16 nay, in the vast majority of cases such help is absolutely neces- sary. When it comes, the higher powers and possibilities of the soul are quickened, spiritual life is awakened, growth is anima- ted, and man becomes holy and perfect in the end.
This quickening impulse cannot be derived from books. The soul can only receive impulses from another soul, and from nothing else. We may study books all our lives, we may became very intellectual; but, in the end, we find that we have not developed at all spiritually. It is not true that a high order of intellectual development always goes hand in hand with a proportionate development of the spiritual side in man. In studying books we are sometimes deluded into think- ing that thereby we are being spiritually helped; but, if we analyse the effect of the study of books on ourselves, we shall find that, at the utmost, it is only our intellect that derived profit from such studies, but not our inner spirit. This insufficiency of books to quicken spiritual growth is the reason why, although almost every one of iis can s^peak most wonderfully on spiritual matters, when it comes to action and the living of a truly spiritual life, we find ourselves so awfully deficient. To quicken the spirit, the impulse mus! come from another soul.
The person from whose soul such impulse comes is called the Guru — the teacher; and the person to whose soul the impulse is conveyed is called the student. To convey such an impulse, to any soul, in the first place, the soul from which it proceeds must possess the power of transmitting it, as it were to another; and, in the second place, the soul to which it is transmitted must be fit to receive it. The seed must be a living seed, and the field must be ready ploughed; and when both these conditions are fulfilled a wonderful growth of 17 genuine religion takes place. “ The true preacher of religion has to he of wonderful capabilities, and clever shall his hearer be’’— ^ ^tcTT; and when both of these are really wonderful and extraordinary, then will a splendid spiri- tnal awakening result, and not otherwise. Such alone are the real teachers, and such alone are also the real students, the real aspirants. All others are only playing with spirituality. They have just a little curiosity awakened, just a little intellectual aspiration kindled in them, but are merely standing on the outward fringe of the horizon of religion. There is, no doubt, some value even in that, as it may, in course of time, result, in the awakening of a real thirst for religion; and it is a mysterious law of nature that, as soon as the field is ready, the seed must and does oome, as soon as the soul earnestly desires to have religion, the trasmitter of the re- ligious force must and does appear to help that soul. When the power that attracts the light of religion in the receiving soul is full and strong, the power which answers to that attraction and sends in light does come as a matter of course.
There are, however, certain great dangers in the way. There is, for instance, the danger to the receiving soul of its mistaking momentary emotions for real religious yearning. We may study that in ourselves. Many a time in our lives, some- body dies whom we loved; we receive a blow; we feel that the world is slipping between our fingers, that we want something surer and higher, and that we must become religious. In a few days that wave of feeling has passed away, and we are left stranded just where we were before. We are all of ns often mistaking such impulses for real thirst after religion; but as long as these momentary emc^ions are thus mistaken, that con- 3 18 tinuous, real, craving of the soul for religion will not come, and we can not find the true transmitter of spirituality into our nature. So, whenever we are tempted to complain of our search after the truth, that we desire so much, proving vain, instead of so complaining, our first duty ought to be to look in- to our own souls, and find whether the craving in the heart is real. Then in the vast majority of cases it would be discovered that we were not fit for receiving the truth, that there was no real thirst for spirituality.
There are still greater dangers in regard to the transmitter Guru. There ai^ many who, though immersed in ignorance, yet, in the pride of their hearts, fancy they know everything, and not only do not atop there, but offer to take others on their should- ers; and thus the blind leading the blind, both fall into the ditch ^ — “ Fools dwelling in darkness, wise in tbeir own conceit, and puffed up with vain knowledge, go round and round staggering to and fro, like blind men led by the blind.” — (Mund. Up,, I. 2. 8). The world is full of these. Every one wants to be a teacher, every beggar wants to make a gift of a million dollars! Just as these beggars are ridiculous, so are these teachers.
dualifications of the Aspirant and the Teacher.
How are we to know a teacher then? The sun requires no torch to make him visible, we need not light a candle in order to see him. When the sun rises, we instinctively become aware of the fact, and when a teacher of men comes to help us, the soul will instinctively know that truth has already begun to shine upon it. Troth stands on its own evidence, it does not require any other testimony to prove it true, it is self -effulgent.
19 19 It penetrates into the innermost comers of our nature, and in its presence the whole universe stands up and says, “ This is truth.” The teachers whose wisdom and truth shine like the light of the sun are the very greatest the world has known, and they are worshipped as gods by the major portion of mankind. Bat we may get help from comparatively lesser ones also; only we ourselves do not possess intuition enough to judge well of the man from whom we receive teaching and guidance; so there ought to be certain tests, certain conditions, for the teacher to satisfy, as there are also for the taught.
