual being; both have indeed a great place, but the one
eternal Spirit is the original power and the original existence. Idea, conceptively creative,—not the Real-Idea which is Being
aware
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of what is in itself and automatically
self-creative by the force of that Truth-awareness,—is a movement of the mind;
desire is a movement of life in mind; life and mind then must be pre-existent
powers and must have been the determinants of the creation of the material
world, and in that case they can equally create worlds of their own supraphysical nature. Or else we must suppose that what
acted was not desire in an individual or a universal Mind or Life, but a will
in the Spirit,—a will of Being deploying something of itself or of its
Consciousness, realising a creative idea or a
self-knowledge or an urge of its self-active Force or a turn to a certain
formulation of its delight of existence. But if the world has been created, not
by the universal Delight of existence, but for the desire of the individual
soul, its caprice of an ignorant egoistic enjoyment, then the mental Individual
and not the Cosmic Being or a Transcendent Divinity should be the creator and
witness of the universe. In the past trend of human thought the individual
being has always loomed enormously large in the front plan of things and in the
premier dimensions of importance; if these proportions could still be
maintained, this origination might conceivably be admitted: for a will towards
the life of the Ignorance or an assent to it in the individual Purusha must indeed be part of the operative movement of
Consciousness in the involutionary descent of the
Spirit into material Nature. But the world cannot be a creation of the
individual mind or a theatre erected by it for its own play of consciousness;
nor can it have been created solely for the play and the satisfaction or
frustration of the ego. As we awake to a sense of the premier importance of the
universal and the dependence of the individual upon it, a theory of this kind
becomes an impossibility to our intelligence. The world is too vast in its
movement for such an account of its working to be credible; only a cosmic Power
or a cosmic Being can be the creator and the upholder of the cosmos and it must
have too a cosmic and not only an individual reality, significance or purpose.
Accordingly,
this world-creating or participating Individual and its desire or assent to the
Ignorance must have been awake before the world at all existed; it must have
been there as an element in some supracosmic Superconscient from which it
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comes and to which it returns out
of the life of the ego: we must suppose an original immanence of the Many in
the One. It becomes then conceivable that a will or an impetus or a spiritual
necessity may have stirred, in some transmundane
Infinite, in some of the Many which precipitated them downward and compelled
the creation of this world of the Ignorance. But since the One is the premier
fact of existence, since the Many depend upon the One, are souls of the One,
beings of the Being, this truth must determine also the fundamental principle
of the cosmic existence. There we see that the universal precedes the
individual, gives it its field, is that in which it exists cosmically even
though its origin is in the Transcendence. The individual soul lives here by
the All-Soul and depends upon it; the All-Soul very evidently does not exist by
the individual or depend upon it: it is not a sum of individual beings, a
pluralistic totality created by the conscious life of individuals; if an All-Soul
exists, it must be the one Cosmic Spirit supporting the one cosmic Force in its
works, and it repeats here, modified in the terms of cosmic existence, the
primary relation of the dependence of the Many on the One. It is inconceivable
that the Many should have independently or by a departure from the One Will
desired cosmic existence and forced by their desire the supreme Sachchidananda to descend unwillingly or tolerantly into
the Nescience; that would be to reverse altogether the true dependence of
things. If the world was directly originated by the will or the spiritual
impetus of the Many, which is possible and even probable in a certain sense,
there must still have been first a Will in Sachchidananda
to that end; otherwise the impetus,—translating here the All-Will into desire,
for what becomes desire in the ego is Will in the Spirit,—could not have arisen
anywhere. The One, the All-Soul, by whom alone the consciousness of the
Individual is determined, must first accept the veil of inconscient
Nature before the Individual too can put on the veil of the Ignorance in the
material universe.
But once we
admit this Will of the supreme and cosmic Being as the indispensable condition
of the existence of the material universe, it is no longer possible to accept
Desire as the creative principle; for desire has no place in the Supreme or in
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the All-being. It can have
nothing to desire; desire is the result of incompleteness, of insufficiency, of
something that is not possessed or enjoyed and which the being seeks for
possession or enjoyment. A supreme and universal Being can have the delight of
its all-existence, but to that delight desire must be foreign,—it can only be
the appanage of the incomplete evolutionary ego which
is a product of the cosmic action. Moreover, if the All-consciousness of the
Spirit has willed to plunge into the inconscience of
Matter, it must be because that was a possibility of its self-creation or
manifestation. But a sole material universe and an evolution there out of inconscience into spiritual consciousness cannot be the one
solitary and limited possibility of manifestation of the All-being. That could
only be if Matter were the original power and form of manifested being and the
spirit had no other choice, could not manifest except through Inconscience into Matter as a basis. This would bring us to
a materialistic evolutionary Pantheism; we would have to regard the beings who
people the universe as souls of the One, souls born here in It and evolving
upward through inanimate, animate and mentally developed forms till the
recovery of their complete and undivided life in the superconscient
Pantheos and its cosmic Oneness would intervene as the
end and goal of their evolution. In that case, everything has evolved here;
life, mind, soul have arisen out of the One in the material universe by the
force of its hidden being, and everything will fulfil
itself here in the material universe. There is then no separate plane of the Superconscience, for the Superconscient
is here only, not elsewhere; there are no supraphysical
worlds; there is no action of supraphysical
principles exterior to Matter, no pressure of an already existent Mind and Life
upon the material plane.
