We speak of the evolution of Life in Matter, the evolution of Mind in Life;
but evolution is a word which merely states the phenomenon without explaining
it. For there seems to be no reason why Life should evolve out of material
elements or Mind out of living form, unless we accept the Vedantic solution that
Life is already involved in Matter and Mind in Life because in essence Matter is
a form of veiled Life, Life a form of veiled Consciousness.
And then there seems
to be little objection to a further step in the series and the admission that
mental consciousness may itself be only a form and a veil of higher states which
are beyond Mind. In that case, the unconquerable impulse of man towards God,
Light, Bliss, Freedom, Immortality presents itself in its right place in the
chain as simply the imperative impulse by which Nature is seeking to evolve
beyond Mind, and appears to be as natural, true and just as the impulse towards
Life which she has planted in certain forms of Matter or the impulse towards
Mind which she has planted in certain forms of Life.
As there, so here, the
impulse exists more of less obscurely in her different vessels with an
ever-ascending series in the power of its will-to-be; as there, so here, it is
gradually evolving and bound fully to evolve the necessary organs and faculties.
As the impulse towards Mind ranges from the more sensitive reactions of Life in
the metal and the plant up to its full organisation in man, so in man himself
there is the same ascending series, the preparation, if nothing more, of a
higher and divine life.
The animal is a living laboratory in which Nature has,
it is said, worked out man. Man himself may well be a thinking and living
laboratory in whom and with whose conscious co-operation she wills to work out
the superman, the God. Or shall we not say, rather, to manifest God?
For if
evolution is the progressive manifestation by Nature of that which slept or
worked in her, involved, it is also the overt realisation of that which she
secretly is. We cannot, then, bid her pause at a given stage of her evolution,
nor have we the right to condemn with the religionist as perverse and
presumptuous or with the rationalist as a disease or hallucination any intention
she may evince or effort she may make to go beyond. If it be true that Spirit is
involved in Matter and apparent Nature is secret God, then the manifestation of
the divine in himself and the realisation of God within and without are the
highest and most legitimate aim possible to man upon earth.
Thus the eternal paradox and eternal truth of a divine life in an animal
body, an immortal aspiration or reality inhabiting a mortal tenement, a single
and universal consciousness representing itself in limited minds and divided
egos, a transcendent, indefinable, timeless and spaceless Being who alone
renders time and space and cosmos possible, and in all these the higher truth
realisable by the lower term, justify themselves to the deliberate reason as
well as to the persistent instinct or intuition of mankind.
Attempts are
sometimes made to have done finally with questionings which have so often been
declared insoluble by logical thought and to persuade men to limit their mental
activities to the practical and immediate problems of their material existence
in the universe; but such evasions are never permanent in their effect. Mankind
returns from them with a more vehement impulse of inquiry or a more violent
hunger for an immediate solution.
By that hunger mysticism profits and new
religions arise to replace the old that have been destroyed or stripped of
significance by a scepticism which itself could not satisfy because, although
its business was inquiry, it was unwilling sufficiently to inquire. The attempt
to deny or stifle a truth because it is yet obscure in its outward workings and
too often represented by obscurantist superstition or a crude faith, is itself a
kind of obscurantism.
The will to escape from a cosmic necessity because it is
arduous, difficult to justify by immediate tangible results, slow in regulating
its operations, must turn out eventually to have been no acceptance of the truth
of Nature but a revolt against the secret, mightier will of the great Mother. It
is better and more rational to accept what she will not allow us as a race to
reject and lift it from the sphere of blind instinct, obscure intuition and
random aspiration into the light of reason and an instructed and consciously
self-guiding will. And if there is any higher light of illumined intuition or
self-revealing truth which is now in man either obstructed and inoperative or
works with intermittent glancings as if from behind a veil or with occasional
displays as of the northern lights in our material skies, then there also we
need not fear to aspire.
For it is likely that such is the next higher state of
consciousness of which Mind is only a form and veil, and through the splendours
of that light may lie the path of our progressive self-enlargement into whatever
highest state is humanity's ultimate resting-place.
