Page 15 - NAMAH-Oct-2021

Namah The symbolic and the subjective

after a long adventure, the lord of Mind, Indra, is supposed to understand symbols. By its
gets the name Sahasraaksa — the thousand- very design, a symbol has two meanings.
eyed one. But the Vedas used this name when One for the advanced student, one for the
they wanted to indicate the mind’s power of lay person. It helps the adept but does no
gathering knowledge from all sides. When the harm to the lay person.
context needed a god who is a concentration
of mental energies, they used another name Subsequent ages of man
a
of Indra — Maghavan. Every name has a deep
psychological meaning. Similarly, every With the passage of time, the symbolic literature
s
synonym is used deliberately — asva for horse of the ancient wisdom texts became con-
to indicate life-force, and vajin when speed is ventionalised until the secret was lost and
the desired attribute. Over time this subtlety only the mundane meaning remained. Then
of expression was lost on the readers. Much came the individualistic age, which erased the
later, scholars like Sri Aurobindo decoded the symbols and replaced them with direct non-
symbolism and revealed the wisdom that is metaphoric speech. Man’s source of knowledge
hidden in these texts. came from outer instruments, such as the
thermometer and the telescope, instead of the
inner instruments, as was the case during the
symbolic age. The ‘inner instruments’, called
the antahhkaranna in Sanskrit, are these four —
a
citta, manas, buddhi and ahammkara. The citta is
the basic consciousness that plants and metals
also possess; the manas is the interpreter of
sense impulses; the buddhi is the intellect,
which includes reason and creativity; and the
a
m
ahamkara is the ego, the sense of the bounded
individual self.
In the individualistic age, which is the rational
Other ancient civilisations too began with age, knowledge is not what the senses report,
the image, the metaphor and the symbol or what the sense-mind interprets it to be. The
as the grammar of truth. These are the sun does not go around the earth even if it is
hieroglyphics of Egypt, the pictograms of experienced every day to do so, because the
the Mayan people, the Chinese script, telescopes and calculations say otherwise.
and the divinations derived from various The focus has shifted from the experiencer
formations, such as turtle shell patterns, to the observed fact. The subject does not
and the position of planets. Symbols are matter, the object is the primary source of
powerful and concise. Yantras and bıija truth. Whatever outer instruments report
mantras are examples of these powerful are universal truths, applicable to all of
symbols. Symbols speak directly to the humanity, for all time.
intuitive mind. They can therefore seem
cryptic to the rational mind. Not everyone This age lasted until science admitted the

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