It has then to
be asked what are Mind and Life, and it may be answered that they are products
of Matter or of the Energy in Matter. Or else they are forms of consciousness
that arise as results of an evolution from Inconscience
to Superconscience: consciousness itself is only a
bridge of transition; it is spirit becoming partially aware of itself before plunging
into its normal trance of luminous superconscience.
Even if there proved to be planes of larger Life and Mind, they would only be
subjective
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constructions of this
intermediary consciousness erected on the way to that spiritual culmination.
But the difficulty here is that Mind and Life are too different from Matter to
be products of Matter; Matter itself is a product of Energy, and mind and life
must be regarded as superior products of the same Energy. If we admit the
existence of a cosmic Spirit, the Energy must be spiritual; life and mind must
be independent products of a spiritual energy and themselves powers of
manifestation of the Spirit. It then becomes irrational to suppose that Spirit
and Matter alone exist, that they are the two confronting realities and that
Matter is the sole possible basis of the manifestation of Spirit; the idea of a
sole material world becomes immediately untenable. Spirit must be capable of
basing its manifestation on the Mind principle or on the Life principle and not
only on the principle of Matter; there can then be and logically there should
be worlds of Mind and worlds of Life; there may even be worlds founded on a
subtler and more plastic, more conscious principle of Matter.
Three questions
then arise, interrelated or interdependent: whether there is any evidence or
any true intimation of the existence of such other worlds; whether, if they
exist, they are of the nature we have indicated, arising or descending in the order
and within the rationale of a hierarchical series between Matter and Spirit; if
that is their scale of being, are they otherwise quite independent and
unconnected, or is there a relation and interaction of the higher worlds on the
world of Matter? It is a fact that mankind almost from the beginning of its
existence or so far back as history or tradition can go, has believed in the
existence of other worlds and in the possibility of communication between their
powers and beings and the human race. In the last rationalistic period of human
thought from which we are emerging, this belief has been swept aside as an
age-long superstition; all evidence or intimations of its truth have been
rejected a priori as fundamentally false and undeserving of inquiry because
incompatible with the axiomatic truth that only Matter and the material world
and its experiences are real; all other experience purporting to be real must
be either a hallucination or an imposture or a subjective result of
superstitious
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credulity and imagination or
else, if a fact, then other than what it purported to be and explicable by a
physical cause: no evidence could be accepted of such a fact unless it is
objective and physical in its character; even if the fact be very apparently supraphysical, it cannot be accepted as such unless it is
totally unexplainable by any other imaginable hypothesis or conceivable
conjecture.
It should be
evident that this demand for physical valid proof of a supraphysical
fact is irrational and illogical; it is an irrelevant attitude of the physical
mind which assumes that only the objective and physical is fundamentally real
and puts aside all else as merely subjective. A supraphysical
fact may impinge on the physical world and produce physical results; it may
even produce an effect on our physical senses and become manifest to them, but
that cannot be its invariable action and most normal character or process.
Ordinarily, it must produce a direct effect or a tangible impression on our
mind and our life-being, which are the parts of us that are of the same order
as itself, and can only indirectly and through them, if at all, influence the
physical world and physical life. If it objectivises
itself, it must be to a subtler sense in us and only derivatively to the
outward physical sense. This derivative objectivisation
is certainly possible; if there is an association of the action of the subtle
body and its sense-organisation with the action of
the material body and its physical organs, then the supraphysical
can become outwardly sensible to us. This is what happens, for example, with
the faculty called second sight; it is the process of all those psychic
phenomena which seem to be seen and heard by the outer senses and are not
sensed inwardly through representative or interpretative or symbolic images
which bear the stamp of an inner experience or have an evident character of
formations in a subtle substance. There can, then, be various kinds of evidence
of the existence of other planes of being and communication with them; objectivisation to the outer sense, subtle-sense contacts,
mind contacts, life contacts, contacts through the subliminal in special states
of consciousness exceeding our ordinary range. Our physical mind is not the
whole of us nor, even though it dominates almost the whole of our surface
consciousness, the
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best or greatest part of us;
reality cannot be restricted to a sole field of this narrowness or to the
dimensions known within its rigid circle.
If it be said
that subjective experience or subtle-sense images can easily be deceptive,
since we have no recognized method or standard of verification and a too great
tendency to admit the extraordinary and miraculous or supernatural at its face-value,
this may be admitted: but error is not the prerogative of the inner subjective
or subliminal parts of us, it is also an appanage of
the physical mind and its objective methods and standards, and such liability
to error cannot be a reason for shutting out a large and important domain of
experience; it is a reason rather for scrutinising it
and finding out in it its own true standards and its characteristic appropriate
and valid means of verification. Our subjective being is the basis of our objective
experience, and it is not probable that only its physical objectivisations
are true and the rest unreliable. The subliminal consciousness, when rightly
interrogated, is a witness to truth and its testimony is confirmed again and
again even in the physical and the objective field; that testimony cannot,
then, be disregarded when it calls our attention to things within us or to
things that belong to planes or worlds of a supraphysical
experience. At the same time belief by itself is not evidence of reality; it
must base itself on something more valid before one can accept it. It is
evident that the beliefs of the past are not a sufficient basis for knowledge,
even though they cannot be entirely neglected: for a belief is a mental construction
and may be a wrong building; it may often answer to some inner intimation and
then it has a value, but, as often as not, it disfigures the intimation,
usually by a translation into terms familiar to our physical and objective experience,
such as that which converted the hierarchy of the planes into a physical
hierarchy or geographical space-extension, turned the rarer heights of subtle
substance into material heights and placed the abodes of the gods on the
summits of physical mountains. All truth supraphysical
or physical must be founded not on mental belief alone, but on experience,—but
in each case experience must be of the kind, physical, subliminal or spiritual,
which is appropriate
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to the order of the truths into
which we are empowered to enter; their validity and significance must be scrutinised, but according to their own law and by a
consciousness which can enter into them and not according to the law of another
domain or by a consciousness which is capable only of truths of another order;
so alone can we be sure of our steps and enlarge firmly our sphere of
knowledge.
