<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 3.2//EN">
<HTML>
<HEAD>
	<META HTTP-EQUIV="CONTENT-TYPE" CONTENT="text/html; charset=utf-8">
	<TITLE></TITLE>
	<META NAME="GENERATOR" CONTENT="Namo WebEditor v4.0">
	<META NAME="CREATED" CONTENT="20040108;2382200">
	<META NAME="CHANGED" CONTENT="20040218;450500">
	
</HEAD>
<BODY LANG="en">
<div align="center">
	<table border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" width="100%">
		<tr>
			<td>
<p align="center" style="border-bottom:1px solid black; text-indent:0.37cm; padding-top:0cm; padding-right:0cm; padding-bottom:0.07cm; padding-left:0cm; border-top-style:none; border-right-style:none; border-left-style:none; line-height:150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0"><B>THE QUEST AND THE GOAL</B></p>
&nbsp;</p>
<P LANG="en-US" ALIGN="center" STYLE="text-indent:0.37cm; line-height:150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0">
<b>
<FONT face="Times New Roman" size="4"><I>Man </I></FONT>
<FONT face="Times New Roman,sans-serif" size="4"><I>and
the Gods</I></FONT></b></P>
<P ALIGN="center" STYLE="text-indent:0.37cm; line-height:150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0">
&nbsp;</P>
<P LANG="en-US" ALIGN=CENTER STYLE="text-indent:0.37cm; line-height:150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0">
<B><span style="font-size:12pt;">1</span></B></P>
<P LANG="en-US" ALIGN=CENTER STYLE="text-indent:0.37cm; line-height:150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0">
&nbsp;</P>
<P LANG="en-US" ALIGN=JUSTIFY STYLE="text-indent:0.37cm; line-height:150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0">
<span style="font-size:12pt;">THE Earth symbolises and epitomises material Nature. It
is the body and substance, the very personification, of
uncon&shy;sciousness-Ignorance carried to the last limit and
concretised. It represents, figures the very opposite of the Reality
at the summit. The supreme and original Reality is the quaternary:
(1) Light, (2) Truth, (3) Love and (4) Life. They are the first and
primal godheads with whom creation starts and who preside over the
whole play of the manifestation. These gods that emanated out of the
supreme consciousness of the Divine Mother as her fundamental aspects
and personalities had automatically an absolute freedom of action and
movement, otherwise they would not be divine personalities. And this
freedom could be exercised and was in fact exercised in cutting the
tie with the mother consciousness, in order to follow a line of
independent and separate development instead of a merger life of
solidarity with the Supreme. The result was immediate and drastic-the
precipitation of a physical life and an earthly existence which
negated the very principles of the original nature of the godheads
and brought forth exactly their contraries: instead of Light there
brooded Darkness and Inconscience, Truth turned to Falsehood, Love
and Delight gave place to Hatred and Suffering and finally, instead
of Life and Immortality there appeared Death. That was how
separation, &quot;the disobedience&quot; of the Bible, caused the
distortion that turned the gods into Asuras, that was how Lucifer
became Satan.</span></P>
<P LANG="en-US" ALIGN=JUSTIFY STYLE="text-indent:0.37cm; line-height:150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0">
<span style="font-size:12pt;">And that was how Paradise was lost. But the story of
Paradise Regained is yet more marvellous. When the Divine Mother,</span></P>
<P LANG="en-US" ALIGN="center" STYLE="border-bottom:1px solid black; text-indent:0.37cm; padding-top:0cm; padding-right:0cm; padding-bottom:0.07cm; padding-left:0cm; border-top-style:none; border-right-style:none; border-left-style:none; line-height:150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0">
<FONT STYLE="font-size: 8pt"><span style="font-size:12pt;">Page –
267</span></FONT></P>
<P ALIGN="justify" STYLE="line-height:150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0">
<span style="font-size:12pt;">the creative infinite Consciousness found herself
parcelled out and scattered (even like the body of Sati borne about
by Shiva, in the well-known Indian legend) and lost in
unconsciousness, something shot down from the Highest into the
lowest, something in response to an appeal, a cry, as it were, from
the depth of the utter hopelessness in the heart of Matter and the
Inconscient. A dumb last-minute S O S from below – a </span><I><span style="font-size:12pt;">De
profundis clamavi-went </span></I><span style="font-size:12pt;">forth and the Grace descended: the Supreme
himself came down and entered into the scuttled dead particles of
earth's dust as a secret core of light and flame, just a spark out of
his own conscious substance. The Earth received the Grace and held it
in her bosom. Thus she had her soul born in her – the psychic being
that is to grow and evolve and bring about her redemption, her
transmutation into the divine substance.</span></P>
<P LANG="en-US" ALIGN=JUSTIFY STYLE="text-indent:0.37cm; line-height:150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0">
