Personality (Lectures delivered in America)/The World of Personality
THE WORLD OF PERSONALITY
SIR RABINDRANATH TAGORE AND W. W. PEARSON AT RIVERSIDE, CALIFORNIA
THE WORLD OF PERSONALITY
"The night is like a dark child just born of her mother day. Millions of stars crowding round its cradle watch it, standing still, afraid lest it should wake up."
I am ready to go on in this strain, but I am interrupted by Science laughing at me. She takes objection to my statement that stars are standing still.
But if it is a mistake, then apology is not due from me but from those stars themselves. It is quite evident that they are standing still. It is a fact that is impossible to argue away.
But science will argue, it is her habit. She says, "When you think that stars are still, that only proves that you are too far from them."
I have my answer ready, that when you say that stars are rushing about, it only proves that you are too near them.
Science is astonished at my temerity.
But I obstinately hold my ground and say that if Science has the liberty to take the side of the near and fall foul of the distant, she cannot blame me when I take the opposite side and question the veracity of the near.
Science is emphatically sure that the near view is the most reliable view.
But I doubt whether she is consistent in her opinions. For when I was sure that the earth was flat under my feet, she corrected me by saying that the near view was not the correct view, that to get at the complete truth it is necessary to see it from a distance.
I am willing to agree with her. For do we not know that a too near view of ourselves is the egotistical view, which is the flat and the detached view—but that when we see ourselves in others, we find that the truth about us is round and continuous?
But if Science has faith at all in the wholesomeness of distance then she must give up her superstition about the restlessness of the stars. We the children of the earth attend our night school to have a glimpse of the world as a whole. Our great teacher knows that the complete view of the universe is as much too awful for our sight as that of the midday sun. We must see it through a smoked glass. Kind Nature has held before our eyes the smoked glass of the night and of the distance. And what do we see through it? We see that the world of stars is still. For we see these stars in their relation to each other, and they appear to us like chains of diamonds hanging on the neck of some god of silence. But Astronomy like a curious child plucks out an individual star from that chain and then we find it rolling about.
The difficulty is to decide whom to trust. The evidence of the world of stars is simple. You have but to raise your eyes and see their face and you believe them. They do not set before you elaborate arguments, and to my mind, that is the surest test of reliability. They do not break their hearts if you refuse to believe them. But when some one of these stars singly comes down from the platform of the universe and slyly whispers its information into the ears of mathematics, we find the whole story different.
Therefore let us boldly declare that both facts are equally true about the stars. Let us say that they are unmoved in the plane of the distant and they are moving in the plane of the near. The stars in their one relation to me are truly still and in their other relation are truly moving. The distant and the near are the keepers of two different sets of facts, but they both belong to one truth which is their master. Therefore when we take the side of the one to revile the other, we hurt the truth which comprehends them both.
About this truth the Indian sage of Ishopanishat says: "It moves. It moves not. It is distant. It is near."
The meaning is, that when we follow truth in its parts which are near, we see truth moving. When we know truth as a whole, which is looking at it from a distance, it remains still. As we follow a book in its chapters the book moves, but when we have known the whole book, then we find it standing still, holding all the chapters in their interrelations.
There is a point where in the mystery of existence contradictions meet; where movement is not all movement and stillness is not all stillness; where the idea and the form, the within and the without, are united; where infinite becomes finite, without losing its infinity. If this meeting is dissolved, then things become unreal.
When I see a rose leaf through a microscope, I see it in a more extended space than it usually occupies for me. The more I extend the space the more vague it becomes. So that in the pure infinite it is neither rose leaf nor anything at all. It only becomes a rose leaf where the infinite reaches finitude at a particular point. When we disturb that point towards the small or the great, the rose leaf begins to assume unreality.