If
we scrutinise the intimations of supraphysical
world-realities which we receive in our inner experience and compare with it
the account of such intimations that has continued to come down to us from the
beginnings of human knowledge, and if we attempt an interpretation and a summarised order, we shall find that what this inner
experience most intimately conveys to us is the existence and action upon us of
larger planes of being and consciousness than the purely material plane, with
its restricted existence and action, of which we are aware in our narrow
terrestrial formula. These domains of larger being are not altogether remote
and separate from our own being and consciousness; for, though they subsist in
themselves and have their own play and process and formulations of existence
and experience, yet at the same time they penetrate and envelop the physical
plane with their invisible presence and influences, and their powers seem to be
here in the material world itself behind its action and objects. There are two
main orders of experience in our contact with them; one is purely subjective,
though in its subjectivity sufficiently vivid and palpable, the other is more
objective. In the subjective order, we find that what shapes itself to us as a
life-intention, life-impulse, life-formulation here, already exists in a
larger, more subtle, more plastic range of possibilities, and these
pre-existent forces and formations are pressing upon us to realise
themselves in the physical world also; but only a part succeeds in getting
through and even that emerges partially in a form and circumstance more proper
to the system of terrestrial law and sequence. This precipitation takes place,
normally, without our knowledge; we are not aware of the action of these
powers, forces and influences upon us, but take them as formations of our own
life and mind, even when our reason or will repudiates them and strives not to
be mastered:
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but when we go inwards away from
the restricted surface consciousness and develop a subtler sense and deeper awareness,
we begin to get an intimation of the origin of these movements and are able to
watch their action and process, to accept or reject or modify, to allow them
passage and use of our mind and will and our life and members or refuse it. In
the same way we become aware of larger domains of mind, a play, experience,
formation of a greater plasticity, a teeming profusion of all possible mental
formulations, and we feel their contacts with us and their powers and
influences acting upon our parts of mind in the same occult manner as those
others that act upon our parts of life. This kind of experience is, primarily,
of a purely subjective character, a pressure of ideas, suggestions, emotional
formations, impulsions to sensation, action, dynamic experience. However large
a part of this pressure may be traced to our own subliminal self or to the
siege of universal Mind-forces or Life-forces belonging to our own world, there
is an element which bears the stamp of another origin, an insistent supraterrestrial character.
But
the contacts do not stop here: for there is also an opening of our mind and
life parts to a great range of subjective-objective experiences in which these
planes present themselves no longer as extensions of subjective being and consciousness,
but as worlds; for the experiences there are organised
as they are in our own world, but on a different plan, with a different process
and law of action and in a substance which belongs to a supraphysical
Nature. This organization includes, as on our earth, the existence of beings
who have or take forms, manifest themselves or are naturally manifested in an
embodying substance, but a substance other than ours, a subtle substance
tangible only to subtle sense, a supraphysical form-matter.
These worlds and beings may have nothing to do with ourselves and our life,
they may exercise no action upon us; but often also they enter into secret
communication with earth-existence, obey or embody and are the intermediaries
and instruments of the cosmic powers and influences of which we have a
subjective experience, or themselves act by their own initiation upon the
terrestrial world's life and motives and happenings. It is possible to
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receive help or guidance or harm
or misguidance from these beings; it is possible even to become subject to
their influence, to be possessed by their invasion or domination, to be instrumentalised by them for their good or evil purpose. At
times the progress of earthly life seems to be a vast field of battle between supraphysical Forces of either character, those that strive
to uplift, encourage and illumine and those that strive to deflect, depress or
prevent or even shatter our upward evolution or the soul's self-expression in
the material universe. Some of these Beings, Powers or Forces are such that we
think of them as divine; they are luminous, benignant or powerfully helpful:
there are others that are Titanic, gigantic or demoniac, inordinate Influences,
instigators or creators often of vast and formidable inner upheavals or of
actions that overpass the normal human measure. There may also be an awareness
of influences, presences, beings that do not seem to belong to other worlds
beyond us but are here as a hidden element behind the veil in terrestrial
nature. As contact with the supraphysical is
possible, a contact can also take place subjective or objective, — or at least objectivised, — between our own consciousness and the
consciousness of other once embodied beings who have passed into a supraphysical status in these other regions of existence.