<span style="font-size:12pt;">This is the special privilege accorded to earth, </span><SPAN STYLE="font-size:12pt; text-decoration:none;"><I>viz.,</I></SPAN><span style="font-size:12pt;">
she has a soul, a spark consciousness imbedded in her unconscious
substance that came from the highest summit, from the supreme Divine
himself. And thus earth became the representative, the personified
form of the material universe; she became the mouthpiece of the
extended universe, the head and front of creation, so that in and
through her the supreme manifestation, the incarnation of the Divine
may take place.</span></P>
<P LANG="en-US" ALIGN=JUSTIFY STYLE="text-indent:0.37cm; line-height:150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0">
<span style="font-size:12pt;">The Earth has come out of the universe, has evolved out
of it as a distinct entity, carrying and developing within it the
end, the purpose for which God created the world out of Himself. And
as the earth epitomises the universe and becomes the instrument and
channel of an evolutionary manifestation, even so man takes up within
himself the earthly life and leads it to the high fulfilment intended
for it. Earth is there as the home of man, as his mother and nurse;
she has fashioned man out of her substratum and is seeking through
him the release, the growth and expression of her secret
consciousness.<BR>
</span></P>
<P LANG="en-US" ALIGN="center" STYLE="text-indent:0.37cm; line-height:150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0">
<B><span style="font-size:12pt;">2</span></B></P>
			<P LANG="en-US" ALIGN="center" STYLE="text-indent:0.37cm; line-height:150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0">
&nbsp;</P>
<P LANG="en-US" ALIGN="justify" STYLE="text-indent:0.37cm; line-height:150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0">
<span style="font-size:12pt;">The purpose of man's existence upon earth is the growth
of his consciousness. Each human being is a soul, a psyche, a spark
from the Spirit sent down into Matter, a ray from the</span></P>
<P LANG="en-US" ALIGN="center" STYLE="border-bottom:1px solid black; text-indent:0.37cm; padding-top:0cm; padding-right:0cm; padding-bottom:0.07cm; padding-left:0cm; border-top-style:none; border-right-style:none; border-left-style:none; line-height:150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0">
<FONT STYLE="font-size: 8pt"><span style="font-size:12pt;">Page –
268</span></FONT></P>
<P LANG="en-US" ALIGN=JUSTIFY STYLE="text-indent:0.37cm; line-height:150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0">
<span style="font-size:12pt;">Divine Light descended upon earth and housed in a
physical body. The spark, the ray is to attain the amplitude and
splendour of its original form in the divine consciousness, to
express that plenitude here below. This original, the archetype of
each and every individual embodied upon earth is the central being,
Jivatman. At the beginning the individual soul in terrestrial
evolution is just a tiny particle of consciousness: it evolves, that
is to say, grows and increases in stature and potency, through a
series of lives upon this earth, each life bringing its quota of
experience that serves to tend the flame. When the soul has thus
grown and finally reached its optimum, and is in union with its
original and archetype in the fullness of self-expression, what next?
What is its destiny thereafter, how does it live or move
henceforward?</span></P>
<P LANG="en-US" ALIGN=JUSTIFY STYLE="text-indent:0.37cm; line-height:150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0">
<span style="font-size:12pt;">Three courses are open to the perfected and completely
developed soul. First, it may remain, contented with its fullness,
self-gathered and self-sufficient, dwelling in its own domain – the
psychic world – and enjoying the even, equal, undisturbed felicity
and beatitude of union with the Divine. This status may perhaps not
be chosen by many or for a long time. The second line that the Psyche
can adopt is to come down or remain upon earth and take a share in
the fulfilment of the Divine Purpose in the world. That purpose is
the transformation of the physical, making the material an embodiment
of</span></P>
<P LANG="en-US" ALIGN=JUSTIFY STYLE="text-indent:0.37cm; line-height:150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0">
<span style="font-size:12pt;">the divine Light and Power and Bliss and Immortality. A
third development also may take place; this is not strictly speaking
normal, not the logical and inevitable happening in the course of
things, nor does it depend wholly upon any personal choice of the
psychic being, so to say. It occurs when the force of a higher
destiny operates, for a special work and at a special time. It is
when the psychic being is contacted with, made to identify itself
with, a godhead under a higher dispensation, when, in a word, a
divinity descends into a human soul.</span></P>
<P LANG="en-US" ALIGN=JUSTIFY STYLE="text-indent:0.37cm; line-height:150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0">