It is the same with regard to time. If by some magic I could remain in my normal plane of time while enhancing its quickness with regard to the rose leaf, condensing, let us say, a month into a minute, then it would rush through its point of first appearance to that of its final disappearance with such a speed that I would hardly be able to see it. One can be sure that there are things in this world which are known by other creatures, but which, since their time is not synchronous with ours, are nothing to us. The phenomenon which a dog perceives as a smell does not keep its time with that of our nerves, therefore it falls outside our world.
Let me give an instance. We have heard of prodigies in mathematics who can do difficult sums in an incredibly short time. With regard to mathematical calculations their minds are acting in a different plane of time, not only from ours, but also from their own in other spheres of life. As if the mathematical part of their minds were living in a comet, while the other parts were the inhabitants of this earth. Therefore the process through which their minds rush to their results is not only invisible to us, it is not even seen by themselves.
It is a well-known fact that our dreams often flow in a measure of time different from that of our waking consciousness. The fifty minutes of our sundial of dreamland may be represented by five minutes of our clock. If from the vantage of our wakeful time we could watch these dreams, they would rush past us like an express train. Or if from the window of our swift-flying dreams we could watch the slower world of our waking consciousness, it would seem receding away from us at a great speed. In fact if the thoughts that move in other minds than our own were open to us, our perception of them would be different from theirs, owing to our difference of mental time. If we could adjust our focus of time according to our whims, we should see the waterfall standing still and the pine forest running fast like the waterfall of a green Niagara.
So that it is almost a truism to say that the world is what we perceive it to be. We imagine that our mind is a mirror, that it is more or less accurately reflecting what is happening outside us. On the contrary, our mind itself is the principal element of creation. The world, while I am perceiving it, is being incessantly created for myself in time and space.
The variety of creation is due to the mind seeing different phenomena in different foci of time and space. When it sees stars in a space which may be metaphorically termed as dense, then they are close to each other and motionless. When it sees planets, it sees them in much less density of sky and then they appear far apart and moving. If we could have the sight to see the molecules of a piece of iron in a greatly different space, they could be seen in movement. But because we see things in various adjustments of time and space therefore iron is iron, water is water, and clouds are clouds for us.
It is a well-known psychological fact that by adjustment of our mental attitude things seem to change their properties, and objects that were pleasurable become painful to us and vice versa. Under a certain state of exultation of mind mortification of the flesh has been resorted to by men to give them pleasure. Instances of extreme martyrdom seem to us superhuman because the mental attitude under the influence of which they become possible, even desirable, has not been experienced by us. In India, cases of fire-walking have been observed by many, though they have not been scientifically investigated. There may be differences of opinion about the degree of efficacy of faith cure, which shows the influence of mind upon matter, but its truth has been accepted and acted upon by men from the early dawn of history. The methods of our moral training have been based upon the fact that by changing our mental focus, our perspective, the whole world is changed and becomes in certain respects a different creation with things of changed value. Therefore what is valuable to a man when he is bad becomes worse than valueless when he is good.
Walt Whitman shows in his poems a great dexterity in changing his position of mind and thus changing his world with him from that of other people, rearranging the meaning of things in different proportions and forms. Such mobility of mind plays havoc with things whose foundations lie fixed in convention. Therefore he says in one of his poems:
I hear that it was charged against me that I sought to destroy institutions;
But really I am neither for nor against institutions;
(What indeed have I in common with them—
Or what with the destruction of them?)
Only I will establish in thee Mannahatta, and in every city of these States, inland and seaboard,
And in the fields and woods, and above every keel, little or large, that dents the water,
Without edifices, or rules, or trustees or any argument,
This institution of dear love of comrades.
Institutions which are so squarely built, so solid and thick, become like vapour in this poet's world. It is like a world of Rŏntgen rays, for which some of the solid things of the world have no existence whatever. On the other hand, love of comrades, which is a fluid thing in the ordinary world, which seems like clouds that pass and repass the sky without leaving a trace of a track, is to the poet's world more stable than all institutions. Here he sees things in a time in which the mountains pass away like shadows, but the rain-clouds with their seeming transitoriness are eternal. He perceives in his world that this love of comrades, like clouds that require no solid foundation, is stable and true, is established without edifices, rules, trustees or arguments.