—The Life Divine —The Human Aspiration, pg. 4-5
In Europe and in India, respectively, the negation of the,materialist and the
refusal of the ascetic have sought to assert themselves as the sole truth and to
dominate the conception of Life. In India, if the result has been a great
heaping up of the treasures of the Spirit, — or of some of them, — it has
also been a great bankruptcy of Life; in Europe, the fullness of riches and the
triumphant mastery of this world's powers and possessions have progressed
towards an equal bankruptcy in the things of the Spirit. Nor has the intellect,
which sought the solution of all problems in the one term of Matter, found
satisfaction in the answer that it has received.
Therefore the time grows ripe and the tendency of the world moves towards a new
and comprehensive affirmation in thought and in inner and outer experience and
to its corollary, a new and rich self-fulfilment in an integral human existence
for the individual and for the race.
From the difference in the relations of Spirit and Matter to the Unknowable
which they both represent, there arises also a difference of effectiveness in
the material and the spiritual negations. The denial of the materialist although
more insistent and immediately successful, more facile in its appeal to the
generality of mankind, is yet less enduring, less effective finally than the
absorbing and perilous refusal of the ascetic. For it carries within itself its
own cure. Its most powerful element is the Agnosticism which, admitting the
Unknowable behind all manifestation, extends the limits of the unknowable until
it comprehends all that is merely unknown.
Its premise is that the physical
senses are our sole means of Knowledge and that Reason, therefore, even in its
most extended and vigorous flights, cannot escape beyond their domain; it must
deal always and solely with the facts which they provide of suggest; and the
suggestions themselves must always be kept tied to their origins we cannot go
beyond, we cannot use them as a bridge leading us into a domain where more
powerful and less limited faculties come into play and another kind of inquiry
has to be instituted.
A premise so arbitrary pronounces on itself its own sentence of
insufficiency. It can only be maintained by ignoring or explaining away all that
vast field of evidence and experience which contradicts it, denying or
disparaging noble and useful faculties, active consciously or obscurely or at
worst latent in all human beings, and refusing to investigate supraphysical
phenomena except as manifested in relation to matter and its movements and
conceived as a subordinate activity of material forces.
As soon as we begin to
investigate the operations of mind and of supermind, in themselves and without
the prejudgment that is determined from the beginning to see in them only a
subordinate term of Matter, we come into contact with a mass of phenomena which
escape entirely from the rigid hold, the limiting dogmatism of the materialist
formula. And the moment we recognise, as our enlarging experience compels us to
recognise, that there are in the universe knowable realities beyond the range of
the senses and in man powers and faculties which determine rather than are
determined by the material organs through which they hold themselves in touch
with the world of the senses, —that outer shell of our true and complete
existence,— the premise of materialistic Agnosticism disappears. We are ready
for a large statement and an ever-developing inquiry.
But, first, it is well that we should recognise the enormous, the
indispensable utility of the very brief period of rationalistic Materialism
through which humanity has been passing. For that vast field of evidence and
experience which now begins to reopen its gates to us, can only be safely
entered when the intellect has been severely trained to a clear austerity;
seized on by unripe minds, it lends itself to the most perilous distortions and
misleading imaginations and actually in the past encrusted a real nucleus of
truth with such an accretion of perverting superstitions and irrationalising
dogmas that all advance in true knowledge was rendered impossible. It became
necessary for a time to make a clean sweep at once of the truth and its disguise
in order that the road might be clear for a new departure and a surer advance.
The rationalistic tendency of Materialism has done mankind this great service.
— The Life Divine —The Two Negations: The Materialist Denial,
pg. 9-11
Matter expresses itself eventually as a formulation of some unknown force. Life,
too, that yet unfathomed mystery, begins to reveal itself as an obscure energy
of sensibility imprisoned in its material formulation; and when the dividing
ignorance is cured which gives us the sense of a gulf between Life and Matter,
it is difficult to suppose that Mind, Life and Matter will be found to be
anything else that one Energy triply formulated, the triple world of the Vedic
seers. Nor will the conception then be able to endure of a brute material Force
as the mother of the Mind. The Energy that creates the world can be nothing else
than a Will, and Will is only consciousness applying itself to a work and a
result.