It is possible also to pass beyond a subjective contact or a subtle-sense
perception and, in certain subliminal states of consciousness, to enter
actually into other worlds and know something of their secrets. It is the more objective
order of other-worldly experience that seized most the imagination of mankind
in the past, but it was put by popular belief into a gross-objective statement
which unduly assimilated these phenomena to those of the physical world with
which we are familiar; for it is the normal tendency of our mind to turn
everything into forms or symbols proper to its own kind and terms of
experience.
This has always
been, put into its most generalised terms, the normal
range and character of other-worldly belief and experience in all periods of
the past of the race; names and forms differ, but the general features have
been strikingly similar in all countries and ages. What exact value are we to
put upon these persistent beliefs or upon this mass of
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supernormal experience? It is not
possible for anyone who has had these contacts with any intimacy and not only
by scattered abnormal accidents, to put them aside as mere superstition or
hallucination; for they are too insistent, real, effective, organic in their
pressure, too constantly confirmed by their action and results to be so flung
aside: an appreciation, an interpretation, a mental organisation
of this side of our capacity of experience is indispensable.
One explanation
which can be put forward is that man himself creates the supraphysical
worlds which he inhabits or thinks he inhabits after death, creates the gods,
as ran the ancient phrase,—it is claimed even that God himself was created by
man, was a myth of his consciousness, and has now been abolished by man! All
these things then may be a sort of myth of the developing consciousness in
which it is able to dwell, a captive in its own buildings, and by a kind of realizing
dynamisation maintain itself in its own imaginations.
But pure imaginations they are not, they can only be so treated by us so long
as the things they represent, however incorrectly, are not part of our own
experience. Yet there may conceivably be myths and imaginations that are used
by the power of the creative Consciousness-Force to materialise
its own idea-forces; these potent images may take form and body, endure in some
subtly materialised world of thought and react on
their creator: if so, we might suppose that the other worlds are buildings of
this character. But if that were so, if a subjective consciousness can thus
create worlds and beings, it might well be that the objective world also is a
myth of Consciousness or even of our consciousness, or that Consciousness
itself is a myth of the original Nescience. Thus, on this line of thinking, we
swing back towards a view of the universe in which all things assume a certain
hue of unreality except the all-productive Inconscience
out of which they are created, the Ignorance which creates them and, it may be,
a superconscient or inconscient
impersonal Being into whose indifference all finally disappears or goes back
and ceases there.
But we have no
proof and there is no likelihood that man's mind can create in this way a world
where none was
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before, create in vacuo without a substance to build in or build on, though
it may well be that it can add something to a world already made. Mind is
indeed a potent agency, more potent than we readily imagine; it can make
formations which effectuate themselves in our own or others' consciousness and
lives and even have an effect on inconscient Matter;
but an entirely original creation in the void is beyond its possibilities. What
we can rather hazard is that as it grows, man's mind enters into relation with
new ranges of being and consciousness not at all created by him, new to him,
already pre-existent in the All-Existence. In his increasing inner experience
he opens up new planes of being in himself; as the secret centres
of his consciousness dissolve their knots, he becomes able through them to
conceive of those larger realms, to receive direct influences from them, to
enter into them, to image them in his terrestrial mind and inner sense. He does
create images, symbol-forms, reflective shapes of them with which his mind can
deal; in this sense only he creates the Divine Image that he worships, creates
the forms of the gods, creates new planes and worlds within him, and through
these images the real worlds and powers that overtop our existence are able to
take possession of the consciousness in the physical world, to pour into it
their potencies, to transform it with the light of their higher being. But all
this is not a creation of the higher worlds of being; it is a revelation of
them to the consciousness of the soul on the material plane as it develops out
of the Nescience. It is a creation of their forms here by a reception of their
powers; there is an enlargement of our subjective life on this plane by the
discovery of its true relation with higher planes of its own being from which
it was separated by the veil of the material Nescience. This veil exists
because the soul in the body has put behind it these greater possibilities in
order that it might concentrate exclusively its consciousness and force upon
its primary work in this physical world of being; but that primary work can
have a sequel only by the veil being at least partially lifted or else made
penetrable so that the higher planes of Mind, Life and Spirit may pour their
significances into human existence.
It is possible
to suppose that these higher planes and worlds
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have been created subsequently to
the manifestation of the material cosmos, to aid the evolution or in some sense
as a result of it. This is a notion which the physical mind, starting in all
its ideas from the material universe as the one thing which it knows, has analysed and can deal with in a beginning of mastery, might
easily tend to accept, if obliged to admit a supraphysical
existence; it could then keep the material, the Inconscience,
as the starting-point and support of all being, as it is undoubtedly the
starting-point for us of the evolutionary movement of which the material world
is the scene. Our mind could still keep matter and material force as the first existence,—so
accepted and cherished by it because it is the first thing that it knows, the
one thing that is always securely present and knowable,—and maintain the
spiritual and the supraphysical in a dependence upon
the assured foundation in Matter.1 But how then were these other
worlds created, by what force, by what instrumentality? It might be the Life
and Mind developing out of the Inconscient which have
at the same time developed these other worlds or planes in the subliminal consciousness
of the living beings who appear in it. To the subliminal being in life and
after death,—for it is the inner being that survives the death of the
body,—these worlds might be real because sensible to its wider range of
consciousness; it would move in them with that sense of reality, derivative
perhaps but convincing, and it would send up its experience of them as belief
and imagination to the surface being. This is a possible account, if we accept
Consciousness as the real creative Power or agent and all things as formations
of consciousness; but it would not give to the supraphysical
planes of being the unsubstantiality or less palpable
reality which the physical mind would like to attach to them; they would have
the same reality in themselves as the physical world or plane of physical experience
has in its own order.
