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knowledge
that it is not exhausted by its visible
side, that behind this visible side there lies a whole world of the 'invisible', a whole
world of new and incomprehensible forces and relations. The
knowledge
of the
existence of the invisible world is the first key to it.
Especially many new things are revealed to us in the most mysterious aspects of our
existence, in those aspects through which we come into direct contact with
eternity -
in
Love and in Death. And in Hindu mythology Love and Death are the two faces of
one
deity.
Shiva, the god of the reproductive force in nature, is at the same time the god of
violent death, murder and destruction. His wife Parvati is the goddess of beauty, love
and happiness, and she is also Kali or Durga - the goddess of evil, misfortune, sickness
and death. And Shiva and Kali together are gods of wisdom, gods of the knowledge of
good and evil.
In the beginning of his book
The Drama of Love and Death,
Edward Carpenter
defines very well our relation to those profoundly incomprehensible and mysterious
aspects of being: 'Love and Death move through this world of ours like things apart
underrunning it truly, and everywhere present, yet seeming to belong to some other
mode of existence.' And further:
These figures. Love and Death, move through the world, like closest friends indeed,
never far separate, and together dominating it in a kind of triumphant superiority; and
yet like bitterest enemies, dogging each other's footsteps, undoing each other's work,
fighting for the bodies and souls of mankind.*
* Edward Carpenter,
The Drama of Love and Death,
London, George Allen, 1912.
These few words reveal the depths of the mystery which faces us, envelops
us, creates us and destroys us. But men's relationship to the two sides of this
mystery is not the same. Strange as it may seem,
the face of death
has had a
greater attraction for the mystical imagination of men, than
the face of love.
There has always been a great urge to understand and define the hidden
meaning of death; all religions, all creeds begin by giving man one or another
view of death. It is impossible to build any philosophy of life without one or
another definition of death. And a great many philosophies of life, as for
instance the modern spiritualism, consist entirely of 'views on death', of a
doctrine about death and life after death. (In one of his articles V. V.
Rosanoff says that, on the whole,
all religions
are
teachings about death.)
But the problem of love is usually accepted in modern philosophies of life
as something given, something already understood and known. Different
systems introduce comparatively few differences into the understanding of
love. And, although in reality love is for us as great a mystery as death, for
some reason we notice it much less forcibly. We have evolved a series of
stereotyped views on love, and men meekly accept one or another of these
stereotyped views. Art, which from its very nature should have much to say
on the subject, pays great attention to love; love has perhaps always been and
is the principal subject of art. But even an limits itself, on the whole, to mere
descriptions and a psychological analysis of love, rarely touching the depths
of love, that contact with the eternal and the infinite which it holds for man.
In reality love is a
cosmic phenomenon,
in which people, mankind, are
merely accidental; a cosmic phenomenon as little concerned with either the
lives or the souls of men as the sun is concerned in shining so that, by its
light, men may go about their trivial affairs and use it for their own ends. If
men could understand this, be it only with one pan of their consciousness, a
new world would open up before them and it would become very strange for
them to look at life from all the usual angles.
They would understand then that love is something quite different, and of a
different order from the small events of earthly life.
Perhaps it is a world of special spirits which at times take possession of
men, subjugating them, making tools of them for the accomplishment of their
own incomprehensible aims. Maybe it is some particular region of the inner
world, which the souls of men happen to enter at times and where, in that
case, they live according to the laws of
that
world, while their bodies remain
on earth, bound by the
laws of the terrestrial world. Perhaps it is the alchemical work of the Great
Master, in which the souls and bodies of men play the part of elements out of
which is evolved the
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