THE SIVA DARSANAM.

Blessed are the pure in heart: for they shall see God. – St. Matthew, v.8.

    The phenomenon of Siva-darsanam which is recognised by Agamantins as the highest achievement of the bond-freed spirit, has been sedulously sought and realised by such God-taught souls as Sri-Ramakrishna-Paramahamsa. But there are others at the present day who have been blessed only with a glimpse of the Light, or in whom there has only been a feeble flash of the Beyond, who, in the first flush of that strange jumble of thought-perception and sense-perception, accompanying the momentary lifting of the heart, mistake the shadows for the substance, nay, endeavour to prove that they have attained to the very Bourne, dazzled by the shimmering sheen of those shadows. Such visionaries are not in any degree possessed of that rare "degree of sanctification" which Hindu Mystics have always eulogised as Sabdarthajnana, a condition of superb truth-piercing "wakefulness" which dawns only on ripe and endowed illuminati, but hardly, if ever, on halting or haphazard intruders on "half-real" Realms. "Clairvoyance" is a dubious term, meaning nothing more than 'transport vision', and such 'vision', making short work of space, time and, finally, of all notions of 'succession', including the so-called phantasm of "causation" which is only a sort of succession in disguise, comprises, under another classification, vision on the "temporal", "temporal-real" and "real" planes, of which the last leads to the luring "Spiritual Awareness" which is "Diving into the Deity" or "Going to God". This is the true Turiyatitam, the Adhvanahparam of the Katha-Upanishat, that tantalises the devotee amid worldly wails, and draws him towards the "Doom of Day", known to the Sanctified Spirits of the Romish Church as the "Beatific Vision".

    The states summed up by the curious combination, "Clairvoyance", are so elusive of grasp and so slippery that a hotchpotch is the inevitable result, if we do not pause to ponder on the variety of its versi-coloured revelations. It does not fully follow, from the sole reason of a person being a clairvoyant on the physical plane, that he must needs be also a "seer" on the Bosom of the Boundless Blue. But the ecstatic clairvoyant in his luciform vesture, who can soar into the sweeping stretches of the Superliminal, has the Will of the Widest Vision in the hollow of his hand. Yet, even to him, "seeing" is only "sense perception" at best, whatever the sweet subtlety of its objective, and, hence, he does not deign to such scattering of his forces, and, dunning of the dust". Real clairvoyants rarely care to communicate their connings to the public press, and even if sometimes they would, they could not. And some of the "booming" pseudo-clairvoyants of self-deceived dogmatism, are quite keen on the so-called analysis of sense-experiences or sensations into thought-perceptions or cerebrations. But if they would be true to their salt, they should not stop short at a search for samskaras or vasanas or the inherited tendencies of the subtler mind-stuff, but should drive their drill deeper down. A vaunted knowledge of the mysterious modes of mastering the powerful "plexuses", or of meandering around the mandalas, never even takes us to the back-door of the "Heaven of Heavens", of the true Siva-pura. The Seeker after God should proceed further in his quest, and boil down "thoughts" into their meta-psychical rudiments, and these "rudiments" again into their very "first principles", until they "vanish into thin air" in the infinite azure of "Absolute Being". The truth is that whatever is analysis and reduction from below upwards, is synthesis and complication from above downwards. Unless the would-be "Anointed" be prepared to tear "thought" to tatters, to visualise, if he can, the "Motor of Kutila", it is idle of him to pose as a Seeker of God, inflicting the world with his lisping gabble of shady significance, which has abundantly been to the fore as much as the existence of babes, ever since the dawn of time.

    But, for those, who, sleeping or waking, rest in the face-to-face certitude of the true Superliminal, physical hunger and thirst are absent, for, even their fleshy frame is full of that "supple essence" which is the "sweet sap" sustaining the whole universe. What is observed above is applicable, by parity of reasoning, to "Clairaudience" or any other psychical sense. For, as mystics know, a stage is reached in their ecstasy, where all senses seem to boil and blend, when "seeing" is "hearing", and every other sensation. That is the true "Translation" of Atma-puranam. The subtle secret of "finding" the "Kingdom of Heaven" is to be sought for in one's own body. As Svami Vivekananda so frankly says in a different connexion, "If the steam is turned, on the engine must run". The apt allusion to the 'steam' and the 'engine' , has more than a surface semblance. The trouble is, we have to store the 'stream', and not only to store it, but also to know how and where to turn it. And purity of thought is the fuel which will gently generate the steam, but never that graceless purity, divorced from compassion, which will not scruple to spill the life-blood of one's neighbour, in the name of parading piety; on the other hand, the purity that is capable of bearing fruit, is what pervades the "poverty-stricken" soul, as it feels the fullest favour of its "Father in Heaven", alike in the stings of scorpions, and the pleasures of the passing, phenomenal panorama. Thus tempered in the fires of the "Valley of the Shadow of Death", the pining bhakta perchance probes into the depths of the "Great Being", and, one day, the flood-gates of the Divine Light suddenly lift, and, in a blaze of dazzling splendour, he sees his real form, and aye, behind and through it, the very back-ground of all "forms". Such a blessed soul gazes on the fullness of his own reality, flaming in ineffable lustre, where, just but a moment ago, he described, as he now finds only an empty, though a seemingly significant, fata morgana of sighs and tears, a hideous dance of dire shadows.

    Such a sight, even if it should vanish in the twinkling of an eye, is more confirmatory of the substantiality of our existence, than anything that the weary world can show. Out of the phantasmal past peer, to be sure, St. John of the Cross and Sri-Mula, Buddha and Sankara, Santideva and Nagarjuna, Chaitanya and Srikantha, but what of that? Has not the living present its own "Legion of Honour"? Ramakrishna-Paramahamsa and Emerson, Sadasiva-brahmam and Tillainathan-svami, are ever with us to comfort and cheer us along the "Razor-Path".

V. V. Raman