THAT THIS TEACHING has been forgotten, neglected, and misunderstood for so many centuries in sleepy monasteries or remote mountain-caves is not its own fault. It is the fault of men. Those who could understand its immensely practical bearing, its vital immediacy, were necessarily few in number. Such understanding could be got only by arduous intellectual efforts beyond the capacity of most men. But generally we get what we pay for. The one teaching which could guide mankind to the right solution of difficult problems is to be valued accordingly. It is a costly genuine diamond, not a cheap bit of glass.
We live in a practical world. Men may theorize as they like, but they have to act, to work, and to deal with other men. Therefore the question must come up, will this teaching make any difference to the way in which people live on earth?
For it is a widespread belief that philosophy is aristocratically cut off from the pressing concerns of everyday existence, that the philosopher—if not a fool or even a lunatic!—is a hopelessly impractical man occupied merely with manufactured problems and that the pursuit of truth is a pastime for those who have no burden of practical responsibilities, or for library-crawling bookworms or for armchair dreamers who wish to escape action. It is widely believed that the philosopher makes an unnatural dichotomy of attitude between the inner life of thought and the outer life of action.
This may be true of that merely metaphysical speculation or theological web-spinning which passes itself off for philosophy, but it is not true of genuine philosophy, such as some of the best ancient Greek citizens followed, while utterly untrue of the hidden Indian philosophy. If so-called philosophy has lost touch with life this is because it has lost itself in a maze of long technical words or made such a fetish of clever logical subtleties which delight nobody but dialecticians that it has forgotten its foundation—the facts of human experience. Perhaps in no other study are men so carried away by sounding words and polysyllabic names which disguise error and crystallize fallacy, and in no other study has such a forbidding terminology arisen with so little necessity. A philosopher who cannot say what he has to say with a minimum of long, difficult, and unfamiliar words, but must get himself involved into using a maximum, is not only likely to get himself involved in hidden untruths but is sure to keep not a few sincere aspirants outside the portals of philosophy itself.
If such philosophy has vanished from everyday ken into a verbal vacuum or fallen from high regard into contempt, then the so-called philosophers themselves are to blame. They write their thoughts down in a technical jargon which hides meaning and harms clearness, and which builds forbidding bulwarks of unintelligibility around the grandest truths. They construct systems of reflection about the world and about life which do not take into account the primary facts of the world and life. They ignore the tremendous asset of science and find themselves left to play with their own fancies. They start their reflections with the arbitrary fancies of other philosophers instead of starting with the verified facts of the world that confronts them. In this they are curiously like unto mystics. They imitate each other and get caught in the literary history of philosophy instead of actively creating fresh philosophy.
What is the business of philosophy? What definite end has it in view? What is the proper vocation of a philosopher? What are the practical lessons of philosophy? The briefest answer to all these questions is: genuine philosophy shows men how to live! If it could not do that, if it could not serve practical ends, it would not be worth having. It does not toil through the profoundest strata of thought merely to become alienated from the suffering world. It does not end in abstraction, but in action. The fruits of philosophy can be gathered only on this hard earth, not in some remote metaphysical empyrean. It embraces an individual and social labour which must visibly contribute to the welfare of our race and make itself felt in living history, or else it is not true philosophy. It must justify its existence by what it can do, not only by what it can imagine. It must show men not only what they really are but also what course of life should be the object of their behaviour.
The fact is that philosophy does make a revolutionary difference when applied to human existence, expressed in human deeds, and inlaid in human intercourse. It is the deep-held desire of those who are the living custodians of the hidden teaching in our tormented age that the artificial divorce which exists between philosophy and practical life should come to an end. It is their heartfelt wish to bring men to realize that philosophy is intimately linked with life and is useful as a guide, an inspirer, and a judge. It will be one of the missions of the subsequent volume to challenge the validity of the common criticism that philosophers can deal with concerns that are too remote from everyday life to be of use to anyone. It will there be shown that the very contrary is the correct case so far as the hidden teaching is concerned, for its final teachings affect every moment of a man’s earthly existence.
For philosophy is not a pale fiction fit for dreamers only, it is primarily for men living in the world of action. It is interested in the full circle of existence, not merely in a segment. The moment we begin to reflect upon life, the moment we begin to consider the lessons of experience, the moment we search for meaning or explanation of the world in which we find ourselves, that moment we become a temporary philosopher. Where the specialist philosopher goes farther than us is when he demands that all experience be taken as the material for reflection, that the experience of all existence be meditated upon. But the critic will ask how can that be when history has not written its last word, experience is continually increasing, and life never comes to an end? The answer is that just as a circle may be indefinitely enlarged without ceasing to be a circle, so experience may be continually expanded without the truth of experience ceasing to be the truth. And that truth is the philosopher’s final target. This is why he must work methodically, why he must first establish the true meaning of universal experience and then seek to translate this meaning in terms of concrete activities. His visible actions must first be justified by his invisible reflections.
The world has no use for a doctrine which treats the common life of men as something alien and apart. The world is right. The philosopher does not know any point in this wide universe where truth should be kicked out. Hence he finds its principles are everywhere applicable and everywhere present and that whoever neglects them does so at his own peril. Philosophy is what is workable; it is put in practice, or it is only half-philosophy. It believes in inspired action and illumined service. Its worth is not known to dilettanti who play with academic theories for a day and then forget them. It can be carried into action: It can be made of worth to the toilers, the sufferers, and the executives of society: It shows everybody how he ought to live amid the particular circumstances in which he finds himself. For every deed of the genuine philosopher is the direct descendant of those ideas of truth for which he has struggled so arduously. He learns the right rules of the game of life and sets out to obey them.
Therefore philosophy is equally for the man doomed to hang from the ghastly gallows as for the man who dooms him from the grand judicial bench. It reveals a truth whose application to daily living arrests fear, removes doubt, supplies inspiration, and kindles mental strength. Be we workers with hoe and plough, or surgeons with scalpel and lancet, or directors with glass-topped desks, we all meet with critical moments when we need the sure guidance, the firm pointing finger which philosophy alone can offer. For it alone is concerned with the rigid truth of a situation rather than with emotional distortions of it or egoistic veilings of it. Therefore the value of philosophy is the value of its practical contribution to day-to-day living. The connection between the office, the factory, the farm, the theatre, and the home with philosophy is direct and plain. Philosophy is the guide of all life. Its final worth is to tell us how to live, and how to meet and master our difficulties and temptations.
The study of the hidden teaching demands that one pass through a severe intellectual discipline which may extend over some years, according to the reasoning capacity of the student. It certainly cannot be got in a hurry. Once this knowledge is won, however, it proves its practical worth by standing every test. The wisdom it confers, the ethic it upholds, the strength it gives, the tranquillity it sheds, and the intellectual capacity it develops—all combine to make the student who completes his course, who passes from nescience to knowledge, a better man. If he turns to politics he will render superior service, and not inferior. If he takes up manufacturing his products will be honest and meritorious. The man trained in the labours and pains of philosophical reflection will tackle each practical problem as it arises with clear insight, and only he—other things being equal—will be the most likely to give correct judgment upon a matter.
All our ideas are dumb until we try to put them into practice. They then gain voice and people our message. The philosophic life is not a mere fragment to be lived out in a dusty library; it is a continuous experience whether it be lived in a home, a business, a senate chamber, or a farm. And a man will be a better citizen because he is a philosopher just as he will be a better philosopher because he is a citizen. If his studies separate him outwardly from the general life of his community, then whatever else they may be they are certainly not philosophic studies. For the philosopher has got to put the content of continuous disinterested action into the fine or clever phrases that he writes or utters, or he will merely be a half-philosopher. Only when the tenets of philosophy have entered his bloodstream can he become a real philosopher.
Truth is a dynamic, not a narcotic.
The philosopher will always be found a rational, sensible, practical, and balanced man in his everyday dealings. He well understands that the two wings of a bird must move to keep it in balanced flight, and that the two sides of man—thought and action—must operate to keep him in balanced existence. But his balance is wider than that. Amid the restless hustle of modern society he keeps inwardly calm and undisturbed. And his peace is so hard forged as to endure when he passes out of the quiet philosophical sanctus into the busy street.
The philosophic discipline trains the mind and through the mind all the acts of a man. Thoughts that are constantly and intensely held tend sooner or later to speak in deeds. It is because men have not realized the power of concentrated thinking to help or hurt others that they have brought forth the hideous age in which we are born. Without joining those who harm a good cause by poor logic and worse philosophy when they deny the power of external surroundings, we may yet say that the general and habitual line of thinking tends ultimately and largely to reproduce itself in the features of one’s environment. The mind has both attractive and repulsive properties. It attracts other minds and material conditions of a like nature; it repels those of jarring kind. This activity constantly goes on in man’s subconscious self; he need not always be aware of it to make it effective. This silent influence never ceases operating. Only when we see it strikingly made evident in the lives of good or evil geniuses do we dimly realize what potency lies hid in controlled and concentrated thought.