The conditions necessary for the taught are purity, a real thirst after knowledge, and perseverance. No impure soul can be really religious. Purity in thought, speech, and act, is ab- solutely necessary for any one to be religious. As to the thirst after knowledge, it is an old law that we all get whatever we want. None of us can get anything other than what we fix our hearts upon. To pant for religion truly is a very difficult thing, not at all so easy as we generally imagine. Hearing re- ligious talks, reading religious books, is no proof yet of a real want felt in the heart; there must be a continuous struggle, a constant fisjht, an unremitting grappling with our lower nature, till the higher want is actually felt and the victory is achieved. It is not a question of one or two days, of years, or of lives; the struggle may have to go on for hundreds of life-times. The success sometimes may come immediately, but we must be ready to wait patiently even for what may look like an infinite length of time. The student who sets out with such a spirit of per- severance will surely find success and realisation at last.
In regard to the teacher, we must see that he knows the spirit of the scriptures. The whole world reads Bibles, Vedas, and Qurans; but they are all only words, syntax, 20 otymology, philology, the dry bones of religion. The teacher who deals too much in words, and allows the mind to be carried away by the force of words, loses the spirit. It is the knowledge of the spirit of the scriptures alone that con- stitutes the true religious teacher. The network of the words of the scriptures is like a huge forest in which the human mind often loses itself and finds no way out.
“ The network of words is a big forest; it is the cause of curious wanderings." The various methods of join- ing words, the various methods of speaking in beautiful lan- giiasfe, the various methods of explaining the diction of the scriptures, are only for the disputations and enjoyment of the learned; they do not conduce to the development of spiritual perception.
perception.
^ 3 I Those who employ such methods to impart religion to others are only desirous to show off their learning, so that the world may praise them as great scholars. You will find that no one of the great teachers of the world ever went into these various explanations of the texts; there is with them no attempt at “ text-torturing," no eternal playing upon the meaning of words and their roots. Yet they nobly taught, while others who have nothing to teach, have taken up a word sometimes, and written a three volume book on its origin, on the man who used it first, and on what that man was accustomed to eat, and how long he slept and so on.
Bhagavan R&mkrishna used to tell a story of some men who went into a mango orchard and busied themselves in count- ing the leaves, the twigs, and the branches, examining theii* color, comparing their size, and noting down everything most 21 21 oarsfully) and then got up a learned discussion on each of these topics which were undoubtedly highly interesting to them. But one of them, more sensible than the others, did not care for all these things, and instead thereof, began to eat the mango fruit. And was he not wise P So leave this counting of leaves and twigs and this note-taking to others. This kind of work has its proper place, but not here in the spiritual domain. You can never once see a strong spiritual man among these “ leaf-counters.” Religion, the highest aim, the highest glory of man, does not require so much labour as leaf -counting. If you want to be a Bhahta it is not at all necessary for you to know where Krishna was born, in Madhura or in Vraja, what he was doing, or just the exact date on which he pronounced the teachings of the GUd. You only require to feel the crav- ing for the beautiful lessons of duty and love in the Oita, All the other particulars about it and its author are for the enjoy- ment of the learned. Let them have what they desire. Say ‘ 8 antihf 8 dntiJC^ to their learned controversies, and let us eat the mangoes.
The second condition necessary in the teacher is—sinless- uess. The question is often asked, “Why should we look into the character and personality of a teacher? We have only to judge of what he says, and take that up.” This is not right.
If a man wants to teach me something of dynamics or chemis- try, or any other physical science, he may be any thing he likes, because what the physical sciences require, is merely an intellectual equipment; but in the spiritual sciences it is im- possible from first to last that there can be any spiritual light in the soul that is impure. What religion can an impure man teach P The sine qua non of acquiring spiritual truth for one’s self, orfor imparting it to others, is the purity of heart and 22 22 soul. A vision of God, or a glimpse of the beyond, never comes until the soul is pure. Hence with the teacher of religion we must see first what he is, and then what he says. He must be perfectly pure, and then alone comes the value of his words, because he is only then the true “ transmitter.” What can he transmit, if he has not spiritual power in himself? There must be the worthy vibration of spirituality in the mind of the teacher so that it may be sympathetically conveyed to the mind of the taught. The function of the teacher is indeed an affair of the transference of somethin*?, and not one of a mere stimu- lation of the existing intellectual or other faculties in the taught Something real and appreciable as an influence comes from the teacher and goes to the taught. Therefore the teacher must be pure.
