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V MAN THE PROTOTYPE The earth has been created for a special purpose; it has a divine role to fulfil. And so there is only one earth and not many, in spite of what the scientists may say. The earth is not a mass of dead matter, not merely the dwelling-place of the growths that have occurred upon it, of plants and animals and men. She is the home and she is the mother of them all. She has a consciousness and a personality, the outer form that we see is only her body. Indeed, all the luminaries of heaven have each its conscious personality, the planets, the moon and above all the great sun. It is not fancy or idle imagination that made the astrologers ascribe definite influences to these heavenly bodies. In Hindu astrology, for example, they are considered as real persons, each with a Page-19 The so-called Nature-gods in the Vedas or in ancient mythology generally are in the same way not creations of mere poetic imagination: they are realities, more real in a sense than the real objects that represent and incarnate them. Not only so. Our limited mind and senses are accustomed to view and recognise individuals alone as persons. But there are group personalities too. Thus each species has a generic personality, a consciousness and an ideal or intrinsic form also: the individuals on the physical plane are its various incarnations, projections and formations. Old Plato was not so naive, as we of today are apt to believe, when he spoke of the real reality of general ideas. The attributes, qualities and functions of the generic personality are the source and pattern of what the individuals that form the group actually are. The group person is the king, he is also the body of the Dharma ruling the domain. Any change in the law of being of the group person is necessarily translated in a similar change in the nature and activity of the individuals of the species. What evolutionists describe as sudden Page-20 variation or mutation and whose cause or genesis they are at a loss to trace, is precisely due to an occult change in the consciousness and will of the group soul. Man too as a species has a generic personality, his prototype. Only, in opposition to the scientific view, that is an earlier phenomenon belonging to the very origin of things. Man in his essential form and reality is found at the source and beginning of creation. When the unmanifest Transcendent stoops to manifest, when there is the first expression of typal variations in the infinite as the basis of physical creation, then and there appears Man in his essential and eternal divine form. He is there almost as a sentinel, guarding the passage from the formless to form. Indeed, he is the first original form of the formless. A certain poet says that man is the archetype of all living forms. A bird is a flying man, a fish a swimming man, a worm a crawling man, even a plant is but a rooted man. His form belongs to a region beyond even the first principles of creation. The first principles that bring out and shape and uphold the manifested universe Page-21 are the trinity: Life, Light and Delight— in other terms, Sachchidananda. The whole complex of the manifest universe is resolvable into that unity of triple status. But behind even this supernal, further on towards the final disappearance into the absolute Unmanifest—summing up, as it were, in him the whole manifestation—stands this original primordial form, this first person, this archetypal Man. The essential appearance of Man is, as we have said, the prototype of the actual man. That is to say, the actual man is a projection, even though a somewhat disfigured projection, of the original form; yet there is an essential similarity of pattern, a commensurabi-lity between the two. The winged angels, the cherubs and seraphs are reputed to be ideal figures of beauty, but they are nothing akin to the Prototype, they belong to a different line of emanation, other than that of the human being. We may have some idea of what it is like by taking recourse to the distinction that Greek philosophers used to make between the formal and the material cause of things. The prototype is the formal reality Page-22 hidden and imbedded in the material reality of an object. The essential form is made of the original configuration of primary vibrations that later on consolidate and become a compact mass, arriving finally at its end physico-chemical composition. A subtle yet perfect harmony of vibrations forming a living whole is what the prototype essentially is. An artist perhaps is in a better position to understand what we have been labouring to describe. The artist's eye is not confined to the gross physical form of an object, even the most realistic artist does not hold up the mirror to Nature in that sense: he goes behind and sees the inner contour, the subtle figuration that underlies the external volume and mass. It is that that is beautiful and harmonious and significant, and it is that which the artist endeavours to bring out and fix in a system or body of lines and colours. That inner form is not the outer visible form and still it is that form fundamentally, essentially. It is that and it is not that. We may add another analogy to illustrate the point. Pythagoras, for example, spoke of numbers being Page-23 realities, the real realities of all sensible objects. He was evidently referring to the basic truth in each individual and this truth appeared to him as a number, the substance and relation that remain of an object when everything concrete and superficial is extracted—or abstracted—out of it. A number to him is a quality, a vibration, a quantum of wave-particles, in the modern scientific terminology, a norm. The human prototype can be conceived as something of the category of the Pythagorean number. The conception of the Purusha at the origin of things, as the very source of things, so familiar to the Indian tradition, gives this high primacy to the human figure. We know also of the cosmic godhead cast in man's mould —although with multiple heads and feet— visioned and hymned by sages and seers. The gods themselves seem to possess a human frame. The Upanishads say that once upon a time the gods looked about for a proper body to dwell in, they were disappointed with all others; it is only when the human form was presented that they exclaimed, "This is indeed Page-24 a perfect form, a perfect form indeed." All that indicates the feeling and perception that there is something eternal and transcendent in the human body-frame. Page-25 |