If in this or
some other way the higher worlds were developed subsequently to the creation of
the material world,
1 There are certain expressions in the Rig Veda
which seem to embody this view. Earth (the material principle) is spoken of as
the foundation of all the worlds or the seven worlds are described as the seven
planes of Earth.
Page – 779
the primary creation, by a larger
secret evolution out of the Inconscient, it must have
been done by some All-Soul in its emergence, by a process of which we can have
no knowledge and for the purpose of the evolution here, as adjuncts to it or as
its larger consequences, so that life and mind and spirit might be able to move
in fields of a freer scope with a repercussion of these greater powers and
experiences on the material self-expression. But against this hypothesis there stands
the fact that we find these higher worlds in our vision and experience of them
to be in no way based upon the material universe, in no way its results, but
rather greater terms of being, larger and freer ranges of consciousness, and
all the action of the material plane looks more like the result and not the
origin of these greater terms, derivatory from them, even
partly dependent on them in its evolutionary endeavour.
Immense ranges of powers, influences, phenomena descend covertly upon us from
the Overmind and the higher mental and vital ranges,
but of these only a part, a selection, as it were, or restricted number can
stage and realise themselves in the order of the
physical world; the rest await their time and proper circumstance for
revelation in physical term and form, for their part in the terrestrial1 evolution
which is at the same time an evolution of all the powers of the Spirit.
This
character of the other worlds defeats all our attempts to give the premier
importance to our own plane of being and to our own part in the mundane
manifestation. We do not create God as a myth of our consciousness, but are instruments
for a progressive manifestation of the Divine in the material being. We do not
create the gods, his powers, but rather such divinity as we manifest is the
partial reflection and the shaping here of eternal godheads. We do not create
the higher planes, but are intermediaries by which they reveal their light,
power, beauty in whatever form and scope can be given to them by Nature-force
on the material plane. It is the pressure of the Life-world which enables life
to evolve and develop here in
1 Necessarily, by terrestrial we do not mean this one
earth and its period of duration, but use earth in the wider root-sense of the Vedantic Prithivi, the
earth-principle creating habitations of physical form for the soul.
Page 780
the forms we already know; it is
that increasing pressure which drives it to aspire in us to a greater
revelation of itself and will one day deliver the mortal from his subjection to
the narrow limitations of his present incompetent and restricting physicality.
It is the pressure of the Mind-world which evolves and develops mind here and
helps us to find a leverage for our mental self-uplifting and expansion, so
that we may hope to enlarge continually our self of intelligence and even to
break the prison-walls of our matter-bound physical mentality. It is the
pressure of the supramental and spiritual worlds
which is preparing to develop here the manifest power of the Spirit and by it
open our being on the physical plane into the freedom and infinity of the superconscient Divine; that contact, that pressure can
alone liberate from the apparent Inconscience, which
was our starting-point, the all-conscient Godhead
concealed in us. In this order of things our human consciousness is the
instrument, the intermediary; it is the point in the development of light and
power out of the Inconscience at which liberation
becomes possible: a greater role than this we cannot attribute to it, but this
is great enough, for it makes our humanity all-important for the supreme
purpose of evolutionary Nature.
At
the same time there are some elements in our subliminal experience which raise
a point of question against any invariable priority of the other worlds to the
material existence. One such indication is that in the vision of after-death experience
there is a persistent tradition of residence in conditions which seem to be a supraphysical prolongation of earth-conditions,
earth-nature, earth-experience. Another is that, in the Life-worlds especially,
we find formulations which seem to resemble the inferior movements of
earth-existence; here are already embodied the principles of darkness, falsehood,
incapacity and evil which we have supposed to be consequent upon the evolution
out of the material Inconscience. It seems even to be
the fact that the vital worlds are the natural home of the Powers that most
disturb human life; this is indeed logical, for it is through our vital being
that they sway us and they must therefore be powers of a larger and more
powerful life-existence. The descent of Mind and Life into evolution need not
have created any such untoward developments of the
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limitation of being and
consciousness: for this descent is in its nature a limitation of knowledge;
existence and cognition and delight of being confine themselves in a lesser
truth and good and beauty and its inferior harmony, and move according to that
law of a narrower light, but in such a movement darkness and suffering and evil
are not obligatory phenomena. If we find them existing in these worlds of other
mind and other life, even though not pervading it but only occupying their
separate province, we must either conclude that they have come into existence
by a projection out of the inferior evolution, upward from below, by something
in the subliminal parts of Nature bursting there into a larger formation of the
evil created here, or that they were already created as part of a parallel
gradation to the involutionary descent, a gradation
forming a stair for evolutionary ascension towards Spirit just as the involutionary was a stair of the descent of the Spirit. In
the latter hypothesis the ascending gradation might have a double purpose. For
it would contain pre-formations of the good and evil that must evolve in the
earth as part of the struggle necessary for the evolutionary growth of the Soul
in Nature; these would be formations existing for themselves, for their own
independent satisfaction, formations that would present the full type of these
things, each in its separate nature, and at the same time they would exercise
on evolutionary beings their characteristic influence.
