As if to point her finger to the thing she intends, she has accumulated the signs of this process of breaking and rebuilding in the phenomena of genius. It is now common knowledge that genius hardly appears in the human species unattended, unprepared or unaccompanied by abnormalities in the individual body, vitality and mind which contains it, – degeneration, insanity or freak in the heredity which produces it and even disturbance and supranormality in the human environment in which it occurs. The haste of a brilliant generalisation establishes on this basis the paradox that genius itself is a morbid phenomenon of insanity or degeneration. The true explanation is sufficiently clear. In order to establish genius in the human system, Nature is compelled to disturb and partially break the normality of that system, because she is introducing into it an element that is alien as it is superior to the type which it enriches. Genius is not the perfect evolution of that new and divine element; it is only a beginning or at the highest an approximation in certain directions. It works fitfully and uncertainly in the midst of an enormous mass of somewhat disordered human mentality, vital nervosity, physical animality. The thing itself is divine, it is only the undivine mould in which it works that is to a lesser or greater extent broken and ploughed up by the unassimilated force that works in it. Sometimes there is an element in the divine intruder which lays its hand on the mould and sustains it, so that it does not break at all, nor is flawed; or if there is a disturbance, it is slight and negligible. Such an element there was in Caesar, in Shakespeare, in Goethe. Sometimes also a force appears to which we can no longer apply the description of genius without being hopelessly inadequate in our terminology. Then those who have eyes to see, bow down and confess the Avatar. For it is often the work of the Avatar to typify already, partly or on the whole, what Nature has not yet effected in the mass or even in the individual, so that his passing may stamp it on the material ether in which we live.
But what is this type of which the great Mother is in labour? What birth will emerge from the cries and throes of this prolonged and mighty pregnancy? A greater type of humanity, it may be said. But in order to understand what we are saying, we must first see clearly what the humanity is which she seeks to surpass. This human symbol, this type we now are is a mental being with a mental ego, working in a vital case by mind always, but upon matter, in matter and through matter. It is limited in its higher workings by its lower instruments. Its basis of mind is egoistic, sensational and determined by experience and environment, its knowledge therefore pursues wider or narrower circles in a fixed and meagre range. Its moral temperament and action is similarly egoistic, sensational, experiential and determined by environment; for this reason it is bound equally to sin and virtue and all attempts radically to moralise the race within the limits of its egoistic nature have been and must necessarily, in spite of particular modifications, end in general failure. It is not only a mixed but a confused type, body and vitality interfering with mind and mind both hampered by and hampering body and vitality. Its search for knowledge, founded on sense contact, is a groping like that of a man finding his way in a forest at night; it makes acquaintance with its surroundings by touching, dashing on or stumbling over them; and, although it has an uncertain light of reason given it which partially corrects this disability, yet since reason has also to start from the senses which are consistent falsifiers of values, rational knowledge is not only restricted but pursued by vast dimnesses and uncertainties even in that which it seems to itself to have grasped. It secures a few flowers of truth by rummaging in a thorny hedge of doubts and errors. The actions of the type also are a breaking through thickets, a sanguine yet tormented stumbling forward through eager failures to partial and temporary successes. Immensely superior to all else that Nature had yet effected, this type is yet so burdened with disabilities, that, if it were impossible to break its mould and go forward, there would be much justification for those pessimistic philosophies which despair of Life and see in the Will not to Live humanity‘s only door of escape admitting to it no other salvation. But Nature is the will of the all-Wise God and she is not working out a reduction of the world to absurdity. She knows her goal, she knows that man as he is at present is only a transitional type; and so far as she can consistently with the survival of the type, she presses forward to what she has seen in God‘s eternal knowledge as standing beyond. From this ego, she moves towards a universal consciousness, from this limitation to a free movement in infinity, from this twilit and groping mind to the direct sunlit vision of things, from this conflict without issue between vice and virtue to a walking that keeps spontaneously to a God-appointed path, from this broken and grief-besieged action to a joyous and free activity, from this confused strife of our members to a purified, unentangled and harmonious combination, from this materialised mentality to an idealised and illuminated life, body and mind, from the symbol to reality, from man separated from God to man in God and God in man. In brief, as she has aspired successfully from matter to life, from life to mind and mental ego, so she aspires and with a fated success to an element beyond mind, the vijnana of the Hindus, the self-luminous idea or Truth-self now concealed and superconscious in man and the world, as life was always concealed in matter and mind in life. What this vijnana is, we have yet to see, but through it she knows she can lay firm hold on that highest term of all which is the reality of all symbols, in Spirit, in Sachchidananda.
The aim of Nature is also the aim of Yoga. Yoga, like Nature at its summit, seeks to break this mould of ego, this mould of mentalised life body and materialised mind, in order to achieve ideal action, ideal truth and infinite freedom in our spiritual being. To effect so enormous an end great and dangerous processes have to be used. Those who have been eager on this road or have opened up new paths towards the goal, have had to affront as a possibility frequently realised loss of reason, loss of life and health or dissolution of the moral being. They are not to be pitied or scorned even when they succumb; rather are they martyrs for humanity‘s progress, far more than the lost navigator or the scientist slain by the dangers of his investigation. They prepare consciently the highest possible achievement towards which the rest of humanity instinctively and unconsciously moves. We may even say that Yoga is the appointed means Nature holds in reserve for the accomplishment of her end, when she has finished her long labour of evolving at least a part of humanity temperamentally equal to the effort and intellectually, morally and physically prepared for success. Nature moves toward supernature, Yoga moves towards God; the world-impulse and the human aspiration are one movement and the same journey.
* * *
Chapter 5
The Conditions for Integral Fulfilment
The attainment of God is the true object of all human effort for which all his other efforts political, social, literary, intellectual, are only a necessary condition and preparation of the race; but then there are both differences in the state of the attainment, differences in its range and effectivity. Three states of divine attainment may usefully be distinguished, touch with God, indwelling in Him and becoming He. The first is initial and elementary; unless passing the veil of our ordinary nature we touch the divine Being or He leaning down impose His touch on us, unless we come first into contact with Him either in our heart, our mind, our works or our being, we cannot go on to indwell in Him. If we are strong in spirit, the touch may indeed be rapid and summary and we may wake at once and stride forward to the state of divine indwelling, soul of man in the soul of God, the individual in the universal; but the touch must be there. To enforce this preliminary step, to bring man into some kind of contact with God, is the common and sometimes the sole preoccupation of human religions. It does not matter greatly to Nature for her purpose how it is done, – in however crude and elementary a way, through whatever intellectual errors and emotional blunders or ethical outrages, the touch must be established; this imperatively and above all things the religious spirit demands. Nature, as is always her way, presses on to her all-important, immediate steps and is willing to purchase a single great and general gain by any number of particular losses. Man, besides, is so various in the arrangement of his human qualities, the master spring as well as the peculiar temperament differs so greatly or so subtly in each individual that there can never be, for this purpose of Nature’s, too many sects, disciplines or different religions. Swami Vivekananda has well seen the consummation of religion in a state when each human individual has his own religion