17
The Coming to Birth of the Spirit

“You cannot dip your feet twice into the same waters,
because fresh waters are ever flowing in upon you.”
Heracleitus

The present article embodies a part of the material which I have assembled during recent years towards a critical analysis of the Indian, and incidentally neo-Platonic and other doctrines of “reincarnation,” regeneration, and transmigration, as these terms are defined below.¹ These doctrines, often treated as one, appear to have been more profoundly misunderstood, if that is possible, than any other aspect of Indian metaphysics. The theses that will be proposed are that the Indian doctrine of palingenesis is correctly expressed by the Buddhist statement that in “reincarnation” nothing² passes over from one embodiment to another, the continuity being only such as can be seen when one lamp is lighted from another: that the terms employed for “rebirth” (e.g. punar janma, punar bhava, punar apâdana [prati januma, nava jamma]) are used in at least three easily distinguishable senses: (1) with respect to the transmission of physical and psychic characteristics from father to son, i.e. with respect to palingenesis in a biological sense, defined by Webster as “The reproduction of ancestral characters without change,”³ (2) with respect to a transition from one to another plane of consciousness effected in one and the same individual and generally one and the same life, viz. that kind of rebirth which is implied in the saying “Except ye be born again” and of which the ultimate term is deification,⁴ and (3) with respect to the “motion” or peregrination of the Spirit from one body-and-soul to another, which “motion”⁵ necessarily takes place whenever one such a compound vehicle dies or another is generated, just as water might be poured out of one vessel into the sea, and dipped out by another, being always “water,” but never, except in so far as the vessel seems to impose a temporary identity and shape on its contents, properly “a water”; and thirdly, that no other doctrines of rebirth are taught in the Upanisads and Bhagavad Gîtâ than are already explicit and implicit in the Rig Veda.

“Spirit” we employ in the present introduction with reference to âtman, brahman, mrtyu, purusa, etc., alike, but in the body of the article only as a rendering of âtman, assuming as usual a derivation from a root an or vâ meaning to breathe or blow. But because the Spirit is really the whole of Being in all beings, which have no private essence but only a becoming, âtman is also used reflexively to mean the man himself as he conceives “himself” (whether as body, or body-and-soul, or body-soul-and-spirit, or finally and properly only as Spirit),⁶ and in such contexts we render âtman by “self,” or sometimes “self, or spirit.” Capitals are employed whenever there seems to be a possibility of confusing the very Man or immanent God with the man “himself”; but it must always be remembered that the distinction of spirit from Spirit and person from Person is “only logical, and not real,” in other words, a distinction without difference (bhedâbheda). A sort of image of what may be implied by such a distinction (which is analogous to that of the Persons as envisaged in the Christian Trinity) can be formed if we remember that the Perfected are spoken of as “rays” of the Supernal Sun, which rays are manifestly distinct if considered in their extension, but no less evidently indistinct if considered in their intension, i.e. at their source.

The Upanisads and BG are primarily concerned to bring about in the disciple a transference of self-reference, the feeling that “I am,” from oneself to the Spirit within us: and this with the purely practical purpose⁷ in view of pointing out a Way (mârga, Buddhist magga)⁸ that can be followed from darkness to light and from liability to pain and death to a state of deathless and timeless beatitude, attainable even here and now. In the Upanisads and early Buddhism it is clear that what had been an initiatory teaching transmitted in pupillary succession was now being openly published and in some measure adapted to the understanding of “royal” and not merely “sacerdotal” types of mentality, for example in the BG.

On the other hand, it is equally clear that there existed widespread popular misunderstandings, based either on an ignorance of the traditional doctrines or on a too literal interpretation of what had been heard of them.⁹ The internal evidence of the texts themselves with their questions and answers, definitions and refutations, is amply sufficient to show this. Hence, then, the necessity of those innumerable dialogues in which, alike in the Upanisads, BG and Buddhism, that which in “us” is, and that which is not, the Spirit are sharply distinguished and contrasted; the Spirit being that which “remains over”¹⁰ when all other factors of the composite personality “identity-and-appearance,” or “soul-and-body” have been eliminated. And furthermore, because “That One that breathes yet does not breathe” (RV. X,129.2) is not any what as opposed to any other what, It or He is described simultaneously by means of affirmations and denials, per modum excellentiae et remotionis.¹¹ The following analysis of the Supreme Identity (tad ekam), restricted to words derived from an, to “breathe” or vâ, to “blow,” may contribute to a better understanding of the texts:

These are not “philosophical” categories, but categories of experience from our point of view, sub rationem dicendi sive intelligendi, rather than secundum rem.