When the mind of a person like Walt Whitman moves in a time different from that of others, his world does not necessarily come to ruin through dislocation, because there in the centre of his world dwells his own personality. All the facts and shapes of this world are related to this central creative power, therefore they become interrelated spontaneously. His world may be like a comet among stars, different in its movements from others, but it has its own consistency because of the central personal force. It may be a bold world or even a mad world, with an immense orbit swept by its eccentric tail, yet a world it is.
But with Science it is different. For she tries to do away altogether with that central personality, in relation to which the world is a world. Science sets up an impersonal and unalterable standard of space and time which is not the standard of creation. Therefore at its fatal touch the reality of the world is so hopelessly disturbed that it vanishes in an abstraction where things become nothing at all. For the world is not atoms and molecules or radio-activity or other forces, the diamond is not carbon, and light is not vibrations of ether. You can never come to the reality of creation by contemplating it from the point of view of destruction. Not only the world but God Himself is divested of reality by Science, which subjects Him to analysis in the laboratory of reason outside our personal relationship, and then describes the result as unknown and unknowable. It is a mere tautology to say that God is unknowable, when we leave altogether out of account the person who can and who does know Him. It is the same thing as saying that food is uneatable when the eater is absent. Our dry moralists also play the same tricks with us in order to wean away our hearts from their desired objects. Instead of creating for us a world in which moral ideals find their natural places in beauty, they begin to wreck the world that we have built ourselves, however imperfectly. They put moral maxims in the place of human personality and give us the view of things in their dissolution to prove that behind their appearances they are hideous deceptions. But when you deprive truth of its appearance, it loses the best part of its reality. For appearance is a personal relationship; it is for me. Of this appearance, which seems to be of the surface, but which carries the message of the inner spirit, your poet has said:
Beginning my studies, the first step pleased me so much,
The mere fact, consciousness—these forms—the power of motion,
The least insect or animal—the senses—eyesight—love;
The first step, I say, aw'd me and pleased me so much,
I have hardly gone, and hardly wished to go, any farther,
But stop and loiter all the time, and sing it in ecstatic songs.
Our scientific world is our world of reasoning. It has its greatness and uses and attractions. We are ready to pay the homage due to it. But when it claims to have discovered the real world for us and laughs at the worlds of all simple-minded men, then we must say it is like a general grown intoxicated with his power, usurping the throne of his king. For the reality of the world belongs to the personality of man and not to reasoning, which, useful and great though it be, is not the man himself.
If we could fully know what a piece of music was in Beethoven's mind we could ourselves become so many Beethovens. But because we cannot grasp its mystery we may altogether distrust the element of Beethoven's personality in his Sonata—though we are fully aware that its true value lies in its power of touching the depth of our own personality. But it is simpler to keep observation of the facts when that sonata is played upon the piano. We can count the black and white keys of the keyboard, measure the relative lengths of the strings, the strength, velocity and order of sequence in the movements of fingers, and triumphantly assert that this is Beethoven's Sonata. Not only so, we can predict the accurate production of the same sonata wherever and whenever our experiment is repeated according to those observations. By constantly dealing with the sonata from this point of view we may forget that both in its origin and object dwells the personality of man, and however accurate and orderly may be the facts of the interactions of the fingers and strings they do not comprehend the ultimate reality of the music.
A game is a game where there is a player to play it. Of course, there is a law of the game which it is of use to us to analyse and to master. But if it be asserted that in this law is its reality, then we cannot accept it. For the game is what it is to the players. The game changes its aspects according to the personality of its players: for some its end is the lust of gain, in others that of applause; some find in it the means for whiling away time and some the means for satisfying their social instinct, and there are others who approach it in the spirit of disinterested curiosity to study its secrets. Yet all through its manifold aspects its law remains the same. For the nature of Reality is the variedness of its unity. And the world is like this game to us—it is the same and yet not the same to us all.
