THEOLOGY AND AUTOLOGY

The Sacrifice (yajña) undertaken here below is a ritual mimesis of what was done by the Gods in the beginning, and in the same way both a sin and an expiation. We shall not understand the Myth until we have made the Sacrifice, nor the Sacrifice until we have understood the Myth. But before we can try to understand the operation it must be asked, What is God? and What are we?

God is an essence without duality (advaita), or as some maintain, without duality but not without relations (visidvaita). He is only to be apprehended as Essence (asti),26 but this Essence subsists in a two fold nature (dvaitbhva);²⁷ as being and as becoming. Thus, what is called the Entirety (ktsnam, pram, bhman) is both explicit and inexplicit (niruktnirukta), sonant and silent (abdabda), characterised and uncharacterised (sagua. nirgua), temporal and eternal (klkla), partite and impartite (sakalkal), in a likeness and not in any likeness (mrtmrta), shewn and unshewn (vyaktvyakta), mortal and immortal (martymartya), and so forth. Whoever knows him in his proximate (apara) aspect, immanent, knows him also in his ultimate (para) aspect, transcendent; ²⁸ the Person seated in our heart, eating and drinking, is also the Person in the Sun.²⁹ This Sun of men,³⁰ and Light of lights,³¹ “whom all men see but few know with the mind”,³² is the Universal Self (tman) of all things mobile or immobile.³³ He is both inside and outside (bahir anta ca bhtnm), but uninterruptedly (anantaram ), and therefore a total presence, undivided in divided things.³⁴ He does not come from anywhere, nor does he become anyone,³⁵ but only lends himself to all possible modalities of existence.³⁶

The question of his names, such as Agni, Indra, Prajpati, Siva, Brahma, etc., whether personal or essential, is dealt with in the usual way: “they call him many who is really one”;³⁷ “even as he seems, so he becomes”;³⁸ ”he takes the forms imagined by his worshippers”.³⁹ The trinitarian names—Agni, Vayu and Aditya or Brahma, Rudra and Vishnu—”are the highest embodiments of the supreme, immortal, bodiless Brahma ... their becoming is a birth from one another, partitions of a common Self defined by its different operations . . . These embodiments are to be contemplated, celebrated, and at last recanted. For by means of them one rises higher and higher in the worlds; but where the whole ends, attains the simplicity of the Person”.⁴⁰ Of all the names and forms of God the monogrammatic syllable Om, the totality of all sounds and the music of the spheres chanted by the resonant Sun, is the best. The validity of such an audible symbol is exactly the same as that of a plastic icon, both alike serving as supports of contemplation (dhiylamba); such a support is needed because that which is imperceptible to eye or ear cannot be apprehended objectively as it is in itself, but only in a likeness. The symbol must be naturally adequate, and cannot be chosen at random; one infers (veyati, vhayati) the unseen in the seen, the unheard in the heard; but these forms are only means by which to approach the formless and must be discarded before we can become it.

Whether we call him Person, or Sacerdotium, or Magna Mater, or by any other grammatically masculine, feminine or neuter names, “That” (tat, tad ekam) of which our powers are measures (tanmtr ) is a syzygy of conjoint principles, without composition or duality. These conjoint principles or selves, indistinguishable ab intra, but respectively self-sufficient and insufficient ab extra, become contraries only when we envisage the act of self-manifestition (svaprakatvam ) implied when we descend from the silent level of the Non-duality to speak in terms of subject and object and to recognize the many separate and individual existences that the All (sarvam = τ πν) or Universe (vivam) presents to our physical organs of perception. And since this finite totality can be only logically and not really divided from its infinite source, “That One” can also be called an “Integral Multiplicity”⁴¹ and “Omniform Light”.⁴² Creation is exemplary. The conjoint principles, for example, Heaven and Earth, or Sun and Moon, man and woman, were originally one. Ontologically, their conjugattion (mithunam, rambhava, eko bhava) is a vital operation, productive of a third in the image of the first and nature of the second. Just as the conjugation of Mind (manas= νoς) with the Voice (vc=δινoια) gives birth to a concept (sakalpa) so the conjugation of Heaven and Earth kindles the Bambino, the Fire, whose birth divides his parents from one another and fills the intervening Space (ka, antarika, Midgard) with light; and in the same way microcosmically, being kindled in the space of the heart, he is its light. He shines in his Mother’s womb,⁴³ in full possession of all his powers.⁴⁴ He is no sooner born than he traverses the Seven Worlds,⁴⁵ ascends to pass through the Sundoor, as the smoke from an altar or central hearth, whether without or within you, ascends to pass out through the eye of the dome.⁴⁶ This Agni is at once the messenger of God, the guest in all men’s houses, whether constructed or bodily, the luminous pneumatic principle of life, and the missal priest who conveys the savour of the Burnt-offering hence to the world beyond the vault of the Sky, through which there is no other way but this “Way of the Gods” (devayna). This Way must be followed by the Forerunner’s footprints, as the word for ”Way”⁴⁷ itself reminds us, by all who would reach the “farther shore” of the luminous spatial river of life⁴⁸ that divides this terrestrial from yonder celestial strand; these conceptions of the Way underlying all the detailed symbolisms of the Bridge, the Voyage and the Pilgrimage.