We can scarcely argue here in detail what was really meant by the palingenesis, metempsychosis, or metasomatosis of the neo-Platonic tradition.¹³ We shall only remark that in such texts as Plotinus, Enneads III, 4.2 (Mackenna’s version), where it is said that “Those (i.e. of “us”) that have maintained the human level are men once more. Those that have lived wholly to sense become animals ... the spirit of the previous life pays the penalty,”¹⁴ it must be realized that it is a metempsychosis and metasomatosis (and not a transmigration of the real person) that is in question; it is a matter, in other words, of the direct or indirect inheritance of the psycho-physical characteristics of the deceased, which he does not take with him at death and which are not a part of his veritable essence, but only its temporary and most external vehicle. It is only in so far as we mistakenly identify “ourselves” with these accidental garments of the transcendent personality, the mere properties of terrestrial human existence, that it can be said that “we” are reincorporated in men or animals: it is not the “spirit” that pays the penalty, but the animal or sensitive soul with which the disembodied spirit has no further concern.¹⁵ The doctrine merely accounts for the reappearance of psycho-physical characteristics in the mortal sphere of temporal succession. The intention of the teaching is always that a man should have recognized “himself” in the spirit, and not in the sensitive soul, before death, failing which “he” can only be thought of as in a measure “lost,” or at any rate disintegrated. When, on the other hand, it is said that the “Soul” is “self-distributed” (cf. âtmânam vibhajya, MU VI,26) and “always the same thing present entire” (ibid., III,4.6), and that this “Soul passes through the entire heavens in forms varying with the variety of place”¹⁶—the sensitive form, the reasoning form, even the vegetative form” (ibid., III,4.2) it is evident that it is only as it were that there is any question of “several Souls,” and that what is described is not the translation of a private personality from one body to another, but much rather the peregrination of the Spirit (âtman) repeatedly described in the Upanisads as omnimodal and omnipresent, and therefore as occupying or rather animating body after body, which bodies or rather bodies and sensitive souls, follow one another in causally determinated series.¹⁷

All this is surely, too, what Eckhart (in whom the Neo-Platonic tradition persists) must mean when be says “Aught is suspended from the divine essence; its progression (i.e. vehicle) is matter, wherein the soul puts on new forms and puts off her old ones ... the one she doffs she dies to, and the one she dons she lives in” (Evans ed. I, 379), almost identical with BG II, 22 “As a man casting off worn-out garments, taketh other new ones, so the Body-dweller (dehin = sarîra âtman), casting off worn-out bodies, enters into new ones,” cf. BU IV,4.4 “Just so this Spirit, striking down the body and driving off its nescience,¹⁸ makes for itself some other new and fairer form.”

The three sections of Upanisads translated below begin with the question, “What is most the Spirit”? That is to say, “What is this ‘Self’ that is not ‘myself’? What is this ‘Spirit’ in ‘me,’ that is not ‘my’ spirit”? It is the distinction that Philo is making in Quaestiones ... ad Genesis II, 59 and De Cherubim, 113ff. (as cited by Goodenough, By Light, Light, 1941, pp. 374-375) when he distinguishes “us” from that in us which existed before “our” birth and will still exist when “we, who in our junction with our bodies,¹⁹ are mixtures (sunkritoi) and have qualities, shall not exist, but shall be brought into the rebirth, by which, becoming joined to immaterial things, we shall become unmixed (asunkritoi) and without qualities.” The “rebirth” (palingenesia) is here certainly not an “aggregation” or palingenesis in the biological sense, but a “regeneration” (palingenesis as a being born again of and as the Spirit of Light), cf. Goodenough, p. 376, note 35.