It is the invisible inner man of thought and feeling who dictates man’s daily actions and reactions, who faces him when he is alone, and who lives a secret existence which imperils or protects his whole external existence. The thoughts which most often occupy his mind and the moods which most frequently fill his heart are his invisible rulers and, in comparison with the physical body, constitute his more important self. The younger races of the West look first to the outward stature of a man when they wish to measure him, whereas the older people of Asia knew thousands of years ago that his greatest power for weal or woe lay hidden in his mind. The ancient sages who sat with crossed legs and benignant faces in the Himalayan forests taught their reverent pupils this vital truth. Thus this teaching amply justifies itself on the most utilitarian grounds.
Everything or everyone is in relation to something or someone else. Nothing or nobody stands alone. The life of every creature is interwoven with the lives of others: its fancied separateness of vaunted independence is a delusion. Humanity especially is interrelated. Therefore the philosopher is not merely a philosopher; he is also a member of society. He cannot escape being so, cannot completely disentangle himself. Even if he retreat to a cave he will need another to attend him or a dog to accompany him or a cow to give him milk, and lo! there is a society of two already. How he conducts himself in this society will depend on ethical principles which will remain precisely the same even if it were a society of two millions and not merely of two. Does philosophy, then, contribute anything to ethics, anything to values, anything to point out the right path of duty?
The answer is that philosophy is the only thing in the world which makes such contributions to the fullest extent needed by human existence. Once we come into consciousness of this great truth all the most important questions that trouble mankind take on a totally new appearance. Then, and then only, can satisfactory solutions of ancient and perplexing problems be got at. The very atmosphere in which these answers have to be worked out will be wholly changed. We shall be compelled, whether we like it or not, to force the old queries into new shapes, because the standard of reference will now be far other than it hitherto was. Here the student of philosophy finds the actual value of his studies and gets his reward in the awakened insight which shows him how to act rightly, wisely, and well. The philosopher could never be a failure in life, however much he might fail in fortune.
Philosophy is meant not only to interpret the world, but also to better it, for it pursues ideas through to their practical conclusion. Social or personal idealism must be related to an attainable goal, otherwise it will be harmful. Philosophy provides drifting men with a compass. Hence it is as much for those who are conscious of the absence of any principle of ethical guidance in their lives as for those who seek pure knowledge. They will find philosophy of the greatest help in reaching right decisions at the demands of practical life. What, in the whole range of human culture, could be more useful than this?
There is no minute of the day when we are not engaged in doing something or thinking something and this process goes on all through our waking life; it is an endless and incessant activity. The problem whether what we are doing or what we are thinking is right or wrong, best or worst, that is to say the problem of ethics, is one of the most fundamental and most important we can raise.
There are two questions which face every man every day. They are: What is the right way for me to act? And what is the right thing for me to seek? Several other problems are involved in and hinge on this single problem of what constitutes the duty of man; some of them are: (a) What is my highest duty as against my immediate duty, the intrinsic as against the instrumental? (b) What is the justification for accepting the notion that there is such a thing as duty and that it is not the creation of human fancy? (c) What is the standard of measurement which permits me to grade duties on any scale?
All these, however, are philosophical problems. This indicates that pure philosophy does have the most practical bearing on life. And whatever a man sets up as right or wrong is the conscious or unconscious reflection of his conscious or unconscious philosophy of life. His general view of the universe, that is to say his conscious or unconscious philosophic view, supplies him with a standard to mark out or to test either duty or desire. When it applies itself to conduct, philosophy is less concerned with laying down particular rules than with laying down foundational principles. It cares less for little legal clauses and more for large ways of living.
Human conduct is ordinarily governed by desire. All desires, emotions, passions, energies, longings, sympathies, and antipathies begin to regulate themselves when we understand them better, when we understand ourselves better, and when we understand the world better. The value of this study in restoring emotional balance may be expressed in such physical terms as these. It normalizes blood pressure and beneficially regulates glandular secretions. Still more, it harmoniously integrates the neurophysiological functions. It disciplines passions, overcomes bad habits, and eliminates nervous fears. It tranquillizes the heart, puts reason into the head, and purpose into life. It is of special value to kings, rulers, presidents, ministers of state, and governmental chiefs, and to a lesser extent to professional men such as physicians, lawyers, educators, and business executives. The benefits received affect both the personal and professional sides of life.
It is a misapprehension, however, to imagine that the philosopher must be an acolyte of asceticism, a votary of life-negation, utterly remote from human interests and human enjoyments. There is no room in true philosophy for the incurable antinomies of the ascetic-hedonistic conflict. The narrow ascetic denies life and views the world as a treacherous trap. But the philosopher finds it a useful school wherein he learns much and lives understandingly. Experience does not merely offer him theoretical food for thought but also practical training for wisdom.
Nevertheless Cupid and cupidity need to be well-reined. Every sensible man who wants to fortify his life is indeed something of an ascetic. The power that self-restraint gives his mental, ethical, and physical character helps him in every way. And when such a man betakes himself to the quest of truth he will need even more of this inner strength. The flabby weakling who yields to every impulse does not know the delight of being independent, the satisfaction of being in bondage to nothing. But such sane restraint is never to be confused with the unhealthy and unnatural total rejection of everything human. We are here to live and not to run away from life. We must find a way of existence that is reasonable and balanced, not fanatical and remote. Anything overdone is a mistake; a good overdone generates a fresh evil, a virtue overdone creates a new vice.
The philosopher is not afraid of any facet of life. He makes the contradictory the complementary! That is why he does not need to run away from the world like the ascetic. Whatever running away he deems necessary is done secretly inside his heart and is not publicly advertised by donning the coloured robe of the monk. No amount of world-desertion will lead to wisdom in his view because he knows that he was put into the world to learn its lessons. Nevertheless he is at one with the monk in wishing to be free from enslavement to desires and in seeking dominion over his own emotions. Beyond this he cannot travel with the fanatical ascetic. His chief effort being directed toward the control of thought and disciplining of the intellect, its success will reward him with the ability to pass through comfort and discomfort with sufficient detachment to keep his mind unruffled and provide him with the power to work amid the intense hustle of any environment without any loss of inner calmness.
Ascetic life is a good and necessary beginning, but when it congeals into rigidity, frigidity, and a profession, it is an imperfect end. The wise man is not afraid to endorse the generous and excellent lines of Terence: “I am a man; nothing pertaining to humanity is alien to me.” He will move untempted amid the fretting tide of a city’s crowds, where he is needed, while the fearful hide in caves; he will keep his serenity amid labour or leisure, for his ascetic abandonment is hidden deep within the mind. He will not need to crush out human affection in order to crush out human egoism. He will not need to ignore the treasures of art or fail to respond to the charms of nature in order to maintain emotional equipoise.
But the problems of action and conduct do not exhaust man’s concern with society and the world. He seeks also to beautify both. Thus art is born. Philosophy has also to find a place for it, and to consider its contribution to the whole. Art indeed is fuel for the philosophic enterprise. Why is it that man feels drawn to music, painting, architecture, poetry, drama, and the other arts? What is this beauty which lures man on through his lesser loves? Is the culture of artistic sensitivity a stage on his quest? Those who imagine that philosophy isolates man from all that is warm and beautiful in life are mistaken. The fragrance of white jasmine gives him pleasure as much as it does to others, the ravishing beauty of the sun dying in a great ball of fire does not leave him unaffected, and the tender voice of a violin is not meaningless to him. He is different from other men in this, that he keeps always moored to the higher viewpoint which places these experiences where they belong and does not permit them to overwhelm him utterly.
The work of the genuine artist is primarily an imaginative one. He is entitled to call himself a creative artist to the extent that he can carry out an original work in his first available medium—imagination. If he can work only in his second medium, that is to say merely copy photographically in paint, wood, stone, word, or sound what others have thus created, we call him a talented artist, but not a creative one. Indeed, competent critics have gone so far as to separate both classes, refusing to dignify the unimaginative with the title of artist and calling him but a workman. There are usually authentic indications in the works of genius to show the profundity of its imaginative power.
Yet the imagination itself is nothing else in the end than a tissue of mental pictures, i.e., of thoughts. Mozart, who was a genius even as a child, described the process of his experience of musical composition in a brief but illuminative sentence: “All the finding and making only goes on in me as in a very vivid dream.” In this self-created world the artist must make himself at home so completely and so absorbedly that he will resent the coming of mealtimes as a disturbance and the coming of friends as an intrusion. This is why Balzac locked himself in a room literally night and day. When he wrote those wonderful novels he was as much in a state of semitrance as any Indian yogi. That Balzac well understood the mystical character of his art is attested by his own utterance: “Today the writer has replaced the priest … he consoles, condemns, prophesies. His voice does not resound in the nave of a cathedral, it spreads thunderously from one end of the world to the other.” For the production of genuine art is nothing less than the practise of genuine yoga. The artist is on a perfect level with the mystic, only he seeks memorable beauty where the latter seeks memorable peace.
