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THE ROAR OF AWAKENING the sage passes from involvement in what is here displayed to a discovery of its cause.
And such knowledge is achicved through cither of two techniques: 1. a systematic disparagement of the whole world as illusion, or 2. an equally thoroughgoing realization of the sheer materiality of it all.
This we recognize as precisely the non-theistic, anthropocentric position that we ourselves are on the point of reaching today in the West, if indeed we are not already there. For where dwell the gods to whoni we can uplift our lands, send forth our prayers, and makc oblation? Beyond the Milky Way are only island universes, galaxy beyond galaxy in the infinitudes of spacc-no rcalm of angels, no heavenly mansions, no choirs of the blessed surrounding a divine throne of the Father, revolving in beatific consciousness about the axial mystery of the Trinity. Is there any region left in all these great reiches where the soul on its quest might expect to arrive at the feet of God, having become divested of its own material coil? Or must we not now turn rather inward, scck the divine internally, in the deepest vault, beneath the floor; hearken within for the secret voice that is both commanding and consoling; diaw from inside the grace which passeth all understanding?
We of the modern Occident are at last prepared to scck and licar the voice that India has licard. But like the tiger cub) we must hear it not from thc teacher but from within ourselves. Just as in the period of the deflation of the revealed gods of the Vedic pantheon, so today revealed Christianity has been devaluated. The Christian, as Nietzsche says, is a man who behaves like everybody else. Our professions of faith have no longer any discernible bcaring either on our public conduct or on our private state of hope. The sacraments do not work on many of us their spiritual transformation; we are bereft and
Ba Respectively, as in the Vedānta (infra, pp. 409-463) and the Sänkhya (infra, pp. 280-332).
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