Page 11 - All India Magazine Sep-2022

gious scriptures, — for they are a record of the deepest spiritual
experiences, — documents of revelatory and intuitive philosophy of
an inexhaustible light, power and largeness and, whether written in
verse or cadenced prose, spiritual poems of an absolute, an unfail-
ing inspiration inevitable in phrase, wonderful in rhythm and expres-
sion. It is the expression of a mind in which philosophy and religion
and poetry are made one, because this religion does not end with a

cult nor is limited to a religio-ethical aspiration, but rises to an infinite
discovery of God, of Self, of our highest and whole reality of spirit
and being and speaks out of an ecstasy of luminous knowledge and

an ecstasy of moved and fulfilled experience, this philosophy is not
an abstract intellectual speculation about Truth or a structure of
the logical intelligence, but Truth seen, felt, lived, held by the inmost
mind and soul in the joy of utterance of an assured discovery and
possession, and this poetry is the work of the aesthetic mind lifted
up beyond its ordinary field to express the wonder and beauty of

the rarest spiritual self-vision and the profoundest illumined truth
of self and God and universe. Here the intuitive mind and intimate
psychological experience of the Vedic seers passes into a supreme
culmination in which the Spirit, as is said in a phrase of the Katha
Upanishad, discloses its own very body, reveals the very word of its
self-expression and discovers to the mind the vibration of rhythms
which repeating themselves within in the spiritual hearing seem to

build up the soul and set it satisfied and complete on the heights
of self-knowledge.
CWSA 20: 329-30

Hierarchy of the Worlds
This inner Vedic religion started with an extension of the psy-
chic significance of the godheads in the Cosmos. Its primary no-

tion was that of a hierarchy of worlds, an ascending stair of planes
of being in the universe. It saw a mounting scale of the worlds
corresponding to a similar mounting scale of planes or degrees
or levels of consciousness in the nature of man. A Truth, Right

All India Magazine, September 2022