The third condition is in regard to the motive. The tea- cher must not teach with any ulterior selfish motive, for money, name, or fame; his work must be simply out of love, out of pure love for mankind at large. The only medium through which spiritual force can be transmitted is love. Any selfish motive, such as the desire for gain or for name, will immediately destroy this conveying medium. God is love, and only he who has known God as love can be a teacher of godliness and God to man- When you see that, in your teacher, these conditions are all fulfilled, you are safe; if they are not, it is unsafe to allow yourself to be taught by him, for there is the great danger that, if he cannot convey goodness into your heart, he may con- vey wickedness. This danger must by all means be guardcd against. - “He who is learned, sinless and unpollutted by lust is the greatest knower of the Brcikman.'^ 23 From what hns been said, it naturally follows that wc cannot be taught to love, appreciate, and assimilate religion everywhere and by everybody. The “ sermon in stones, books in running brooks, and good in everything” is all very true as a poetical figure: but no man can impart to another a single grain of truth unless he has the undeveloped germs of it in himself. To whom do the stones and brooks preach sermons r To the human soul the lotus of whose inner holy shrine is already quick with life. And the light which causes the beautiful opening out of this lotus comes always from the good and wise teacher. When the heart has thus been opened, it becomes fit to receive teaching from the stones, or the brooks, or the stars, or the sun, or the moon, or from anything which has its existence in our divine universe; but the unopened heart will see in them nothing but mere stones or mere brooks. A blind man may go to a museum, but he will not profit by it in any way; bis eyes must be opened first, and then alone he will be able to learn what the things in the museum can teach.
This eye-opener of the aspirant after religion is the teacher. With the teacher, therefore, our relationship is the same as that between an ancestor and his descendant. Without faith, humility, submission, and veneration in our hearts to our reli- gious teacher, there can not be any growth of religion in us; and it is a significant fact that, where this kind of relation between the teacher and the taught prevails, there alone gigan- tic spiritual men are growing, while in those countries which have neglected to keep up this kind of relation, the religious teacher has become a mere lecturer, the teacher expecting his five dollars, and the person taught expecting his brain to be filled with the teacher’s words, and each going his own way after this much is done. Under such circumstances spiritua- 84 lity becomes almost an un-known quantity. There is none to transmit it, and none to have it transmitted to. Reli^on with such people becomes business, they think they can obtain it with their dollars. Would to God that religion could be obtained so easily! But unfortunately it cannot.
Religion, which is the highest knowledge and the highest wisdom, cannot be bought, nor can it be acquired from books. You may thrust your head into all the corners of the world, you may explore the Himalayas, the Alps, and the Caucasus, you may sound the bottom of the sea, and pry into every nook of Thibet and the desert of Gobi, you will not find it any where, until your heart is ready for receiving it, and your teacher has come. And when that divinely appointed teacher comes, serve, him with childlike confidence and simplicity freely open your heart to his influence, and see in him God manifested. Those who come to seek truth with such a spirit of love and venera- tion, to them the Lord of Truth reveals the most wonderful things regarding Truth, Goodness, and Beauty.
Incarnate Teachers and Incarnation.
Wherever His name is spoken, that very place is holy. How much more so is the man who speaks His name, and with what veneration ought we to approach that man out of whom comes to us spiritual truth? Such great teachers of spiri- tual truth are indeed very few in number in this world, but the world is never altogether without them. The moment it is absolutely bereft of these, it becomes a hideous hell and hastens on to its destruction. They are always the fairest flowers of human life, * — the ocean of mercy without any motive. “ Know the Guru to be Me,” says Krishna in the Gita.
25 Higher and nobler than all ordinary ones are another set of teachers, the Amtdras of fhara in the world. They can transmit spirituality with a touch, even with a mere wish. The lowest and the most degraded characters become in one second saints at their command. They are the Teachers of all teachers, the highest manifestations of God through man. We cannot see God except through them. We cannot help worship- ping them; and indeed they are the only ones whom we are bound to worship.