Inspiration simply means that the artist is so carried away by a series of ideas that for the time being their reality dominates him completely. For him thought has temporarily become what is felt to be the Real. In this respect the artist is a veritable mystic. Both come to acquire a fervent faith in the reality of their mental constructions. Both arrive unconsciously at the truth of mentalism through the same avenue—intense concentrated self-absorption in a single dominating idea or a single series of thoughts. Both are in the end conscious, semiconscious, or unconscious believers in mentalism. The painter Whistler saw great beauty on the mist-covered river Thames shrouding its dirty barges and rat-ridden wharves and raucous steam tugs; this really means that the beauty he saw was contained within his own mind. The artist who would attain to the front rank of creative genius must be a mentalist. He must be a believer in this subtle and refined doctrine which is fit only for subtle and refined temperaments. Were he otherwise he would be false to his own experience and blind to its implicit meaning.
We hear often of the enthralling ecstasy wherein he creates his work and of the moody melancholy which succeeds it later. He walks on air for a while but then treads the earth with leaden feet, regretting that he did not know how to hold his high mood, how to retain it. Let us not envy him. For he pays heavily for his ecstasies; he pays for them in the coin of gloomy moods and black depressions.
There are two explanations, two causes to account for this fact to be found in all the biographies of genius: the first is that during creative work he forgets himself, loses his I utterly, because it is only by perfect concentration that he can accomplish perfect work. If he cannot forget his ego, then he cannot concentrate perfectly, hence cannot become a perfect artist. Or else he unites in feeling with his prospective audience, i.e., merges his individuality in others, and thus loses his ego for another cause. The second is that the brief pleasure he derives from those precious minutes when he is absorbed in his imagination is the same that his audience will later derive when beholding or experiencing the finished product of his work. But if this second fact means anything at all it means that at the precise moment of inspired production by the artist or of engrossed reception by the audience, both are or should be utterly immersed in the world of imaginations. At this sacred time they find thought to be all-important and as real as they had heretofore regarded the material world of their own belief. Moreover, in the artist’s yearning to find perfect expression of his ideas in paint or on paper he is unconsciously seeking to break down the fancied barriers between thought and thing, between mind and matter. He is, in short, striving to construct a second idea which shall be a perfect copy of his first one.
We may now understand why the artist suffers when his creative mood passes away. For it is then that, psychologically, he lapses back into the ordinary egoistic state and the ordinary unconcentrated state. The contrast is as striking as that between black and white and affects his emotions accordingly. These are some elementary lessons which philosophy teaches in regard to art.
Because of its neglect of the primal fact of mind being the ground that supports all else in human life, the scientific culture of the last century found itself in the position of an ethically dangerous materialism which made man into a mechanically manipulated biped. Although the front-rank scientists themselves are now emerging from this materialistic phase, the onslaughts of their predecessors have seriously damaged the fabric of religious authority and greatly weakened the strength of religious influence. The popularization of science in the West has made the masses less amenable to the checks and disciplines offered by religion. Moreover, the aftermath of all wars has often been a decay of religious faith and an indifference to codes of morality.
We are therefore approaching a period when the chief social justification of religion—its power to restrain the conduct of the masses within certain limits—will be definitely impaired. The example of Russia’s violent rejection of organized religion following war and revolution is a phenomenon to be calmly and dispassionately considered. It is not to be enthusiastically admired by the irresponsible and unbalanced, nor to be violently denounced by the reactionary and unteachable. For we face a period when the decay of moral sanctions, the loosening of social ties, the lowering of individual standards and the general inclination to unsettle and disturb society combine to constitute an ethically dangerous situation. Those who care for human welfare should understand that to apply antiquated sanctions which have lost much of their force will not meet this situation satisfactorily. Religion will be unable to avoid the straight issue and will do better for humanity and for itself if it faces the problem with courage and common sense. Its contribution is always needed, but it ought to be a right one.
Every institutional orthodox religion can save itself from the crisis whose preliminary rumbles herald its approach, and even effectively expand its influence, if, first, it will have the courage to cast bad custom behind if need be and find a better life for man, and if, second, it will live up to its ethical highest and not down to its ethical lowest; and if, third, it will abandon the mental slavery of childish dogma and become intellectually progressive. It should add new beliefs, or alter and adapt its system wherever needed. It must progress parallel with the intellect of man, be on the move with our moving age, and not remain an inflexibly obstinate creed. Some of the more sensible ecclesiastics have already yielded their old crude ideas in surrender to advancing knowledge, but many more are merely parcels of timid conventional superstitions, neatly tied together and adorned with hat, suit, and shoes. The Very Reverend Inge has not hesitated to advocate bold rational changes in Christian doctrine, while in Africa and Asia, Muslim, Hindu, and Buddhist divines have done the same to a lesser extent. But until the highest dignitaries boldly promulgate more refined and rational conceptions, a more tenable faith, until they value living ethics above dying history, present trends will injure their obsolete dogmas and, what is worse, injure the moral supports of their devotees.
The illusions of their flocks may be excused, but the ignorance or obstinacy of the clerics themselves is unpardonable. The world is in pregnancy with new thoughts. The labour pains of commencing childbirth affect it and the cries that come from it are to be expected. The whole universe is subject to the law of change; all history is but a tale of continuous adaptation to environment; and when the leaders of a religion submit to this law voluntarily their reward will be great in every way. Those who submit at the proper time will be practising wisdom; those who resist at the wrong time will be practising foolishness. In an age of advancing education such as ours religion must voluntarily clear its labyrinth of traditional rubbish and reorganize itself on a more intellectual basis. Mystery and tradition have made the organized religions powerful institutions; science and the spirit of inquiry are unmaking them. Therefore the last word of counsel from every well-wisher who is not dead to the time spirit nor blind to the world crisis is that religion must grow up with the growing mind of man. The position of an unprogressive religious institution which rigidly rules its adherents, binds them forever to believe in a kindergarten creed, and discourages interest in contemporary knowledge is not different from that of a schoolmaster who, while welcoming new pupils to his class, prevents the old ones from passing up to the next higher class and would forever detain them under him in the same class. It ought never to forget its higher purpose, which is to fit the more advanced among its flock for the next higher degree. It will then cease to resent the individualism of mystics but rather delight in their progress. In this way it will best help others and most help itself. Finally there is plenty of hope for religion for the reason that it is needed, if only it will arouse new energies and bravely reconstruct itself.
But even if this unlikely event occurs the ethically dangerous postwar situation will not be fully solved thereby. Many people will still be irrevocably lost to religion, however much it adapt itself. For when ignorant men think that religion is a delusion they often leap to the false conclusion that morality is a myth. History shows that it has proved disastrous in times of great social change to identify ethics with any special religious creed. When the creed goes the ethics entangled with it goes too.
Whoever cares for the well-being of the race cannot look unconcerned upon this dark prospect. What is to be done? The remedy lies in remembering that those who have caught the modern attitude are not going to yield to ethical exhortations unless these are scientifically based. But is such a basis obtainable? Is a rational ethics available for them which will uplift and not degrade them and which will supply a sensible motive for well-doing? The answer is that a most reasonable doctrine has long existed in Asia. Unfortunately it has not kept its pristine purity, but degenerative time has mixed much irrelevant superstition with it, while imaginative man has tangled much religious dogma with what is the fundamentally sane and scientific basis of a sound ethical code. The Indian name of this venerable doctrine is karma.
The essence of this doctrine is, first, psychological reaction, i.e., that habitual thoughts form themselves into tendencies and thus affect our own character; this in turn expresses itself sooner or later in deeds; these, again, not only affect other persons, but also, by a mysterious principle of reaction, ourselves. The working out of this principle implies, second, physical rebirth, i.e., the persistence of thought in the sphere of the Unconscious Mind, as well as sooner or later the reappearance of more or less the same “character” or personality upon this earth. Karma creates the need for readjustments and inevitably leads to rebirth, to an outlet for the dynamic factors which have been set in motion. The consequence of this principle is personal retribution, i.e., that acts whereby we injure others are inevitably reflected back to ourselves and thus injure us, whereas acts whereby we benefit others eventually benefit us too.
This doctrine, like that of mentalism, was discovered by the astute Indian sages through the revealing power of intense concentration of mind, used to sharpen an intelligence devoted to the perplexing problems of the inequality in character and circumstance of human beings. In this manner they came to discern a certain rhythm at work beneath the incessant flux of man’s fortunes.
There is no such thing as a natural law in the sense of an arbitrary or authoritative commandment issued by some supreme being. Man makes a law of nature in his thought in order to describe how a particular part of nature behaves. Karma is a perfectly scientific law. It dovetails smoothly into three great scientific discoveries whose verification and proclamation during the nineteenth century stirred thoughtful men with the tremendous possibilities thus opened up as well as into two others which have not been so sensational. The first two were: (a) the evolution of animal and human forms, (b) the conservation or indestructibility of energy. The former brought together all the myriad kinds of species in nature into some kind of scheme of progressive improvement, giving at least a cold justification for the agonizing immolation of the individual upon the altar of its class, while the latter brought together the different manifestations of heat, work, and chemical power into a simple unified system. Although more modern views have largely modified the original explanation of the method of these processes, and although the “how” of both still remains much of a mystery, nevertheless their basic principles remain untouched. The evolutionary character of nature’s larger changes and the persistence of force still fit better to the known facts of the general universal movement than any other hypotheses.