Science deals with this element of sameness, the law of perspective and colour combination, and not with the pictures—the pictures which are the creations of a personality and which appeal to the personality of those who see them. Science does this by eliminating from its field of research the personality of creation and fixing its attention only upon the medium of creation.
What is this medium? It is the medium of finitude which the Infinite Being sets before him for the purpose of his self-expression. It is the medium which represents his self-imposed limitations—the law of space and time, of form and movement. This law is Reason, which is universal—Reason which guides the endless rhythm of the creative idea, perpetually manifesting itself in its ever-changing forms.
Our individual minds are the strings which catch the rhythmic vibrations of this universal mind and respond in music of space and time. The quality and number and pitch of our mind strings differ and their tuning has not yet come to its perfection, but their law is the law of the universal mind, which is the instrument of finitude upon which the Eternal Player plays his dance music of creation.
Because of the mind instruments which we possess we also have found our place as creators. We create not only art and social organizations, but our inner nature and outer surroundings, the truth of which depends upon their harmony with the law of the universal mind. Of course, our creations are mere variations upon God's great theme of the universe. When we produce discords, they either have to end in a harmony or in silence. Our freedom as a creator finds its highest joy in contributing its own voice to the concert of the world-music.
Science is apprehensive of the poet's sanity. She refuses to accept the paradox of the infinite assuming finitude.
I have nothing to say in my defence except that this paradox is much older than I am. It is the paradox which lies at the root of existence. It is as mysterious yet as simple as the fact that I am aware of this wall, which is a miracle that can never be explained.
Let me go back to the sage of Ishopanishat and hear what he says about the contradiction of the infinite and the finite. He says:
"They enter the region of the dark who are solely occupied with the knowledge of the finite, and they into a still greater darkness who are solely occupied with the knowledge of the infinite."
Those who pursue the knowledge of finite for its own sake cannot find truth. For it is a dead wall obstructing the beyond. This knowledge merely accumulates but does not illuminate. It is like a lamp without its light, a violin without its music. You cannot know a book by measuring and weighing and counting its pages, by analysing its paper. An inquisitive mouse may gnaw through the wooden frame of a piano, may cut all its strings to pieces, and yet travel farther and farther away from the music. This is the pursuit of the finite for its own sake.
But according to the Upanishat the sole pursuit of the infinite leads to a deeper darkness. For the absolute infinite is emptiness. The finite is something. It may be a mere cheque-book with no account in the bank. But the absolute infinite has no cash and not even a cheque-book. Profound may be the mental darkness of the primitive man who lives in the conviction that each individual apple falls to the ground according to some individual caprice, but it is nothing compared to the blindness of him who lives in the meditation of the law of gravitation which has no apple or anything else that falls.
Therefore Ishopanishat in the following verse says:
"He who knows that the knowledge of the finite and the infinite is combined in one, crosses death by the help of the knowledge of the finite and achieves immortality by the help of the knowledge of the infinite."
The infinite and the finite are one as song and singing are one. The singing is incomplete; by a continual process of death it gives up the song which is complete. The absolute infinite is like a music which is devoid of all definite tunes and therefore meaningless.
The absolute eternal is timelessness, and that has no meaning at all,—it is merely a word. The reality of the eternal is there, where it contains all times in itself.
Therefore Upanishat says: "They enter the region of darkness who pursue the transitory. But they enter the region of still greater darkness who pursue the eternal. He who knows the transitory and the eternal combined together crosses the steps of death by the help of the transitory and reaches immortality by the help of the eternal."
We have seen that forms of things and their changes have no absolute reality at all. Their truth dwells in our personality, and only there is it real and not abstract. We have seen that a mountain and a waterfall would become something else, or nothing at all to us, if our movement of mind changed in time and space.
