We hear in the scriptures that when creation was complete, a war took place between the Devas and Asuras, the celestials and the demons. The epics and the Puranas in India are replete with stories of Devasura Sangrama, the Yuddha or the war continuously taking place between the gods and the demons. The gods used to have an upper hand sometimes, but mostly they were defeated. In the Upanishad we are told that the gods are lesser in number than the Asuras. As we have also in the Epic, the Mahabharata, the Pandavas were lesser in number than the Kauravas. The evil forces are larger in quantum than the beneficent forces in the world. Acharya Sankara, while commenting on the Upanishad, tells us that it is quite obvious, because the impulse towards evil, which is the urge towards contact with the objects of sense, is more powerful than the impulse towards God. Rarely people turn to God; mostly they go down to objects of sense. So the number of spirited seekers moving towards the light of God, perhaps, can be counted on fingers. But the downward forces rejoicing in contact with senses are plenty, and, therefore, their number is more. So the war went on for ages and ages. Once the gods had a brainwave. They conferred among themselves. “This state of affairs cannot be for a long time. We must find out a means of overcoming the Asuras. We shall chant the holy Udgitha Saman which is a Veda Mantra, and we shall have some of us engaged in doing this work of holy recitation to quell the Asuras.” So the deities, who were all implanted in the sense like eyes, ears, etc., and even the mind, were all requested to undertake this discipline of the chant of the Udgitha. The deity of the speech was told: “You chant the Udgitha for us, and with the power of this great force we shall overcome the Asura forces.” The Asuras got wind of it. They knew that a great spiritual discipline is being undertaken by the Devas so that they may overcome the Asuras. So the Asuras thought, “We shall not allow this to happen. We shall not permit this spiritual discipline going on. We shall attack it.” When speech was chanting the holy Mantra, the Udgitha, Asuras came and attacked, and speech was quelled and thrown down. The Upanishad says that this is the reason sometimes - why sometimes, mostly - speech that is uttered by people is not beneficent, not worthy, not delicate; but harsh, barbaric, cruel, cutting and insulting to others. This detrimental negative attitude adopted by speech often is the effect of evil influence imprecated upon it by the Asura forces. So the deity of speech was defeated. Then the gods told the deity of the nose, “You chant the Mantra, speech is defeated.” So the deity of the nose started chanting the holy Mantra, and the Asuras understood this. They came with a force and attacked this deity of the nose. That is why it is said that we can smell also bad odour, not only fragrance. So sometimes we close our nose, when certain odours enter our nostrils. The nose was defeated. The angels told the other sense-organs, one by one, to chant the Mantra, and all had the same fate. They were all overcome. The Upanishad tells us that every sense-organ has, therefore, a double activity. It can do good and it can do bad; it can receive what is good and it can receive what is bad. We can hear nice things and we can hear bad things also. The mind also was defeated. The mind was inflicted with the evil by the Asuras when it chanted the Mantra. So it can think right and it can think wrong, Thus, there was no way out. The gods were defected repeatedly. They were utterly helpless.

When they were all thus defeated, they joined together and considered as to what could be done under the circumstances. They thought that they had made a mistake in choosing their agents for chanting the Udgitha. So they asked the vital force, the Prana Sakti, which is prior to the operation of the senses, which impels the senses to act as sun impels all activity in the world, himself not doing anything. They said: “O Prana, chant the Udgitha for us.” And the Prana, the unifying force, the vital energy, chanted the Udgitha. And when the Prana started the chant, the Asuras came in a large battalion to attack it. What happened? They were thrown back. As a mud-ball thrown against a hard rock would break to pieces and become dispersed in all directions, the Asuras were thrown and cast in various directions powerless by the force of the Udgitha chant conducted by the vital force, Prana Sakti - a thing which the senses could not undertake and could not succeed in doing. Then the Devas won victory over the demons. They assumed their original positions of angels, which had been occupied by the Asuras, the demons. Now, inasmuch as the Asuras were quelled and overthrown completely in this battle with the force of a chant conducted by the vital force, the gods regained their original positions. The lost kingdom was regained. “One who knows this secret also regains one’s own position,” says the Upanishad.

Here is a very mystical anecdote given to us in the sacred text, the Upanishad, which is very precise and goes to the point. The meditational process or spiritual discipline is described here in the form of a story. The angels fall and lose their positions due to the evil influence of the Asuras. And in order to regain their lost positions they have to take recourse to the vital force and not to the sense-organs. Sense-organs are not our friends in the practice of spirituality. They succeed in making an attempt only, but really they do not succeed in the end. Now what does all these mean to us? It means everything to us. The gods, the angels, the celestials are the denizens of the Garden of Eden. They were bosom friends of God, limbs of the Almighty, scintillating sparks of the Divine Conflagration, inseparable from the Supreme Being. That is the angelic condition. There, in that condition, the consciousness of the angel is a perpetual awareness of its relation to the Almighty. The angels never lose consciousness of God. Whether it is Deva, or Michael, or Gabriel, or any other angel mentioned in the scriptures, whatever be the name given to these angels, they are perpetually in the presence of God. They are the guardians of heaven; they are parts of the Divine Kingdom. There is eternal daylight there, says the Upanishad. “Sakrit Vibhato hi Brahmalokah.” In Brahmaloka, which is the Indian counterpart of the Garden of Eden in the Bible, there is eternal day, no night there. It is all blazing radiance. This blazing radiance does not come from some object hanging in the skies, as it is the case here in this world. The radiance of Brahmaloka is not the effect of a light coming from some lamp, not even the lamp like the sun or the moon. It is self-radiance. It is the light emanating from everything that is there. It is light shining upon its own self and not shining on some other object which cannot shine. This is the Kingdom of God, this is the Garden of Eden, this is Brahmaloka, this is the world of the angels, the gods, the celestials.

