VIII
F
WE WANT to approach such a creation as the sublime
Bhagavad Gita
with full understanding it is necessary for us to attune our
souls to it, so to say; bring them into that manner of thought and
feeling that really lies at the basis of such a work. This is
especially true for people who, through their situation and
circumstances, are as far removed from this great poem as are the
people of the West. It is natural for us to make a contemporary work
our own without much difficulty. It is also natural that those who
belong to a certain nation should always have an immediate feeling
for a work that has sprung directly out of the substance of that
nation, even though it might belong to a previous age. The population
of the West (not those of southern Asia), however, is altogether
remote in sentiment and feeling from the
Bhagavad Gita.
If we would approach it
then with understanding we must prepare ourselves for the very
different mood of soul, the different spirit that pervades it. Such
appalling misunderstandings can arise when people imagine they can
approach this poem without first working on their own souls. A
creation coming over to us from a strange race, from the ninth or
tenth century before the foundation of Christianity, cannot be
understood as directly by the people of the West as, say, the
Kalevala by the Finnish people, or the Homeric poems by the
Greeks. If we would enter into the matter further we must once more
bring together different materials that can show us the way to enter
into the spirit of this wonderful poem.
Here I would above all
draw attention to one thing. The summits of spiritual life have at
all times been concealed from the wide plain of human intelligence.
So it has remained, in a certain sense, right up to our present age.
It is true that one of the characteristics of our age, which is only
now dawning and which we have somewhat described, will be that
certain things hitherto kept secret and really known to but very few
will be spread abroad into large circles. That is the reason why you
are present here, because our movement is the beginning of this
spreading abroad of facts that until now have remained secret from
the masses. Perhaps some subconscious reason that brought you to the
anthroposophical view of the world and into this spiritual movement
came precisely from the feeling that certain secrets must today be
poured out into all people. Until our time, however, these facts
remained secret not because they were deliberately kept so, but
because it lay in the natural course of man's development that they
had to remain secret. It is said that the secrets of the old
Mysteries were protected from the profane by certain definite,
strictly observed rules. Far more than by rule, these secrets were
protected by a fundamental characteristic of mankind in olden times,
namely, that they simply could not have understood these secrets.
This fact was a much more powerful protection than any external rule
could be.
This has been, for
certain facts, especially the case during the materialistic age. What
I am about to say is extreme heresy from the point of view of our
time. For example, there is nothing better protected in the regions
of Central Europe than Fichte's philosophy. Not that it is kept
secret, for his teachings are printed and are read. But they are not
understood. They remain secrets. In this way much that will have to
enter the general development of mankind will remain occult knowledge
though it is published and revealed in the light of day.
Not only in this sense
but in a rather different one too, there is a peculiarity of human
evolution that is important concerning those ideas we must have in
order to understand the
Bhagavad Gita.
Everything we may call
the mood, the mode of feeling, the mental habit of ancient India from
which the Gita sprang, was also in its full spirituality
accessible to the understanding of only a few. What one age has
produced by the activity of a few, remains secret in regard to its
real depth, even afterward when it passes over and becomes the
property of a whole people. Again, this is a peculiar trait in the
evolution of man, which is full of wisdom though it may at first seem
paradoxical. Even for the contemporaries of the
Bhagavad Gita
and for their followers, for the whole race to which this summit of
spiritual achievement belongs, and for its posterity, its teaching
remained a secret. The people who came later did not know the real
depth of this spiritual current. It is true that in the centuries
following there grew up a certain religious belief in its teachings,
combined with great fervor of feeling, but with this there was no
deepening of perception. Neither the contemporaries nor those who
followed developed a really penetrating understanding of this poem.
In the time between then and now there were only a few who really
understood it.
Thus it comes about
that in the judgment of posterity what was once present as a strong
and special spiritual movement is greatly distorted and falsified. As
a rule we cannot find the way to come near to an understanding of
some reality by studying the judgments of the descendants of the race
that produced it. So, in the deep sentiments and feelings of the
people of India today we will not find real understanding for the
spiritual tendency that in the deepest sense permeates the
Bhagavad Gita.