Considered apart, the “halves” of the originally undivided Unity can be distinguished in various ways according to our point of view; politically, for example, as Sacerdotium and Regnum (brahma-katrau ), and psychologically as Self and Not-self, Inner Man and Outer Individuality, Male and Female. These pairs are disparate; and even when the subordinate has been separated from the superior with a view to productive cooperation, it still remains in the latter, more eminently. The Sacerdotium, for example, is “both the Sacerdotium and the Regnum”—a condition found in the mixta persona of the priest-king Mitrvaruau, or Indrgn—but the Regnum as a separated function is nothing but itself, relatively feminine, and subordinated to the Sacerdotium, its Director (net=γεμν). The functional distinction in terms of sex defines the hierarchy. God himself is male to all, but just as Mitra is male to Varua and Varua in turn male to Earth, so the Priest is male to the King, and the King male to his realm. In the same way the man is subject to the joint government of Church and State; but in authority with respect to his wife, who in turn administers his estate. Throughout the series it the noetic principle that sanctions or enjoins what the aesthetic performs or avoids; disorder arising only when the latter is distracted from her rational allegiance by her own ruling passions and identifies this submission with “liberty”.⁴⁹

The most pertinent application of all this is to the individual, whether man or woman: the outer and active individuality of “this man or woman, So-and-so” being naturally feminine and subject to its own inner and contemplative Self. On the one hand, the submission of the Outer to the Inner Man is all that is meant by the words “self-control” and “autonomy”, and the opposite of what is meant by “self-assertion”: and on the other, this is the basis of the interpretation of the return to God in terms of an erotic symbolism, “As one embraced by a darling bride knows naught of ‘I’ and ‘thou’, so self embraced by the foreknowing (solar) Self knows naught of a ‘myself’ within or a ‘thyself’ without”;⁵⁰ because, as akara remarks, of “unity”. It is this Self that the man who really loves himself or others, loves in himself and in them; “all things are dear only for the sake of the Self”.⁵¹ In this true love of Self the distinction of “selfishness” from “altruism” loses all its meaning. He sees the Self, the Lord, alike in all beings, and all beings alike in that Lordly Self.⁵² “Loving thy Self”, in the words of Meister Eckhart, “thou lovest all men as thy Self”.⁵³ All these doctrines coincide with the Sufi, “What is love? Thou shalt know when thou becomest me”.^{54, 158}

The sacred marriage, consummated in the heart, adumbrates the deepest of all mysteries.⁵⁵ For this means both our death and beatific resurrection. The word to “marry” (eko bh, become one) also means to “die”, just as in Greek, τελω is to be perfected, to be married, or to die. When “Each is both”, no relation persists: and were it not for this beatitude (nanda) there would be neither life nor gladness anywhere.⁵⁶ All this implies that what we call the world-process and a creation is nothing but a game (kr, ll, παιδι, dolce gioco) that the Spirit plays with itself, and as sunlight “plays” upon whatever it illuminates and quickens, although unaffected by its apparent contacts. We who play the game of life so desperately for temporal stakes might be playing at love with God for higher stakes—our selves, and his. We play against one another for possessions, who might be playing with the King who stakes his throne and what is his against our lives and all we are: a game in which the more is lost, the more is won.⁵⁷

