Great Throughts Treasury

"The world is only a partial manifestation of the Godhead, it is not that Divinity. The Godhead, it is not that Divinity. The Godhead is infinitely greater than any natural manifestation can be. By his very infinity, by his absolute freedom, he exists beyond all possibility of integral formulation in any scheme of worlds or extension of cosmic Nature, however wide, complex, endlessly varied this and every world may seem to us."

"I saw the Omnipotent's flaming pioneers Over the heavenly verge which turns towards life Come crowding down the amber stairs of birth; Forerunners of a divine multitude, Out of the paths of the morning star they came Into the little room of mortal life. I saw them cross the twilight of an age, The sun-eyed children of a marvellous dawn, The great creators with wide brows of calm, The massive barrier-breakers of the world And wrestlers with destiny in her lists of will, The labourers in the quarries of the gods, The messengers of the Incommunicable, The architects of immortality."

"A memory steals in from lost heavens of Truth, A wide release comes near, a Glory calls, A might looks out, an estranged felicity. In glamorous passages of half-veiled light Wandering, a brilliant shadow of itself, This quick uncertain leader of blind gods, This tender of small lamps, this minister serf Hired by a mind and body for earth-use Forgets its work mid crude realities; It recovers its renounced imperial right, It wears once more a purple robe of thought And knows itself the Ideal's seer and king, Communicant and prophet of the Unborn, Heir to delight and immortality. All things are real that here are only dreams, In our unknown depths sleeps their reserve of truth, On our unreached heights they reign and come to us In thought and muse trailing their robes of light."

"An errant ray from the immortal Mind Accepted the earth's blindness and became Our human thought, servant of Ignorance. An exile, labourer on this unsure globe Captured and driven in Life's nescient grasp, Hampered by obscure cell and treacherous nerve, It dreams of happier states and nobler powers, The natural privilege of unfallen gods, Recalling still its old lost sovereignty. Amidst earth's mist and fog and mud and stone It still remembers its exalted sphere And the high city of its splendid birth."

"As in a studio of creative Death The giant sons of Darkness sit and plan The drama of the earth, their tragic stage. All who would raise the fallen world must come Under the dangerous arches of their power; For even the radiant children of the gods To darken their privilege is and dreadful right. None can reach heaven who has not passed through hell. This too the traveller of the worlds must dare."

"An instant's visitor the godhead shone. On life's thin border awhile the Vision stood And bent over earth's pondering forehead curve. Interpreting a recondite beauty and bliss In colour's hieroglyphs of mystic sense, It wrote the lines of a significant myth Telling of a greatness of spiritual dawns, A brilliant code penned with the sky for page."

"Then through the pallid rift that seemed at first Hardly enough for a trickle from the suns, Outpoured the revelation and the flame. The brief perpetual sign recurred above. A glamour from unreached transcendences Iridescent with the glory of the Unseen, A message from the unknown immortal Light Ablaze upon creation's quivering edge, Dawn built her aura of magnificent hues And buried its seed of grandeur in the hours."

"One lucent corner windowing hidden things Forced the world's blind immensity to sight. The darkness failed and slipped like a falling cloak From the reclining body of a god."

"Insensibly somewhere a breach began: A long lone line of hesitating hue Like a vague smile tempting a desert heart Troubled the far rim of life's obscure sleep. Arrived from the other side of boundlessness An eye of deity peered through the dumb deeps; A scout in a reconnaissance from the sun, It seemed amid a heavy cosmic rest, The torpor of a sick and weary world, To seek for a spirit sole and desolate Too fallen to recollect forgotten bliss."

"It was as though even in this Nought's profound, Even in this ultimate dissolution's core, There lurked an unremembering entity, Survivor of a slain and buried past Condemned to resume the effort and the pang, Reviving in another frustrate world."

"The impassive skies were neutral, empty, still. Then something in the inscrutable darkness stirred; A nameless movement, an unthought Idea Insistent, dissatisfied, without an aim, Something that wished but knew not how to be, Teased the Inconscient to wake Ignorance."

