Surya And The Descending Path Of The Spirit
Vedic Deities
Śruti manifests through the ritual of a self-aware Knowledge into the successive states of the Spirit pointing towards a terrestrial possibility, a realisation of the high in the low and a revelation and revealing of the Godhead in the demagogue of the Inconscient. This ritual symbolism of the Veda is spiritual and pragmatic in its essence and movement, not charlatanism extolled by a few confused and deluded men immersed in tiresome rituals, but men of self-exceeding knowledge and revelers in the divine Wisdom, who cleaved a path upwards towards the immortal Sun and attempted a descending course through the establishment of successive states of the higher Consciousness in the descending spiral pointing towards not only a possibility in the terrestrial existence but a greater realisation of the higher and larger potencies of the divine Gnosis in the inherent movements and forms of terrestrial existence. The terrestrial is often represented as a high-ground of a particular ritual concealing the esoteric movement of the mystic Light immanent in the lower waters as a conscient-Flower invisible to the naked eye of men but for the inner vision of the Rishi reveals as the first impulse of a greater ascent of consciousness aspiring for the supracosmic Infinity. The Vedic Rishis were building a descending path for the higher Gods or rather attempting to build it; attempting, because often an effective realisation and organisation of the ascending path determines an effective realisation and organisation of the descending path, and the Vedic Rishis had built the initial foundation of the descending curve for the long journey of the Gods to the earth’s atmosphere, but it was still built on the basis of a multitudinous Spirit asserting itself as many through a common unity inherent in each of its manifestation rather than on the basis of an inherent and indivisible divine Unity asserting itself as the One and the Many and still not divined or limited by its multitudinousness. The inherent unity underlying the principle of the great descending path of the Spirit must derive its synthesis and power of effective organisation from the Supramental Sun of Knowledge and manifest out of its inherent power of unity a wider and larger principle of the Spirit in each successive plane of consciousness till there is a clear harmony of the higher established even in the lower spheres of manifestation. A newer Sunlit path were to be built by Sri Aurobindo for the Supramental Godhead to come down into the terrestrial consciousness.
The Vedic knowledge of the states of Consciousness was more of a derivation of a greater self-seeing from the footsteps of an ascending stair of a divine Infinity, in which each ascending state was measured in a self-cognitive trace of higher mind, a luminous measure of the Spirit but not yet a self-exceeding part of the Gnosis divine, and out of which comes the essential knowledge of the descending stair through which the Gods descend the steps into the world of evolution. The Vedic Surya descending through the downward staircase into the evolutionary play has been well documented in Vedic lore and captured brilliantly through its esoteric symbolism, but there is, however, a problem which, if left unattended, will only result in a limited realisation of the descending Spirit of light and therefore, will not suffice for our purpose. A spiritualised mind in its own afflatus is a self-existent, a self-aware and a self-sufficient consciousness containing within its inherent knowledge all the creative possibilities of the all-Spirit to be manifested into the terrestrial play, but in the cosmology of Vishnu or in the cosmic play of things, a manifestation of the potencies and powers of a spiritualised consciousness can at best have only an influence on the terrestrial and its decaying forms, and if at all a change is possible, it is more likely to be transient in character and scope, though a good many things could still be achieved here in the earth-consciousness from the individual viewpoint, from the standpoint of a ripe and self-saturated Siddhi. Siddhi it is indeed of a higher light and truth, but of a limited potency and action in the terrestrial domain, for an occult or higher Force acting here would mean a great number of things rendered possible by the pressure of its descent into Matter, but it is limited to the creation of certain conditions which might be conducive or even imperative and indispensable to the arrival of a still greater Force of the Supreme Gnosis, the very heart of the highest Divine in the core and substratum of hard Matter. The Vedic Riks seem to indicate nothing more than a bare knowledge of the altitude of the descending course of Surya, for it was not due to an insufficiency of knowledge or of incomplete experience but intentional and on purpose to preserve and safeguard the secrets of an occult and divine self-experience from falling into hands of the uninitiated and undeserving. A domain of spiritual knowledge encompassing the terrestrial ignorance in order to transform it into an intimate and direct expression of the divine Spirit must be built upon a greater and more viable foundation of the Divine Gnosis and can act only as an intermediary here and not as a sole and indisputable representative of the Supreme Divine,- for indeed out of these intermediary ranges of the spiritual Mind can still emerge a downward movement of the Spirit towards greater evolutionary possibilities here in this earth-bound ignorant life and radically alter Nature’s course towards something new and orderly, something truer and larger but the changes effected might remain confined to a mental or vital synthesis acting on the lower forms and recalcitrant determinates without much success; even if it acts out of its own evolutionary devising, its success is very limited both in scope and result. There ascends beyond the spiritual Mind a greater Consciousness, out of which must emerge a descending stair for the Supramental Sun to create out of its own native forms and devices of knowledge a Sunlit path of its own infinite measure beyond the cosmology of Vishnu.