We have also seen that this relational world of ours is not arbitrary. It is individual, yet it is universal. My world is mine, its element is my mind, yet it is not wholly unlike your world. Therefore it is not in my own individual personality that this reality is contained, but in an infinite personality.
When in its place we substitute law, then the whole world crumbles into abstractions; then it is elements and force, ions and electrons; it loses its appearance, its touch and taste; the world drama with its language of beauty is hushed, the music is silent, the stage mechanism becomes a ghost of itself in the dark, an unimaginable shadow of nothing, standing before no spectator.
In this connection I quote once again your poet-seer, Walt Whitman:
When I heard the learned astronomer,
When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me,
When I was shown the charts and diagrams, to add, divide and measure them,
When I sitting heard the astronomer where he lectured with much applause in the lecture room,
How soon unaccountably I became tired and sick,
Till rising and gliding out I wandered off by myself,
In the mystical moist night air, and from time to time,
Looked up in perfect silence at the stars.
The prosody of the stars can be explained in the classroom by diagrams, but the poetry of the stars is in the silent meeting of soul with soul, at the confluence of the light and the dark, where the infinite prints its kiss on the forehead of the finite, where we can hear the music of the Great I AM pealing from the grand organ of creation through its countless reeds in endless harmony. It is perfectly evident that the world is movement. (The Sanskrit word for the world means "the moving one.") All its forms are transitory, but that is merely its negative side. All through its changes it has a chain of relationship which is eternal. In a story-book the sentences run on, but the positive element of the book is the relation of the sentences in the story. This relation reveals a will of personality in its author which establishes its harmony with the personality of the reader. If the book were a collection of disjointed words of no movement and meaning, then we should be justified in saying that it was a product of chance, and in that case it would have no response from the personality of the reader. In like manner the world through all its changes is not to us a mere runaway evasion, and because of its movements it reveals to us something which is eternal.
For revealment of idea, form is absolutely necessary. But the idea which is infinite cannot be expressed in forms which are absolutely finite. Therefore forms must always move and change, they must necessarily die to reveal the deathless. The expression as expression must be definite, which it can only be in its form; but at the same time, as the expression of the infinite, it must be indefinite, which it can only be in its movement. Therefore when the world takes its shape it always transcends its shape; it carelessly runs out of itself to say that its meaning is more than what it can contain.
The moralist sadly shakes his head and says that this world is vanity. But that vanity is not vacuity—truth is in that vainness itself. If the world remained still and became final, then it would be a prison-house of orphaned facts which had lost their freedom of truth, the truth that is infinite. Therefore what the modern thinker says is true in this sense, that in movement lies the meaning of all things—because the meaning does not entirely rest in the things themselves but in that which is indicated by their outgrowing of their limits. This is what Ishopanishat means when it says that neither the transitory nor the eternal has any meaning separately. When they are known in harmony with each other, only then through help of that harmony we cross the transitory and realize the immortal.
Because this world is the world of infinite personality it is the object of our life to establish a perfect and personal relationship with it, is the teaching of Ishahpanishat. Therefore it begins with the following verse:
"Know that all that moves in this moving world is held by the infinity of God; and enjoy by that which he renounces. Desire not after other possessions."
That is to say, we have to know that these world movements are not mere blind movements, they are related to the will of a Supreme Person. A mere knowledge of truth is imperfect because impersonal. But enjoyment is personal and the God of my enjoyment moves; he is active; he is giving himself. In this act of giving the infinite has taken the aspect of the finite, and therefore become real, so that I can have my joy in him.
In our crucible of reason the world of appearance vanishes and we call it illusion. This is the negative view. But our enjoyment is positive. A flower is nothing when we analyse it, but it is positively a flower when we enjoy it. This joy is real because it is personal. And perfect truth is only perfectly known by our personality.