By the separation of Heaven and Earth the “Three Worlds” are distinguished; the in-between World (antarika) provides the etherial space (ka) in which the inhibited possibilities of finite manifestation can take birth in accordance with their several natures. From this first etherial substance are derived in succession air, fire, water and earth; and from these five elemental Beings (bhtni), combined in various proportions, are formed the inanimate bodies of creatures;⁵⁸ into which the God enters to awaken them, dividing himself to fill these worlds and to become the “Several Gods”, his children.⁵⁹ These Intelligences⁶⁰ are the host of “Beings” (bhtagaa ) that operate in us, unanimously, as our “elemental soul” (bhttman), or conscious self;⁶¹ our “selves”, indeed, but for the present mortal and unspiritual (antmya, antmna), ignorant of their immortal Self (tmnam ananuvidya, antmajña),⁶² and to be distinguished from the Immortal deities who have already become what they are by their “worth” (arhaa) and are spoken of as “Arhats” (=“Dignities”).⁶³ Through the mundane and perfectible deities, and just as a King receives tribute (balim h) from his subjects,⁶⁴ the Person in the heart, our Inner Man who is also the Person in the Sun, obtains the food (anna, hra), both physical and mental, on which he must subsist when he proceeds from being to becoming. And because of the simultaneity of his dynamic presence in all past and future becomings,⁶⁵ the emanated powers at work in our consciousness can be regarded as the temporal support of the solar Spirit’s timeless providence (prajñna) and omniscience (sarvajñna). Not that this sensible world of successive events determined by mediate causes (karma, adria, aprva) is the source of his knowledge, but rather that it is itself the consequence of the Spirit’s awareness of ”the diversified world-picture painted by itself on the vast canvas of itself”.⁶⁶ It is not by means of this All that he knows himself, but by his knowledge of himself that he becomes this All.⁶⁷ To know him by this All belongs only to our inferential manner of knowing.

You must have begun to realise that the theology and the autology are one and the same science, and that the only possible answer to the question, “What am I?” must be “That art thou”.⁶⁸ For as there are two in him who is both Love and Death, so there are, as all tradition affirms unanimously, two in us; although not two of him or two of us, nor even one of him and one of us, but only one of both. As we stand now, in between the first beginning and the last end, we are divided against ourselves, essence from nature, and therefore see him likewise as divided against himself and from us. Let us describe the situation in two different figures. Of the conjugate birds, Sunbird and Soulbird, that perch on the Tree of Life, one is all-seeing, the other eats of its fruits.⁶⁹ For the Comprehensor these two birds are one;⁷⁰ in the iconography we find either one bird with two heads, or two with necks entwined. But from our point of view there is a great difference between the spectator’s and the participant’s lives; the one is not involved, the other, submerged in her feeding and nesting, grieves for her lack of lordship (ana) until she perceives her Lord (a), and recognizes her Self in him and in his majesty, whose wings have never been clipped.⁷¹

In another way, the constitution of worlds and of individuals is compared to a wheel (cakra), of which the hub is the heart, the spokes powers, and their points of contact on the felly, our organs of perception and action.⁷² Here the “poles” that represent our selves, respectively profound and superficial, are the motionless axle-point on which the wheel revolves—il punto dello stelo al cui la prima rota va dintorno⁷³—and the rim in contact with the earth to which it reacts. This is the “wheel of becoming, or birth” (bhavacakra = τoχς τς γενσεως^73a). The collective motion of all the wheels within wheels—each one turning on a point without position and one and the same in all—that are these worlds and individuals is called the Confluence (sasra), and it is in this “storm of the world’s flow” that our “elemental self” (bhttman) is fatally involved: fatally, because whatever “we” are naturally “destined” to experience under the sun is the ineluctable consequence of the uninterrupted but unseen operation of mediate causes (karma, ada), from which only the aforesaid “point” remains independent, being in the wheel indeed, but not a “part” of it.

It is not only our passible nature that is involved, but also his. In this compatible nature he sympathises with our miseries and our delights and is subjected to the consequences of things done as much as “we” are. He does not choose his wombs, but enters into births that may be aughty or naughty (sadasat)⁷⁴ and in which his mortal nature is the fructuary (bhokt) equally of good and evil, truth and falsity.⁷⁵ That “he is the only seer, hearer, thinker, knower and fructuary” in us,⁷⁶ and that “whoever sees, it is by his ray that he sees”,⁷⁷ who looks forth in all beings, is the same as to say that “the Lord is the only transmigrator”⁷⁸ and it follows inevitably that by the very act with which he endows us with consciousness “he fetters himself like a bird in the net”,⁷⁹ and is subject to the evil, Death⁸⁰,—or seems to be thus fettered and subjected.