"But Savitri answered meeting scorn with scorn, The mortal woman to the dreadful Lord: “Who is this God imagined by thy night, Contemptuously creating worlds disdained, Who made for vanity the brilliant stars? Not he who has reared his temple in my thoughts And made his sacred floor my human heart. My God is will and triumphs in his paths, My God is love and sweetly suffers all."

"Live within; be not shaken by outward happenings. There is nothing small in God's eyes; let there be nothing small in thine. A God who cannot smile, could not have created this humorous universe. The meeting of man and God must always mean a penetration and entry of the divine into the human and a self-immergence of man in the Divinity. In God's providence there is no evil, but only good or its preparation. Others boast of their love for God. My boast is that I did not love God; it was He who loved me and sought me out and forced me to belong to Him. When I was mounting upon ever higher crests of His joy, I asked myself whether there was no limit to the increase of bliss and almost I grew afraid of God's embraces. My lover took away my robe of sin and I let it fall, rejoicing; then he plucked at my robe of virtue, but I was ashamed and alarmed and prevented him. It was not till he wrested it from me by force that I saw how my soul had been hidden from me. Our actual enemy is not any force exterior to ourselves, but our own crying weaknesses, our cowardice, our selfishness, our hypocrisy, our purblind sentimentalism. He who would win high spiritual degrees, must pass endless tests and examinations. But most are anxious only to bribe the examiner. Suffering makes us capable of the full force of the Master of Delight; it makes us capable also to bear the utter play of the Master of Power. Pain is the key that opens the gates of strength; it is the high-road that leads to the city of beatitude. Turn all things to honey; this is the law of divine living. Delight is the secret. Learn of pure delight and thou shalt learn of God. The whole world yearns after freedom, yet each creature is in love with his chains; this is the first paradox and inextricable knot of our nature. Indian religion has always felt that since the minds, the temperaments and the intellectual affinities of men are unlimited in their variety, a perfect liberty of thought and of worship must be allowed to the individual in his approach to the Infinite. God took a child to fondle him in His bosom of delight; but the mother wept and would not be consoled because her child no longer existed. Care not for time and success. Act out thy part, whether it be to fail or to prosper. Forgiveness is praised by the Christian and the Vaishnava, but for me, I ask, "What have I to forgive and whom?" Live according to Nature, runs the maxim of the West; but according to what nature, the nature of the body or the nature which exceeds the body ? This first we ought to determine. When I approached God at that time, I hardly had a living faith in Him. The agnostic was in me, the atheist was in me, the sceptic was in me and I was not absolutely sure that there was a God at all. I did not feel His presence. Yet something drew me to the truth of the Vedas, the truth of the Gita, the truth of the Hindu religion. I felt there must be a mighty truth somewhere in this Yoga, a mighty truth in this religion based on the Vedanta. Spirituality is the master key of the Indian mind. It is this dominant inclination of India which gives character to all the expressions of her culture. In fact, they have grown out of her inborn spiritual tendency of which her religion is a natural out flowering. The Indian mind has always realized that the Supreme is the Infinite and perceived that to the soul in Nature the Infinite must always present itself in an infinite variety of aspects. The seers of ancient India had, in their experiments and efforts at spiritual training and the conquest of the body, perfected a discovery which in its importance to the future of human knowledge dwarfs the divinations of Newton and Galileo, even the discovery of the inductive and experimental method in Science was not more momentous. O soldier and hero of God, where for thee is sorrow or shame or suffering? For thy life is a glory, thy deeds a consecration, victory thy apotheosis, defeat thy triumph. Evolution is not finished; reason is not the last word nor the reasoning animal the supreme figure of Nature. As man emerged out of the animal, so out of man the superman emerges. Genius discovers a system; average talent stereotypes it till it is shattered by fresh genius. It is dangerous for an army to be led by veterans; for on the other side God may place Napoleon."

"It was the hour before the Gods awake. Across the path of the divine Event The huge foreboding mind of Night, alone In her unlit temple of eternity, Lay stretched immobile upon Silence' marge. Almost one felt, opaque, impenetrable, In the sombre symbol of her eyeless muse The abysm of the unbodied Infinite; A fathomless zero occupied the world."