No man can really see God except through these human manifestations. If we try to see God otherwise, we make for ourselves a hideous caricature of Him, and believe the carica- ture to be no worse than the original. There is a story of an ignorant man who was asked to make an image of the God Siva, and who, aftei- days of hard struggle, manufactured only the image of a monkey. So, whenever we try to think of God as He is in His absolute perfection, we invariably meet with the most miserable failure; because as long as we are men we cannot conceive Him as anything higher than man. The time will come when we shall transcend our hu mandat ure, and know Him as He is; but as long as we are men we must wor- ship Him in man and as man. Talk as you may, try as you may, you cannot think of God except as a mao. You may deliver great intellectual discourses on God and on all things under the sun, become very great rationalists and prove to your satisfaction that all these accounts of the Avatdras of God as man are nonsense. But let us come for a moment to prac- tical common sense. What is there behind this kind of re- markable intellect? Zero, nothing, simply so much froth. When next you hear a man delivering a great intellectual lecture against this worship of the Avatdras of God, get hold of 26 him and ask him what his idea of G-od is, what he knows by “omnipotence,” “omnipresence,” and all similar terms, beyond the spelling of the wor-ds. He really means nothing by them; he cannot formulate as their meaning any idea unaffected by his own human nature; he is no better off in this matter than the man in the street who has not read a single book. That man in the street, however, is quiet an-, does not disturb the peace of the world; while this big talker creates disturbance and misery among mankind. Religion is after all realisation, and we must make the sharpest distinction between talk and intuitive experience. What we experience in the depths of our souls is realisation. Nothing indeed is so uncommon as common sense in regard to this matter.
By our present constitution we are limited and bound to see God as man. If, for instance, the buffaloes want to worship God, they will, in keeping with their own nature? see Him as a huge buffalo; if a fish wants to worship God, it will have to form an idea of Him as a big fish; and man has to think of Him as man. And these various oonceptionsHe not due to morbidly active imagination. Man, the buffalo, and the fish, all may be supposed to represent so many different vessels so to say. All these vessels go to the sea of God to get filled with water, each according to its own shape and capacity; in the man the water takes the shape of man, in the buffalo the shape of a buffalo, and in the fish the shape of a fish. In each of these vessels there is the same water of the sea of God. When men see Him, they see Him a.s man, and the animals, if they have any conception of God at all, must see Him as animal, each according to its own ideal. So we cannot help seeing God as man, and, therefore, we are bound to worship Him as man. There is no other way.
27 27 Two kinds of men do not worship God as man — the human brute who has no religion, and the Faramahamsa^ who has risen beyond all the weaknesses of humanity and has transcend- ed the limits of his own human nature. To him all nature has become his own Self. He alone can worship God as He is. Here too, as in all other cases, the two extremes meet. The extreme of ignorance and the other extreme of knowledge— neither of these go through acts of worship. The human brute does not worship because of his ignorance, and the Jivanmuktas (free souls) do not worship because they have realised God in themselves, Being between these two poles of existence, if any one tells you that he is not going to worship God as man, take kindly care of that man; he is, not to use any harsher term, an irresponsible talker; his religion is for unsound and empty brains, God understands human failings and becomes man to do good to humanity.
tue subsides and wickedness prevails I manifest myself. To establish virtue, to destroy evil, to save the good I come from yuga to yuga. " 3T^5rRfcf JTf i q?
JR II “ Fools deride me who have assumed the human form, without knowing my real nature as the Lord of the universe.” Soch is Sri Krishna’s declaration in the Qitii on incarnation. ViThen a huge tidal wave comes,” say# Bhagavan S^ri Ramakrishna, “ all the little brooks and ditches become full to the brim without any effort or con- sciousness on their own part; so when an incarnation comes a tidal wave of spirituality breaks upon the world, and people feel spirituality almost full in the air.”
The Mantra: Om: Word and Wisdom.
But wc are now considering not these Maht^purushas^ the great incarnations, but only the Hiddha-Gums (teachers who have attained the goal); they as. a rule have to convey the germs of bpiritual wisdom to the disciple by means of words {mantra) to be meditated upon. What are these mantras? The whole of this universe has, according to Indian philosophy, both name* and form as its conditions of manifestation In the human microcosm, there can not be a single wave in the mind-stufE unconditioned by name and form. If it be true that nature is built throughout on the same plan, this kind of conditioning by name and form must also be the plan of the building of the whole of the cosmos.
As one lump of clay being known, all clay is known,” so the knowledge of the microcosm must lead to the knowledge of the macrocosm. Now, form is the outer crust, of which the name or the idea is the inner essence or kernel. The body is the form, and the mind or the antahkarana is the name, and sound-symbols are univer- sally associated with — name — in all beings having the power of speech. In the individual man the thought-waves rising in the limited (mafiat) or (mind-stuff) must mani- fest themselves, first as words, and then as the more concrete forms.