Thus he is submitted to our ignorance and suffers for our sins. Who then can be liberated and by whom and from what? It would be better to ask, with respect to this absolutely unconditional liberty, What is free now and nowever from the limitations that are presupposed by the very notion of individuality (aha ca mama ca, “I and mine; kart‘ham iti, “ ‘I’ am a doer”) ?⁸¹ Freedom is from one’s self, this “I”, and its affections. He only is free from virtues and vices and all their fatal consequences who never became anyone; he only can be free who is no longer anyone; impossible to be freed from oneself and also to remain oneself. The liberation from good and evil that seemed impossible and is impossible for the man whom we define by what he does or thinks and who answers to the question, “Who is that?”, “It’s me”, is possible only for him who can answer at the Sundoor to the question “Who art thou?”, “Thyself”.⁸² He who fettered himself must free himself, and that can only be done by verifying the assurance, “That art thou”. It is as much for us to liberate him by knowing Who we are as for him to liberate himself by knowing Who he is; and that is why in the Sacrifice the sacrificer identifies himself with the victim.

Hence also the prayer, “What thou art, thus may I be”,⁸³ and the eternal significance of the critical question “In whose departure, when I go hence, shall I be departing?”,⁸⁴ i.e. in myself, or “her immortal Self” and “Leader”.⁸⁵ If the right answers have been verified, if one has found the Self, and having done all that there is to be done (ktaktya), without any residue of potentiality (kty), the last end of our life has been presently attained.⁸⁶ It cannot be too much emphasized that freedom and immortality⁸⁷ can be, not so much “reached”, as “realised” as well here and now as in any hereafter. One “freed in this life” (jvan mukta) “dies no more” (na punar mriyate).⁸⁸ “The Comprehensor of that Contemplative, ageless, undying Self, in whom naught whatsoever is wanting and who wanteth nothing, has no fear of death”.⁸⁹ Having died already, he is, as the Sufi puts it, “a dead man walking”.⁹⁰ Such an one no longer loves himself or others, but is the Self in himself and in them. Death to one’s self is death to “others”; and if the “dead man” seems to be “unselfish”, this will not be the result of altruistic motives, but accidentally, and because he is literally un-self-ish. Liberated from himself, from all status, all duties, all rights, he has become a Mover-at-will (kmacr),⁹¹like the Spirit (Vyu, tm devnm) that “moveth as it will” (yath vaa carati),⁹² and as St. Paul expresses it, “no longer under the law”

This is the superhuman impartiality of those who have found their Self,—“The same am I in all beings, of whom there is none I love and none I hate”⁹³; the freedom of those who have fulfilled the condition required of his disciples by Christ, to hate father and mother and likewise their own “life” in the world.⁹⁴ We cannot say what the freeman is, but only what he is not,—Trasumanar significar per verba non si poria! But this can be said that those who have not known themselves are neither now nor ever shall be free, and that “great is the destruction” of these victims of their own sensations.⁹⁵ The Brahmanical autology is no more pessimistic than optimistic, but only more authoritative than any other science of which the truth does not depend on our wishes. It is no more pessimistic to recognize that whatever is alien to Self is a distress, than it is optimistic to recognize that where there is no “other” there is literally nothing to be feared.⁹⁶ That our Outer Man is “another” appears in the expression “I cannot trust myself”. What has been called the “natural optimism” of the Upanishads is their affirmation that our consciousness of being, although invalid as an awareness of being So-and-so, is valid absolutely, and their doctrine that the Gnosis of the Immanent Deity, our Inner Man, can be realised now: “That art thou”. In the words of St. Paul, Vivo autem, jam non ego.

That this is so, or that “He is” at all, cannot be demonstrated in the classroom, where only quantitative tangibles are dealt with. At the same time, it would be unscientific to deny a presupposition for which an experimental proof is possible. In the present case there is a Way prescribed for those who will consent to follow it: and it is precisely at this point that we must turn from the first principles to the operation through which, rather than by which, they can be verified; in other words from the consideration of the contemplative to the consideration of the active or sacrificial life.