These worlds of
a larger Life would then hold in themselves both the more luminous and the
darker formations of our world's life in a medium in which they could arrive
freely at their independent expression, their own type's full freedom and natural
completeness and harmony for good or for evil,—if indeed that distinction
applies in these ranges,—a completeness and independence impossible here in our
existence where all is mingled in the complex interaction necessary to the
field of a many-sided evolution leading towards a final integration. For we
find what we call false, dark or evil seems there to have a truth of its own
and to be entirely content with its own type because it possesses that in a
full expression which creates in it a sense of a satisfied power of its own
being, an accord, a complete adaptation of all its circumstances to its
principle of existence; it enjoys there its
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own consciousness, its own
self-power, its own delight of being, obnoxious to our minds but to itself full
of the joy of satisfied desire. Those life impulses which are to earth-nature
inordinate and out of measure and appear here as perverse and abnormal, find in
their own province of being an independent fulfilment
and an unrestricted play of their type and principle. What is to us divine or
titanic, Rakshasic, demoniac and therefore
supernatural, is, each in its own domain, normal to itself and gives to the
beings that embody these things the feeling of self-nature and the harmony of
their own principle. Discord itself, struggle, incapacity, suffering enter into
a certain kind of life-satisfaction which would feel itself baulked or deficient
without them. When these powers are seen in their isolated working, building
their own life-edifices, as they do in those secret worlds where they dominate,
we perceive more clearly their origin and reason of existence and the reason
also for the hold they have on human life and the attachment of man to his own
imperfections, to his life-drama of victory and failure, happiness and
suffering, laughter and tears, sin and virtue. Here on earth these things exist
in an unsatisfied and therefore unsatisfactory and obscure state of struggle
and mixture, but there reveal their secret and their motive of being because
they are there established in their native power and full form of nature in
their own world and their own exclusive atmosphere. Man's heavens and hells or
worlds of light and worlds of darkness, however imaginative in their building, proceed
from a perception of these powers existing in their own principle and throwing
their influences on him in life from a beyond-life which provides the elements
of his evolutionary existence.
In the same way
as the powers of Life are self-founded, perfect and full in a greater Life
beyond us, so too the powers of Mind, its ideas and principles that influence
our earth-being, are found to have in the greater Mind-world their own field of
fullness of self-nature, while here in human existence they throw out only
partial formations which have much difficulty in establishing themselves
because of their meeting and mixture with other powers and principles; this
meeting, this mixture curbs their completeness, alloys their purity, disputes
and defeats their
Page 783
influence. These other worlds,
then, are not evolutionary, but typal; but it is one
though not the sole reason of their existence that they provide things that
must arise in the involutionary manifestation as well
as things thrown up in the evolution with a field of satisfaction of their own
significance where they can exist in their own right; this established
condition is a base from which their functions and workings can be cast as
elements into the complex process of evolutionary Nature.
If we look from
this point of view at man's traditional accounts of other-worldly existence, we
shall find that mostly they point to worlds of a larger Life liberated from the
restrictions and imperfections or incompletenesses of
Life in earth- nature. These accounts
are evidently built largely by imagination, but there is an element also of
intuition and divination, a feeling of what Life can be and surely is in some
domain of its manifested or its realisable nature;
there is also an element of true subliminal contact and experience. But the
mind of man translates what he sees or receives or contacts from other-nature into
figures proper to his own consciousness; they are his translations of supraphysical realities into his own significant forms and
images and through these forms and images he enters into communication with the
realities and can make them to a certain degree present and effective. The
experience of an after-death continuance of a modified earth-life may be explained
as due to this kind of translation; but it is also explainable partly as the
creation of a subjective post-mortal state in which he still lives in figures
of habitual experience before he enters into other-worldly realities, partly as
a passage through Life-worlds where the type of things expresses itself in
formations originative of those to which he was attached in his earthly body or
akin to them and therefore exercises a natural attraction on the vital being
after its exit from the body. But, apart from these subtler Life-states, the
traditional accounts of other-worldly existence contain, though as a rarer more
elevated element not included in the popular notion of these things, a higher
grade of states of existence which are clearly of a mental and not a vital
character and others founded on some spiritual-mental principle; these higher
principles are formulated in states of being into which our inner experience
can rise or the
Page 784
soul enter. The principle of
gradation we have accepted is therefore justified provided we recognise that it is one way of organising
our experience and that other ways proceeding from other viewpoints are
possible. For a classification can always be valid from the principle and
viewpoint adopted by it while from other principles and viewpoints another classification
of the same things can be equally valid. But for our purpose the system we have
chosen is of the greatest value because it is fundamental and answers to a
truth of the manifestation which is of the utmost practical importance; it helps
us to understand our own constituted existence and the course of the involution
and the evolutionary motion of Nature. At the same time we see that the other
worlds are not things quite apart from the material universe and earth-nature,
but penetrate and envelop it with their influences and have on it a secret
incidence of formative and directive force which is not easily calculable. This
organisation of our other-worldly knowledge and
experience supplies us with the clue to the nature and lines of action of this
incidence.