A third scientific teaching which requires mention is that of heredity. The patterns of the fleshly body are inherited ones.
If we go farther back in time we shall find a fourth significant scientific teaching. Newton’s third law of motion reveals that for every action there is a reaction, which is equal and opposite.
But we are not yet done. For there is a fifth discovery of science—which cannot be overlooked—that all life is ultimately unitary. The universe constitutes a single entity. All the sciences touch each other at some point and none can stand alone. The unity of the universe is the fundamental law of its being.
When we bring all these scientific principles into harmony with karma we find how they analogically support it. The law of evolution reveals that life is a continuation of all that has gone before. We are but links in a long series. We begin as primal molecule and end as complex man. We press toward an unseen goal because we feel the need of completion. We have already travelled a long journey from the planetary mud up to our present-day self. But we shall have to travel still farther. For the end of this journey will be the sublime discovery that man is no mere cypher in a statistical census, no mere glorified ape of the jungle, but an unconscious partaker of a blessed and benign Reality.
The principle of conservation of energy expresses the fact that no energy can be destroyed in the process of its transformations. In the same way human thoughts and deeds are nothing else than energies which are not destroyed but which reappear in the form of their effects upon others and upon ourselves. They are seeds which sprout eventually into time-and-space manifestation.
Science admits in the doctrine of heredity that every body has had some kind of existence before birth. Similarly, the mind must have had some kind of existence before birth. The mental characteristics are transmitted ones and can have been derived from a former earthly existence alone.
Newton’s law of equal return reappears in the world of ethics, where the same sequence holds true. Whatever we do unto others is returned to us in some way and at some time. Life pays us back in our own coin. Our misdeeds find us out one day. The good deeds we do foreshadow the good fortune we shall eventually reap. We get what we give.
The unitary character of the whole universe must also include man’s life. Any violation of this law of his own being must, by reaction, sooner or later bring its own punishment in the shape of suffering or discord. Any fulfilment of it must equally bring harmony and happiness. Moreover, this same individual unity indicates that rebirth is inevitable because of the continuity of the world process, because each appearance of life must emerge out of what has somewhere gone before, because the present cannot be sundered from the past.
Thus human life becomes, broadly speaking, an education of mind, character, and capacity. This education develops over long periods of time in a series of related physical re-embodiments, each of which provides appropriate lessons through the experiences and reflections therein generated. All living is learning. All incarnation is education. To take a new body is to take a new seat in life’s school. The growth of mind is the true biography of man. All history becomes allegory. Just as a child’s understanding of the three R’s—reading, writing, and ‘rithmetic—constitutes its elementary education in school, so an adult’s understanding of these three R’s of Reaction, Rebirth, and Retribution constitutes his elementary education in the larger school of life. Mentally, the struggles of existence tend first to unfold and then to sharpen reason; ethically, the notion that whatever seeds we sow we shall reap an appropriate harvest becomes slowly borne in upon us; technically, ability rises from untrained mediocrity and gradually gets concentrated along special lines until it achieves its culmination in facile unlaboured genius.
The law of karma is the only one which will reasonably account for those blights on existence which must otherwise be accepted as the awful products of mere chance or as the unjust fiats of an arbitrary deity. Without karma we must give up these problems in despair as being pieces in a perfectly insoluble puzzle. The babe helplessly born blind, the child brought up in a squalid filthy slum, the fame-hungry young man who struggles in vain to find a fit outlet for unrecognized ability, the middle-aged woman whose whole life has been wrecked by an unfortunate marriage, the elderly family breadwinner who falls fatally under an automobile—these are the tragedies which make life seem either a hideous game of sheer luck or the unfortunate plaything of a cruel God. Karma, however, puts a more rational face upon these enigmas by turning them into the outcome of wrong acts done previously, either in the same existence or in an earlier fleshly embodiment. Thus it responds to a profound need of the human heart for more adequate justice in life.
An imperfect notion of this tenet is that which places the effect of present thoughts and deeds only in future births and remote incarnation. We must impress firmly upon our minds that the consequences of our actions may have to be reaped at any moment here in this birth; that the wrong or right behaviour of one incarnation may determine the misery or happiness of the same incarnation: and that there is no necessity to wait for lives yet to come before we can feel the benefits of virtue or pay for the pains caused to others. Karma covers both the present and future births. Its reactions can come into operation on the very same day that an act is performed or the same year or the same birth without waiting for a future embodiment. The relation between an evil deed and its inevitable retributory consequences is a sure one, but the time when it manifests itself is obscure and must necessarily vary with each individual.
Nevertheless this doctrine does not imply that all our sufferings without exceptions are merited. For humanity is so interlinked that we cannot always escape the effects of the evil acts performed by others with whom we are thrown in contact even though the misfortune thereby wrought is not our due. But in that case we may rest assured that the compensatory working of karma will eventually bring into play some good fortune which would not otherwise have been ours.
Karma therefore does not doom us to complete fatalism. It is only a part of life. The element of freedom is likewise present. There is no absolute freedom in life, but then there is no absolute fatalism either. Karma makes us personally responsible for our thoughts and deeds. We cannot shift the blame for wrong-doing on to the shoulders of another, whether he be man or God.
We take up our old tendencies with each new birth in this frail tenement of flesh, renew great loves and grand friendships, face afresh the problem of old enmities, suffer or enjoy our proper deserts, and drink from the cup of life’s experience until we are satiated. But satiety forces reflection, and this in turn brings wisdom. When we have moved up and down the ladder from ragged beggar to bejewelled king we learn at last how to handle the contrasting situations of human existence correctly. When we have been tempted, tantalized, and disillusioned, when we have burnt our fingers because of wrong-doing or been benefited by well-doing, we understand finally the best way to conduct ourselves in all dealings with others. We are all the products of our unseen past experience and our unremembered past thinking, i.e., of time, and are not to be blamed for being what we are: we cannot help that, but we are to blame for not trying to be better. Time is thus the supreme teacher. No mortal can give us the lessons it places before our eyes. It brings all the wealth of varied experience, it assuages errors into wisdom, pain into peace, disappointment into discipline and hatred into goodwill. Time will turn better pages for us than those in books, and speak more sagely than the lips of men. It teaches us to learn from our weaknesses, not to weep over them.
It is an error to put karma on a moral plane only. It also operates on the intellectual plane. Thus a good man’s feebler intelligence pitted against an evil man’s superior intelligence may bring the former loss and even suffering for a time, even though he is morally better. For he has to learn to build a balanced personality, and not merely a lopsided one. Moreover, pious persons who suffer from an excess of sentimentality do not understand that charity only becomes a virtue when it is done at the right time to the right person, and that it is nothing less than a vice when it is misplaced or mistimed. Karma provides us with the assurance that no efforts are wasted. Whether in this birth or in a later we shall enjoy their just consequences. Where heredity fails to explain why a clever son should be born to foolish parents, karma steps in and smoothes the problem. We inherit physical characteristics from our parents but mental characteristics from our previous personality on earth. This explains why there are children who are old for their age and adults who are children for their age. It puts order and justice where formerly chaos and cruelty alone reigned.
Those who reject karma reject what is patent all around them. Their own lives are unalterably predetermined to a certain extent, do what they will. The good or bad family into which they were born, the wealth or poverty they have inherited, the white or black skin they possess—all these are matters in which they have been powerless to choose and wherein they have been but the unconsulted recipients of the awards of karma. To a limited extent, therefore, but no more, karma forges a steel ring around every man.
Others who raise the ancient bogey that where there is no remembrance of past lives there can be no benefit from present pleasure or pain arising out of them overlook two points. The first is the very constitution of the mind itself, which presents the double faces of the Unconscious and the conscious to our gaze. The merest initiation into psychology is an initiation into this undoubted fact. How much of present experience has already disappeared into the storehouse of the Unconscious? The second point is that they cannot have the memory of one previous embodiment without having the memories of all the thousands which preceded it. But who could endure such an opening of the bound volumes of human experience for even a single day? Who could take in all that cinematograph-film of a myriad bestial horrors and a myriad primitive joys that are now no longer joys? The upshot of such an experience would be a complete lapse into madness. Rather should we be thankful to Nature for this gift of forgetfulness as we should be thankful to her for the gift of sleep. For if we had not received it we should be totally unable to concentrate upon the present life at all.