“What is most the Self,” or “most the Spirit”? As the late C. E. Rolt has said in another context (Dionysius the Areopagite on the Divine Names and Mystical Theology, 1920, p. 35), “Pascal has a clear-cut answer: ‘Il n’y a que l’Être universel qui soit tel ... Le Bien Universel est en nous, est nous-mêmes et n’est pas nous.’ This is exactly the Dionysian doctrine. Each must enter into himself and so find Something that is his true Self and yet is not his particular self ... Something other than his individuality which (other) is within his soul and yet outside of him.”

“If any man come to me ... and hate not his own soul (heautou psuchên, Vulgate animam suam) he cannot be my disciple” (Luke, 14:26). The English versions shrink from such a rendering, and have “hate not his own life.” It is evidently, however, not merely “life” that is meant, since those who are at the same time required to “hate” their own relatives, if, on the contrary, they love them, may be willing to sacrifice even life for their sake: what is evidently meant is the lower soul, as regularly distinguished in the neo-Platonic tradition from the higher power of the soul which is that of the Spirit and not really a property of the soul but its royal guest.²⁰ It is again, then, precisely from this point of view that St. Paul says with a voice of thunder, “For the word of God is quick and powerful, and sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing even to the dividing asunder of soul and spirit” (Heb. 4:12),²¹ and consistently with this that “Whoever is joined unto the Lord is One Spirit” (I Cor. 6:17, cf. 12:4-13).

With this may be compared, on the one hand, BG VI, 6 “The Spirit is verily the foeman of and at war with what-is-not-the-Spirit” (anâtmanas tu satrutve vartetâtmaiva satruvat), where anâtman = Buddhist anattâ,²² all that, body-and-soul, of which one says na me so attâ, “This is not my spirit,” and on the other, with Eckhart’s “Yet the soul must relinquish her existence” (Evans ed., I, 274),²³ and, in the anonymous Cloud of Unknowing, Ch. XLIV, “All men have matter of sorrow: but most specially he feeleth sorrow, that feeleth and wotteth that he is,” and with Blake’s “I will go down unto Annihilation and Eternal Death, lest the Last Judgment come and find me unannihilate, and I be seiz’d and giv’n into the hands of my own Selfhood.” All scripture, and even all wisdom, truly, “cries aloud for freedom from self.”

But if “he feeleth sorrow that feeleth and wotteth that he is,” he who is no longer anyone, and sees, not himself, but as our texts express it, only the Spirit, one and the same in immanence and transcendence, being what he sees, geworden was er ist, he feels no sorrow, he is beatified,— “One ruler, inward Spirit of all beings, who maketh manifold a single form! Men contemplative, seeing Him whose station is within you, and seeing with Him,—eternal happiness is theirs, none others” (KU V,12).²⁴

An “actual experience of Unknowing and of the Negative Path that leads to it” (Rolt, ibid.) is not easy to be had, unless for those who are perfectly mature, and like ripe fruits, about to fall from their branch. There are men still “living,” at least in India, for whom the funeral rites have been performed, as if to seal them “dead and buried in the Godhead.” “It is hard for us to forsake the familiar things around, and turn back to the old home whence we came” (Hermes, Lib. IV, 9). But it can be said, even of those who are still self-conscious, and cannot bear the strongest meat, that he specially, if not yet most specially, “feeleth joy,” whose will has already fully consented to, though it may not yet have realized, an annihilation of the whole idea of any private property in being, and has thus, so to speak, foreseen and foretasted an ultimate renunciation of all his great possessions, whether physical or psychic. Mors janua vitae.

Notes

1. Frag. 12; cf. Fragments 30, 31a, 31b, 91a (qv), 91b, 48a, 50 and 10. The line could also be translated: “As they step into the same rivers, different and still different waters flow upon them”, cf. Plut. De apud Delphous 3926. The original reference is to Arius, Didyma, Dox. Gr. 471.47 and Plato, Theatetus 160D, Cratylus 401D and 402A. The emphasis is here the unity of the World’s Flux of which we are a part, at any one point one thing and another at the next.See also my “Vedic Exemplarism,” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies, I, 1936 and “Rebirth and Omniscience in Pali Buddhism,” Indian Culture, III, p. 19f. and p. 760; and René Guénon, L’Erreur spirite, Paris, 1930, Ch. VI.
2. Mil. 72, na koci satto, “not any being.” Note that this expression is by no means necessarily exclusive of the Âtman as defined in the Upanisads by negation, of Basilides’ ouk ôn Theos, Eriugena’s God who “is not any what,” Eckhart’s “nonexistent” Godhead, Behmen’s God who is “no thing.”