And therefore Upanishat has said: "Mind comes back baffled and words also. But he who realizes the joy of Brahma fears nothing."
The following is the translation of another verse in which Ishopanishat deals with the passive and the active aspects of the infinite:
"He who is without a stain, without a body, and therefore without bodily injury or bodily organs of strength, without mixture and without any touch of evil, enters into everywhere. He who is the poet, the ruler of mind, the all-becoming, the self-born, dispenses perfect fulfilment to the endless years."
Brahma, in his negative qualities, is quiescent. Brahma, in his positive qualities, acts upon all time. He is the poet, he uses mind as his instrument, he reveals himself in limits, the revelation which comes out of his abundance of joy and not from any outside necessity. Therefore it is he who can fulfil our needs through endless years by giving himself.
From this we find our ideal. Perpetual giving up is the truth of life. The perfection of this is our life's perfection. We are to make this life our poem in all its expressions; it must be fully suggestive of our soul which is infinite, not merely of our possessions which have no meaning in themselves. The consciousness of the infinite in us proves itself by our joy in giving ourselves out of our abundance. And then our work is the process of our renunciation, it is one with our life. It is like the flowing of the river, which is the river itself.
Let us live. Let us have the true joy of life, which is the joy of the poet in pouring himself out in his poem. Let us express our infinity in everything round us, in works we do, in things we use, in men with whom we deal, in the enjoyment of the world with which we are surrounded. Let our soul permeate our surroundings and create itself in all things, and show its fulness by fulfilling needs of all times. This life of ours has been filled with the gifts of the divine giver. The stars have sung to it, it has been blessed with the daily blessing of the morning light, the fruits have been sweet to it, and the earth has spread its carpet of grass so that it may have its rest. And let it like an instrument fully break out in music of its soul in response to the touch of the infinite soul.
And this is why the poet of the Ishopanishat says:
"Doing work in this world thou shouldst wish to live a hundred years. Thus it is with thee and not otherwise. Let not the work of man cling to him."
Only by living life fully can you outgrow it. When the fruit has served its full term, drawing its juice from the branch as it dances with the wind and matures in the sun, then it feels in its core the call of the beyond and becomes ready for its career of a wider life. But the wisdom of living is in that which gives you the power to give it up. For death is the gate of immortality. Therefore it is said, Do your work, but let not your work cling to you. For the work expresses your life so long as it flows with it, but when it clings, then it impedes, and shows, not the life, but itself. Then like the sands carried by the stream it chokes the soul-current. Activity of limbs is in the nature of physical life; but when limbs move in convulsion, then the movements are not in harmony with life, but become a disease, like works that cling to a man and kill his soul.
No, we must not slay our souls. We must not forget that life is here to express the eternal in us. If we smother our consciousness of the infinite either by slothfulness or by passionate pursuit of things that have no freedom of greatness in them, then like the fruit whose seed has become dead we go back into the primal gloom of the realm of the unformed. Life is perpetual creation; it has its truth when it outgrows itself in the infinite. But when it stops and accumulates and turns back to itself, when it has lost its outlook upon the beyond, then it must die. Then it is dismissed from the world of growth and with all its heaps of belongings crumbles into the dust of dissolution. Of them Isha Upanishat has said: "Those who slay their souls pass from hence to the gloom of the sunless world."
The question, "What is this soul," has thus been answered by the Isha Upanishat:
"It is one, and though unmoving is swifter than mind; organs of sense cannot reach it; while standing it progresses beyond others that run; in it the life inspiration maintains the fluid forces of life."
The mind has its limitations, the sense organs are severally occupied with things that are before them, but there is a spirit of oneness in us which goes beyond the thoughts of its mind, the movements of its bodily organs, which carries whole eternity in its present moment, while through its presence the life inspiration ever urges the life forces onward. Because we are conscious of this One in us which is more than all its belongings, which outlives the death of its moments, we cannot believe that it can die. Because it is one, because it is more than its parts, because it is continual survival, perpetual overflow, we feel it beyond all boundaries of death.