<span style="font-size:12pt;">The gods are especial powers and executive agents of the
one Divine. They move and act in a special way with a special end in
view. They are, we may say, highbrow entities: they carry things with
a high hand. That is to say, what they have got to do, they seek to
do without any consideration or computation of the means, without
regard to the pauses and hindrances that naturally attend all
terrestrial and human</span></P>
<P LANG="en-US" ALIGN="center" STYLE="border-bottom:1px solid black; text-indent:0.37cm; padding-top:0cm; padding-right:0cm; padding-bottom:0.07cm; padding-left:0cm; border-top-style:none; border-right-style:none; border-left-style:none; line-height:150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0">
<FONT STYLE="font-size: 8pt"><span style="font-size:12pt;">Page –
269</span></FONT></P>
<P LANG="en-US" ALIGN=JUSTIFY style="line-height: 150%; margin-top: 0; margin-bottom: 0">
<span style="font-size:12pt;">achievements. God said, let there be light, and there
was light. That is also the way of the gods. There is here an
imperial majesty and grandeur, a sweeping mastery and sovereign
indifference,<BR>
</span></P>
<P LANG="en-US" ALIGN=JUSTIFY STYLE="text-indent:1.03cm; line-height:150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0">
<span style="font-size:12pt;">Remote from the Force that cries out in its pain,</span><FONT FACE="Luxi Serif"><span style="font-size:12pt;">&sup1;</span></FONT><span style="font-size:12pt;">

</span></P>
<P LANG="en-US" ALIGN=JUSTIFY STYLE="text-indent:0.37cm; line-height:150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0">
<span style="font-size:12pt;">and<BR>
</span></P>
<P LANG="en-US" ALIGN=JUSTIFY STYLE="text-indent:1.01cm; line-height:150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0">
<span style="font-size:12pt;">Above joy and sorrow is that grandeur's walk:</span><FONT FACE="Luxi Serif"><span style="font-size:12pt;">&sup2;</span></FONT><span style="font-size:12pt;"><BR>
</span></P>
<P LANG="en-US" ALIGN=JUSTIFY STYLE="text-indent:0.37cm; line-height:150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0">
<span style="font-size:12pt;">The gods possess this high quality of crystal purity, of
a concentrated seeing will in which vision and execution form one
single simultaneous movement, of the taut yet perfectly serene rhythm
of a hero-consciousness. Something of that grandiose sweep of godly
march – the Virgilian </span><I><span style="font-size:12pt;">gradus divi – </span></I><span style="font-size:12pt;">is</span><I><span style="font-size:12pt;"> </span></I><span style="font-size:12pt;">echoed in
these Vedic lines hymned to Varuna:</span></P>
<P ALIGN=JUSTIFY STYLE="text-indent:0.37cm; line-height:150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0">
<I><span style="font-size:12pt;">Adabdh</span><FONT FACE="Luxi Serif"><span style="font-size:12pt;">Ä</span></FONT><span style="font-size:12pt;">ni varunasya
vrat</span><FONT FACE="Luxi Serif"><span style="font-size:12pt;">Ä</span></FONT><span style="font-size:12pt;">ni vicaka</span><FONT FACE="Luxi Serif"><span style="font-size:12pt;">ś</span></FONT><span style="font-size:12pt;">accandram</span><FONT FACE="Luxi Serif"><span style="font-size:12pt;">Ä</span></FONT><span style="font-size:12pt;">
naktameti</span></I></P>
<P ALIGN=JUSTIFY STYLE="text-indent:0.37cm; line-height:150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0">
<span style="font-size:12pt;">&quot;The moon comes out in the night revealing the
inviolable workings of Varuna.&quot;</span></P>
<P ALIGN=JUSTIFY STYLE="text-indent:0.37cm; line-height:150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0">
<span style="font-size:12pt;">Such are the gods, such is their nature:</span></P>
<P ALIGN=JUSTIFY STYLE="text-indent:0.37cm; line-height:150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0">
<span style="font-size:12pt;">The Spirit's free and absolute potencies Burn in the
solitude of the thoughts of God.</span><FONT FACE="Luxi Serif"><span style="font-size:12pt;">&sup3;</span></FONT></P>
<p align="justify" style="text-indent:0.37cm; line-height:150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0"><span style="font-size:12pt;">and</span></p>
<P ALIGN="justify" STYLE="text-indent:0.37cm; line-height:150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0">
<span style="font-size:12pt;">Unmoved by cry of revolt and ignorant prayer</span></P>
<P LANG="en-US" ALIGN="justify" STYLE="text-indent:2.01cm; margin-right:1.77cm; line-height:150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0">
<span style="font-size:12pt;">They reckon not our virtue and our sin,</span></P>
<P LANG="en-US" ALIGN="justify" STYLE="text-indent:2.01cm; margin-right:1.77cm; line-height:150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0">
<span style="font-size:12pt;">They bend not to the voices that implore.<sup>4</sup></span></P>
<P ALIGN="justify" STYLE="text-indent:0.37cm; line-height:150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0">
<span style="font-size:12pt;">
Human nature, human movement, is, however, different.