3. In a number of important texts, rebirth is explicitly and categorically defined in terms of heredity, and this is probably the only sense in which the individual is thought of as returning to the plane of being from which he departs at death. It is expressly stated of the deceased that he is not seen again here (SB XIII, 8.4.12, etaj jîvâ’s ca pitaras ca na samdrsyante, and SB. passim, sakrd parâñcah pitarah).

   We have now RV VI,70.3: “He is born forth in his progeny according to law” (pra prajâbhir jâyate dharmanas pari); AB VII,13, “The father enter the wife, the mother, becoming an embryo, and coming into being anew, is born again of her” (jâyâm pravisati, garbho bhûtvâ, sa mâtaram, tasyâm punar navo bhûtvâ jâyate, cf. AV XI,4.20); AA II,5, “In that he both before and after birth maketh the son to become (sa yat kumâram ... adhibhâvayati), it is just himself as son that he maketh to become” (kumâram ... adhibhâvayati âtmânam eva); CU III,17. 5, “That he has procreated, that is his rebirth” (asosteti punar-utpâdanam); BU III,9.28, “He (the deceased) has indeed been born, but he is not born again, for (being deceased) who is there to beget him again?” (jâta eva na jâyate, ko nv enam janayet punah). We have also BU II,2.8 where filiation is rebirth “in a likeness” (pratirûpah). It would be impossible to have a clearer definition of the ordinary meaning of “reincarnation.” This filial reincarnation is moreover precisely the antapokatastasis or “renewal of things by substitution” of Hermes, as explained by Scott (Hermetica, II, 322), “The father lives again in his son; and though the individuals die and return no more, the race is perpetually renewed.”

   It should be added that beside the natural fact of progenitive reincarnation there is also a formal communication and delegation of the father’s nature and status in the world, made when the father is at the point of death. Thus in BU I,5.17-20, when this “All bequest” (sampratti) has been made, “the son who has been thus induced (anusistah) is called the father’s ‘mundane-representative’” (lokyah), and so “by means of the son the father is still-present-in (prati-tisthati) the world”: and similarly in Kaus. Up. II,15 (10) where the “All-bequest of the father to the son” (pitâpûtrîyam sampradânam) is described in greater detail, after which bequest if perchance the father should recover, he must either live under the lordship of the son or become a wandering religious (parivâvrajet, i.e. become a parivrâjaka dead to the world at least in outward form).

4. Cf. my “Indian Doctrine of Man’s Last End,” Asia, May 1937.
5. “Motion,” not a local motion, but an omnipresence, and as we speak, although metaphorically, of a “procession” in divinis. Not a local motion, but that of the Unmoved Mover, “Motionless One, swifter than thought itself ... who outgoeth others though they run” (Isâ 4), “Seated, He fares afar; reclining, goeth everywhere” (KU II,21), being “Endless in all directions” (MU VI,17), and though “He hath not come from anywhere” (KU II,18), still “Perpetually differentiated and going everywhere” (Mund. I,2.6) and “Multifariously taking birth” (bahudhâ jâyamânah, Mund. II,2.6).
6. Where we say, “Do not hurt me,” meaning the body, or “I know,” or “my soul,” the very careful teacher would say “Do not hurt this body,” “this mind knows,” and “the Spirit in ‘me’” or “Body-dweller.”
7. Cf. Edgerton, “The Upanisads, what do they seek and why?”, JAOS., 51. 97; Dante, Ep. ad. Can. Grand. §§15, 16. The Vedic tradition is neither philosophical, mystical, nor religious in the ordinary modern senses of these words. The tradition is metaphysical; “mystical” only in the sense that it expounds a “mystery,” and in that of Dionysius, Theologia Mystica. The Indian position has been admirably defined by Satkari Mookerjee: “Of course the question of salvation is a problem of paramount importance and constitutes the justification and ultimate raison d’être of philosophical enquiry. Philosophy in India has never been a mere speculative interest irrespective of its bearing on life ... The goal loomed large in the philosophical horizon, but it was recognized that there was no short cut or easy walk-over to it. The full price had to be paid in the shape of unfaltering philosophical realization of the ultimate mysteries of existence achieved through a rigorous moral discipline; and mere academic and intellectual satisfaction accruing from philosophical studies was considered to be of value only in so far as it was calculated to bring about the happy consummation” (in The Cultural Heritage of India, Vol. III, pp. 409, 410, 1937; italics mine).
8. For the meaning of this word see my “Nature of ‘Folklore’ and ‘Popular art’” in Quarterly Journal Mythic Society, Bangalore, Vol. XXVII.