The angels fell. What is this falling? The Upanishad’s answer is, the fall took place due to the Asura influence, which is a difficult thing for us to understand. The problem of evil is an indescribable problem for every one. Philosophically conceived, the Asura is the impulse towards sense-objects. The desire for anything other than one’s own self is the Asura or the demon. This is something very interesting. We can know where we stand by the measure of this yardstick. One who desires anything other than one’s own Self is the Asura. The angels have no such desires. They are self-satisfied, self-contained, self-complete, radiant sparks of Divinity. Something happens! Nobody knows the mystery of creation. This mystery, this so-called something seems to have occurred, whether it was the cause of the fall of Lucifer or the cause of fall of anybody else. Something happened. This mystery diverted the attention of the angels in a direction which is contrary to the original angelic vision. So we do not think like angels. We think like men and women, like human beings. What is the difference between the vision of the celestials and the vision of the mortals like us? The Upanishads have many things to tell us in regard to this interesting feature in the process of creation. An explanation of the significance behind this anecdote can be found in the Aitareya Upanishad, wherein the description of the descent is characteristically described. When the angel or the celestial or the god becomes the mortal, the subject becomes the object and the object becomes the subject. This is what has happened. In the beginning of the creationprocess, the universe remains as an inseparable body of the Almighty. Since God revealed Himself as this creation, all things in creation are inseparable from God’s Being; and since God cannot be regarded as an object, anything in this world also cannot be regarded as an object. Since the world is the body of God, it is an appearance of the glory of the Almighty Himself. But, for every one of us the world is an object of sense, as if God Himself has become a sense-object. We are running after things which were originally inseparable from us, but which have assumed now the context or the position of the things which are external to us. The origins of our own present individualities, the causes of our present form of existence have assumed erroneously the position of an object of sense outside. The world is an object of sense for every one of us. And we have assumed a false position of subjectivity or the position of a seer or experiencer, while we are the experienced objects from the angelic or the cosmic point of view. The so-called subjectivity in us is an objectivity to God, and to assume that we are subjects is to assume what Lucifer assumed in the presence of the Almighty. So what a position we are all occupying in this world will be clear to every one of us.

The senses were asked to chant the holy Mantra. We also chant the Mantra everyday. We employ our sense-organs in the practice of spiritual Sadhana. The chanting of the Udgitha is nothing but the invocation of God, the Almighty, for the purpose of overcoming this evil influence by which we have somehow or the other become entangled in attraction to objects, the evil influence inflicted upon us by the Asuras. But the senses are not reliable instruments for spiritual practice. The ears, the nose, the senses of seeing, touching, tasting, etc. are not our friends. And, therefore, to ask them to chant the spiritual Mantra would be to court defeat in this battle. This has actually happened. The cosmical envisagement is impossible for the sense-organs. The very idea of contemplation in Yoga or meditation on the Divine Principle is a non-sensory or a super-sensory aspiration arising from us. Spiritual aspiration is a super-sensory impulse. It is not a sensory impulse. It has very little to do with the sense-organs. What we call Pratyahara, the well-known word, is the accumulation within ourselves of a force which overcomes the distracting influences of the senses, the production of a cumulative energy within ourselves which precedes the distracting movements of the senses. This is actually what is meant by the Prana which sung the Udgitha and won victory.

There is something in us that is different from, superior to, and transcending the sensory diversifications. We cannot see God with the eyes, not hear Him with the ears, not touch Him with the fingers, not taste Him with the tongue, not smell Him with the nose. That which is transcendent is not an object of these senses. That means to say that the recourse to spiritual practice is not a sensory activity. It is not anything that is done by the eyes or the ears, or the fingers or the nose or the tongue. So the chanting of the holy text, the Udgitha, which is an invocation of the glory of God, cannot be undertaken except by that which is Divine in us. And the senses are the undivine henchmen which force us to go contrary to the righteousness of the Kingdom of God. So all the senses were defeated. The gods had to take recourse to that which is superior to all the senses, viz., the Prana, which has a variegated meaning. We do Pranayama, control the breath, by withholding inspiration and expiration, and we speak of the restraint of the Prana. We are also told that there are various functions of the Prana viz., Prana, Apana, Vyana, Samana, Udana, etc. Actually Prana is the vitality in the whole human organism. It is not located in any particular sense-organ, but the sense-organs move on account of this dynamo that is working inside. This dynamo is the power generator and it can be utilised for any purpose, to move a train or to light a bulb or work a refrigerator or heat a stove. We can do anything we like but the generator is not concerned with that. Likewise is the Prana Sakti. We can use it for seeing with the eyes or hearing with the ears, smelling with the nose, tasting with the tongue, etc., but it has no concern with all these, even as electricity has no concern with light and movement, etc. So there is a super-sensory integrating vitality in us which was the thing that finally succeeded in chanting the holy invocation and quelled the Asuras. How could it be done? Because the integrating force is the only power that can put down the distracting force. The impulse of the senses in terms of or in relation to objects is the evil spoken of as the Asuras here in this battle. This sensory impulse cannot be overcome by employing the senses themselves. It would be like employing a thief himself as a police to catch the thief. He will not succeed in that, because he is a friend of the thief. So the senses are not good instruments in the practice of Yoga. They have to be withdrawn in Pratyahara, and this is done by various ways, as you all know. So the Udgitha, the divine invocation was the recital by that integrating vitality which sung the chant and the concentration of this force, which is the total energy of the system, melted the impulses of the senses, and there was a retention of the activity of the senses; a true Pranayama-Kumbhaka took place in Yogic parlance. The senses ceased from operating in their own ways.