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THE MALADY OF THE CENTURY
The Malady of the Century
I
WHAT is the malady of our age? It is that man has lost touch with his soul. There were ages no doubt in the past, dark periods, when man's soul retired into the background, was obscured or veiled; but only today there seems to have occurred a definite cleavage, a clear sundering. Man no longer drags the lengthening chain that tied him, in spite of everything, to his divine essence; he has cut it clean and let himself adrift.
The Eternal Enemy appeared and spread out before our enchanted eyes the panorama of earth's riches and glories, not merely riches of comfort and pleasure and well-being, but glories of power and knowledge; we could not resist this time; we hurled ourselves headlong into the valley of temptation, delivering, as the price of the bargain, our soul. Indeed, we are masters of many fields, our knowledge and power extend over an immense variety of regions, uncharted till now. Even like Vishnu the Dwarf, our consciousness has covered with its three strides the entire creation, barring that domain alone where the soul resides.
Our mind, our life and our body have become today far
more conscious and consciously powerful – each has found itself and
is big with its own proper value. But what was familiarly known as
the mind of the mind, the life of the life, the body of the body has
vanished and all it meant. The pith has been taken out, We are now
playing with the empty stalk; the secret thread on which the pearls
of life-movements were strung has been removed and they lie about
scattered and disjointed. We have enriched our possessions, we have
made
Page – 133 ourselves more complex and multiple in our becoming: the telescope and the microscope in the physical world, and a subtler sense in the mind also, have extended the superficies of our consciousness. But with all that and in our haste to be busy about too many things, we have forgotten and left out of account the one thing needful.
We have sought to increase our consciousness, but away from the centre of consciousness; so what we have actually gained is not an increase, in the sense of a growth or elevation of consciousness, but an accumulation of consciousnesses, that is to say, many forms and external powers or applications of consciousness. A multiplicity of varied and independent movements of consciousness that jostle and hurt and limit one another, because they are not organized round a fundamental unity, forms the personality of the modern man, which is therefore tending to become on the whole more and more ill-balanced and neurasthenic and attitudinizing, in comparison with the simpler and less equivocal temperament that mankind had in the past. And a good part of the catholicity or liberalism or toleration that appears to be more in evidence in the present-day human consciousness is to be attributed not so much to the sense of unity or identity, that is the natural and inevitable outcome of a real growth in consciousness, but rather to the doubt and indecision and hesitation, to the agnosticism and dilettantism and cynicism of a pluralistic consciousness.
Cut away from the soul, from the central fount of its being, the human consciousness has been, as it were, desiccated and pulverized; it has been thrown wholly upon its multifarious external movements and bears the appearance of a thirsty shifting expanse of desert sands.
II
Indeed a peculiar aridity has invaded the modern
consciousness; the sap has dried that once made life fresh and green
and glad. It is not that we are turned away from life; on the
contrary, we are attached to it more than ever, – but the
attachment has come upon us like a morbid hunger. And so
Page – 134 we have the lust for life, but know not the joy of life. We lay an inordinate stress upon the body, upon what is external and superficial, upon the matter of life, and suffer from a simultaneous recoil and disgust for it. Human nature has been rent in twain and life has lost its unity of rhythm.
The old-world had no experience of this self-division. It had a frank and full joy in things of life, even in their most material forms. And when it turned away from life, it did so in the same spirit, of joy and frankness and wholeness. There was not this immixture, this Hamletian "to be or not to be" – an unregenerate, barbaric life-impulse "sicklied o'er with the pale cast 0' thought" that troubles the modern consciousness.
In old days, while we enjoyed life we were not without the taste for life. We were youthful and in full possession of the dharma of youth. And when we left the world and life we cherished no regret; we did it whole-heartedly. We were young; and our movements were whole and entire. It may be said that that was an age of unthinking innocence; but in the attempt to gain the arid richness of an old-age consciousness, we have lost the simplicity, the spontaneity and the integrality of our non-age. Yes, we have eaten of the fruit of knowledge and our. youth is the price that we have paid. With our present nature we not merely enjoy, but we want to know that we enjoy; we cannot enjoy a thing, unless in the very act we weigh and dissect and scrutinize the object and ourselves too, into the bargain.