9. We do not say that a theory of reincarnation (re-embodiment of the very man and true personality of the deceased) has never been believed in India or elsewhere, but agree with M. Guénon that “it has never been taught in India, even by Buddhists and is essentially a modern European notion,” and further “that no authentic traditional doctrine has ever spoken of reincarnation” (L’Erreur spirite, pp. 47, 199). It has been generally agreed by modern scholars that “reincarnation” is not a Vedic doctrine, but one of popular or unknown origin adopted and taken for granted already in the Upanisads and Buddhism. Neglecting Buddhism for the moment, it may be pointed out that where we have to do with a fundamental and revolutionary thesis, and not the simple expansion of doctrines previously taught, it would be inconceivable from the orthodox and traditional Hindu point of view that what is not taught in one part of sruti could have been taught in another; in such a matter, one cannot imagine an orthodox Hindu “choosing between” the RV and Upanisads, as though one might be right and the other wrong. This difficulty disappears if we find that the theory of reincarnation (as distinguished from the doctrines of metempsychosis and transmigration) is not really taught in the Upanisads: in this connection we call particular attention to the statement of BU IV, 3.37 where, when a new entity is coming into being, the factorial elements of the new composite are made to say, not “Here comes so-and-so” (previously deceased) but, “HERE COMES BRAHMAN.” This is furthermore in full agreement with the Buddhist Mil., 72 where it is said categorically that no entity whatever passes over from one body to another, and it is merely that a new flame is lighted.

   In differentiating reincarnation, as defined above, from metempsychosis and transmigration it may be added that what is meant by metempsychosis is the psychic aspect of palingenesis, or in other words psychic heredity, and that what is meant by transmigration is a change of state or level of reference excluding by definition the idea of a return to any state or level that has already been passed through. The transmigration of the “individual” âtman (spirit) can only be distinguished as a particular case of the transmigration of the paramâtman (Spirit, Brahman), for which last, however, it may be proved desirable to employ some such term as “peregrination”; peregrination replacing transmigration when the state of the kâmâcârin (Mover-at-will) has been attained.

   There are doubtless many passages in the Upanisads, etc., which, taken out of their whole context, seem to speak of a “personal reincarnation,” and have been thus misunderstood, alike in India and in Europe. Cf. Scott, Hermetica, II, pp. 193-194, note 6 (“he” in the first quoted sentence is the son of Valerius, and for our purposes “so-and-so” or Everyman; the italics are mine): “During his life on earth he was a distinct portion of pneuma, marked off and divided from the rest; now, that portion of pneuma, which was he, is blended with the whole mass of pneuma in which the life of the universe resides. This is what the writer (Apollonius) must have meant, if he adhered to the doctrine laid down in the preceding part of the letter. But from this point onward, he speaks ambiguously, and uses phrases which, to a reader who had not fully grasped the meaning of his doctrine, might seem to imply a survival of the man as a distinct and individual person.”

   The modern mind, with its attachment to “individuality” and its “proofs of the survival of personality” is predisposed to misinterpret the traditional texts. We ought not to read into these texts what we should like or “naturally” expect to find in them, but only to read in them what they mean: but “it is hard for us to forsake the familiar things around us, and turn back to the old home whence we came” (Hermes, Lib. IV, 9).

   Individuality, however we may hug its chains, is a partial and definite modality of being: “I” is defined by what is “not-I,” and thus imprisoned. It is with a view to liberation from this prison and this partiality that our texts so repeatedly demonstrate that our vaunted individuality is neither uniformal nor constant, but composite and variable, pointing out that he is the wisest who can most say “I am not now the man I was.” This is true in a measure of all werdende things; but the “end of the road” (adhvanah pâram) lies beyond “manhood.” It is only of what is not individual, but universal (cosmic) that perduration can be predicated, and only of what is neither individual nor universal that an eternity, without before or after, can be affirmed.