In the universe, Brahma or Hiranya-garhha or the cosmic (mahat) first manifested himself as name, and then as form, i. e., as this universe. All this expressed sensible uni- verse is the form, behind which stands the eternal inexpressi- 29 ble (sphota)^ the manifester as Logos or Word. This eternal sphota, the essential eternal material of all ideas or names, is the power through which the Lord creates the universe; nay,theLord first becomes conditioned as th.e sphota, and then evolves himself out as the yet more concrete sensible universe. This sphota has one word as its only possible symbol, and this is the ^ {Om.) And as by no possible means of analysis we can separate the word from the idea, this Om and the eternal sphota are insepar- able; and therefore it is out of this holiest of all holy words, the mother of all names and forms, the eternal Om, that the whole universe may be supposed to have been created. But it may be said that, although thought and word are insepara- ble, yet as there may be various word-symbols for the same thought, it is not necessary that this particular word Om should be the word representative of the thought, out of which the universe has become manifested. To this objection we reply that this Om is the only possible symbol which covers the whole ground, and there is none other like it. The sphota is the material of all words, yet it is not any definite word in its fully formed state. That is to say, if all the peculiarities which distinguish one word from another be removed, then what remains will be the sphota; therefore this sphota is called the {N dda- Brahma), the sound- Brahma^i. Now, as every word-symbol, intended to express the inexpressible sphota will so particularize it that it will no longer be the sphota, that symbol which particularizes it the least and at the same time most approximately expresses its nature, will be the truest symbol thereof; and this is the Om, and the Om only; because these ihree letters U, M), pronounced in comiunation as Jpw, may well be the generalised symbol of all possible sounds. iJbe letter^ (A) is the least differentiated of all sounds, therefore 30 Krishna says in the Gita ^^kTi’W “I am il among the letters.” Again, all articulate sounds are produced in the space within the mouth beginning with the root of the tongue and ending in the lips — the throat sound is A, and M is the last lip sound; and the U exactly represents the rolling forward of the impulse which begins at. the root of the tongue till it ends in the lips. If properly pronounced, this Om will represent tlie whole phenomenon of sound -production, and no other word can do this; and this, therefore, is the fittest symbol of the sphota, which is the real meaning of the Om. And as the symbol can never be separated from the thing signified, the Om and the sphota are one, And as the sphota, being the finer side of the manifested universe, is nearer to Grod, and is indeed the first manifestation of Divine Wisdom, this Om is truly symbolic of God. Again, just as the “ one only” Brahman^ the Akhanda — Satchiddnanday the undivided Exis- teuce-Knowledge-Bliss, can be conceived by imperfect human souls only from particular standpoints of view and associated with particular qualities, so this universe, His body, has also to be thought of along the line of the thinker’s mind. 3^*5“ This direction of the worshipper’s mind is guided by its prevailing elements or Tattvas. The result is that the same God will be seen in various manifestations as the possessor of various predominant qualities, and the same universe will appear as full of manifold forms. In the same way in which, even in the case of the least differentiated and the most universal symbol Om, thought and sound-symbol are seen to be inseparably associated with each other, this law of their inseparable association ap- plies to the many differentiated views of God and the universe: each of them must have a particular word-symbol to ex- press it- These word-symbols, evolved out of the deepee^t 31 spiritual perceptions of sages, symbolize and express as nearly as possible the particular view of God and the universe they stand for. And as the Om represents the the undifferentiated Brahman, the others represent the /Chanda or the differentiated views of the same Being; and they are all helpful to divine meditation and the acquisition of true know- ledge.
Worship of Substitutes and Images.
The next points to be considered are the worship of Pratihds or of things more or less satisfactory as substitutes for God, and the worship of Prat1m(h or images. What is the wor- ship of God through a Pratihi? It is “Joining the mind with devotion to that which is not Brahman, taking it to be Brahman'' Says Bhagavan Ramanuja: — “ Wor- ship the mind as Brahman, this is internal; and the A'kdsa is Brahman, this is the sense-meaning.” The mind is an internal Prattkd, the Akdsa is an external one; and both have to be wor- shipped as substitutes of God. Similarly— The Sun is Brahman, this is the command’...‘He who worships Name as Brahman' and in all such passages the doubt arises as to the worship of Pratt- kds says S'ankara. The word Prattkd means going towards, and worshipping a Prattkd is worshipping some thing which as a substitute, is, in some one or more respects, like the Brahman more and more, but is not the Brahman. Along with the Pratikds mentioned in the Srutis there are various others to be found in the Purdnas and the Tantras, In this kind of Prattkd -worship may be included all the various forms of Pitri- worship and Beva-worship,