This knowledge, or rather, this curiosity does not arise
from any depth of our being; it is the product of the meddlesome
superficial brain-mind. We have become self-conscious; a vigilant
self-consciousness is now the invariable coefficient of all our
movements, but it is a self-consciousness that has deviated into mere
mental introspection and intellectual analysis. It was the soul's
consciousness, although perhaps more often from behind the veil, that
once inspired and enlivened human nature in its youth; and life was
after all a thing of beauty and joy – for the soul is the one Rasa
of existence. We have deposed the Divine King; an anarchy now
reigns in human nature which has become the battle-ground of
qualities and forces that are, if not always more crude, at least,
invariably crooked and perverse. We live and move in the cold and
blighting, and withal shallow, glare of the brain-mind.
Page – 135 III
We of the modern age know many things – perhaps too many; and we yearn and strive to know yet more. We are never content with the knowledge that we have at the moment; our mind is always restive to leap beyond its immediate ken, thinking always that the secret of existence is to be found in what escapes its scrutiny, in what lies just outside the limits of what we happen to know. We are never sure of our knowledge. We are rich in curiosity, subtle in guessing; but always there lacks the sense of assurance and achievement. A certain unrest or malaise pursues our activities, something that gives to our most perfect creation, the impress of an experiment, of what is tentative, transitional, temporary.
The ancients, on the contrary, knew not many things – not so many as we know; but what they knew they knew well, they were sure of their knowledge. Their creations were not perhaps on the whole as rich and varied and subtle – even in a certain sense as deep as those of modern humanity; but they were finished and completed things, net and clear and full of power. The simple unambiguous virile line that we find in Kalidasa or in the Ajanta, in Homer or in the Parthenon, no longer comes out of the hands of a modern artist. Our delight is in the complexity and turbidity of the composition; we are not satisfied with richness only, we require a certain tortuousness and tangledness in the movement. We love the intermingling of many tints, the play of light dying away into haze and mist and obscurity, of shades 11fat blur the sharpness of the contour. Our preoccupation, in Art, is how to create the impression of the many in its all-round simultaneity of forms and movements. The ancients were more simple and modest; they were satisfied with expressing one thing at a time and that simply done.
The ancient Rishis were worshippers of the Sun and the Day; they were called Finders of the Day, Discoverers of the Solar World. They knew what they were about and they sought to make their meaning plain to others who cared to go to them. They were clear in their thought, direct in their perception; their feelings, however deep, were never obscure. We .meet in their atmosphere and in their creative activity no circum- Page – 136 ambulating chiaroscuro, nothing of the turbid magic that draws us today towards the uncertain, the unexpected and the disconcerting. It is a world of certitude, of solid reality – even if it be on the highest spiritual levels of consciousness – presenting a bold and precise and clear outline. When we hear them speak we feel they are uttering self-evident truths; there is no need to pause and question. At least so they were to their contemporaries; but the spokesman of our age must needs be a riddle even to ourselves.
To the moderns truth is merely relative; the absolute is an ever-receding reality and has only a theoretical existence. The true reality, whatever it is, we can never reach or possess; we may say that we are approaching it nearer and nearer, but shall never come up to it – there is no end to our pursuit. An eternally progressive rapprochement between our knowledge or realization and the object of it is our destiny and also perhaps our privilege. It is this movement without end or finality that is life and all its zest and beauty. The ancients, on the other hand, aimed and worked at siddhi, that is to say, definite and final achievement. This did not mean, however, that there was a dead stop and they stagnated after siddhi. It means that the consciousness having undergone a change in character, takes a different kind of movement altogether: it proceeds now from truth to truth, from light to light, from siddhi to siddhi. The modern consciousness moves, on the other hand, from uncertainty to uncertainty, at best, from the more obscure to the less obscure.
Ours is an age of hunger – hunger for knowledge, for
power, for enjoyment. But we do not know, nor care to know, the
conditions under which alone such hunger can really be appeased.
First of all, we think that to satisfy our hunger we have simply to
go straight and pounce upon the object; we do not consider it at all
necessary to look beforehand to our assimilative nature and capacity.
Our hunger serves only to multiply the objects of hunger; and the
objects of hunger again multiply our hunger; this is the vicious
circle in which we are entrapped. We hungered for progress, but what
we have succeeded in getting is change and movement, speed and
restlessness; we yearned for light, we have found only information;
we looked for power, we have mastered
Page – 137 a few tricks or clever manipulations; we aspired for happiness, we have stopped with stray pleasures and hence with dissatisfaction.
To relieve life of this mingled strain and tension, to
lift it out of this ambiguity and uncertainty, to free it from this
gravitational force that drives it towards what is superficial and
external – to endow it with its real worth, we must find and
possess life at a higher level, at its unspoilt source; we must first
draw back and re-establish, this time consciously and integrally, the
lost connection with our soul, the Divine in our being. Page – 138
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