10. KU V, 4 kim atra sisyate ? CU VIII, 5 atisisyate ... âtman. Note that tad sisyate = Sea = Ananta = Brahman = Âtman.
11. We have briefly discussed the Indian doctrine de divinis nominibus in JIH XV, 84-92, 1936, and will only remark here that RV V,44.6 yâdrg eva dadrse tâdrg ucyate, “As he is envisaged, so is he called” answers to St. Thomas, Sum. Theol., I. XIII. [1c: Voces referuntur ad rea significandas mediante conceotione intellectus. Secundum iqitur quod aliquid a nobis intellectu cognosci potest, sic a nobis potest nominari, and ad 3: Pronomina vero demonstrationem ad id quod intelligitur, and 5c: Secundum analogium creaturum ad ipsum.]

12. Prâna, like Gk. pneuma has the double value of Spiritus and spiraculum vitae according to the context. “It is as the Breath-of-life (prâna) that the Provident Spirit (prajnâtman) grasps and erects the flesh” (Kaus. Up. III,3), cf. St. Thomas, Sum. Theol., III,32.1, “The power of the soul which is in the semen, through the spirit enclosed therein fashions the body,” and Schiller, Wallenstein, III, 13 “Es ist der Geist der sick den Körper schart”; and JUB III,32.2. Whereas the divided prânah are said to move within the vectors of channels (nadi, hita) of the heart (see refs. Hume, Upanisads, ed. 2), in Hermes Lib. X, 13 and 17 the “vital Spirit” (pneuma) traverses the veins and arteries “with, but not as, the blood” and thus “moves the body, and carries it like a burden ... (and) controls the body.”

    The Prâna is identified with the Prajñâtman: as Prâna, “life,” as Prajñâtman, “immortality”; length of days in this world and immortality in the other are complementary. As distinguished from the Prâna, the divided prânah are the currents of perception by means of the sense organs and are prior to them. Hence as in KU IV.1 one says, “The Self-existent pierced the openings outward, thereby it is that one looks forth” (but must look in to see the Seer; see the discussion of this passage in JIH XI, 571-578, 1935).

13. For many references, see Scott, Hermetica, II, 265ff.

14. Viz. of “shameful transmigration into bodies of another kind,” Hermes Trismegistus, Asclepius I, 12a, cf. BU VI,2.16, CU V,10,7-8, Kaus. I.2. We understand that the result of a bestiality in “us” is that bestial types are propagated: this is the reincarnation of character in our sense (1), and it is in this way that “the sins of the fathers are visited upon their children.”

    “Beasts,” moreover, is a symbol, just as when we say, “Don’t be a beast” or refer to some man as a “worm” or some woman as a “cat.” The Indian tradition regularly employs this sort of language, AA II,3.8 (a locus classicus, cf. the definition of “person” by Boethius, Contra Eutychen, II), for example, defining the spiritual man who “knows what is and what is not mundane,” etc., as a “person” (purusa), and “others” whose knowledge is merely an affection as “cattle” (pasu).

    For the benefit of those who believe in the folk origin of the notion of reincarnation (understood to mean a rebirth in the flesh of the very person lately deceased) it may be observed that the Sumatran Bataks devoured “captives in war to assimilate their valor and grandmothers or grandfathers as a form of pious internment. This last was frequently, if not always, at the request of the victim, in the belief that it would assure continued existence in the form of a new soul” (G.H. Seybold in Asia, September 1937, p. 641, italics mine). This cannibal belief is a belief in metempsychosis, and not a belief in “reincarnation.”