We will find enthusiasm, strong feeling and fervent belief
in abundance, but not a deep perception of its meaning. This is
especially true of the age just passed, from the fourteenth and
fifteenth to the nineteenth century. As a matter of fact, it is most
especially true for the people who confess that religion. There is
one anecdote that like many others reveals a deep truth — how a
great European thinker said on his deathbed, “Only one person
understood me, and he misunderstood me.”
It can also be said of
this age that has just run its course, that it contained some
spiritual substance that represents a great height of achievement but
in the widest circles has remained unknown as to its real nature,
even to its contemporaries. Here is something to which I would like
to draw your attention. Without doubt, among the present people of
the East, and of India, some exceptionally clever people can be
found. By the whole configuration of their mind and soul, however,
they are already far from understanding those feelings poured out in the
Bhagavad Gita.
Consider how these people receive from
Western civilization a way of thought that does not reach to the
depths but is merely superficial understanding. This has a twofold
result. For one, it is easy for the Eastern peoples, particularly for
the descendants of the
Bhagavad Gita
people, to develop something that may easily make them feel how far behind
a superficial Western culture is in relation to what has already been given
by their great poem. In effect they still have more ways of
approach to the meaning of that poem than to the deeper contents of
Western spiritual and intellectual life. Then there are others in
India who would gladly be ready to receive such spiritual substance
as is contained, let us say, in the works of Solovieff, Hegel and
Fichte, to mention a few of many spiritualized thinkers. Many Indian
thinkers would like to make these ideas their own.
I once experienced
something of this kind. At the beginning of our founding of the
German Section in our movement an Indian thinker sent me a
dissertation. He sent it to many other Europeans besides. In this he
tried to combine what Indian philosophy can give, with important
European concepts, such as might be gained in real truth —
so he implied — if one entered deeply into Hegel and Fichte. In
spite of the person's honest effort the whole essay was of no use
whatever. I do not mean to say anything against it, rather I would
praise his effort, but the fact is, what this man produced could only
appear utter dilettantism to anyone who had access to the real
concepts of Fichte and Hegel. There was nothing to be done with the
whole thing.
Here we have a person
who honestly endeavors to penetrate a later spiritual stream
altogether different from his own point of view, but he cannot get
through the hindrances that time and evolution put in his way.
Nevertheless, when he attempts to penetrate them, untrue and
impossible stuff is the result. Later I heard a lecture by another
person, who does not know what European spiritual evolution really
is, and what its depths contain. He lectured in support of the same
Indian thinker. He was a European who had learned the arguments of
the Indian thinker and was bringing them forward as spiritual wisdom
before his followers. They too of course were ignorant of the fact
that they were listening to something which rested on a wrong kind of
intellectual basis. For one who could look keenly into what the
European gave out, it was simply terrible. If you will forgive the
expression, it was enough to give one the creeps. It was one
misunderstanding grafted onto another misunderstanding. So difficult
is it to comprehend all that the human soul can produce. We must make
it our ideal to truly understand all the masterpieces of the human
spirit. If we feel this ideal through and through and consider what
has just been said, we shall gain a ray of light to show us how
difficult of access the
Bhagavad Gita
really is. Also, we shall realize how untold misunderstandings are possible,
and how harmful they can be.
We in the West can well
understand how the people of the East can look up to the old creative
spirits of earlier times, whose activity flows through the Vedantic
philosophy and permeates the Sankhya philosophy with its deep
meaning. We can understand how the Eastern man looks up with
reverence to that climax of spiritual achievement that appears in
Shankaracharya seven or eight centuries after the foundation of
Christianity. All this we can realize, but we must think of it in
another way also if we want to attain a really deep understanding. To
do so we must set up something as a kind of hypothesis, for it has
not yet been realized in evolution.