The
existence and influence of other worlds are a fact of primary importance for
the possibilities and for the scope of our evolution in terrestrial Nature. For
if the physical universe were the only field of manifestation of the infinite
Reality and at the same time the field of its whole manifestation, we should
have to suppose that, since all the principles of its being from Matter to
Spirit are entirely involved in the apparently inconscient
Force which is the basis of the first workings of this universe, they are being
evolved by it here completely and here solely, without any other aid or
pressure except that of the secret Superconscience
within it. There would then be a system of things in which the principle of
Matter must always remain the first principle, the essential and original
determining condition of manifested existence. Spirit might indeed in the end
arrive to a limited extent at its natural domination; it might make its basis
of physical matter a more elastic instrument not altogether prohibitive of the
action of its own highest law and nature or opposed to that action, as it now
is in its inelastic resistance. But Spirit would always be dependent upon
Matter for its field and its manifestation; it could have no other field: it
could not get outside it to another
Page 785
kind of manifestation; and within
it also it could not very well liberate any other principle of its being into
sovereignty over the material foundation; Matter would remain the one
persistent determinant of its manifestation. Life could not become dominant and
determinative, Mind could not become the master and creator; their boundaries
of capacity would be fixed by the capacities of Matter, which they might
enlarge or modify but would not be able to transform radically or liberate.
There would be no place for any free and full manifestation of any power of the
being, all would be limited for ever by the conditions of an obscuring material
formation. Spirit, Mind, Life would have no native field or complete scope of
their own characteristic power and principle. It is not easy to believe in the
inevitability of this self-limitation if Spirit is the creator and these
principles have an independent existence and are not products, results or
phenomena of the energy of Matter.
But,
given the fact that the infinite Reality is free in the play of its
consciousness, it is not bound to involve itself in the nescience of Matter
before it can at all manifest. It is possible for it to create just the
contrary order of things, a world in which the unity of spiritual being is the
matrix and first condition of any formation or action, the Energy at work is a self-aware
spiritual existence in movement, and all its names and forms are a
self-conscious play of the spiritual unity. Or it might be an order in which
the Spirit's innate power of conscious Force or Will would realise
freely and directly its own possibilities in itself and not, as here, through
the restricting medium of the Life-Force in matter; that realisation
would be at once the first principle of the manifestation and the object of all
its free and blissful action. It might be an order, again, in which the free
play of an infinite mutual self-delight in a multiplicity of beings conscious
not only of their concealed or underlying eternal unity but of their present
joy of oneness would be the object; in such a system the action of the
principle of self-existent Bliss would be the first principle and the universal
condition. Again, it might be a world-order in which the Supermind
would be the dominant principle from the beginning; the nature of the
manifestation would then be a multiplicity of beings finding through the free
and luminous
Page 786
play of their divine
individuality all the manifold joy of their difference in oneness.
Nor need the
series stop here: for we observe that with us Mind is hampered by Life in
Matter and finds all the difficulty possible in dominating the resistance of
these two different powers and that Life itself is similarly restricted by the mortality,
the inertia and the instability of Matter; but evidently there can be a
world-order in which neither of these two disabilities forms part of the first
conditions of existence. There is the possibility of a world in which Mind
would be from the first dominant, free to work upon its own substance or matter
as a quite plastic material, or where Matter would be quite evidently the
result of the universal Mind-Force working itself out in life. It is that even
here in reality; but here the Mind-Force is involved from the beginning, for a
long time subconscient, and, even when it has
emerged, never in free possession of itself, but subject to its encasing
material, while there it would be in possession of itself and master of its material,
which would be much more subtle and elastic than in a predominantly physical
universe. So too Life might have its own world-order where it would be
sovereign, able to deploy its own more elastic and freely variable desires and tendencies,
not menaced at every moment by disintegrating forces and therefore occupied
chiefly with the care of self-preservation and restricted in its play by this
state of precarious tension which limits its instincts of free formation, free self-gratification
and free adventure. The separate dominance of each principle of being is an
eternal possibility in the manifestation of being,—given always that they are
principles distinct in their dynamic power and mode of working, even though one
in original substance.
That could make
no difference if all this were only a philosophical possibility or a
potentiality in the being of Sachchidananda which it
never realises or has not yet realised,
or, if realised, has not brought within the scope of
the consciousness of beings living in the physical universe. But all our
spiritual and psychic experience bears affirmative witness, brings us always a
constant and, in its main principles, an invariable evidence of the existence
of higher worlds, freer planes of existence. Not having
Page 787
bound ourselves down, like so
much of modern thought, to the dogma that only physical experience or
experience based upon the physical sense is true, the analysis of physical
experience by the reason alone verifiable, and all else only result of physical
experience and physical existence and anything beyond this an error,
self-delusion and hallucination, we are free to accept this evidence and to
admit the reality of these planes. We see that they are, practically, different
harmonies from the harmony of the physical universe; they occupy, as the word
“plane” suggests, a different level in the scale of being and adopt a different
system and ordering of its principles. We need not inquire, for our present
purpose, whether they coincide in time and space with our own world or move in
a different field of space and in another stream of time,—in either case it is
in a more subtle substance and with other movements. All that directly concerns
us is to know whether they are different universes, each complete in itself and
in no way meeting, intercrossing or affecting the others, or are rather
different scales of one graded and interwoven system of being, parts therefore
of one complex universal system. The fact that they can enter into the field of
our mental consciousness would naturally suggest the validity of the second
alternative, but it would not by itself be altogether conclusive. But what we
find is that these higher planes are actually at every moment acting upon and
in communication with our own plane of being, although this action is naturally
not present to our ordinary waking or outer consciousness, because that is for
the most part limited to a reception and utilisation
of the contacts of the physical world: but the moment we either go back into
our subliminal being or enlarge our waking consciousness beyond the scope of the
physical contacts, we become aware of something of this higher action. We find
even that the human being can project himself partially into these higher
planes under certain conditions, even while in the body; a fortiori must he be
able to do it when out of the body, and to do it then completely, since there
is no longer the disabling condition of the physical life bound down to the
body. The consequences of this relation and this power of transference are of
immense importance. On the one side they immediately justify, at any rate as an
actual possibility,
Page 788
the ancient tradition of at least
a temporary sojourn of the human conscious being in other worlds than the
physical after the dissolution of the physical body. On the other side they
open to us the possibility of an action of the higher planes on the material
existence which can liberate the powers they represent, the powers of life,
mind and spirit for the evolutionary intention inherent within Nature by the
very fact of their embodiment in Matter.