"The yoga we practice is not for ourselves alone, but for the Divine; its aim is to work out the will of the Divine in the world, to effect a spiritual transformation and to bring down a divine nature and a divine life into the mental, vital and physical nature and life of humanity. Its object is not personal Mukti, although Mukti is a necessary condition of the yoga, but the liberation and transformation of the human being. "

"When we have passed beyond knowings, then we shall have Knowledge. Reason was the helper; Reason is the bar. When we have passed beyond willings, then we shall have Power. Effort was the helper; Effort is the bar. When we have passed beyond enjoyings, then we shall have Bliss. Desire was the helper; Desire is the bar. When we have passed beyond individualising, then we shall be real Persons. Ego was the helper; Ego is the bar. When we have passed beyond humanity, then we shall be the Man. The Animal was the helper; the Animal is the bar. Transform reason into ordered intuition; let all thyself be light. This is thy goal. Transform effort into an easy and sovereign overflowing of the soul-strength; let all thyself be conscious force. This is thy goal. Transform enjoying into an even and objectless ecstasy; let all thyself be bliss. This is thy goal. Transform the divided individual into the world-personality; let all thyself be the divine. This is thy goal. Transform the Animal into the Driver of the herds; let all thyself be Krishna. This is thy goal."

"A soul shall wake in the Inconscient's house; The mind shall be God-vision's tabernacle, The body intuition's instrument, And life a channel for God's visible power The Spirit shall look out through Matter's gaze And Matter shall reveal the Spirit's face. Then man and superman shall be at one And all the earth become a single life. "

"A certain class of minds shrink from aggressiveness as if it were a sin. Their temperament forbids them to feel the delight of battle and they look on what they cannot understand as something monstrous and sinful. ?Heal hate by love, drive out injustice by justice, slay sin by righteousness? is their cry. Love is a sacred name, but it is easier to speak of love than to love. The love which drives out hate, is a divine quality of which only one man in a thousand is capable. A saint full of love for all mankind possesses it, a philanthropist consumed with the desire to heal the miseries of the race possesses it, but the mass of mankind do not and cannot rise to that height. Politics is concerned with masses of mankind and not with individuals. To ask masses of mankind to act as saints, to rise to the height of divine love and practice it in relation to their adversaries or oppressors is to ignore human nature. It is to set a premium on injustice and violence by paralyzing the hand of the deliverer when raised to strike. The Gita is the best answer to those who shrink from battle as a sin and aggression as a lowering of morality."

"A God who cannot smile, could not have created this humorous universe."

"A poet of sweetness and love who has done much to awaken Bengal, has written deprecating the Boycott as an act of hate. The saintliness of spirit which he would see brought into politics is the reflex of his own personality coloring the political ideals of a sattwic race. But in reality the Boycott is not an act of hate. It is an act of self-defense, of aggression for the sake of self- preservation. To call it an act of hate is to say that a man who is being slowly murdered, is not justified in striking out at his murderer. To tell that man that he must desist from using the first effective weapon that comes to his hand because the blow would be an act of hate, is precisely on a par with this deprecation of boycott. Doubtless the self-defender is not precisely actuated by feelings of holy sweetness towards his assailant, but to expect so much from human nature is impracticable. Certain religions demand it, but they have never been practiced to the letter by their followers."

"A thought is an arrow shot at the truth; it can hit a point, but not cover the whole target. But the archer is too well satisfied with his success to ask anything farther."

"A vast deception was the law of things; only by that deception they could live. An unsubstantial Nihil guaranteed the falsehood of the forms this Nature took and made them seem awhile to be and live. A borrowed magic drew them from the Void; they took a shape and stuff that was not theirs and showed a color that they could not keep, mirrors to a phantasm of reality. Each rainbow brilliance was a splendid lie; a beauty unreal graced a glamour face. Nothing could be relied on to remain: joy nurtured tears and good an evil proved, but never out of evil one plucked good: love ended early in hate, delight killed with pain, truth into falsity grew and death ruled life. A Power that laughed at the mischief of the world, an irony that joined the world?s contraries and flung them into each other?s arms to strive, put a sardonic rictus on God?s face."