Let us imagine that
those who were the creators of that sublime spirituality that
permeates the Vedas, the Vedantic literature, and the philosophy of
Shankaracharya, were to appear again in our time with the same
spiritual faculty, the same keenness of perception they had when they
were in the world in that ancient epoch. They would have come in
touch with spiritual creations like those of Solovieff, Hegel, and
Fichte. What would they have said? We are supposing it does not
concern us what the adherents of those ancient philosophies say, but
what those spirits themselves would say. I am aware that I am going
to say something paradoxical, but we must think of what Schopenhauer
once said. “There is no getting away from it, it is the sad
fate of truth that it must always become paradoxical in the world.
Truth is not able to sit on the throne of error, therefore it sits on
the throne of time, and appeals to the guardian angel of time. So
great, however, is the spread of that angel's mighty wings that the
individual dies within a single beat.” So we must not shrink
from the fact that truth must needs appear paradoxical. The following
does also, but it is true.
If
the poets of the Vedas, the founders of Sankhya philosophy, even
Shankaracharya himself, had come again in the nineteenth century and
had seen the creations of Solovieff, Hegel and Fichte, all those
great men would have said, “What we were striving for back in
that era, what we hoped our gift of spiritual vision would reveal to
us, these three men have achieved by the very quality and tenor of
their minds. We thought we must rise into heights of clairvoyant
vision, then on these heights there would appear before us what
permeates the souls of these nineteenth century men quite
naturally, almost as a matter of course!”
This sounds paradoxical
to those Western people who in childlike unconsciousness look to the
people of the East, comparing themselves with them, and all the while
quite misunderstanding what the West actually contains. A
peculiarly grotesque picture. We imagine those founders of Indian
philosophy looking up fervently to Fichte and other Western thinkers;
and along with them we see a number of people today who do not value
the spiritual substance of Europe but grovel in the dust before
Shankaracharya and those before him while they themselves are not
concerned with the achievements of such as Hegel, Fichte and
Solovieff. Why is this so? Only by such an hypothesis can we
understand all the facts history presents to us.
We shall understand this if
we look up into those times from which the spiritual substance of the
Bhagavad Gita
flowed. Let us imagine the man
of that period somewhat as follows. What appears to a person today in
varied ways in his dream-consciousness — the pictorial
imagination of dream-life — was in that ancient time the normal
content of man's soul, his everyday consciousness. His was a
dreamlike, picture consciousness, by no means the same as it was in
the Old Moon epoch but much more evolved. This was the condition out
of which men's souls were passing on in the descending line of
evolution. Still earlier was what we call sleep-consciousness, a
state wholly closed to us today, from which a kind of inspiration,
dream-like, came to men. It was the state closed to us today during
our sleep. As dream-consciousness is for us, so was this
sleep-consciousness for those ancient men. It found its way into
their normal picture-consciousness much as dream-consciousness does
for us, but more rarely. In another respect also it was somewhat
different in those times. Our dream-consciousness today generally
brings up recollections of our ordinary life. Then, when
sleep-consciousness could still penetrate the higher worlds, it gave
men recollections of those spiritual worlds. Then gradually this
consciousness descended lower and lower.
Anyone who at that time
was striving as we do today in our occult education, aimed for
something quite different. When we today go through our occult
development we are aware that we have gone downhill to our everyday
consciousness and are now striving upward. Those seekers were also
striving upward, from their everyday dream-consciousness. What was it
then that they attained? With all their pains it was something
altogether different from what we are trying to attain. If someone
had offered those men my book
Knowledge of the Higher Worlds
they would have had no use for it at all. What it contains would have
been foolishness for that ancient time; it has sense only for mankind
today. Then, everything those men did with their Yoga and the Sankhya
was a striving toward a height that we have reached in the most
profound works of our time, in those of the three European thinkers I
have mentioned. They were striving to grasp the world in ideas and
concepts. Therefore, one who really penetrates the matter finds no
difference — apart from differences of time, mood, form, and
quality of feeling — between our three thinkers and the
Vedantic philosophy. At that time the Vedantic philosophy was that to
which men were striving upward; today it has come down and is
accessible to everyday consciousness.
