Mathomathis would like to continue the discussion from the previous article on:- The Metaphysics of the Law – 102
Deification in the Rigveda: In the very beginning of the Devi Sukta the vak which is the same entity as the word, in the Gospel of Saint John, assumes an identification with the goddess, and for this reason, the hymn is styled as the vak hymn. The vak or the word, which is the basic form of speech involving the perception of sound, being an essential attribute of the ether, is the first evolute of the psycho-physical evolution. The identification of the word with the goddess has been devised to acquaint the knower with the fountain force of psychological evolution.
In the third verse of this hymn, the goddess has been described as the dominus of the universe, one with the infinite and the chieftain of the divinities. In the fourth hymn, the statement is concrete that it is with the vigour of the goddess, that annam or the cereal is consumed. The statement is a metaphor for the conception of primal force as source and sustainer of appetite in all forms including the fecundity or the impulse to procreation. What is narrated in esoteric way, is significance of the carnal appetite in biological evolution. The annam or the cereal feeds only the flesh. It sustains carnality. This is the subtle mode of demonstrating the rupture of creation by pleasure of pro-creation. The aphorism used is insinuation of the descent of creative energy in the procreative process of an organism.
In the seventh hymn, she is introduced as the holder of the deep abyss in the infinite soul. She is meant to be all pervasive. In the eighth hymn, the goddess aphorize herself as saying:
“When as cause, I enter creation, then with automation. I move like air, indulging voluntarily into actions. I have transcendence over lands and heavens and I am so in my own majesty”.
Such is the view of the formless form of the first cause, the creative force which
has not yet sprung into creation. Such is the vision of infinite law, liable to
execution by operation of its autoerotic principle.
The Auto-Erotic Principle: The infinite law is spirit of the infinite. It is the creative mood of the creating stuff. The creative mood, or the animate spirit, is the emotive disposition of the conscious faculty. It is modification of the mind, in the colloquial sense. This depicts an inclination to evolve. The word animus of the Latin origin is conceivably the most exquisite carrier of the meaning ascribable to the inner repercussion to realize, in patent form, the latent just, in the law. It is manasah retah or the viscid of the volition as has been alternatively expressed in the Nadadiya Sukta of the Rigveda.
The Nasadiya Sukta of the Rigveda, as apparently an exposition of the seventh and eighth verses of the Devi Sukta is itself an endeavour to delineate the formless form of the first cause. Its own, inmate, self-composed, state is state, prior to its evolution, the state ‘of its involution, when it was neither real, nor unreal, neither sat nor as at, a state when there was neither day nor night, neither life nor death, neither land nor heavens, a state of perfect balance or repose, when all of a sudden there was an inner upheaval, some indomitable desire to liberate its energy and realize its own nature, an automatic but invincible eagerness to gush out.
The Upanishads have frequently referred to this eagerness with the aid of the word eekshana which literally and etymologically carries the meaning of desire or passion, the will, as Arthur Schopenhauer denominates it in his World as Will and Idea, explained as “the primary, timeless, spaceless, uncaused activity, that expresses itself as impulse, instinct, striving, carving, fearing”‘. The essence of the basic law is will.
The creative mood of this passionate will is the first inseminating the first impregnating agency. It was a self-modifications of the primal stuff which got a fillip from within. There was an onset of some inner alchemy and the product was a facultative fluid so artfully described in the “Nasadiya Sukta” as manasah Retail, that is, self-dissemination.
The potential force of the auto-erotic principle, has been alluded to the “Nasadiya Sukta” as the “Kama” or the cupid, which in substance, is metaphysical counterpart of that Freud calls as libido or the subtle sex. It is wit the erotic will that the law of the infinite is inherently charged. The deep slumbering pose of the infinite has been alluded too in the Rigveda as “Ratri” or the night, which is a figure of speech for this over-abounding nonsentience’s of the infinite will.
Over-Abounding Non-Semience: In the “Ratri Sukta“, the nescient force has been described as the reflector of all terrestrial objects and an arbiter of the deeds of all beings. She is immortal and imminent. In the second verse of this Hymn, this nescient force, the “Tam Shakti”, has asserted herself as the destroyer of ‘Tamah’ or the nescience itself, and in the third verse, she has been introduced as the maker of the dawn, the “ushas”, the vedie counterpart of the Roman goddess “dianna’. This is simple metaphysical anthropomorphic explaining the derivation of sentience from nescience, of action from inaction, of enlightenment from ignorance, on the analogy of the cycle of day and night which is a phenomenon explaining either as a cause of other.
A “march from darkness to night” is an oft quoted phrase from the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad, which is mere paraphrasis of the above aphorism. This is the vision of tire stage where the uncreated stuff leaps into its creative mood, a stage where the infinite resolves to proceed to finiteness. It is a call for conversion in the infinite.