"A sort of atavism is at work in the Indian consciousness at the present moment which is drawing it back into the spirit of the fathers of the race who laid the foundations of our being thousands of years ago. Perhaps as a reaction from the excessively outward direction which our life had taken since the European invasion, the spirit of the race has taken refuge in the sources of its past and begun to bathe in the fountains of its being. A reversion such as this is the sole cure for national decay. Every nation has certain sources of vitality which have made it what it is and can always, if drawn upon in time, protect it from disintegration. The secret of its life is to be found in the recesses of its own being."

"Action is the first power of life. Nature begins with force and its works which, once conscious in man, become will and its achievements; therefore it is that by turning his action Godwards the life of man best and most surely begins to become divine. It is the door of first access, the starting-point of the initiation. When the will in him is made one with the divine will and the whole action of the being proceeds from the Divine and is directed towards the Divine, the union in works is perfectly accomplished. But works fulfil themselves in knowledge; all the totality of works, says the Gita, finds its rounded culmination in knowledge, sarvam karm?khilam j¤?ne parisam?pyate. By union in will and works we become one in the omnipresent conscious being from whom all our will and works have their rise and draw their power and in whom they fulfil the round of their energies. And the crown of this union is love; for love is the delight of conscious union with the Being in whom we live, act and move, by whom we exist, for whom alone we learn in the end to act and to be. That is the trinity of our powers, the union of all three in God to which we arrive when we start from works as our way of access and our line of contact."

"All can be done if the god-touch is there."

"Aggression is unjust only when unprovoked, violence unrighteous when used wantonly or for unrighteous ends. It is a barren philosophy which applies a mechanical rule to all actions, or takes a word [non-violence] and tries to fit all human life into it... Ramdas is not complete without Shivaji. To maintain justice and prevent the strong from despoiling and the weak from being oppressed is the function for which the Kshatriya was created. Therefore, says Srikrishna in the Mahabharat, God created battle and armour, the sword, the bow and the dagger."

"All conduct and action are part of the movement of a Power, a Force infinite and divine in its origin and secret sense and will even though the forms of it we see seem inconscient or ignorant, material, vital, mental, finite, which is working to bring out progressively something of the Divine and Infinite in the obscurity of the individual and collective nature. This power is leading towards the Light, but still through the Ignorance. It leads man first through his needs and desires; it guides him next through enlarged needs and desires modified and enlightened by a mental and moral ideal. It is preparing to lead him to a spiritual realization that overrides these things and yet fulfils and reconciles them in all that is divinely true in their spirit and purpose."

"And in the present balance of humanity there is seldom any real danger of exaggerated individualism breaking up the social integer. There is continually a danger that the exaggerated pressure of the social mass by its heavy unenlightened mechanical weight may suppress or unduly discourage the free development of the individual spirit. For man in the individual can be more easily enlightened, conscious, open to clear influences; man in the mass is still obscure, half-conscious, ruled by universal forces that escape its mastery and its knowledge. Against this danger of suppression and immobilization Nature in the individual reacts. It may react by an isolated resistance ranging from the instinctive and brutal revolt of the criminal to the complete negation of the solitary and ascetic. It may react by the assertion of an individualistic trend in the social idea, may impose it on the mass consciousness and establish a compromise between the individual and the social demand. But a compromise is not a solution; it only shelves the difficulty and in the end increases the complexity of the problem and multiplies its issues."

"All that is born and destroyed is reborn in the sweep of the ages; life like a decimal ever recurring repeats the old figure."

"An indication of the immense changes which are coming over our country, is the sudden leaping into being of new movements and organizations which are, by their very existence, evidence of revolutions in public feeling and omens of the future. The dead bones live indeed and the long sleep of the ages is broken. The Moslem League was indicative of much, the Hindu Sabha is indicative of yet more. The Nationalist Party, while in entire disagreement with the immediate objects and spirit of the league, welcomed its birth as a sign of renovated political life in the Mahomedan community. But the Mahomedan community was always coherent, united and separately self-conscious. The strength of Islam lay in its unity and cohesion, the fruit of a long discipline in equality and brotherhood, the strength of the Hindu in flexibility, progressiveness, elasticity, a divination of necessary changes, broad ideas, growing aspirations, the fruit of a long discipline in intellectual and moral sensitiveness. The Moslem League meant that the Mahomedan was awakening to the need of change, the growth of aspiration in the world around him, ? not yet to the broad ideas modern life demanded. The Hindu Sabha means that the Hindu is awakening to the need of unity and cohesion."