If we would describe
the condition of our souls in this connection we may say to begin
with that we have a sleep-consciousness that for us is closed but for
the ancient people of India was still permeated by the light of
spiritual vision. What we are now striving for lay hidden in the
depths of the future for them. I mean what we call Imaginative
Knowledge, fully conscious picture-consciousness, permeated by the
sense of the ego; fully conscious Imagination as it is described in
Knowledge of the Higher Worlds.
So much for the technical
point that should be inserted here. In these abstract technicalities
lies something far more important, that if the man of today will only
vigorously make use of the forces present in his soul, what the men of the
Bhagavad Gita
era strove for with all their might lies
right at his hand. It really does, even if only for a Solovieff, a
Fichte or a Hegel. There is something more. What today can be found
right at hand was in those ancient times attained by application of
all the keenness of vision of Sankhya, and the deep penetration of
Yoga. It was attained by effort and pain, by sublime effort to lift
the mind.
Now imagine how
different the situation is for a man who, for example, lives at the
top of a mountain, has his house there and is continually enjoying
the magnificent view, from that of a man who has never once seen the
view but has to toil upward with trouble and pain from the valley. If
you have the view every day you get accustomed to it. It is not in
the concepts, in their content, that the achievements of
Shankaracharya, of the Vedic poets, and of their successors are
different from those of Hegel and Fichte. The difference lies in the
fact that Shankaracharya's predecessors were striving upward from the
valley to the summit; that it was their keenness of mind in Sankhya
philosophy, their deepening of soul in Yoga, that led them there. It
was in this work, this overcoming of the soul, that the experience
lay. It is the experience, not the content of thought that is
important here.
This is the immensely
significant thing, something from which we may in a certain sense
derive comfort because the European does not value what we can find
right at hand. Europeans prefer the form in which it meets them in
Vedantic and Sankhya philosophies, because there, without knowing it,
they value the great efforts that achieved it. That is the personal
side of the matter. It makes a difference whether you find a certain
content of thought here or there, or whether you attain it by the
severest effort of the soul. It is the soul's work that gives a thing
its life. This we must take into account. What was once attained
alone by Shankaracharya and by the deep training of Yoga can be found
today right at hand, even if only by men like those we have named.
This is not a matter
for abstract commentaries. We only need the power to transplant
ourselves into the living feelings of that time. Then we begin to
understand that the external expressions themselves, the outer forms
of the ideas, were experienced quite differently by the men of that
era from the way we can experience them. We must study those forms of
expression that belong to the feeling, the mood, the mental habit of
a human soul in the time of the Gita, who might live through
what that great poem contains. We must study it not in an external
philological sense, not in order to give academic commentaries, but
to show how different is the whole configuration of feeling and idea
in that poem from what we have now. Although the conceptual
explanation of the world — which today, to use a graphic term,
lies below and then lay above — though the content of thought
is the same, the form of expression is different. Whoever would stop
with the abstract contents of these thoughts may find them easy to
understand, but whoever would work his way through to the real,
living experience will not find it easy. It will cost him some pains
to go this way again and feel with the ancient man of India because
it was by this way that such concepts first arose as those that
flowed out into the words sattwa, rajas, tamas. I do not attach
importance to the ideal concepts these words imply in the
Bhagavad Gita,
but indeed we today are inclined to take them much too
easily, thinking we understand them.
What is it that
actually lies in these words? Without a living sympathy with what was
felt in them we cannot follow a single line of the poem with the
right quality of feeling, particularly in its later sections. At a
higher stage, our inability to feel our way into these concepts is
something like trying to read a book in a language that is not
understood. For such a person there would be no question of seeking
out the meaning of concepts in commentaries. He would just set to
work to learn the language. So here it is not a matter of
interpreting and commenting on the words sattwa, rajas, tamas in an
academic way. In them lies the feeling of the whole period of the
Gita, something of immense significance because it led men to
an understanding of the world and its phenomena. If we would describe
the way they were led, we must first free ourselves from many things
that are not to be found in such men as Solovieff, Hegel, and Fichte,
yet lie in the widespread, fossilized thinking of the West. By
sattwa, rajas, tamas is meant a certain kind of living one's way into
the different conditions of universal life, in its most varied
kingdoms. It would be abstract and wrong to interpret these words
simply on the basis of the ancient Indian quality of thought and
feeling. It is easier to take them in the true sense of the life of
that time but to interpret them as much as possible through our own
life. It is better to choose the external contour and coloring of
these conceptions freely out of our own experience.