Karma properly understood never kills initiative but positively promotes it. What we do now will actively contribute to the making of our future, no matter what we have done in the forgotten or remembered past. Therefore there is always some degree of hope for everyone. We are simultaneously the hapless creatures of our past and the hopeful creators of our future. What men do not comprehend about fate is that although certain events of life are more or less predetermined by karma at birth, still they can sometimes be changed to some extent by changing character. For character is the seed, the root, of all fate. If we have to endure certain limitations imposed by destiny we have also got certain freedom to work within those limitations. It is the art of right living to reconcile both factors and adjust them sensibly.
Here it may be well to observe that the Indian teaching adds that the last thoughts of a dying man will conjoin with his general and subconscious tendencies to determine the characteristics which will take a foothold in his next embodiment. It would be well therefore if this were better known and more widely utilized. For thus we may more readily meet again those we love, thus we may mentally picture and obtain a particular field of desired service, and thus the disciple ties himself more closely to his teacher.
There are times to fight fate and times to endure it. When the latter periods come it is wise to apply the Chinese technique of handling a cycle of misfortune as expounded in their ancient classic texts. This is based on the principle of adapting oneself to the cycle by conforming patiently and voluntarily to its restrictions and anticipating them in self-restraint. Just watch a juggler catch falling eggs on porcelain plates without breaking egg or plate! How does he do it? When the moment of meeting between egg and plate occurs he gives a slight downward movement to the latter. The speed of this movement coincides with the speed of the fall of the egg and thus reduces the shock of contact. Or observe the technique of expert boxers. When one launches a hard blow at the other the latter will sometimes make a backward motion as though apparently yielding to the blow. Were he to move forward to meet the attack the force of impact would naturally be greater just as the combined velocities of two trains approaching each other is greater than that of any single train. The boxer who yields by slightly retreating lessens the force of the blow which he receives. In the same way we should meet the blows of karma by flexibly adapting ourselves to the inevitable, by not attempting new enterprises during a dark cycle, for instance.
Here again we can call in the confirmation of science. Quantum theory and uncertainty principle have shed startling new light on physics. The old views of science were favourable to faith in the notion of karma; the new views are favourable to faith in the notion of free will. The old views were based on a world-structure which was clasped in the iron clutches of physical law. Determinism and necessitarianism were inevitable outlooks in such a universe. The new science has passed beyond this cold-blooded rigidity and has penetrated into the strange spontaneity of subatomic life. Its discovery completes the circle. The truth is that the universe has freedom at its heart but fate at its circumference, and that man consequently is a creature of both influences.
The practical lesson is: Change the prevailing tenor of your thoughts and you will help to change, in time, the prevailing condition of your affairs. Correct your mental and ethical errors and the correction will ultimately tend to become apparent in better character and improved environment. To a considerable extent man builds and changes his environment, constructs the history of his life, and shapes his own circumstances by the simple power of mind, for destiny is ultimately self-earned and mind-made. Karma shows how this can be so, and the doctrine of mentalism shows why this must be so.
Lastly we must learn through yoga practice and philosophic reflection the art of being unruffled. For troubles must come, but as they come so will they go. The same power that brought them will also take them away. Fortune is a turning wheel. Meanwhile the mind should remain firmly anchored where it belongs—in truth, not in illusion.
Although karma is really a scientific law it was appropriated by the Asiatic religions as well as by the pagan faiths of early Europe. But for an apparent accident of history it might also have been an item among the tenets of modern Christianity, for it lived in Christian faith for five hundred years after Jesus. Then a group of men, the Council of Constantinople, banished it from the Christian teaching, not because it offended the ethics of Jesus (what could be nobler than its perfect harmony with the Master’s own statement: Whatsoever ye sow, that shall ye also reap?), nor because it offended the integrity of Christianity (where is there a clearer advocacy of it than in the writings of the great Christian Patriarch Origen?), but because it offended their own petty personal prejudices. Thus a little band of foolish men sitting near the shores of the Sea of Marmora so late as five hundred and fifty years after the appearance of Jesus have been permitted to banish a Christian tenet which did not suit their own cast of temperament. Thus they have robbed the West of a religious belief which, in the turn of history’s wheel, must now be restored to the modern world for the scientific truth that it really is.
It is the duty of those who rule nations, guide thought, influence education, and lead religion to make this restoration.1 Truth demands it in any case, but the safety and survival of Western civilization imperiously demand it still more. When men learn that they cannot escape the consequences of what they are and what they do they will be more careful in conduct and more cautious in thinking. When they comprehend that hatred is a sharp boomerang which not only hurts the hated but also the hater, they will hesitate twice and thrice before yielding to this worst of all human sins. When they understand that their life in this universe is intended to be an evolutionary process of gradual growth in understanding they will begin to assess their physical, moral, and mental values aright. A sound ethical life will follow naturally as a function of such understanding. The West has great and quick need for the acceptance of karma and rebirth because they make men and nations ethically self-responsible as no irrational or incoherent dogma can make them. Modern scientific knowledge can easily fit these doctrines into its framework of reference, provided they are properly presented, because they alone explain neatly how the simpleminded Hottentot evolves into the subtle-minded Hegel.
We live in a shrieking tower of Babel. Nearly everyone has something to say, says it at the top of his voice, and yet for all this shouting few succeed in saying anything that is worthwhile, for few tell us why we are here on earth at all. Hence the urgency of popularizing the karma doctrine.
We have so far treated karma from the scientific and practical standpoint. What the hidden philosophy has to say about it puts an entirely different aspect on the matter, but that is a reserved subject too. We have indeed forgotten the philosopher for the moment to remember the more urgent needs of the unphilosophic masses who have been touched by the questioning ferment of our time. It may be said, however, that as our studies in mentalism have revealed that the primal substance of this world is thought and that matter is nothing other than mind, so we must concede to mind in actuality and universality a permanence with which we normally refuse to endow it. And we must further concede that because man’s whole life and activity are purely mental his thoughts may vanish into the depths of the Unconscious and yet not be lost. For mind is incessantly generating its constructions anew, unhindered by limitations of time and space because the latter are also its own constructions. Hence the individual streams of ideas may reappear again or react on each other across long lapses of time and great acres of space. Thus the doctrine of karma can find a mentalistic justification.
The philosopher, however, finds a still higher basis than karma for lofty and unselfish personal and social ethics when he finds truth and reality. To understand this we must anticipate advanced studies and consider for a moment that the ecstatic peace which comes to the artist during his creative moments is not dissimilar from that which comes to the mystic. It has been pointed out that this is mostly due to their temporary release from the ego. The I carries a great burden, be it one of ulcerous worries or gay pleasures. Few know that forgetting oneself is the key to a larger happiness. In philosophy, after all the facts have been ascertained and verified, this ideal is set up as one of its rational conclusions; it is then also found that there is a secret thread running from man to man, from creature to creature, and that the hidden constitution of the world is so unified that whoever believes he can assure his own happiness and welfare regardless of what happens to others is forever fated to be bitterly disillusioned. So long as the chasm which separates the I and the you remains as wide and as deep as it is, so long will I and you be foredoomed to suffer. Moreover, one of the philosophical implications of the principle of relativity is that no single thing in the whole universe stands isolated from anything else, no single thing exists in its own right. A web of interrelatedness stretches right across the world. Even the interdependence of modern society—with its economic, political, and social reactions from one corner of the world to another—is alone enough to hint at this. There is hardly a half-educated man in any country of the globe who is not more familiar with international affairs than was the average educated man prior to 1914. Such is the growing awareness of this interdependence.
Philosophy preaches self-control and advocates service of humanity not because these might be good for the other man alone or good for the philosopher alone, but because it is good for both! Its view of man is a view of society as a whole. Hence it teaches and proves that no individual man can attain other than illusory happiness so long as his fellows are unhappy. The old notion that a philosopher is impervious to current events must go. He is interested in them because he is interested in the welfare of his fellow men. But he will not permit them to swamp his judgment or menace his peace, for amid all else he holds to philosophic calm and impartial reason.
Whoever finds the high privilege of this wisdom conferred upon him will automatically find that it comes like a double-edged sword—the new privilege upon one side but a new responsibility upon the other; for the lofty knowledge which he has attained enjoins upon him that he shall henceforth practise the highest of all ethics. In discovering the final unity of all things and creatures, in being born again, as Jesus put it, in realizing that the Overself2 of which he is now aware is likewise the Overself of all other living beings, he has no alternative but to perceive that the welfare of the world is equivalent to his own welfare. The service of the ALL will henceforth replace in his heart the service of the individual ego. His acts must not only satisfy his own self but also be beneficial to others: they must always try to perform this twofold function. It is for this reason that a real sage is not a hibernating hermit.
Such a sage makes the discovery that the Golden Rule of doing unto others what we would have them do unto ourselves is uncommon sense made common. No religion has ever taught a higher ethic than this and no experience can ever suggest a more sensible one. No other maxim for the conduct of life than this simple maxim of Jesus and Krishna, Confucius and Buddha, will help a man more to travel smoothly and unhindered along the stone-scattered highways of existence. It is a rule which works wonders and which can be universally applied to all men in all stations of life and at all times. It is as good with brown-skinned Orientals as with white-skinned Occidentals, as satisfactory with ragged outcasts as with well-fed millionaires, and its value is out of all proportion to its simplicity. For we are all children of the one Infinite Life, members of the same vast human family. Let us therefore do the considerate, the generous, and the compassionate deed whenever possible in preference to the mean, the selfish, and the cruel one, if we would have karma deal kindly with us.