—The Life Divine —The Two Negations: The Materialist Denial,
pg. 14
If we push the materialist conclusion far enough, we arrive at an insignificance
and unreality in the life of the individual and the race which leaves us,
logically, the option between a feverish effort of the individual to snatch what
he may from a transient existence, to "live his life" as it is said,
or a dispassionate and objectless service of the race and the individual,
knowing well that the latter is a transient fiction of the nervous mentality and
the former only a little more long-lived collective form of the same regular
nervous spasm of Matter. We work or enjoy under the impulsion of a material
energy which deceives us with the brief delusion of life or with the nobler
delusion of an ethical aim and a mental consummation. Materialism like spiritual
Monism arrives at a Maya that is and yet is not, —is, for it is present and
compelling, is not, for it is phenomenal and transitory in its works.
—The Life Divine —The Two Negations: The Refusal of the Ascetic,
pg. 20
For at the gates of the Transcendent stands that mere and perfect Spirit
described in the Upanishads, luminous, pure, sustaining the world but inactive
in it, without sinews of energy, without flaw of duality, without scar of
division, unique, identical, free from all appearance of relation and of
multiplicity, — the pure Self of the Adwaitins1, the inactive Brahman, the
transcendent Silence. And the mind when it passes suddenly, without intermediate
transitions, receives a sense of the unreality of the world and the sole reality
of the Silence which is one of the most powerful and convincing experiences of
which the human mind is capable. Here, in the perception of this pure Self or of
the Non-Being behind it, we have the starting-point for a second negation, —
parallel at the other pole to the materialistic, but more complete, more final,
more perilous in its effects on the individuals or collectivities that hear its
potent call to the wilderness, — the refusal of the ascetic.
It is this revolt of Spirit against Matter that for two thousand years, since
Buddhism disturbed the balance of the old Aryan world, has dominated
increasingly the Indian mind. Not that the sense of the cosmic illusion is the
whole of Indian thought; there are other philosophical statements, other
religious aspirations. Nor has some attempt at an adjustment between the two
terms been wanting even from the most extreme philosophies. But all have lived
in the shadow of the great Refusal and the final end of life for all is the garb
of the ascetic.
The general conception of existence has been permeated with the
Buddhistic theory of the chain of Karma and with the consequent antinomy of
bondage and liberation, bondage by birth, liberation by cessation from birth.
Therefore all voices are joined in one great consensus that not in this world of
the dualities can there be our kingdom of heaven, but beyond, whether in the
joys of the eternal Vrindavan1 or the high beatitude of Brahmaloka2,
beyond all manifestations in some ineffable Nirvana3 or where all
separate experience is lost in the featureless unity of the indefinable
Existence. And through many centuries a great army of shining witnesses, saints
and teachers, names sacred to Indian memory and dominant in Indian imagination,
have borne always the same witness and swelled always the same lofty and distant
appeal, — renunciation the sole path of knowledge, acceptation of physical
life the act of the ignorant, cessation from birth the right use of human birth,
the call of the Spirit, the recoil from Matter.
1 Goloka, the Vaishnava heaven of eternal Beauty and Bliss.
2 The highest state of pure existence, consciousness and beatitude attainable by
the soul without complete extinction in the Indefinable.
3 Extinction, not necessarily of all being, but of being as we know it;
extinction of ego, desire and egoistic action and mentality.
For an age out of sympathy with the ascetic spirit — and throughout all the
rest of the world the hour of the Anchorite may seem to have passed or to be
passing — it is easy to attribute this great trend to the failing of vital
energy in an ancient race tired out by its burden, its once vast share in the
common advance, exhausted by its many-sided contribution to the sum of human
effort and human knowledge. But we have seen that it corresponds to a truth of
existence, a state of conscious realisation which stands at the very summit of
our possibility. In practice also the ascetic spirit is an indispensable element
in human perfection and even its separate affirmation cannot be avoided so long
as the race has not at the other end liberated its intellect and its vital
habits from subjection to an always insistent animalism.
We seek indeed a larger and completer affirmation. We perceive that in the
Indian ascetic ideal the great Vedantic formula, "One without a
second", has not been read sufficiently in the light of that other formula
equally imperative, "All this is the Brahman". The passionate
aspiration of man upward to the Divine has not been sufficiently related to the
descending movement of the Divine leaning downward to embrace eternally Its
manifestation. Its meaning in Matter has not been so well understood as Its
truth in the Spirit. The Reality which the Sannyasin seeks has been grasped in
its full height, but not, as by the ancient Vedantins, in its full extent and
comprehensiveness. But in our completer affirmation we must not minimise the
part of the pure spiritual impulse. As we have seen how greatly Materialism has
served the ends of the Divine, so we must acknowledge the still greater service
rendered by Asceticism to Life. We shall preserve the truths of material Science
and its real utilities in the final harmony, even if many or even if all of its
existing forms have to be broken or left aside. An even greater scruple of right
preservation must guide us in our dealing with the legacy, however actually
diminished or depreciated, of the Aryan past.