This consciousness of oneness beyond all boundaries is the consciousness of soul. And of this soul Isha Upanishat has said: "It moves. It moves not. It is in the distant. It is in the near. It is within all. It is outside all."
This is to know the soul across the boundaries of the near and the distant, of the within and the without. I have known this wonder of wonders, this one in myself which is the centre of all reality for me. But I cannot stop here. I cannot say that it exceeds all boundaries, and yet is bounded by myself. Therefore Isha Upanishat says:
"He who sees all things in the soul and the soul in all things is nevermore hidden."
We are hidden in ourselves, like a truth hidden in isolated facts. When we know that this One in us is One in all, then our truth is revealed.
But this knowledge of the unity of soul must not be an abstraction. It is not that negative kind of universalism which belongs neither to one nor to another. It is not an abstract soul, but it is my own soul which I must realize in others. I must know that if my soul were singularly mine, then it could not be true; at the same time if it were not intimately mine, it would not be real.
Through the help of logic we never could have arrived at the truth that the soul which is the unifying principle in me finds its perfection in its unity in others. We have known it through the joy of this truth. Our delight is in realizing ourselves outside us. When I love, in other words, when I feel I am truer in some one else than myself, then I am glad, for the One in me realizes its truth of unity by uniting with others, and there is its joy.
Therefore the spirit of One in God must have the many for the realization of the unity. And God is giving himself in love to all. Isha Upanishat says: "Thou shouldst enjoy what God is renouncing." He is renouncing; and I have my joy when I feel that he is renouncing himself. For this joy of mine is the joy of love which comes of the renouncing of myself in him.
Where Isha Upanishat teaches us to enjoy God's renunciation it says: "Desire not after other man's possessions."
For desire is hindrance to love. It is the movement towards the opposite direction of truth, towards the illusion that self is our final object.
Therefore the realization of our soul has its moral and its spiritual side. The moral side represents training of unselfishness, control of desire; the spiritual side represents sympathy and love. They should be taken together and never separated. The cultivation of the merely moral side of our nature leads us to the dark region of narrowness and hardness of heart, to the intolerant arrogance of goodness; and the cultivation of the merely spiritual side of nature leads us to a still darker region of revelry in intemperance of imagination.
By following the poet of Isha Upanishat we have come to the meaning of all reality, where the infinite is giving himself out through finitude. Reality is the expression of personality, like a poem, like a work of art. The Supreme Being is giving himself in his world and I am making it mine, like a poem which I realize by finding myself in it. If my own personality leaves the centre of my world, then in a moment it loses all its attributes. From this I know that my world exists in relation to me, and I know that it has been given to the personal me by a personal being. The process of the giving can be classified and generalized by science, but not the gift. For the gift is the soul unto the soul, therefore it can only be realized by the soul in joy, not analysed by the reason in logic.
Therefore the one cry of the personal man has been to know the Supreme Person. From the beginning of his history man has been feeling the touch of personality in all creation, and trying to give it names and forms, weaving it in legends round his life and the life of his races, offering it worship and establishing relations with it through countless forms of ceremonial. This feeling of the touch of personality has given the centrifugal impulse in man's heart to break out in a ceaseless flow of reaction, in songs and pictures and poems, in images and temples and festivities. This has been the centripetal force which attracted men into groups and clans and communal organizations. And while man tills his soil and spins his cloths, mates and rears his children, toils for wealth and fights for power, he does not forget to proclaim in languages of solemn rhythm, in mysterious symbols, in structures of majestic stone, that in the heart of his world he has met the Immortal Person. In the sorrow of death, and suffering of despair, when trust has been betrayed and love desecrated, when existence becomes tasteless and unmeaning, man standing upon the ruins of his hopes stretches his hands to the heavens to feel the touch of the Person across his darkened world.
