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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 a 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
definite form and character, a dhyana rupa. 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
Page – 178 the nature and activity of the individuals of
the species. What evolutionists describe as sudden 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 steps forward 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 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 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 commensurability 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 hidden and imbedded
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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
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 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.
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