—The Life Divine —The Two Negations: The Refusal of the Ascetic,
pg. 22-24.
In the ordinary distribution of life's activities the individual regards himself
as a separate being included in the universe and both as dependent upon that
which transcends alike the universe and the individual. It is to this
Transcendence that we give currently the name of God, who thus becomes to our
conceptions not so much supracosmic as extracosmic. The belittling and
degradation of both the individual and the universe is a natural consequence of
this division: the cessation of both cosmos and individual by the attainment of
the Transcendence would be logically its supreme conclusion.
The integral view of the unity of Brahman avoids these consequences. Just as
we need not give up the bodily life to attain to the mental and spiritual, so we
can arrive at a point of view where the preservation of the individual
activities is no longer inconsistent with our comprehension of the cosmic
consciousness or our attainment to the transcendent and supracosmic. For the
World-Transcendent embraces the universe, is one with it and does not exclude
it, even as the universe embraces the individual, is one with him and does not
exclude him. The individual is a centre of the whole universal consciousness;
the universe is a form and definition which is occupied by the entire immanence
of the Formless and Indefinable.
This is always the true relation, veiled from
us by our ignorance or our wrong consciousness of things. When we attain to
knowledge or right consciousness, nothing essential in the eternal relation is
changed, but only the inview and the outview from the individual centre is
profoundly modified and consequently also the spirit and effect of its activity.
The individual is still necessary to the action of the Transcendent in the
universe and that action in him does not cease to be possible by his
illumination. On the contrary, since the conscious manifestation of the
Transcendent in the individual is the means by which the collective, the
universal is also to become conscious of itself, the continuation of the
illumined individual in the action of the world is an imperative need of the
world-play. If his inexorable removal through the very act of illumination is
the law, then the world is condemned to remain eternally the scene of unredeemed
darkness, death and suffering. And such a world can only be a ruthless ordeal or
a mechanical illusion.
—The Life Divine —The Destiny of the Individual, pg. 37-38
For if we examine carefully, we shall find that Intuition is our first teacher.
Intuition always stands veiled behind our mental operations. Intuition brings to
man those brilliant messages from the Unknown which are the beginning of his
higher knowledge. Reason only comes in afterwards to see what profit it can have
of the shining harvest. Intuition gives us that idea of something behind and
beyond all that we know and seem to be which pursues man always in contradiction
of his lower reason and all his normal experience and impels him to formulate
that formless perception in the more positive ideas of God, Immortality, Heaven
and the rest by which we strive to express it to the mind.
For Intuition is as
strong as Nature herself from whose very soul it has sprung and cares nothing
for the contradictions of reason or the denials of experience. It knows what is
because it is, because itself it is of that and has come from that, and will not
yield it to the judgment of what merely becomes and appears. What the Intuition
tells us of, is not so much Existence as the Existent, for it proceeds from that
one point of light in us which gives it its advantage, that sometimes opened
door in our own self-awareness. Ancient Vedanta seized this message of the
Intuition and formulated it in the three great declarations of the Upanishads,
"I am He", "Thou art That, O Swetaketu", "All this is
the Brahman; this Self is the Brahman".
—The Life Divine —The Methods of Vedantic Knowledge, pg. 67
Materialism indeed insists that, whatever the extension of consciousness, it is
a material phenomenon inseparable from our physical organs and not their
utiliser but their result. This orthodox contention, however, is no longer able
to hold the field against the tide of increasing knowledge. Its explanations are
becoming more and more inadequate and strained. It is becoming always clearer
that not only does the capacity of our total consciousness far exceed that of
our organs, the senses, the nerves, the brain, but that even for our ordinary
thought and consciousness these organs are only their habitual instruments and
not their generators. Consciousness uses the brain which its upward strivings
have produced, brain has not produced nor does it use the consciousness. There
are even abnormal instances which go to prove that our organs are not entirely
indispensable instruments, —that the heart-beats are not absolutely essential
to life, any more than is breathing, nor the organized brain-cells to thought.