Man, the terrestrial creature, has developed as the result of a slow
growth, through struggle and suffering, the </span><I><span style="font-size:12pt;">sturm und drang </span></I><span style="font-size:12pt;">of
an arduous ascent. He knows of things which the gods do not. He has
an experience which even they, strange to say, covet. First of all,
it must be borne in mind that the gods</span></P>
			<P ALIGN="justify" STYLE="text-indent:0.37cm; line-height:150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0">
&nbsp;</P>
<P LANG="en-US" ALIGN=JUSTIFY STYLE="text-indent:0.37cm; line-height:150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0">
<span style="font-size:10pt;">1 Sri Aurobindo: </span><I><span style="font-size:10pt;">Savitri-Book </span></I><span style="font-size:10pt;">1, Canto 4</span></P>
<P LANG="en-US" ALIGN=JUSTIFY STYLE="text-indent:0.37cm; line-height:150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0">
<span style="font-size:10pt;">2 ibid</span></P>
<P LANG="en-US" ALIGN=JUSTIFY STYLE="text-indent:0.37cm; line-height:150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0">
<span style="font-size:10pt;">3 ibid 
</span></P>
<P LANG="en-US" ALIGN=JUSTIFY STYLE="text-indent:0.37cm; line-height:150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0">
<span style="font-size:10pt;">4 ibid</span></P>
<P LANG="en-US" ALIGN=CENTER STYLE="border-bottom:1px solid black; text-indent:0.37cm; padding-top:0cm; padding-right:0cm; padding-bottom:0.07cm; padding-left:0cm; border-top-style:none; border-right-style:none; border-left-style:none; line-height:150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0">
<FONT STYLE="font-size: 8pt"><span style="font-size:12pt;">Page –
270</span></FONT></P>
<P ALIGN=JUSTIFY STYLE="line-height:150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0">
<span style="font-size:12pt;">represent only one mode of consciousness, a fixed and
definite type – a god is bound by his godhood; but man embodies all
the modes of consciousness, he is an ever growing and changing type.
Man is an epitome of creation, he is coterminous with Nature. If he
is that within which is wholly divine – consciousness and bliss,
truth and immortality – phenomenally he is also quite the opposite
– earthly, unconsciousness, pain and suffering, ignorance and
falsehood, incapacity and death. If heaven is his father, the earth
is his mother</span><I><span style="font-size:12pt;"> – dyaur me </span><FONT FACE="Arial Narrow, sans-serif"><span style="font-size:12pt;">pit</span><FONT FACE="Luxi Serif"><span style="font-size:12pt;">Ä</span></FONT><span style="font-size:12pt;">
</span></FONT><span style="font-size:12pt;">m</span><FONT FACE="Luxi Serif"><span style="font-size:12pt;">Ä</span></FONT><span style="font-size:12pt;">t</span><FONT FACE="Luxi Serif"><span style="font-size:12pt;">Ä</span></FONT><span style="font-size:12pt;">
Prthiv</span><FONT FACE="Luxi Serif"><span style="font-size:12pt;">ī</span></FONT><span style="font-size:12pt;">riyam. </span></I><span style="font-size:12pt;">And all the
gradations in between he has in him and can become any.</span></P>
<P LANG="en-US" ALIGN=JUSTIFY STYLE="text-indent:0.37cm; line-height:150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0">
<span style="font-size:12pt;">Man possesses characters that mark him as an entity </span><I><span style="font-size:12pt;">sui
generis</span></I><span style="font-size:12pt;"> and give him the value that is his. First, toil and
suffering and more failures than success have given him the quality
of endurance and patience, of humility and quietness. That is the
quality of earth-nature – earth is always spoken of by the poets
and seers as all-bearing and all-forgiving. She never protests under
any load put upon her, never rises in revolt, never in a hurry or in
worry, she goes on with her appointed labour silently, steadily,
calmly, unflinchingly. Human consciousness can take infinite pains,
go through the infinite details of execution, through countless
repetitions and mazes: patience and perseverance are the very badge
and blazon of the tribe. Ribhus, the artisans of immortality –
children of Mahasaraswati – were originally men, men who. have
laboured into godhood. Human nature knows to wait, wait infinitely,
as it has all the eternity before it and can afford and is prepared
to continue and persist life after life. I do not say that all men
can do it and are of this nature; but there is this essential
capacity in human nature. The gods, who are usually described as the
very embodiment of calmness and firmness, of a serene and
concentrated will to achieve, nevertheless suffer ill any delay or
hindrance to their work. Man has not perhaps the even tenor, the
steadiness of their movement, even though intense and fast flowing;
but what man possesses is persistence through ups and downs-his path
is rugged with rise and fall, as the poet says. The steadiness or the
staying power of the gods contains something of the nature of