Śruti is not a sum of a grand spiritual philosophy in essence or a methodical dissection of the Spirit in unintelligible Riks, nor it is something dictated into the active mind or conveyed in superlative images and figures, for these are all side-streams of a turbid mind basking in the illusion of its luminosity, a masquerade of the lower mind in self-ignorance and in the grip of contrary forces, and out of these self-deceits of the lower mind no true knowledge can be derived or synthesised into a workable apparatus of the Spirit here in the earth conditions, for what comes down from these can only be a falsity and a chimera. When we say that the Rishis heard the Truth, we mean by it a spiritual self-realisation of the Truth in the conscious minds of the Seers, a Truth heard and lived and relived by them until it had become an intimate self-expression of their consciousnesses, and therefore, out of these intricate processes of the Spirit in the descending curve comes a direct power of divine Śruti in the mind of the aspirant; it becomes in him the guide of all his movements of thought, and in a father development, the reason and purpose of his thought and consequent action. It is a power of the Supreme Mother which moves the individual to create and synthesise a set of esoteric and recondite symbols and weave all together in a complex structure too difficult for the human mind to comprehend or, more properly, impossible to understand but rendered intelligible to the chosen children of the Infinite Mother. And, it is this power of the highest Spirit which must be captured in conscious self-experience and synthesised into each descending plane of consciousness till the last boundary wall of the terrestrial. A nature of a gnostic descent of Consciousness, on the other hand, supersedes, if not disturbs, the inherent or established law of the descending stair and replaces it with a higher law and more complex equilibrium of the divine Spirit, thus creating a descending stair of its own and devising a great apparatus of the Divine Creatrix for a free and unhindered descent of the Supramental Sun-God and His wide-eyed Children. And as a result, direct power of Śruti from the Supramental planes becomes possible in the lower strata, a free manifestation of the native powers of the Divine Supermind here in the terrestrial conditions. A Power thus conceived and rendered effective into the forms of the lower consciousness through a descending stair of the native Spirit must also awaken the dormant and recalcitrant energies coiled up in the dark maze of the lower sphere, the hooded serpent hiding in the dungeon of the Inconscient. This primal Energy may be unorganised and dark, apparently conceived of the womb of Death and Darkness, but it must be purified and freed of their captors, transformed of its original nescience into a wide column of an ever-ascending Energy of the Supreme Conscience here immanent in the terrestrial.
But the last stair of the descending Consciousness is in the body, below which apparently there is no stair to climb down to, no map or path which would aid the painful descent into its burning depths, no precise method that would lead us to a lever of consciousness somewhere deeply buried or presumed to be in existence, because, to be honest, its existence could only be confirmed by our own plunge through the descending stair of the Supreme Sun into the dark abyss and discover there that lever of a Superlife which would transform the hotbed of the Subconscient into something mellower and infinitely suppler, and refashion and reorganise all the movements of its chaos and deformity, all its falsehood and insincerity into a higher figure and boundless movement of the eternal Spirit. It is a discovery of the all-material Spirit or the true, divine Matter in the Waters of inexhaustible Life, but a descending path into the depths of the body is insurmountably difficult and can only be effected by an integral self-surrender of the individual to the Supreme Mother and Her response to his call of aspiration and sincerity. There is in the individual already built and to some extent in the collective aggregate of humanity also a Sunlit path of the divine Surya descending into our darkest woes and insurmountable pains to transform them into potent symbols of the Divine Gnosis here amongst us as a greater Power of the Supreme Mother.
Mahasaraswati and The Sense and History of the Vedic Symbol
Mahasaraswati and The Perfection of The Divine Sruti