If it be asked why should a man trouble to learn or define truth if he is already practising goodwill to all beings, the reply is: because, first, he will not know that it is truth and may therefore change his mind tomorrow, and so give up his goodwill. It will be based on feelings, which are admittedly volatile. And, second, human affairs are notoriously complex, and right and wrong are often curiously intermingled. And, third, philosophy offers the only warrant for an ethical and selfless life which is based wholly on reason and yet does not lead to selfishness or wickedness.
When the Buddha, therefore, inculcated compassion it was not on the basis of mere sentiment but on that of profound knowledge. The man who left loving wife and marble palace in quest of intangibles like peace and truth was no sentimentalist.
It would be a profound error, however, to suppose as is usually supposed that because Buddha also taught the doctrine of nonviolence (which Gandhi has made famous in modern times) he meant this for the practice of all men. He meant it only for monks and those ascetics who had renounced the worldly life with its responsibilities. Like all true sages the Buddha recognized that there was no universal code of morality and that there were gradations in duty, stages in ethics. Hence when General Simha came to question him about this very point, torn by doubt whether he should give up his profession of soldiering or continue in it, the Buddha replied: “He who deserves punishment must be punished. Whosoever must be punished for the crimes he has committed suffers his injury not through the ill will of the judge but on account of his evildoing. The Buddha does not teach that those who go to war in a righteous cause after having exhausted all means to preserve the peace are blameworthy. He must be blamed who is the cause of the war. The Buddha teaches a complete surrender of self but he does not teach a surrender of anything to those powers that are evil.”
These words are quoted only because they express exactly the viewpoint of the hidden teaching upon the same question. It is not denied that the correct attitude for monk or mystic is to take no life under any circumstances, but rather to suffer his own, martyr-like, to be taken away instead; and to cause no hurt to any other person even in punishment. Gandhi, therefore, with his doctrine of nonviolence, represents Indian mysticism at its best; but it would be a gross mistake to take him as a representative of the far higher Indian philosophy. The latter does not teach an ethic of emotional unrealism but an ethic of reasoned service. It is strong where the other is sentimental.
The famous injunction of Jesus to resist not evil must also be interpreted in the same light. It is to be followed literally and externally by mystics and renunciants but intelligently and internally by the wise. For although the latter have come to know their ultimate oneness with the crook and criminal, this need not prevent them from protecting themselves or others against crookedness and criminality or from punishing wrongdoers for their malpractices, provided, as Buddha further pointed out, this is done without hatred. For then, observed the great Asiatic teacher, “the criminal should learn to consider that this punishment is the fruit of his own act, and as soon as he can honestly arrive at such understanding the punishment will purify his soul and he may no longer lament his fate but actually rejoice in it.”
A mysticism which makes a man into a passive spectator of aggressive injustice or violent murder or an asceticism which makes him condone evil done in his presence on the plea that he has renounced the world and its ways does not represent the real wisdom of India. It is the duty of a philosopher not to refuse help when suffering victims cry out against attack, but to bestow it, using force if necessary. A doctrine that preaches lethargic inertia or flabby nonviolence in the face of acts of flagrant violation of justice and goodwill is completely unacceptable to philosophy. Such misunderstanding of the old sages and such weakness of heart and mind have never helped India but merely degraded her. The mystic who is afraid of administering punishment because he is afraid of causing suffering is guided by emotion. The philosopher who is not afraid to do so when necessary knows that suffering is the greatest teacher of man; for what man will not learn by reason he must learn by pain. He who will not think must suffer. What he might learn in a few minutes through reflection will be whipped into him during a few years through pain. Many a blow falls on the head of a man just to get a single idea into it. He must learn by personal anguish what he has refused to learn by personal reflection. He must understand by bitter pain what he would not understand by the persuasions of philosophy. For the mystic wishes to be undisturbed and to disturb none, whereas the philosopher wishes to be altruistic and to serve all.
Nevertheless the philosopher helps humanity in his own way, not in theirs. For they know only what they desire, he what they need. He helps wisely, which means that he is not a sentimentalist. Heart and head must justify each other. Finally he prefers to go quietly to the fountainhead and help the few through whom he can help the many. Thus he economizes time, resources, and energy and in the end achieves immeasurably more service than if he gave his whole time to individuals.
In our frankest moments we discover that we have never been altruistic, but we have sought a subtle or obvious self-satisfaction in all our deeds. Unselfishness is unnatural. We all look at life through I-glasses! “Why therefore should I do good to others?” is a natural and proper question to ask. Philosophy answers by saying: “Because secretly and ultimately all mankind forms one great family. Because the full consciousness of this fact is the grand goal of human evolution. Because life is far holier than pious people realize. Because that unknown reality which men in their remoteness call God, which we may better call the Overself, is both our own secret self and the world’s secret self. He who has realized this unitary consciousness has simultaneously realized that it is the duty of the strong to assist the weak, of the advanced to help the backward, of the saintly to guide the sinful, of the wealthy to lighten the burden of the destitute, and of the wise to enlighten the ignorant.” And because ignorance is the root of all other troubles, therefore the Buddha pointed out that, “explaining and spreading the truth is above all charities.”
Most of us have to work at something whether we like it or not and whether we are philosophers or not. Philosophy does not alter that, but it can alter the ultimate ends for which we are working. We can work to earn a mere livelihood or we can work to make a memorable life. For most people life consists of some pleasures but more burdens. Yet they think and act as though it consisted of some burdens but more pleasures. We must make men reflect upon the values they wish to obtain from life. Do they want to earn a livelihood? Do they want to enjoy themselves? Do they want the truth about the world’s meaning and life’s end? Yet they may have all these, for none are contradictory, provided always they learn to keep a sense of proportion, a proper equilibrium. Tremendous are the possibilities of an existence governed by the philosophic rule of a balanced life, actuated by the selfless desire to better one’s corner of the world, dynamised by the pointed power of concentrated thought, and guided by the full light of this new-old East-West wisdom. Men with far less equipment have amazed the modern world with their achievements for good or evil; are there a few courageous enough to gamble their personal lives with destiny that they may enrich their age and bless others, wise enough to give up this long littleness of the egoistic life whose ultimate end is but the cold grave? Can truth find a few friends to serve and support her with a wholly dedicated life? Who can put self strongly behind him and stretch out his hands far enough to grasp this great paradox?
If the call for men who are actuated by the will to help not only themselves but also mankind is forever sounding silently in the ears of those who understand the meaning of life, it is today sounding a hundred times more strongly. For in no previous epoch of world history has such misery and such ignorance been so widespread. The need of world enlightenment is immensely greater today than in the centuries of Jesus and Buddha—those grand figures who walk through history in auroral splendour. For consider our own time. The modern epoch was the most delightful and withal the most miserable of any. It was sired by Mammon, mothered by the misunderstanding of life’s end, and cradled in a comfortable automobile. It began with the cloud-high expectations and rosy promises of applied and inventive science, but has set low with disappointment and disillusion. It sinks in a dismal decrepitude of ideals.
We went forward so breathlessly that we deluded ourselves with the sensation of rapid and all-round progress. Now that delusion has been exploded. A day of relentless reckoning has come to the world. For our progress was a one-sided affair. It was mainly technological, not teleological. When men crystallize their habits of thought, ways of living, and general outlook along materialistic lines they become unconscious of their ethical danger and of their waste of the precious opportunity of incarnation. Only a tremendous outside impact could shock them back into awareness of the futility and failure of such a life. Such an impact has been provided by the world crisis, with the two wars and the national nightmares which have been its spotlights.
Karma is forever at work in the history of all nations and of all individuals. It does not merely operate among individuals alone; it can also be collective and operate among groups, such as families, tribes, and whole peoples. But this fate is self-created. It is not imposed upon them arbitrarily by any outward power. The fortunes or misfortunes of a country are not wholly due to the capacity or foolishness of those who govern it. They are partly the reflection of the capacity or foolishness of the people themselves. We must always keep in mind that either in the past or the present both the people and the rulers of the country helped to create, often unconsciously, the causes and conditions which reach their climax with open sufferings. Until a transformation in their way of thinking occurs they will have to face intermittent recurrence of conflicts, with the consequent sufferings.
Nevertheless it is an inescapable duty of administrators, who are set by self or circumstance in a position to lead, control, and influence people, to fit themselves for it. So long as their own mind is confused and bewildered and they are unable to put themselves in the position of posterity and gaze at our age through the telescope of time, so long is it impossible for them to guide or govern others aright. The mastery of philosophy, the study of its liberating thoughts, will help them to drive correctly instead of drifting wrongly.