Our physical organism no more causes or explains thought and consciousness than
the construction of an engine causes or explains the motive-power of steam or
electricity. The force is anterior, not the physical instrument.
—The Life Divine —Conscious Force; pg 86.
So long as Matter was Alpha and Omega to the scientific mind, the reluctance to
admit intelligence as the mother of intelligence was an honest scruple. But now
it is no more than an outworn paradox to affirm the emergence of human
consciousness, intelligence and mastery out of an unintelligent, blindly driving
unconsciousness in which no form or substance of them previously existed. Man's
consciousness can be nothing else than a form of Nature's consciousness. It is
there in other involved forms below Mind, it emerges in Mind, it shall ascend
into yet superior forms beyond Mind. For the Force that builds the worlds is a
conscious Force, the Existence which manifests itself in them is conscious Being
and a perfect emergence of its potentialities in form is the sole object which
we can rationally conceive for its manifestation of this world of forms.
—The Life Divine —Conscious Force, pg. 89-90
In truth, the difficulty thus sharply presented arises only if we assume the
existence of an extracosmic personal God, not Himself the universe, one who has
created good and evil, pain and suffering for His creatures, but Himself stands
above and unaffected by them, watching, ruling, doing His will with a suffering
and struggling world or, if not doing His will, if allowing the world to be
driven by an-inexorable law, unhelped by Him or inefficiently helped, then not
God, not omnipotent, not all-good and all-loving. On no theory of an extracosmic
moral God, can evil and suffering be explained, —the creation of evil and
suffering,— except by an unsatisfactory subterfuge which avoids the question
at issue instead of answering it or a plain or implied Manicheanism which
practically annuls the Godhead in attempting to justify its ways or excuse its
works.
But such a God is not the Vedantic Sachchidananda. Sachchidananda of the
Vedanta is one existence without a second; all that is, is He. If then evil and
suffering exist, it is He that bears the evil and suffering in the creature in
whom He has embodied Himself. The problem then changes entirely. The question is
no longer how came God to create for His creatures a suffering and evil of which
He is Himself incapable and therefore immune, but how came the sole and infinite
Existence-Consciousness-Bliss to admit into itself that which is not bliss, that
which seems to be its positive negation.
—The Life Divine —Delight of Existence: The Problem, pg.
94-95
Mind is an instrument of analysis and synthesis, but not of essential knowledge.
Its function is to cut out something vaguely from the unknown Thing in itself
and call this measurement or delimitation of it the whole, and again to analyse
the whole into its parts which it regards as separate mental objects. It is only
the parts and accidents that the Mind can see definitely and, after its own
fashion, know. Of the whole its only definite idea is an assemblage of parts or
a totality of properties and accidents. The whole not seen as a part of
something else or in its own parts, properties and accidents is to the mind no
more than a vague perception; only when it is analysed and put by itself as a
separate constituted object, a totality in a larger totality, can Mind say to
itself, "This now I know." And really it does not know.
It knows only
its own analysis of the object and the idea it has formed of it by a synthesis
of the separate parts and properties that it has seen. There its characteristic
power, its sure function ceases, and if we would have a greater, a profounder
and a real knowledge, —a knowledge and not an intense but formless sentiment
such as comes sometimes to certain deep but inarticulate parts of our
mentality,— Mind has to make room for another consciousness which will fulfil
Mind by transcending it or reverse and so rectify its operations after leaping
beyond it: the summit of mental knowledge is only a vaulting-board from which
that leap can be taken. The utmost mission of Mind is to train our obscure
consciousness which has emerged out of the dark prison of Matter, to enlighten
its blind instincts, random intuitions, vague perceptions till it shall become
capable of this greater light and higher ascension. Mind is a passage, not a
culmination.
—The Life Divine —The Supermind as Creator, pg. 127-128
Science and metaphysics (either founded on pure intellectual speculation or, as
in India, ultimately on a spiritual vision of things and spiritual experience)
have each its own province and method of inquiry. Science cannot dictate its
conclusions to metaphysics any more than metaphysics can impose its conclusions
on Science. Still, if we accept the reasonable belief that Being and Nature in
all their states have a system of correspondences expressive of a common Truth
underlying them, it is permissible to suppose that truths of the physical
universe can throw some light on the nature as well as the process of the Force
that is active in the universe —not a complete light, for physical Science is
necessarily incomplete in the range of its inquiry and has no clue to the occult
movements of the Force.