These
worlds are not in their original creation subsequent in order to the physical
universe but prior to it,—prior, if not in time, in their consequential
sequence. For even if there is an ascending as well as a descending gradation,
this ascending gradation must be in its first nature a provision for the
evolutionary emergence in Matter, a formative power for its endeavour,
contributing to it helpful and adverse elements, and not a mere consequence of
the terrestrial evolution; for that is neither a rational probability nor has
it a spiritual or dynamic and pragmatic sense. In other words, the higher
worlds have not come into being by a pressure from the lower physical
universe,—let us say, from Sachchidananda in the
physical Inconscience, or else by the urge of his
being as it emerges from the Inconscience into Life
and Mind and Spirit and experiences the necessity of creating worlds or planes
in which those principles shall have a freer play and in which the human soul
may strengthen its vital, mental or spiritual tendencies. Still less are they
the creations of the human soul itself, whether its dreams or the result of the
constant self-projections of mankind in its dynamic and creative being beyond
the limits of the physical consciousness. The only thing that man clearly
creates in this direction is the reflex images of these planes in his own
embodied consciousness and the fitness of his own soul to respond to them, to
become aware of them, to participate consciously in the interweaving of their
influences with the action of the physical plane. He may indeed contribute the
results or projections of his own higher vital and mental action to the action
of these planes: but, if so, these projections are, after all, only a return of
the higher planes upon themselves, a return from the earth of their powers
which have come down from them to the earth-mind, since this higher
Page 789
vital and mental action is itself
the result of influences transmitted from above. It is possible also that he can
create a certain kind of subjective annexe to these supraphysical planes, or at least to the lower of them,
environments of a half-unreal character which are rather self-created envelopes
of his conscious mind and life than true worlds; they are the reflections of his
own being, an artificial environment corresponding to his attempt during life
to image these other worlds,—heavens and hells projected by the image-creating
faculty in his human power of conscious being. But neither of these two
contributions at all means a total creation of a real plane of being founded
and acting on its own separate principle.
These
planes or systems are then at least coeval and co-existent with that which
presents itself to us as the physical universe. We have been led to conclude
that the development of Life, Mind and Spirit in the physical being presupposes
their existence; for these powers are developed here by two co-operating
forces, an upward-tending force from below, an upward-drawing and
downward-pressing force from above. For there is the necessity in the Inconscient of bringing out what is latent within it, and
there is the pressure of the superior principles in the higher planes which not
only aids this general necessity to realise itself,
but may very largely determine the special ways in which it is eventually realised. It is this upward-drawing action and this
pressure, this insistence from above, which explain the constant influence of
the spiritual, mental and vital worlds upon the physical plane. It is evident
that, given a complex universe and seven principles interwoven in every part of
its system and naturally therefore drawn to act upon and respond to each other
wherever they can at all get at one another, such an action, such a constant
pressure and influence, is an inevitable consequence, must be inherent in the very
nature of the manifested universe.
A secret
continuous action of the higher powers and principles from their own planes
upon terrestrial being and nature through the subliminal self, which is itself
a projection from those planes into the world born of the Inconscience,
must have an effect and a significance. Its first effect has been the
liberation
Page 790
of Life and Mind out of Matter;
its last effect has been to assist the emergence of a spiritual consciousness,
a spiritual will and spiritual sense of existence in the terrestrial being so
that he is no longer solely preoccupied with his outermost life or with that
and mental pursuits and interests, but has learned to look within, to discover
his inner being, his spiritual self, to aspire to overpass earth and her
limitations. As he grows more and more inward, his boundaries mental, vital,
spiritual begin to broaden, the bonds that held Life, Mind, Soul to their first
limitations loosen or snap, and man the mental being begins to have a glimpse
of a larger kingdom of self and world closed to the first earth-life. No doubt,
so long as he lives mainly on his surface, he can only build a sort of
superstructure ideal and imaginative and ideative
upon the ground of his normal narrow existence.
But if he makes the inward movement which his own highest vision has held up
before him as his greatest spiritual necessity, then he will find there in his
inner being a larger Consciousness, a larger Life. An action from within and an
action from above can overcome the predominance of the material formula,
diminish and finally put an end to the power of the Inconscience,
reverse the order of the consciousness, substitute the Spirit for Matter as his
conscious foundation of being and liberate its higher powers to their complete
and characteristic expression in the life of the soul embodied in Nature.
Page 791