These are hard words, but bursting bombs and grinding calamities have begun to burst the illusions of men and to grind to dust the lies under which they lived. The world crisis provokes the gloom of disillusionment and brings the stirrings of dissatisfaction to a head. It is worth remembering that philosophy appeared in Greece at a time when, as Socrates said, there seemed nothing to be done except crouch behind the wall until the storm passes by.
It is wrong thinking that has ruined and wrecked Europe. It is right thinking that can redeem it. The present state of Europe is but an expression of what concentrated and unbridled emotion—whether for good or evil—can achieve.
The racial antipathies and economic antagonisms, the nationalistic hatreds and militaristic horrors of our woeful planet bear terrible witness to the fact that we have forgotten the high business for which we are here on earth—the business of making our personal lives disclose something of that which is their fundamental reality, the business of breaking the ancient illusion that the ego is our only self and the body our only existence. We might well become sad at the thought of thoughtless mankind, attending to every concern except this first and fundamental one, if we did not know that suffering was itself a tutor. The world has trod its Via Dolorosa and learnt bitter truths from the breaking down of what it has built with deluded mind. A great war telescopes several decades into one, bringing about forced changes in men and their minds, in society and its systems. Calamity creates wisdom and forces people into the wiser path they ought to have travelled willingly. Thus their painful sufferings and disappointed strivings breed wisdom. War strips them of their smug complacency, stabs their frailties, and comes as a grim corrective. The great wars which give us personal gloom give us also mental awakenings. The compensation of chaos and war are the new ideas they generate. The revolutions in historical events usually play the part of a prelude to the revelations in men’s minds. It is a mistake to regard adversity as being always an adversary. It may sometimes be a friend in disguise.
It is true that the study of the theory of philosophy does not flourish during crises, nevertheless the practice of it does. For then its students can show the benefits of their attainment and understanding, then they can display how unflurried and unperturbed they are amid all trials and how sure and decisive when called to posts of responsibility and judgment; then their thought can rest in the quiet inner citadel while their body acts energetically and fearlessly amid the grave terrific stresses outside.
We become unnerved at the outbreak of war and begin to see that life is largely transient, afflicted by disappointments, and pain-laden. Ordinarily people do not observe this instability of existence, do not see that everything is either altering or vanishing continuously. But the contemporary period—with its characteristics of high speed and sudden surprise so well exemplified in its history moving overnight—has begun to make this evident. Such suffering is educative and brings thoughts into our head which would not otherwise have arisen. The instability of sensual existence and the successiveness of personal life are sharply brought home to us and thus our narrow egoistic outlook is diminished, i.e., purified through the arisal of a yearning to find something more stable, unchanging, and lasting. This yearning can only be satisfied in the quest of a reality other than merely material existence. When we become conscious of our weakness we begin to search for a fresh source of inner strength. When we realize that we are unable to order life right we commence to take up the quest of its meaning. When we discover that we have been deceived by appearances we are ready to learn something about reality.
This war teaches us in the severest possible manner the transiency of all things; let us therefore ask ourselves what this means. Where is the fine house which has been shattered to pieces, the beloved child slain, the modest fortune lost? What are they today? Only memories which seem like vivid dreams. But what are memories? Mental constructions, i.e., thoughts! What will these things be in the future? Thoughts! If therefore we have the courage to complete the logical circle, then we are forced to conclude that something which is purely mental both in the past and the future must have been purely mental in that which rests upon both—the present. Thus mentalism is being silently taught by the vicissitudes of life to ordinary unphilosophic folk.
We can keep calmer and saner amid the terrors of our time if we keep to the truth of mentalism, if we regard these terrors as experiences whose stuff is ultimately as mental as the stuff of dreams. And just as men who have bad dreams and fearful nightmares suffer most when they are deluded into clinging to the reality of their experiences, but will suffer least if they could know that they are dreaming and let go their delusion, so we too may modify our physical sufferings by remaining awake to the truth that they are all ideas which come and are felt indeed but will also vanish as they came.
The philosopher, more than any other, can show a path to other men at a time when they are bewildered and when the whole world is at crossroads.
There is always a way of liberation.
It is the way of repentance and return.
Nothing seems simpler, yet nothing seems so hard. But another way there is not. And the way of unloosed suffering is still harder to tread.
However, it is not untrue that the night is darkest before dawn. We have been living through an unforgettable period. Here is history in the making, with all its terrific drama and all its tragic interest. For our age is transitional. Its very uniqueness prepares the way for a unique renaissance. The ravages of the war will need to be repaired. We must learn to meet bad times with better thoughts. We must struggle for a new era characterized by heartfelt universality. It is for us to spell the riddle of the future with letters drawn from the alphabet of the present. It is for us to evaluate the movements disclosed by history and follow its iron logic. It is for us to draw wise lessons out of the vanished centuries for our own ethical guidance and material profit.
First and foremost of these lessons is that we are living at the end of a cycle when karma is closing all the national accounts, clearing up mass arrears. We stand and watch the disappearance of an era. The circle is being completed. The monuments of the old world are toppling. This transition must necessarily be one of confused outlooks, convulsive ferment, and contending ideals, or rebellious emotions and fanatic feelings!
Second and easiest of these lessons is that a stupendous process of swift change is going on before our eyes, such as no people has ever before witnessed. The practical import of this is that although society should certainly be stable it should also be flexible. A fossil is also stable but it is not flexible. The lesson of countries like China is that when the law of change is ignored, suffering comes. The dualism between these two forces, stability and change, will always persist, but the art of reconciling them must always be practised. In times like the present a deliberate emphasis must be placed on the aspect of change.
This does not imply that sudden and violent revolutionary changes are advocated. Revolution for its own brutal sake is the principle of unbalanced emotions and distorted minds. A mystical belief in the coming of a millennium lurks behind every fervid and furious revolution, yet has never been historically realized. Whoever uses wrong methods thereby ruins right aims. Whoever abuses freedom asks for restraint. For he cuts short the period of human adolescence in trying to make too much haste and thus infects society with a fearful psychological disease—hatred!
On the other hand, whoever fails to recognize the time-spirit—which is one of iconoclastic renovation proceeding at an accelerated pace—and foolishly resists it, will resist it at his peril.
There are various ways of bringing about social improvement. There is the way of suddenly beating your neighbour on the head, which is the way of revolution.… There is the alternative of persuading him to bring a more rational and less self-centred mode of thought to bear upon social problems, which is the way of reason. Both unreflective revolutionary and prudent reasoner may be motivated by the same concept of a better world. But the two trends are antagonistic and must inevitably clash. It is perfectly possible for men everywhere to have a finer and fairer existence. The attitude of constructive service and unselfish cooperation will meet all needs. But if it is absent, if men’s desires conflict with fate’s designs, there will then arise the misery of unnecessary strife. It therefore behoves all men to adapt themselves to these irresistible changes or suffer for their stupidity. The stubborn reiteration of loyalties that pertain to a disappearing past is meaningless. It is for those in authority to realize that iconoclastic forces are at work abrogating old dispensations, that new ideas are fermenting and that a new, noble, and generous outlook is required of them. Let us not bemoan the passing of that which has outserved its time. The roaring imperious tide of the twentieth century cannot be restrained. It must be given its way, but it need not be permitted to destroy what is worthwhile in our inheritance. The commingling of keen thought with courageous action will bring tremendous possibilities. Let us envisage the integration of the highest ideals of Orient and Occident, of the union of their two streams of discovery—one coming from the farthest antiquity and the other from the freshest science.
Meanwhile we must keep our sanity. If we abandon all the cultural heritage of religion, mysticism, philosophy, ethics, ideals, and intuitions which has come down to us from our forefathers we are making a terrible mistake. For we abandon the most priceless elements of human existence. Let us simplify and purify this heritage if we wish. Let us sift sound doctrine from superstitious belief. But let us not forget that existence ultimately turns to ash and dust when it holds none of the inner serenity of a good life and inner support of a true one which are needed more than ever by our bewildered epoch.
Can we not see in the awful position of the world woe’s victims a forced asceticism, an involuntary and undesired renunciation, a compulsory giving up of every desired thing, person, attachment? Can we not see in the sudden impoverishment of once-wealthy seats of empire like London and Paris a constrained self-mortification and a coerced putting on of sackcloth and ashes? Can we not see that if millions have been beggared, if all this means anything at all in a larger sense, it means that humanity is being passed against its own will through a purifying process on a scale previously unknown in history? Can we not also see that the financial avalanche which swept away the lifesavings of millions of Americans in 1929 is of the same piece? Are we not all being taught that the earth is but a camping ground and not an eternal home? Is it not plain that what the sage learns through profound reflection and voluntary self-denial the peasant and the townsman are being made to learn through the bitterest misfortunes and the direct losses; that nothing is to become the focus of our whole being save the aspiration toward truth, life-meaning, reality—the kingdom of heaven in Jesus’ words—which are all within us? The sage has sought and found his basic happiness in the Mind, which is his inalienable possession and of which no catastrophe can rob him. Everywhere we perceive that mankind is being blindly driven to seek in the same direction because all else has begun to fail it. This does not mean that wealth is to be ascetically spurned, property to be thrown away, and money mentioned only with hypocritical horror. Such an attitude is right for the monk but not for the man of wisdom. What it does mean is that we may accumulate wealth if we wish to, possess property and estimate the usefulness of money, love, and family and friends, but the moment we permit these things to absorb our whole mind and take up our whole time so that we have neither mind nor time to give to the quest of understanding what we are here for, then they become a disguised curse and a source of latent suffering.