"And what is the end of the whole matter? As if honey could taste itself and all its drops together and all its drops could taste each other and each the whole honeycomb as itself, so should the end be with God and the soul of man and the universe."

"And what is the middle? Division that strives towards a multiple unity, ignorance that labors towards a flood of varied light, pain that travails towards the touch of an unimaginable ecstasy. For all these things are dark figures and perverse vibrations."

"Another question is the use of violence in the furtherance of boycott. This is, in our view, purely a matter of policy and expediency. An act of violence brings us into conflict with the law and such a conflict maybe inexpedient for a race circumstanced like ours. But the moral question does not arise. The argument that to use violence is to interfere with personal liberty involves a singular misunderstanding of the very nature of politics. The whole of politics is an interference with personal liberty. Law is such an interference. Protection is such an interference, the rule which makes the will of the majority prevail is such an interference. The right to prevent such use of personal liberty as will injure the interests of the race, is the fundamental law of society. From this point of view the nation is only using its primary right when it restrains the individual from buying or selling foreign goods."

"As in all infant sciences, the universal habit of the human mind - to take a partial or local truth, generalize it unduly and try to explain a whole field of nature in its narrow terms - runs riot here (in psychoanalysis). Moreover, the exaggeration of the importance of suppressed sexual complexes is a dangerous falsehood."

"Be conscious first of thyself within, then think and act. All living thought is a world in preparation; all real act is a thought manifested. The material world exists because an Idea began to play in divine self-consciousness."

"But few are those who tread the sunlit path; only the pure in soul can walk in light."

"But all life, when we look behind its appearances, is a vast Yoga of Nature who attempts in the conscious and the subconscious to realize her perfection in an ever-increasing expression of her yet unrealized potentialities and to unite herself with her own divine reality. In man, her thinker, she for the first time upon this Earth devises self-conscious means and willed arrangements of activity by which this great purpose may be more swiftly and puissantly attained. Yoga, as Swami Vivekananda has said, may be regarded as a means of compressing one's evolution into a single life or a few years or even a few months of bodily existence."

"Arise - transcend thyself. Thou art man & the whole nature of man is to become more than himself."

"But few are those who tread the sunlit path; by our stumbling the world is perfected do not belong to the past dawns, but to the moons of future."

"Below even our most obscure physical consciousness is a subconscious being in which as in a covering and supporting soil are all manner of hidden seeds that sprout up, unaccountably to us, on our surface and into which we are constantly throwing fresh seeds that prolong our past and will influence our future,--a subconscious being, obscure, small in its motions, capriciously and almost fantastically sub-rational, but of an immense potency for the earth-life. Again behind our mind, our life, our conscious physical there is a larger subliminal consciousness,--there are inner mental, inner vital, inner more subtle physical reaches supported by an inmost psychic existence which is the connecting soul of all the rest; and in these hidden reaches too lie a mass of numerous pre-existent personalities which supply the material, the motive-forces, the impulsions of our developing surface existence. For in each of us here there may be one central person, but also a multitude of subordinate personalities created by the past history of its manifestation or by expressions of it on these inner planes which support its present play in this external material cosmos..."

"But the bodily life in man is a base, not the aim, his first condition and not his last determinant. In the just idea of the ancients man is essentially the thinker, the Manu, the mental being who leads the life and the body."

"But that immergence is not in the nature of an annihilation. Extinction is not the fulfilment of all this search and passion, suffering and rapture. The game would never have been begun if that were to be its ending."