indifference, something hard in its grain, not unlike a crystal or a
diamond. But human patience, when it has formed and taken shape,
possesses a</span></P>
<P LANG="en-US" ALIGN=CENTER STYLE="border-bottom:1px solid black; text-indent:0.37cm; padding-top:0cm; padding-right:0cm; padding-bottom:0.07cm; padding-left:0cm; border-top-style:none; border-right-style:none; border-left-style:none; line-height:150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0">
<FONT STYLE="font-size: 8pt"><span style="font-size:12pt;">Page –
271</span></FONT></P>
<P ALIGN=JUSTIFY STYLE="line-height:150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0">
<span style="font-size:12pt;">mellowness, an understanding, a sweet reasonableness and
a resilience all its own. And because of its intimacy with the tears
of things, because of its long travail and calvary, human
consciousness is suffused with a quality that is peculiarly human and
humane-that of sympathy, compassion, comprehension, the psychic
feeling of closeness and oneness. The gods are, after all, egoistic;
unless in their supreme supramental status where they are one and
identical with the Divine himself; on the lower levels, in their own
domains, they are separate, more or less immiscible entities, as it
were; greater stress is laid here upon their individual functioning
and fulfilment than upon their solidarity. Even if they have not the
egoism of the Asuras that sets itself in revolt and antagonism to the
Divine, still they have to the fullest extent the sense of a separate
mission that each has to fulfil, which none else can fulfil and so
each is bound rigidly to its own orbit of activity. There is no
mixture in their workings – na </span><I><span style="font-size:12pt;">methate, </span></I><span style="font-size:12pt;">as the Vedas say;
the conflict of the later gods, the apple of discord that drove each
to establish his hegemony over the rest, as narrated in the
mythologies and popular legends, carry the difference to a degree
natural to the human level and human modes and reactions. The egoism
of the gods may have the gait of aristocracy about it, it has the
aloofness and indifference and calm nonchalance that go often with
nobility: it has a family likeness to the egoism of an ascetic, of a
saint – it is </span><I><span style="font-size:12pt;">s</span><FONT FACE="Luxi Serif"><span style="font-size:12pt;">Ä</span></FONT><span style="font-size:12pt;">ttwic; </span></I><span style="font-size:12pt;">still
it is egoism. It may prove even more difficult to break and dissolve
than the violent and ebullient </span><I><span style="font-size:12pt;">r</span><FONT FACE="Luxi Serif"><span style="font-size:12pt;">Ä</span></FONT><span style="font-size:12pt;">jasic
</span></I><span style="font-size:12pt;">pride of a vital being. Human failings in this respect are
generally more complex and contain all shades and rhythms. And yet
that is not the whole or dominant mystery of man's nature. His egoism
is thwarted at every step – from outside, by, the force of
circumstances, the force of counter-egoisms, and from inside, for
there is there the thin little voice that always </span><I><span style="font-size:12pt;">cuts </span></I><span style="font-size:12pt;">across
egoism's play and takes away from it something of its elemental blind
momentum. The gods know not of this division in their nature, this
schizophrenia, as the malady is termed nowadays, which is the source
of the eternal strain of melancholy in human nature of which Matthew
Arnold speaks, of the Shelleyan saddest thoughts: Nietzsche need not
have gone elsewhere in his quest for the origin and birth</span></P>
<P LANG="en-US" ALIGN=CENTER STYLE="border-bottom:1px solid black; padding-top:0cm; padding-right:0cm; padding-bottom:0.07cm; padding-left:0cm; border-top-style:none; border-right-style:none; border-left-style:none; line-height:150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0">
<FONT STYLE="font-size: 8pt"><span style="font-size:12pt;">Page –
272</span></FONT></P>
<P ALIGN=JUSTIFY style="line-height: 150%; margin-top: 0; margin-bottom: 0"><span style="font-size:12pt;">of Tragedy. A Socrates discontented, the Christ as the
Man of Sorrows, and Amitabha, the soul of pity and compassion are
peculiarly human phenomena. They are not merely human weaknesses and
failings that are to be brushed aside with a godlike disdain; but
they contain and yield a deeper sap of life and out of them a richer
fulfilment is being elaborated.</span></P>
<P LANG="en-US" ALIGN=JUSTIFY STYLE="text-indent:0.37cm; line-height:150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0">
<span style="font-size:12pt;">Human understanding, we know, is a tangled skein of
light and shade – more shade perhaps than light – of knowledge
and ignorance, of ignorance straining towards knowledge. And yet this
limited and earthly frame that mind is has something to give which
even the overmind of the gods does not possess and needs. It is