15. In all these discussions it must be remembered that “soul” (psuchê, anima, without exact equivalent in Sanskrit, other than nâma, the name or “form” of a thing by which its identity is established) is a two-fold value; the higher powers of the “soul” coinciding with Spirit (pneuma) and/or Intellect, (nous hêgemôn, or noûs), the lower with sensation (aisthêsis) and opinion (doxa). Hence the Gnostic hierarchy of animal, psychic, and spiritual men, the former destined to be lost, the intermediate capable of liberation, and the latter virtually free, and assured of liberation at death (Bruce Codex, etc.). By “lost” understand “unmade into the cosmos” (Hermes, Lib. IX, 6), and by “liberated,” wholly separated from the animal soul and thus become what the higher powers already are, divine. Render âtman by “soul.” Observe that “animal” is from anima = psuchê, “soul,” animalia = empsucha; hence Scott, Hermetica, I. 297 renders Solum enim animal homo by “Man, and man alone of all beings that have soul”; it is by nous and not by psuchê that man is distinguished from animal (Hermes, Lib. VIII, 5). It may be noted that the Averroist doctrine of the Unity of the Intellect (for which “monopsychism” seems a peculiarly inappropriate term) was repugnant to the Christian scholastic authors of a later age, precisely because of its incompatibility with a belief in personal immortality (cf. De Wulf, Histoire.., II, 361, 1936): on the other hand, imagination (phantasmata) and memory survive the death of the body not as they are in the passive intellect (Hermetic noêsis, Skr. asuddha manas), but only as they are in the possible intellect (Hermetic nous, Skr., suddha manas) which “is in act when it is identified with each thing as knowing it” (St. Thomas, Sum. Theol., I,2.67.2C). Furthermore St. Thomas says that “To say that the soul is of the Divine Substance involves a manifest improbability” (I,90.1), and Eckhart is continually speaking of the deaths and last death of the soul. It is clear at least that an immortality of the sensitive and reasoning “soul” is out of the question, and that if the soul can in any sense be called “immortal,” it is with respect to the “intellectual power of the soul” rather than with respect to the soul itself. Hermes’ “soul that is fastened to the body,” Lib. XI, 24a, is no conceivably immortal principle, even supposing a temporary post-mortem cohesion of certain psycho-physical elements of the bhûtâtman; neither can we equate the “soul” that Christ asks us to “hate” with “man’s immortal soul.” The quest of “the modern man in search of a soul” is a very different one from that implied in Philo’s “soul of the soul”; one may say that modern psychology and aesthetics have in view only the lower or animal soul in man, and only the subconscious. What Philo (Quis rerum divinarum Heres, 48, Goodenough’s version, p. 378) says is that “The word ‘soul’ is used in two senses, with reference either to the soul as a whole or to its dominant (hêgemonikon = Skr. anataryâmin) part, which latter is, properly speaking, the soul of the soul” (psuchê psuchês cf. in MU III, 2 bhûtâtman ... amrto’ syâtmâ “elemental self ... its deathless Self). The value of the European “soul” has remained ambiguous ever since.

    Hence in the analysis of neo-Platonic doctrines of rebirth, and also throughout the Christian tradition from the Gospels to Eckhart and the Flemish mystics, it is indispensable to know just what “sort of soul” is being spoken of in a given context: and in translating from Sanskrit it is exceedingly dangerous, if not invariably misleading, to render âtman by “soul.”

16. I do not know the source of this quotation; it is probably Platonic, but corresponds exactly to Nirukta, VII, 4, “It is because of his great divisibility that they apply many names to Him ... The other Gods, or Angels (devâh) are counter-members of the One Spirit. They originate in function (karma); Spirit (âtman) is their source ... Spirit is the whole of what they are,” and BD I, 70-74 “Because of the vastness of the Spirit, a diversity of names is given ... according to the distribution of the spheres. It is inasmuch as they are differentiations (vibhutih, cf, BG X,40) that the names are innumerable ... according to the spheres in which they are established.” Cf. MU VI, 26 “Distributing himself He fills these worlds,” and for further references my “Vedic Monotheism” in JIH XV, pp. 54-92, April, 1936.

    “Now there are diversities of gifts, but the same Spirit. And there are differences of administration, but the same Lord. And there are diversities of operations, but it is the same God that worketh in all ... The members of that body, being many, are one body” (I Cor.12:4-6 and 12).

