PART I
A. DAWN AND BIRTH
Agni
Part I deals with the invisible and underlying foundations of reality; metaontogenesis could be its academic title. It speaks neither of that which “is” nor of that which “shall be.” It uses a past tense, but it does not refer properly to a temporal “was.” The origin of time cannot be temporal. The source of being cannot itself be just “being.” If this were so, there would be no end: we would then search for the source of the source of being and so on indefinitely. The elements of the world or the elements of life are not just parts of the whole. The primordial Word is not yet spoken, nor is the Lord manifested as sovereign; he is not yet Lord. The topics and heroes of Part I of our anthology are not constituents or, as it were, “bricks” of the universe, as if they were molecules out of which reality is composed. They are rather pre-realities, pre-stages, factors shaping the real, not merely components or parts of it, just as in nuclear physics the elemental “particles” cannot any longer be said to be elements or particles out of which the whole is made. In any event our attention is here directed toward discovering the role of nothingness, or becoming aware of the place of a void which cannot be said to exist but which makes it possible that things can exist by the very act of filling up the void. The five sections of Part I, though not systematically connected, are deeply related inasmuch as they all try to give expression to God-above-God, the Beginning-before-the-Beginning, the Lord previous-to-any-Lordship, Life-before-Life, and the Unity underlying all Plurality. We repeat: all that goes on, or rather, in, behind the curtain is not within the range of our experience and thus that Source is neither God, nor Beginning, nor Lord, Life, Light, Unity, Basis, nor even Being or Nonbeing. It is not that I discover what makes Being possible, because it is merely a demand of the mind to find the conditions of possibility for everything. The mind here is by no means outside this very problem. The Prelude is really before the whole play, before all lila, human and divine. It is actually not played. Perhaps the phenomenological mark of “sacred Scriptures,” modern or ancient, secular or religious, is that these Scriptures deal with that which cannot be dealt with and speak of the unspeakable, thus positioning themselves beyond the vigilance of the principle of noncontradiction, without, of course, intending or pretending to deny it (for which they would need the help of the same principle). At a later date cosmogonic images were, if not replaced, complemented and in a way overshadowed by meta-physical reflections and, in the course of time, by more religious language and more elaborated cultic performances. Examples of all this are given in Part I. Here our sights are on the invisible, on the origins, on the foundations, on Nonbeing, on the transcendent, but with no intention of stopping there; on the contrary, the whole thrust is on what follows, on what is coming and is being unfolded before our eyes. Liberation lies ahead; there is a long way to go, but the credentials of reality already show that anything is possible with the really real. The Dawn is not the day, nor is Birth really human life, but without them there would be neither day nor our life. The true “be-coming” is an authentic coming to be; but do not ask where it comes from lest you stop the very becoming. Faith very properly belongs to this section. Without faith nothing takes shape or comes into being. Faith is the beginning of salvation, because it is the very dawn of our true being, the existential openness of our human existence--the very condition of any real, that is, sacred act, the Vedas will say.