indeed a frame, even though perhaps a steel frame, to hold and fix
the pattern of knowledge, that arranges, classifies, consolidates
effective ideas, as they are translated into facts and events. It has
not the initiative, the creative power of the vision of a god, but it
is an indispensable aid, a precious instrument for the canalisation
and expression of that vision, for the intimate application of the
divine inspiration to physical life and external conduct. If nothing
else, it is a sort of blue print which an engineer of life cannot
forego if he has to execute his work of building a new life
accurately and beautifully and perfectly.</span></P>
			<P LANG="en-US" ALIGN=JUSTIFY STYLE="text-indent:0.37cm; line-height:150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0">
&nbsp;</P>
<P LANG="en-US" ALIGN=CENTER STYLE="text-indent:0.37cm; line-height:150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0">
<B><span style="font-size:12pt;">3</span></B></P>
<P ALIGN=JUSTIFY STYLE="text-indent:0.37cm; line-height:150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0">
<span style="font-size:12pt;"><BR>We have spoken of the stability, the fixity, the
rigidity even, of the god type and we contrasted it with the
variability, the many-sidedness, the multiple character of the human
consciousness. In another view, however, the tables are turned and
the opposite appears as the truth. Man, for example., has a physical
body and nothing is more definite and fixed and rigid than this
material sheath. The gods have no body, but they have a form which is
supple and changeful, not hard and crystallised like the human
figure. Gods, we said, are cosmic forces – lines (or vectors, if we
wish to be scientifically precise) of universal forces; this does not
mean that they have no shape or form. They too have a form and can be
recognised by it even as a human being is recognisable</span></P>
<P LANG="en-US" ALIGN=CENTER STYLE="border-bottom:1px solid black; text-indent:0.37cm; padding-top:0cm; padding-right:0cm; padding-bottom:0.07cm; padding-left:0cm; border-top-style:none; border-right-style:none; border-left-style:none; line-height:150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0">
<FONT STYLE="font-size: 8pt"><span style="font-size:12pt;">Page –
273</span></FONT></P>
<P ALIGN=JUSTIFY STYLE="line-height:150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0">
<span style="font-size:12pt;">by his body. In spite of variability the form retains
its identity. The form changes, for a god has the capacity to act in
different contexts at the same time; within his own universe a god is
multi-dimensional. The Indian seer and artist often seeks to convey
this character of the immortals by giving them a plurality of arms
and heads. In modern times the inspiration behind the surrealist
movement lies precisely in this attempt to express simultaneity of
diverse gestures and activities, a synthetic close-up of succeeding
moments and disparate objects or events. But in spite of all changes
Proteus remains Proteus and can be recognised as such by the vigilant
and careful eye. The human frame, we have said, is more fixed and
rigid, being made of the material substance. It has not evidently the
variability of the body of a god. And yet there is a deeper mystery:
the human body is not or need not be so inflexible as it appears to
be or as it usually is. It has considerable plastic capacities. We
would say that the human body holds a marvellous </span><I><span style="font-size:12pt;">juste milieu.</span></I><span style="font-size:12pt;">
By its solid concreteness it acts as a fortress for the inner
consciousness to dwell in safe from easy attacks of the hostiles: it
acts also as a firm weapon for the same inner consciousness to cut
into the material world and indent and impress its pattern of truth
upon an otherwise hard and refractory material made of ignorance and
obscurity and falsehood. Furthermore, it is supple enough to receive
and record into its grain the pattern and substance of the higher
reality. The image of the transubstantiation of bread and wine into
the flesh and blood of Christ is symbolic of the alchemy of which the
human body is capable when one knows how to treat it in occult
knowledge and power. The human body can suffer a sea-change which is
not within the reach of the radiant body of an immortal.</span></P>
<P ALIGN="center" STYLE="text-indent:0.37cm; line-height:150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0">
<B><span style="font-size:12pt;">4</span></B></P>
			<P ALIGN="center" STYLE="text-indent:0.37cm; line-height:150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0">
&nbsp;</P>
<P LANG="en-US" ALIGN=JUSTIFY STYLE="text-indent:0.37cm; line-height:150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0">
<span style="font-size:12pt;">Divine Love is something aloof, apart, beyond. Even then
it is there behind supporting, animating, helping all and everything.