Not that we need war to shrive our spirits and purge our hearts; life with its changing panorama of thought and deed, its endless personal struggles, is always assisting us likewise. But often war is the visible climax of graded periods of the cosmic struggle between the selfless and selfish tendencies in man’s outlook, between whatever works toward unity and whatever works toward disintegration. Meanwhile humanity will rise to higher and higher conceptions of what constitutes evil, dropping its narrower outlooks and ancient brutalities with deepening shame. The horrors of bloody war will disappear and soldiers will throw aside their steel helmets when the beast in man is tamed, but the conflict of minds will replace it. Struggle must continue while the world lasts, but it will gradually be refined, modified, dignified, and purged of its physical brutality. We must therefore admit with Socrates: “Evil, O Glaucon, will not vanish from the earth. How should it, if it is the name of the imperfection through whose defeat the perfect types acquire their value?” and with Buddha: “Struggle there must be, for all life is a struggle of some kind.” But Buddha also pointed out that the conflict in life is not really between good and evil but between knowledge and ignorance. We must remember that the sages refuse to recognize evil as a positive independent existence but only as a limited and transient aspect of existence. Our task is to learn wisdom from all experience, from pain as from pleasure, from cruelty as from kindness, and to express in the arena of everyday life just what we have learnt. In this way everything that happens gives us a better foothold for future living.
Fourth and last of the lessons we may draw is that intelligence, adequately sharpened, courageously accepted, and selflessly applied, is always the dominant factor in the end. Those who worship force rather than brains as the highest social power should take a lesson from the calm perspective of history. If force were the greatest thing known the gigantic dinosaur would be king of this world, and the prehistoric monsters would have inherited the earth long ago. Yet how many herds of these animals have gone with the years and left no heirs? They have died out and disappeared. Why? Because there is something greater than mere force. That something is Thought. Man—puny animal that he was in comparison with these giants—conquered them all. He did it not by force, but by brains. There is no limit to what he shall be able to do when he shall have fully harnessed this wondrous power of thought, so little understood though it be. Science is only a stage in this growth. There are those who have become afraid of it because they have become afraid of what scientific war has done to man. But science is only a sword. With it you may pierce through your problems or pierce through your throat. Whatever you do the responsibility lies with yourself, not with the sword. Intelligence blossoms as the flower of well-reasoned thought and it matures gradually into the fruit of spontaneous insight. That which begins in the primitive man as a glimmer of purely local inquisitiveness ends in the evolved man as a passion for consummate understanding of all existence. The innumerable lives on earth which intervene between both are but lessons in the school of intelligence. When intelligence is only partial, immature, and incomplete it teaches man cunning, selfishness, and materialism. When full, mature, and perfect it teaches him wisdom, selflessness, and truth.
Thus we return to the central thought that the world’s greatest need is not the discovery of a new scientific marvel or a new momentary pleasure but the discovery of a new understanding of life. It is not enough to seek things which complicate existence; it must also be comprehended. We must make up our minds whether we wish to learn this truth through the pain which succeeds folly or through the peace which succeeds philosophy. We who have wandered this queer planet and kept its lessons at heart know inwardly that neither the peaceful, primitive settings of nature in the colourful Orient nor the noisy, metropolitan complexities of man in the colourless Occident constitute our true home. We know that the latter lies in a remote place to which no rolling steamer, no puffing engine, no creaking bullock cart could ever bear us. For it lies in the infinitude of the unpathed Overself.
The restoration of philosophy to its honoured place in the world of living men rather than dead ones has yet to come. After all, the world’s search is not for men who must die but for truths which will live. Philosophy will gather a few votaries because it is our belief that it can be made intelligible to any intelligent man, even if he has never previously studied it, although it cannot be made intelligible to any highly egoistic man because, being nothing but a human bundle of prejudices, he cannot care for truth. The ego is a needle through whose eye the camel of truth cannot contrive to squeeze its way. And truth is the proper target of all genuine philosophy. Egoism and illusion are all that philosophy deprives us of, but in return it assuredly proffers much. The poet will see the radiance of the sunset but ignore the atmospheric conditions that cause it. The scientist will see the atmospheric conditions and ignore the radiance. The philosopher will see both atmospheric change and vivid radiance and something more which neither poet nor scientist knows, for he will know how to live amid the deceptive flux of the evanescent in the fixed serenity of the REAL.
The philosopher is he who has come to the understanding of himself, while his philosophy is his ordinary experience of the world come to the understanding of itself. The fact that we close this modern restatement of an ancient doctrine leaving loose ends of thought and discovery, that we have loosened the knot of the world-problem but have not untied it, should not mislead its readers into impatient judgment upon its contents. For there are no loose ends in the hidden philosophy. Everything is perfectly tied, and he who can master it will possess a finished attitude of mind. Meanwhile the groundwork for the teachings of the final volume of this work with which we shall humbly endeavour to ascend intellectually the highest peaks of human thought has now been prepared. The basis upon which the superstructure of ultimate truth may be reared has now been laid down. Correct comprehension of those higher tenets, which are reserved with regret, will cast a powerful searchlight upon mankind’s most perplexing riddles such as, what is this mystery of Mind, what is the meaning of Death, what is God, what is Man, why has Nature given us dream and sleep and so on.
Let us not lose ourselves in despair because the world seems so bad. It is slowly coming of age amid apparent retrogression and periodic lapses. Its marred childhood draws to an inevitable end before our eyes; its agonies are but the throes of adolescent change. Those of us who have glimpsed both man and life beneath the surface can remain steady and affirm, with American Emerson, that “the age of the quadruped is to go out. The age of the brain and of the heart come in.” If we have been witnessing the woes of an epoch struggling in its death-grapple, we are also about to witness the arisal of a new era where a humane life for human beings may be more possible.
We may honestly nourish the conviction that, amid all the constant alternations of ethical stagnation and awakening during mankind’s long and painful journey from ignorance to truth, goodwill must prevail in the end—not merely because we want to console ourselves, but because the fundamental principle of life is unity.
For seven thousand years at least according to the modern historian’s reckoning, but for double that period according to ours, the Sphinx has squatted before the Egyptian desert, propounding its riddle to the unheeding ears of mankind in a silence as profound as that of Christ’s when he stood in the court before Pilate with the shadow of a ghastly cross over him.
“What is truth?” asked the Roman Governor, thus echoing man’s most perennial question. Did Christ know? Yet he did not answer. His lips did not move. But his eyes fixed themselves on those of Pilate’s throughout that awed silence.
What he could not reveal by lip and tongue—for it transcends both—none else can reveal. But the road that leads to such sublime realization may be mapped out for the ardent seeker. Unto this difficult endeavour an eager pen and white waiting pages have been humbly dedicated.
This quality of the timelessness of truth thrust itself powerfully into the present writer’s meditations one evening in a land of steaming jungles and dense forests, where forgotten Indian sages had carried their culture long ago. He sat amid the vast deserted ruins of ancient Angkor, in Cambodian Indo-China, and watched the night lay siege to day and then waited for the stars to rise outside its largest temple, so large that the enclosing wall was nearly two and a half miles in perimeter. Here and there the great building was ominously cracked; mutilated statues of Ramayana’s gods strewed the ground; lichen and creeper laced themselves around the panels of carved goddesses; thorns flourished thickly around him as advance guards of the invading jungle; lizards crawled blasphemously over the calm faces of fallen Buddhas; bats coated the holy shrines with their nauseous excrement; the bright constellations of heaven gazed down on a scene of solemn desolation; gone were the proud glories of the Khmer people, but the sacred truths taught by their sages still remained though their lips were dumb and their bodies annihilated by time. Was it not wonderful that the immemorial wisdom of these men, who flourished and taught when Europe lay benighted in the dark ages, could be known and studied today, and would be known and studied yet again when another two millenniums had once more passed over this planet?
Out of the burial urn of the Past this same wisdom has been extricated. But because it has here been moulded in an ultramodern form to suit both our time and need, its authenticity or truth may not be plainly recognizable to its present-day Indian inheritors. Yet there is not a single important tenet here which cannot be found phrased in the old Sanskrit writings. We are only the inheritors and not the discoverers of this ever-ancient but ever-new lore. Therefore the writer bends in homage before the Himalayan intelligence of those sages who, since untraceable antiquity, have kept Truth alive.