"But still there is a great difference between the spiritual and the purely material and mental view of existence. The spiritual view holds that the mind, life, body are man's means and not his aims and even that they are not his last and highest means; it sees them as his outer instrumental self and not his whole being. It sees the infinite behind all things finite and it adjudges the value of the finite by higher infinite values of which they are the imperfect translation and towards which, to a truer expression of them, they are always trying to arrive. It sees a greater reality than the apparent not only behind man and the world, but within man and the world, and this soul, self, divine thing in man it holds to be that in him which is of the highest importance, that which everything else in him must try in whatever way to bring out and express, and this soul, self, divine presence in the world it holds to be that which man has ever to try to see and recognize through all appearances, to unite his thought and life with it and in it to find his unity with his fellows. This alters necessarily our whole normal view of things; even in preserving all the aims of human life, it will give them a different sense and direction."

"But the education which was poison to all true elements of national strength and greatness, was meat and drink to the bourgeois. The bourgeois delights in convention, because truth is too hard a taskmaster and makes too severe a demand on character, energy and intellect. He craves superficiality, a shallow soil to grow in. For to attain depth requires time and energy which would have to be unprofitably diverted from his chief business of making his individual way in the world. He cannot give up his life to his country, but if she will be grateful for a few of his leisure hours, he will give in those limits ungrudging service and preen himself on his public virtues. Prodigal charity would be uncomfortable and unwise, but if he can earn applause by parting with a fraction of his superfluities, he is always ready for the sacrifice. Deep scholarship would unfit him for his part in life, but if figuring on learned societies or writing a few articles and essays, an occasional book guiltless of uncomfortable originality, or a learned compilation prepared under his superintendence and issued in his name will make him a man of letters, he will court and prize that easily-earned reputation. The effort to remold society and rebuild the nation is too huge and perilous a task for a comfortable citizen, but he is quite prepared to condemn old and inconvenient institutions and superstitions and lend his hand to a few changes which will make social life more pleasant and comfortable. Superficiality, unreality of thought and deed thus became the stamp of all our activities."

"But the method of India is on the contrary to discover the spirit within and the higher hidden intensities of the superior powers and to dominate life in one way or another so as to make it responsive to and expressive of the spirit and in that way increase the power of life. Its tendency with the intellect, will, ethical, aesthetic and emotional being is to sound indeed their normal mental possibilities, but also to upraise them towards the greater light and power of their own highest intuitions."

"But the hold of this ego-consciousness upon our whole habit of existence is difficult to shake off when we have no longer need of the separative, the individualistic and aggressive stage of development, when we would proceed forward from this necessity of littleness in the child-soul to unity and universality, to the cosmic consciousness and beyond, to our transcendent spirit-stature. It is indispensable to recognize clearly, not only in our mode of thought but in our way of feeling, sensing, doing, that this movement, this universal action is not a helpless impersonal wave of being which lends itself to the will of any ego according to that ego's strength and insistence."

"But the material or animal man is ignorant of the inner aim of life; he knows only its needs and its desires and he has necessarily no other guide to what is required of him than his own perception of need and his own stirrings and pointings of desire. To satisfy his physical and vital demands and necessities before all things else and, in the next rank, whatever emotional or mental cravings or imaginations or dynamic notions rise in him must be the first natural rule of his conduct. The sole balancing or overpowering law that can modify or contradict this pressing natural claim is the demand put on him by the ideas, needs and desires of his family, community or tribe, the herd, the pack of which he is a member."

"But what strange ideas again ? that I was born with a supra-mental temperament and that I know nothing of hard realities! Good God! My whole life has been a struggle with hard realities, from hardships, starvation in England and constant and fierce difficulties to the far greater difficulties continually cropping up here in Pondicherry, external and internal. My life has been a battle from its early years and is still a battle: the fact that I wage it now from a room upstairs and by spiritual means as well as others that are external makes no difference to its character. But, of course, as we have not been shouting about these things, it is natural, I suppose, for others to think that I am living in an august, glamorous, lotus-eating dreamland where no hard facts of life or Nature present themselves. But what an illusion all the same!"

"By our stumbling the world is perfected."

"But what after all, behind appearance, is the seeming mystery? We can see that it is the Consciousness which had lost itself, returning to itself, emerging out of its giant self-forgetfulness, slowly, painfully, as a life that is would-be sentient, to be more than sentient, to be again divinely self-conscious, free, infinite, immortal."