It is indeed the secret Delight in things. It is the sense of utter
identity of Self and self. Its status is in the Transcendent where
Love and Life and Light are fused to</span><span style="font-size:12pt;">gether </span></P>
<P LANG="en-US" ALIGN=CENTER STYLE="border-bottom:1px solid black; text-indent:0.37cm; padding-top:0cm; padding-right:0cm; padding-bottom:0.07cm; padding-left:0cm; border-top-style:none; border-right-style:none; border-left-style:none; line-height:150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0">
<FONT STYLE="font-size: 8pt"><span style="font-size:12pt;">Page –
274</span></FONT></P>
<P ALIGN=JUSTIFY STYLE="line-height:150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0">
<span style="font-size:12pt;">into one single absolute reality. When it
expresses itself, that is to say, when it makes its presence felt as
such in its supreme nature, it seems almost like indifference, so
calm and tranquil and poised it is, wide and vast and far and away,
unlike anything human. Indeed human consciousness would view it
almost as heartlessness. It has the non-humanity of which A.E. speaks
in those famous lines:<BR>
</span></P>
<P LANG="en-US" ALIGN=JUSTIFY STYLE="margin-left:2.2cm; line-height:150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0">
<span style="font-size:12pt;">Like winds or waters were her ways:</span></P>
<P LANG="en-US" ALIGN=JUSTIFY STYLE="margin-left:2.2cm; line-height:150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0">
<span style="font-size:12pt;">They heed not immemorial cries;</span></P>
<P LANG="en-US" ALIGN=JUSTIFY STYLE="margin-left:2.2cm; line-height:150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0">
<span style="font-size:12pt;">They move to their high destinies</span></P>
<P LANG="en-US" ALIGN=JUSTIFY STYLE="margin-left:2.2cm; line-height:150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0">
<span style="font-size:12pt;">Beyond the little voice that prays.</span></P>
<p align="justify" style="margin-left:2.2cm; line-height:150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0"><span style="font-size:12pt;">&nbsp;</span></p>
<P LANG="en-US" ALIGN="justify" STYLE="text-indent:0.37cm; line-height:150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0">
<span style="font-size:12pt;">or to which Victor Hugo gives a very similar expression:<BR>
</span></P>
<P LANG="en-US" ALIGN="justify" STYLE="margin-left:2.2cm; line-height:150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0">
<span style="font-size:12pt;">Nos destins t</span><FONT FACE="Luxi Serif"><span style="font-size:12pt;">&eacute;</span></FONT><span style="font-size:12pt;">n</span><FONT FACE="Luxi Serif"><span style="font-size:12pt;">&eacute;</span></FONT><span style="font-size:12pt;">breux
vont sous des lois immenses</span></P>
<P LANG="en-US" ALIGN="justify" STYLE="margin-left:2.2cm; line-height:150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0">
<span style="font-size:12pt;">Que rien ne d</span><FONT FACE="Luxi Serif"><span style="font-size:12pt;">&eacute;</span></FONT><span style="font-size:12pt;">concerte
et que rien n'attendrit.</span></P>
<P LANG="en-US" ALIGN="justify" STYLE="margin-left:2.2cm; line-height:150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0">
<span style="font-size:12pt;">Vous ne pouvez avoir de subites cl</span><FONT FACE="Luxi Serif"><span style="font-size:12pt;">&eacute;</span></FONT><span style="font-size:12pt;">mences</span></P>
<P LANG="en-US" ALIGN="justify" STYLE="margin-left:2.2cm; line-height:150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0">
<span style="font-size:12pt;">Qui d</span><FONT FACE="Luxi Serif"><span style="font-size:12pt;">&eacute;</span></FONT><span style="font-size:12pt;">rangent le
monde, </span><FONT FACE="Luxi Serif"><span style="font-size:12pt;">&ocirc;</span></FONT><span style="font-size:12pt;"> Dieu, tranquille
esprit!</span><FONT FACE="Luxi Serif"><span style="font-size:12pt;">&sup1;</span></FONT></P>
<P LANG="en-US" ALIGN=JUSTIFY STYLE="text-indent:0.37cm; line-height:150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0">
<span style="font-size:12pt;">This is the divine love, love proper to Maheshwari. But
there is another love more intimate, close, human-the love of
Mahalakshmi. This is the love that comes down here upon earth and
takes on an earthly quality, a terrestrial vibration. In other words,
it has what we call the psychic quality that characterises the human
feeling with its peculiar charm and sweetness and intensity and
magic. It goes with&shy;out saying that by human we do not 'mean here
the gross human thing which is more animal than human, a matter of
the external heart, made up of crude passion and egoistic demand, but
that which is the truth of all this deviation and deformation, lying
behind in the inner heart. The psychic being is a special creation in
and for earth, in and for man, the earthly creature. It is, as we
have said, divine Grace imbedded in Matter.</span></P>