The causeless cause is initially in a penumbrous form. This is candid confession made in the third verse of the “nasadiya sukta”. Call it nescience, ignorance, inaction, involution, “Tamas or darkness, ratri or the night”, it is the dormant or the unmanifest phase of the infinite law, with its potentiality recoiled. Potentiality recoiled denotes the fruit of creation forbidden.
There is fundamental agreement between “nasadiya” and the “devi suktas” that this dormant, unmanifest phase of the force was in the form of water. The ultimate substance of thales is also water. The “nasadiya sukta” denotes the substance by the term “ambh”. The “Devi Sukta” denotes it as ’vat’. Both the terms stand equally for a fluid substance. The ultimate substance to thales, too, is not the gross potable water. The gross potable water cannot be the first cause, because it is merely a compound of hydrogen and oxygen, and finds place only in the relativity of space-time continuum. The infinite water referred to whether in the “nasadiya” or the “devi sukta” or by thales, represents only the fluid water of the first cause.
Unless the attribute of fluidity be ascribed to the infinite substance, the flux in the universe would remain inexplicable, since staticity cannot cause dynamicity. The fluidity in the first cause is its inner incubation, alluded to in various Brahmanic and Upanishadic parts of the vedas, as the “tapa” which literally means penitence or toil. The sweetening substance, produced by the heat of foil, has given rise to the imagery of a fluid substance. In the biological phenomena, this denotes the inseminal fluid excreted from heat in the coitus of two bodies. The collision of two bodies in the physical world can be metaphysically explained as the fusion of two casual forces. Creation metaphysically, and procreation physically, mean the same principle that all production comes out of the union of two opposites. It is the same duality of the seed and the soil in the vegetative world. The one is potential life and the other the material base for the life principle to break through, in Bergson’s view.
The two principles of life and matter, issued forth from a single casual base, denote a force each in itself, and the two together constitute a dual causality.
The Dual Causality: In ARISTOTLE, the dual causality is that of form and matter. According to ZELLE the forms had for ARISTOTLE the conception as ideas had for PLATO.
The dual causality corresponds in PLATO’s “timaeus” respectively to the “demiurge” or the active or the efficient cause, and the receptacle, the locus, the matrix or the material cause. This dual causality represents life and matter as the two principles responsible for actual terrestrial causation.
In the Prashnopanishad, the dual causality has been made up of the “Prana” the life, and the “rayi” which is matter. The imagery of the upanishad refers to the bifurcation of the first cause into a solar and a lunar causality, the former responsible for life and the latter for all that is matter. In the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad, this bifurcation has been adopted to explain biological procreation. Biology traces the origin of progenic life from a single cell, which bifurcates into two, and the process is repeated in the system of fertilization, till it comes into the form of an organism. The Brihadaranyaka Upanishad explains this bifurcation from a single corpus into two organisms, those of the male and the female, like the cereal of the gram, the unity of which is capable of division into two equal halves.
Thales has traced the origin of the world from the primal stuff of water, having its counterpart in the term ‘Apah’ which is literally water and ontologically the fluid fervour of the eternal cause. The fervour in the fluid is, however, inexplicable without postulating the emergence of a striving agency, since motion in inert matter cannot be explained in the absence of a prime mover.
The discovery of two substances as alternating phases of one and the same stuff is the common theme in the ‘devi suktas. The latter refers to it as a deep abyss of nescient waters, dominated by a breathless breather. The former has taken it as an oceanic womb fertilized by something floating like air.
The vast unfathomable oceanic vault becomes turbulent by it own tidal wave, makes a drift into the coursing of two simultaneous currents, one forming the life essence, the breath, the spirit or the concentrated consciousness, and the other, the moving dynamic principle, inert but alluring. The one single primal stuff, by compulsion of its own law, surrounds, supports and sustains as sum and source of both. In course of time, this ornate style of the expression came to be euphemized, in order to turn knowledge into faith.
Expression Euphemized: The mysteries of nature came to be interpreted through anecdotes composed on miracles of deities and divinities. The Homeric and the vedic poetry have similar approach in this context.
The lore of the seers through poetic relish descended into liturgy of the people, making easier the transition of metaphysics to religion. There was, in course of time, a natural overgrowth of myths as well as of legendary characters. The infinite law as coincident of the creative force, which had so far been matter of speculative insight, gradually gave birth to allegorical personifications. From the abyssal nescience of the first cause, wherein rested in dormancy the infinite law, emphasis is, subsequently, shifted to the study of the manifest evolutes visibly sustained in the universe as consequence of operation of that law. The Sun, as the most luminous body, gained the focus of attention.
Responsible for the phenomenon of rains, this lustrous mass was, in the rigveda, introduced as the “indra”, deified as the killer of the “vritra”, meaning literally the victor of clouds. As an all pervasive soul of the universe, piercing its rays through the vast celestial and terrestrial regions and arousing and invigorating the animate beings to action, the same deity has been alternatively described as the “vishnu”, a term employed to denote the one which is widespread or pervasive. As the giver of rains, this deity was, the grower of cereals. The cereal being the sole sustainer of life breath in the animate world, the Sun assumed the significance of the supersoul or the “Parmatman”, of the universe. Free from decay and decomposition, it was rightly conceived as immortal, outstretched in the milky vault of the heavens, creating a visual imagery of a colossal organic personality as if lying in repose on ocean of milk having made the residual space, called the “shesham” as its bed. This explains the animate life traced from the Sun.
