PART III
BLOSSOMING AND FULLNESS
The awakening of human consciousness is not only the chief marvel of creation; it is also the most formidable adventure of Man and, as far as Man himself is capable of gathering, of God also, for the Lord is not a solitary Lord. Whatever Upanishadic or esoteric theology we may propound about Him, it is only within this cosmic adventure that God appears and acts as God.
Part III unfolds a panorama of a marvelously broad horizon. In relation to the total Vedic world view it culminates in the lofty conception of sacrifice and finally presents, in the third section, the concept of renunciation, that most striking anticlimax of the human condition. The first section constitutes from start to finish an extraordinary hymn to Light, here no longer viewed as an exclusive possession of God or as something purely external which is the source of reflected light in Man, but as an all-embracing and all-penetrating quality that illumines the whole of reality from within and without. This Light is first and foremost a feature of the heavenly world, but this same cosmic splendor is to be found also, in an immediate fashion, in Man. In a word, Man discovers his own personal, divine, and, of course, human dignity.
Now, dignity involves responsibility and awareness. This is at the heart of Part III and it finds expression in the central section on sacrifice. Man discovers himself as Man, or rather as fully Man, as a center of the cosmos, fellow with the Gods, and partner of God himself. Between the two poles of reality Man discovers a link, an unbreakable relation, and the burden of this consciousness leads him to discover not only the laws of sacrifice, but also its nature. Man is going to lose his own life in the experiment, for the discovery that he too is God, that he may enter into the mystery of reality, not by an epistemic act of his mind, but by an existential and total involvement of his being, is going to consume him in the very fire of the sacrifice that he himself discovers and prepares. All he can do is to throw himself fully into this adventure and, heedless of all else, trust that the experiment will succeed. The one who emerges will not, of course, be the innocent individual of the beginning, but the risen person, the purusottama, a new being. This fullness is a plenitude that cannot be encompassed by human nature or by any individualistic embrace.
The third section brings us again to the realization of the exigencies and difficulties of the path. Many have not even tried, so difficult is any full experience of humanness; others have gone mad or gone astray and divinized themselves, ensnaring themselves inextricably in a net of their own ideas and falling ultimately and irretrievably into their own trap. Yet others have advanced a long way, and they beckon to us and to the whole human race. “The path is dark,” in the words of the Rig Veda, 1 but it leads to the goal.
Part III gives us a balanced and mature picture of the world view disclosed in the Vedic Revelation. It is certainly optimistic and life-embracing. It is, without doubt, centered on Man and is thus, in a sense, humanistic; but this is only one facet of the whole. This sense of life and fullness is the complement and the result of the other facet, that of effort and asceticism. Moreover, the dynamism of the world does not proceed by way of uncritical progress or deterministic improvement. Freedom acquires a new seriousness, and liberation a dramatic aspect. Rita, the cosmic order that inspires the energy of the sacrificial act, is at the root of everything. This cosmic order, however, is not established once and for all. It grows by means of the very energy it accumulates; it formulates its own plan, as it were. Man, becoming aware of this, is then bound to create by his own freedom a more perfect freedom in the world.