<P LANG="en-US" ALIGN=JUSTIFY STYLE="text-indent:0.37cm; line-height:150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0">
<span style="font-size:12pt;">The gods are glorious beings; they are aspects and
personalities of the Divine, presiding and ruling over the cosmic
laws, each with his own truth and norm and dominion,<BR>
</span></P>
<P LANG="en-US" ALIGN=JUSTIFY STYLE="text-indent:0.37cm; line-height:150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0">
<FONT STYLE="font-size: 9pt"><FONT FACE="Luxi Serif"><span style="font-size:10pt;">&sup1;
</span></FONT><span style="font-size:10pt;">Our dark destinies move under vast laws that nothing diverts,
nothing softens. Thou canst not have sudden clemencies that disturb
the world, 0 God, Spirit tranquil!-Victor Hugo, </span><I><span style="font-size:10pt;">A Villequier.</span></I></FONT></P>
<P LANG="en-US" ALIGN="center" STYLE="border-bottom:1px solid black; font-style:normal; text-indent:0.37cm; padding-top:0cm; padding-right:0cm; padding-bottom:0.07cm; padding-left:0cm; border-top-style:none; border-right-style:none; border-left-style:none; line-height:150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0">
<FONT STYLE="font-size: 8pt"><span style="font-size:12pt;">Page –
275</span></FONT></P>
<P ALIGN=JUSTIFY STYLE="text-indent:0.37cm; line-height:150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0">
&nbsp;</P>
<P LANG="en-US" ALIGN=JUSTIFY STYLE="font-style:normal; line-height:150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0">
<span style="font-size:12pt;">although, in the higher status, all work together and
harmoniously. Even then they do not possess a soul, a psychic core of
being. They are forms and powers of consciousness organised round a
divine truth, a typal Idea; but they do not have this exquisite
presence secretly seated in the heart, which is the privilege of the
terrestrial creature.</span></P>
<P LANG="en-US" ALIGN=JUSTIFY STYLE="text-indent:0.37cm; line-height:150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0">
<span style="font-size:12pt;">And the exquisiteness, the special quality of this inner
Heart is mostly if not wholly derived from a particular factor of
terrestrial evolution. For the journey here is a sacrifice, a passage
through pain and suffering, even through frustration and death. The
tears that accompany the mortal being in his calvary of an earthly
life serve precisely as a holy unction of purification, give a sweet
intensity to all his urges in the progressive march to Resurrection.
This is the Immanent Divine who has to be worshipped and realised as
much as the Transcendent Divine, if man is to fulfil himself wholly
and earth justify its existence.</span></P>
<P LANG="en-US" ALIGN=JUSTIFY STYLE="text-indent:0.37cm; line-height:150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0">
<span style="font-size:12pt;">The legend of the great ascetic Sankaracharya going
straight to the realisation of the Supreme knowledge in Brahman but
obliged to come down and enter into another earthly body for the
experience of love, even earthly love, in order to complete his
realisation is instructive and illustrates our point.</span></P>
<P LANG="en-US" ALIGN=JUSTIFY STYLE="text-indent:0.37cm; line-height:150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0">
<span style="font-size:12pt;">As the human aspiration is to reach out towards
divinity, the gods too at times are not satisfied with their closed
divine status. They lean down to help humanity, to bring it up into
their consciousness; but also they seek this contact and unification
for their own sake, for a change and transformation in themselves;
they may seek to rise further in a higher status of consciousness or
they may wish to participate in the earthly travail, in the human
endeavour. In either case the channel lies through the human
consciousness. In the Vedas the gods always look to men, almost
depend upon them for their own fulfilment and enrichment. Men ask the
gods for wealth and plenty – material as well as spiritual – the
gods too ask from men the sacrifice, the sacrifice that pours out the
substance of the human reality upon which they feed and grow. The
Gita speaks of the same covenant – the interchange of gifts between
the two, each increasing the other and both attaining the highest
good.</span></P>
<P LANG="en-US" ALIGN="center" STYLE="border-bottom:1px solid black; text-indent:0.37cm; padding-top:0cm; padding-right:0cm; padding-bottom:0.07cm; padding-left:0cm; border-top-style:none; border-right-style:none; border-left-style:none; line-height:150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0">
<FONT STYLE="font-size: 8pt"><span style="font-size:12pt;">Page –
276</span></FONT></P>
<P ALIGN="right" style="line-height: 150%; margin-top: 0; margin-bottom: 0">
<a title="Home" href="-00_-Content"><img src="/Nolini/Volume-1/_Gif_Image/house01_green.gif" width="28" height="23" border="0" alt="house06_white.gif"></a></P>
<div align="right"> 
	<p style="line-height: 150%; margin-top: 0; margin-bottom: 0"> </div>
			</td>
		</tr>
	</table>
</div>
</BODY>
</HTML>