The behaviour of all oval bodies operated through their nuclei. It was natural to surmise the solar mass to be possessed of its own nucleus, called “nabhi” or the “garbh”, as the source of all its vitality. In the diction of the Hindu epics, this nucleus was itself made the seat of an independent deity, named as “Brahma” the creator or the progenitor, or the “vidhata” meaning the destiner of law. It is destiner because it unites terrestrial life with its destiny of births and deaths in a cyclic order.
‘Brahma’ seated on navel of “vishnu” denotes symbolically, a primer plugged on to a mass of explosive substance, the function of the primer being to sustain the percussion for firing out the concentric charge thereof. This merely represents the inherent buoyancy in the reservoir of force.
The law of origin and destiny of life has been traced in this background. Since the emission of energy front an oval body can best be interpreted as a compunction in its nucleus, the event of the nucleus being primed, was depicted, din the allegorical way, as the mounting of an invasion or a charge on the nucleus. This priming of the nucleus is one of the prominent themes of the “Markandeya Purana”, the epic named after its seer, the sage “Markandeya”, visualizing this nucleus as the playground of two polar forces, one of life and another of death, diverging and converging in their alternate successions. The epic has symbolised these polar forces with the meaningful nomenclature of the “Madhu” and the “Kaitabha”.
Symbolizing the Polar Forces: The symbols of the Vishnu and the Brahma, thus explained, the role of the “Madhu-Kaitabha” becomes intelligible. The anecdote in the “Durga Saptashati‘”, lays down that when at the end of the cycle of creation, the “vishnu” or the Sun, lay in repose, on the abysmal bed of the residuum of space, two vampires, bom of the mucus of Vishnu’s ear, were charging ahead to kill the ‘Brahma’, sitting as primer to the solar energy, who in order to spare himself, had to invoke the goddess of nescience, named as the “yoga nidra”, a term standing for equipoise.
The state of turbulence is characteristic only of sentience. In a nescient state, when the cognitive faculty is dominants, there is perfect equipoise to which turbulence is allien. The invocation of this nescience was motivated with the desire to break the slumber of nescience and arouse the Sun into action. The invocation did its work, thus relieved from his nescience, the solar force flung into action and the two monsters, who avowedly confessed to be killed only in a dry region, were decapitated on the things of the vishnu.
The dry region is metaphor of the stage prior to evolution of water. Water is serum of life and absence of water is state of absence of life. The thighs is metaphor for the region beneath, which, in relation to the solar corpus, denotes the terrestrial region. This demonstrates the origin of organic life on earth. Vishnu’s sleep is the last phase of the nescient state. The invocation of “yoga nidra”, die nescient or the eternal sleep, depicts the point of emersion of sentience from nescience, which is the process of liberation of the creative energy because of the charge on nucleus by two currents, the positive or the portonic, and the negative or the electronic.’ The decapitation of the “madhu” and the “kaitabha” is a fiction for the fusion of the positive and the negative phases of energy.
The “Madhu” and “Kaitabha” are counterparts of the “eras” and the “thanatos”, the former as god of life or creation, and latter as god of death or destruction. The psychoanalysts after Sigmund Freud recognize the same as the creative and the destructive tendencies in the self. “Madhu” which is honey, literally stands for sap or serum gravy or lymph, denoting the sublime source of life; and “Kaitabha” is the consumer, or the annihilator of this sap, representing death which suck or consumes life. The “Madhu” and the “Kaitabha”, are thus, two opposite forces one of life and another of death, both rushing to implode the nucleus.
The decapitation of the “Madhu” and the “Kaitabha”, denotes a fusion of the creative and the destructive devices, explaining the beginning, on earth of life and death implicated into a single process. This affords an explanation of origin of the mortal beings with their history of lives and deaths. This is genesis of sentient life from nescient source. The ear is the receptacle of the world, or the vak, the subtle sense of speech, which is the first inception of sentience or cognition. This reminds of the identification of vak or the word with the creatress in the ‘Devi Sukta’. The mucus of Vishnu’s ear, symbolises the cognitive modification tending towards creation. It is the release of the serum of sentience, expressed as the “Manasa Retah” in the “Nasadiya sukta”.
The part of “Markandeya Purana” devoted to narrate the majestic accomplishments of the goddess or the “devi” is just an epistee of the operation of the life force and the first cause. This furnishes an advanced allegoric theme associated with the function of maintaining order both in the universe and the society. The warfare of the goddess or the devi against the demons or the assuras is a well cultivated theme of tracing a common source of natural and positive law.