Let us consider the way
man experiences nature when he enters intelligently into the three
kingdoms that surround him. His mode and quality of knowledge is
different in the case of each. I am not trying to make you understand
sattwa, rajas and tamas exhaustively. I only want to help you to come
a little nearer to an idea of their meaning. When man today
approaches the mineral kingdom he feels he can penetrate it and its
laws with his thinking, can in a certain sense live together with it.
This kind of understanding at the time of the Gita would have
been called a sattwa understanding of the mineral kingdom. In
the plant kingdom we always encounter an obstacle, namely, that with
our present intelligence we cannot penetrate life. The ideal now is
to investigate and analyze nature from a physical-chemical
standpoint, and to comprehend it in this manner. In fact, some
scientists spin their threads of thought so far as to imagine they
have come nearer to the idea of life by producing external forms that
imitate as closely as possible the appearance of the generative
process. This is idle fantasy. In his pursuit of knowledge man does
not penetrate the plant kingdom as far as he does the mineral. All he
can do is to observe plant life. Now what one can only
observe, not enter with intellectual understanding, is
rajas-understanding. When we come to the animal kingdom, its
form of consciousness escapes our everyday intelligence far more than
does the life of a plant. We do not perceive what the animal actually
lives and experiences. What man with his science today can understand
about the animal kingdom is a tamas-understanding.
We may add something
further. We shall never reach an understanding beyond the limits of
abstract concepts if we consider only the concepts of science
regarding the activity of living beings. Sleep, for example, is not
the same for man and animal. Simply to define sleep would be like
defining a knife as the same thing whether used for shaving or
cutting meat. If we would keep an open mind and approach the concepts
of tamas, rajas and sattwa once more from a different aspect we can
add something else taken from our present-day life.
Man today nourishes
himself with various substances, animal, plant, and mineral. These
foods of course have different effects on his constitution. When he
eats plants he permeates himself with sattwa conditions. When he
tries to understand them they are for him a rajas condition.
Nourishment from the assimilation of mineral substance — salts
and the like — represents a condition of rajas; that brought
about by eating meat represents tamas. Notice that we cannot keep the
same order of sequence as if we were starting from an abstract
definition. We have to keep our concepts mobile. I have not told you
this to inspire horror in those who feel bound to eating meat. In a
moment I shall mention another matter where the connection is again
different.
Let us imagine that a
man is trying to assimilate the outer world, not through ordinary
science but by that kind of clairvoyance that is legitimate for our
age. Suppose that he now brings the facts and phenomena of the
surrounding world into his clairvoyant consciousness. All this will
call forth a certain condition in him, just as for ordinary
understanding the three kingdoms of nature call forth conditions of
sattwa, rajas and tamas. In effect what can enter the purest form of
clairvoyant perception corresponding to purified clairvoyance, calls
forth the condition of tamas. (I use the word “purified”
not in the moral sense.) A man who would truly see spiritual facts
objectively, with that clairvoyance that we can attain today, must by
this activity bring about in himself the condition of tamas. Then
when he returns into the ordinary world where he immediately forgets
his clairvoyant knowledge, he feels that with his ordinary mode of
knowledge he enters a new condition, a new relation to knowledge,
namely, the sattwa condition. Thus, in our present age everyday
knowledge is the sattwa condition. In the intermediate stage of
belief, of faith that builds on authority, we are in the rajas
condition.
Knowledge in the higher
worlds brings about the condition of tamas in the souls of men.
