Names are images. Carlyle has spoken to us of the profound poetry lying hidden in all nomenclature. Meditate, for a moment, on any important and vital word of people’s language and it will reveal to your mind something of the modes of though, something of the historic reminiscences and of the spiritual aspirations of that people. For instance, a certain school of Western thought has evolved the term ‘Superman’. Nature has made us men. “Let us,” says this school, “strive to become more than men,”-whereas we in India have our Siddha, meaning the “Perfected Man or the complete man. The idea here is to perfect the manhood that nature has given us.”

The Siddha does not worship the “Will to Power” for he knows that power is merely one of the many things necessary for a perfect life and therefore can never be a supreme end in itself.

He worships the Will pure and simple – the Sakti of God. The Will of the Universe, the All-Will, the Will not merely for power but for Being and Loving, that Will should, in full measure, be realized by man in himself if he seeks perfection.

I wonder if the Western school above referred to has, in any of its treatises, described fully and systematically the methods to be adopted for acquiring the will to power. But here, in India, we have a yogi literature which in spite of many interpolations and mediaeval accretions, still contains the most scientific and rational treatment of the question of consciously accelerating human evolutions. By Will is this Universe made. By Will is this Universe maintained in motion and activity. By will does thought become manifested in material forms. By Will odes life stand.

The Siddha realizes that the will in him forms part of this All-Will. A conscious ralisation of this fact tends to make the individual will more and more ablaze with the divine fire, more and more assured of immortality and invincibility.

And the Siddha adores the All-Will, day and night. He meditates on it in his moments of silence; he makes it the them of his songs, his motto, his battle –cry, the awakener of his faculties and the sustainer of his actions.

Teacher or King, wowed celibate or father of a large and prosperous family, poet or soldier – whatever may be the roles of life that the Siddha has chosen to play, it will be sanctified by the Will Divine and shine with the luster of immortality.

But in all that he may do, his heart will ever be free from the taint of self-aggrandizement, of harm, or indifference to the interests of other beings. If sometimes his duty may impel him to impose a severe correction on obstinate evil-doers, he does so with love in his heart, hidden, perhaps, but very real.

Above all, the Siddha is a democrat. Equality is to him a matter of utter reality, as he has seen the basic unity of all beings.

Where Nietzsche’s ‘Superman’ would talk of the ‘hero’, the Siddha speaks of the children of God, the living rays of the Universal Sun.

Heroism and ‘Supermanism’ are, by certain people, wrongly identified with the pursuit of war and kingly domination, exclusively. The siddha, of course, is a hero; for heroism is one of the conditions of human perfection. But he need not necessarily be a War-lord. The Shastras tell us that there are four types of the Hero-the Hero of War(Yuddha – vira), the Hero of Sacrifice (Dana-vira), the Hero of Duty (Dharma-vira) and the hero of compassion (Daya-vira). He may be anyone of the four.

Firmly established in Mauna – the silence internal – fearless of death, disease, and the devil, serene in the strength of God, and happy in the knowledge of immortality, resplendent in his energy, irresistible in his action, tireless in labour, and full-souled in service, the Siddha lives amidst men, a representative of the Will Divine, a veritable messenger from Heaven, protector of men, loving, elevating, immortalizing.

New India
18.06.1915