Man has also known direct communication of the person with the Person, not through the world of forms and changes, the world of extension in time and space, but in the innermost solitude of consciousness, in the region of the profound and the intense. Through this meeting he has felt the creation of a new world, a world of light and love that has no language but of music of silence.
Of this the poet has sung:
There is an endless world, O my Brother.
And there is a nameless Being of whom nought can be said.
Only he knows who has reached that region:
It is other than all that is heard and said.
No form, no body, no length, no breadth, is seen there:
How can I tell you that which it is?
Kabir says: "It cannot be told by the words of the mouth, it cannot be written on paper:
It is like a dumb person who tastes a sweet thing—how shall it be explained?"
No, it cannot be explained, it has to be realized; and when man has done so, he sings:
The inward and the outward has become as one sky,
The infinite and the finite are united:
I am drunken with the sight of this All.
The poet in this has reached Reality which is ineffable, where all contradictions have been harmonized. For the ultimate reality is in the Person and not in the law and substance. And man must feel that if this universe is not the manifestation of a Supreme Person, then it is a stupendous deception and a perpetual insult to him. He should know that under such enormous weight of estrangement his own personality would have been crushed out of its shape in the very beginning and have vanished in the meaninglessness of an abstraction that had not even the basis of a mind for its conception.
The poet of Isha Upanishat at the end of his teachings suddenly breaks out in a verse which in the depth of its simplicity carries the lyrical silence of the wide earth gazing at the morning sun. He sings:
"In the golden vessel is hidden the face of truth. O thou Giver of Nourishment, remove the cover for our sight, for us who must know the law of truth. O thou giver of nourishment, thou who movest alone, who dost regulate the creation, who art the spirit of the lord of all creatures, collect thy rays, draw together thy light, let me behold in thee the most blessed of all forms,—the Person who is there, who is there, he is I Am."
Then at the conclusion this poet of deathless personality thus sings of death:
"Life breath is the breath of immortality. The body ends in ashes. O my will, remember thy deeds, O my will, remember thy deeds. O God, O Fire, thou knowest all deeds. Lead us through good paths to fulfilment. Separate from us the crooked sin. To thee we offer our speech of salutation."
Here stops the poet of Isha Upanishat, who has travelled from life to death and from death to life again; who has had the boldness to see Brahma as the infinite Being and the finite Becoming at the same moment; who declares that life is through work, the work that expresses the soul; whose teaching is to realize our soul in the Supreme Being through our renunciation of self and union with all.
The profound truth to which the poet of Isha Upanishat has given expression is the truth of the simple mind which is in deep love with the mystery of reality and cannot believe in the finality of that logic which by its method of decomposition brings the universe to the brink of dissolution.
Have I not known the sunshine to grow brighter and the moonlight deeper in its tenderness when my heart was filled with a sudden access of love assuring me that this world is one with my soul? When I have sung the coming of the clouds, the pattering of rains has found its pathos in my songs. From the dawn of our history the poets and artists have been infusing the colours and music of their soul into the structure of existence. And from this I have known certainly that the earth and the sky are woven with the fibres of man's mind, which is the universal mind at the same time. If this were not true, then poetry would be false and music a delusion, and the mute world would compel man's heart into utter silence. The Great Master plays; the breath is his own, but the instrument is our mind through which he brings out his songs of creation, and therefore I know that I am not a mere stranger resting in the wayside inn of this earth on my voyage of existence, but I live in a world whose life is bound up with mine. The poet has known that the reality of this world is personal and has sung:
The earth is His joy: His joy is the sky;
His joy is the flashing of the sun and the moon;
His joy is the beginning, the middle, and the end;
His joy is eyes, darkness and light.
Oceans and waves are His joy;
His joy the Saraswati, the Jumana and the Ganges.
The Master is One: and life and death,
Union and separation are all His plays of joy.