Knowledge in our everyday environment is the condition of sattwa;
while faith, religious belief resting on authority, brings about the
condition of rajas. So you see, those whose constitution compels them
to eat meat need not be horrified because meat puts them in a
condition of tamas because the same condition is brought about by
purified clairvoyance. It is that condition of an external thing when
by some natural process it is most detached from the spiritual. If we
call the spirit “light” then the tamas condition is
devoid of light. It is “darkness.” So long as our
organism is permeated by the spirit in the normal way we are in the
sattwa condition, that of our ordinary perception of the external
world. When we are asleep we are in tamas. We have to bring about
this condition in sleep in order that our spirit may leave our body
and enter the higher spirituality around us. If we would reach the
higher worlds — and the Evangelist already tells us what man's
darkness is — our human nature must be in the condition of
tamas. Since man is in the condition of sattwa, not of tamas, which
is darkness, the words of the Evangelist, “The light shineth in
darkness and the darkness comprehendeth it not,” can be
rendered somewhat as follows, “The higher light penetrated as
far as man, but he was filled by a natural sattwa that he would not
give up.” Thus the higher light could not find entrance because
it can only shine in darkness.
If we are seeking
knowledge of such living concepts as sattwa, rajas, and tamas, we
must get accustomed to not taking them in an absolute sense.
They are always, so to say, turning this way and that. For a right
concept of the world there is no absolute higher or lower, only in a
relative sense. A European professor took objection to this. He
translated sattwa as “goodness” and objected to another
man who translated it as “light,” though he translated
tamas as “darkness.” Such things truly express the source
of all misunderstanding. When man is in the condition of tamas —
whether by sleep or clairvoyant perception, to take only these two
cases — then in effect he is in darkness as far as external man
is concerned. So ancient Indian thought was right, yet it could not
use a word like “light” in place of the word sattwa.
Tamas may always be translated “darkness” but for the
external world the sattwa condition could not always be simply
interpreted as “light.”
Suppose we are
describing light. It is entirely correct to call the light colors —
red, orange, yellow — in the sense of Sankhya philosophy the
sattwa colors. In this sense too green must be called a rajas color;
blue, indigo, violet, tamas colors. One may say effects of light and
of clairvoyance in general fall under the concept of sattwa. Under
the same concept we must also place, for example, goodness, kindness,
loving behavior by man. It is true that light falls under the concept
of sattwa, but this concept is broader; light is not really identical
with it. Therefore it is wrong to translate sattwa as “light”
though it is quite possible to translate tamas as “darkness.”
Nor is it correct to say that “light” does not convey the
idea of sattwa.
The criticism that the
professor made of a man who may have been well aware of this is also
not quite justified, for the simple reason that if someone said,
“Here is a lion,” nobody would attempt to correct him by
saying, “No, here is a beast of prey.” Both are correct.
This comparison hits the nail right on the head. As regards external
appearance it is correct to associate sattwa with what is full of
light, but it is wrong to say sattwa is only of light. It is a more
general concept than light, just as beast of prey is more general
than lion.
A similar thing is not
true of darkness for the reason that in tamas things that in rajas
and sattwa are different and specific merge into something more
general. After all, a lamb and a lion are two very different
creatures. If I would describe them as to their sattwa characters —
the form that the natural element of life and force and spirit takes
in lambs and lions — I would describe them very differently.
But if I would describe them in the condition of tamas the
differences do not come into consideration because we have the tamas
condition when the lamb or lion is simply lying lazily on the ground.
In the sattwa condition lambs and lions are very different, but for
cosmic understanding the indolence of both is after all one and the
same.
Our power of truly
looking into such concepts must therefore adapt to much
differentiation. As a matter of fact, these three concepts with the
qualities of feeling in them are among the most illuminating things
in the whole of Sankhya. In all that Krishna puts before Arjuna, when
he presents himself as the founder of the age of self-consciousness,
he has to speak in words altogether permeated by those shades of
feeling derived from the concepts sattwa, rajas, and tamas. About
these three concepts, and what at length leads to a climax in the
Bhagavad Gita,
we shall speak more fully in the last lecture
of this course.
|