17. For “karma” (= “adrsta”) in Christian doctrine, cf. Augustine, Gen. ad. Lit., VII, 24 (cited by St. Thomas, Sum. Theol. I,91.2), “The human body pre-existed in the previous works in their causal virtues” and De Trin. III, 9, “As a mother is pregnant with the unborn offspring, so the world itself is pregnant with the causes of unborn things” (cf. St. Thomas, I, 115.2 ad 4), and St. Thomas, I. 103.7 ad 2, “If God governed alone (and not also by means of mediate causes) things would be deprived of the perfection of causality.”
18. Hermes Trismegistus, Lib. X, 8b, kakia de psuchês agnôsia ... Tounantion de aretê psuchês gnôsis ... ho gar gnous ... êdê theios, and XI.ii.21a, “But if you shut up your soul in your body, and abase yourself, and say ‘I know nothing’ (Ouden noô)..., then what have you to do with God?” Ignorantia divisiva est errantium, as Ulrich says in comment on Dionysius, De div. Nom. “Agnostic” means “ignoramus,” or even quis ignorare vult sine ignorantiam diligit. On the contrary, “Think that for you too nothing is impossible” (Hermes, Lib. XI,ii.20b), cf. “Nothing shall be impossible to you” (Matt. 17:20); “Not till the soul knows all that there is to be known does she cross over to the unknown good” (Eckhart, Evans ed. I, 385); “No despiration without omniscience” (SP V, 74-75). Note that Hermes Lib. II,ii.20b-21a corresponds to CU VIII.1.
19. BG XIII, 26 “Whatsoever is generated, whatever being (kimcit sattvam, cf. Mil. 72 koci satto, cited above) whether mobile or immobile, know that it is from the conjunction (samyogât) of the Field with the Knower of the Field.” The “Field” has been previously defined in XIII, 5-6; it embraces the whole of what we should call “soul and body” and all that is perceived by them.

20. Cf. Plutarch, Obsolescence of Oracles, 436F, where the soul of man is assigned to Prophecy (hê mantikê here = pronoia, Providence as distinguished from “compelling and natural causes”) as its material support (hulên men autê tên psychên tou anthrôpou ... apodidotes); and BG VI.6 where the Spirit is called the enemy of what is not the Spirit (anâtmanas tu ... âtmaiva satruvat).

    “To be willing to lose (hate) our psuchê must mean to forget ourselves entirely ... to live no more my own life, but let my consciousness be possessed and suffused by the Infinite and Eternal life of the spirit” (Inge, Personal Idealism and Mysticism, p. 102 and James, Varieties of Religious Experience, p. 451).

21. merismou psuchês kai pneumatos, cf.Hermes, Lib. X, 160 ho nous tês psuchês (chôrixetai).
22. Anâtman, similarly “un-en-spired” (not “despirated”) in SB II, 2.28 where gods and titans alike are originally “un-en-spired and “mortal,” and “to be un-en-spired is the same as to be mortal” (anâtmâ hi martyah); Agni alone is “immortal” (amartyah).
23. Compare the expressions used by St. Bernard, deficere a se tota and a semetipsa liquescere in De diligendo Deo; and as Gilson remarks, p. 156, “Quelle différence y-a-til donc, à la limite, entre aimer Dieu et s’aimer soi-même?”

24. Eko vasî sarva-bhûtântarâtmâ ekam rûpam bahudhâ yah karoti: Tam âtmastham ye’nu pasyanti dhîrâs tesâm sukham sâsvatam nêtaresâm [(KUV.12).]

    The force of anu in anupasyanti we can only suggest by the repeated “seeing ... and seeing with.” It is lamented by the descending souls that “Our eyes will have little room to take things in ... and when we see Heaven, our forefather, contracted to small compass, we shall never cease to moan. And even if we see, we shall not see outright” (Hermes, Stobaeus, Exc. XXIII, 36); “For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known” (I Cor. 13:12). Sight-of is perfected in sight-as, even as knowledge-of in knowledge-as (adaequatio rei et intellectus: to see Heaven “outright” requires an eye of Heaven’s width). Dhîrâh, “contemplatives, those who see inwardly, not with the “eye of the flesh” (mâmsa caksus); who see the Spirit “above all to be seen” (abhidhyâyeyam, MU I, 1), “the Spirit that is yours and in all things, and than which all else is a wretchedness” (BU III, 4. 2).

    Note that ekam rûpam bahuddhâ yah karoti corresponds to S II, 212 eko’pi bahuddhâ homi: and “than which all else is a wretchedness” to the Buddhist anicca, anattâ, dukkha.