—The Life Divine —Life, pg. 178
But there comes a new equipoise, there intervenes a new set of terms which
increase in proportion as Life delivers itself out of this form and begins to
evolve towards conscious Mind; for the middle terms of Life are death and mutual
devouring, hunger and conscious desire, the sense of a limited room and capacity
and the struggle to increase, to expand, to conquer and to possess. These three
terms are the basis of that status of evolution which the Darwinian theory first
made plain to human knowledge. For the phenomenon of death involves in itself a
struggle to survive, since death is only the negative term in which Life hides
from itself and tempts its own positive being to seek for immortality. The
phenomenon of hunger and desire involves a struggle towards a status of
satisfaction and security, since desire is only the stimulus by which Life
tempts its own positive being to rise out of the negation of unfulfilled hunger
towards the full possession of the delight of existence.
The phenomenon of
limited capacity involves a struggle towards expansion, mastery and possession,
the possession of the self and the conquest of the environment, since limitation
and defect are only the negation by which Life tempts its own positive being to
seek for the perfection of which it is eternally capable. The struggle for life
is not only a struggle to survive, it is also a struggle for possession and
perfection, since only by taking hold of the environment whether more or less,
whether by self-adaptation to it or by adapting it to oneself either by
accepting and conciliating it or by conquering and changing it, can survival be
secured, and equally is it true that only a greater and greater perfection can
assure a continuous permanence, a lasting survival. It is this truth that
Darwinism sought to express in the formula of the survival of the fittest.
—The Life Divine —The Ascent of Life, pg. 199
This third status is a condition in which we rise progressively beyond the
struggle for life by mutual devouring and the survival of the fittest by that
struggle; for there is more and more a survival by mutual help and a self-perfectioning
by mutual adaptation, interchange and fusion. Life is a self-affirmation of
being, even a development and survival of ego, but of a being that has need of
other beings, an ego that seeks to meet and include other egos and to be
included in their life. The individuals and the aggregates who develop most the
law of association and the law of love, of common help, kindliness, affection,
comradeship, unity, who harmonise most successfully survival and mutual
self-giving, the aggregate increasing the individual and the individual the
aggregate, as well as individual increasing individual and aggregate aggregate
by mutual interchange, will be the fittest for survival in this tertiary status
of the evolution.
—The Life Divine —The Ascent of Life, pg. 203
Therefore the material universe was bound in the nature of things to evolve from
its hidden life apparent life, from its hidden mind apparent mind, and it must
in the same nature of things evolve from its hidden Supermind apparent Supermind
and from the concealed Spirit within it the triune glory of Sachchidananda. The
only question is whether the earth is to be a scene of that emergence or the
human creation on this or any other material scene, in this or any other cycle
of the large wheelings of Time, its instrument and vehicle.
The ancient seers
believed in this possibility for man and held it to be his divine destiny; the
modern thinker does not even conceive of it or, if he conceived, would deny or
doubt. If he sees a vision of the Superman, it is in the figure of increased
degrees of mentality or vitality; he admits no other emergence, sees nothing
beyond these principles, for these have traced for us up till now our limit and
circle. In this progressive world, with this human creature in whom the divine
spark has been kindled, real wisdom is likely to dwell with the high aspiration
rather than with the denial of aspiration or with the hope that limits and
circumscribes itself within those narrow walls of apparent possibility which are
only our intermediate house of training. In the spiritual order of things, the
higher we project our view and our aspiration, the greater the Truth that seeks
to descend upon us, because it is already there within us and calls for its
release from the covering that conceals it in manifested Nature.
—The Life Divine —The Sevenfold Chord of Being, pg. 269-270
A theory of Maya in the sense of illusion or the unreality of cosmic existence
creates more difficulties than it solves; it does not really solve the problem
of existence, but rather renders it for ever insoluble. For, whether Maya be an
unreality or a non-real reality, the ultimate effects of the theory carry in
them a devastating simplicity of nullification. Ourselves and the universe fade
away into nothingness or else keep for a time only a truth which is little
better than a fiction. In the thesis of the pure unreality of Maya, all
experience, all knowledge as well as all ignorance, the knowledge that frees us
no less than the ignorance that binds us, world-acceptance and world-refusal,
are two sides of an illusion; for there is nothing to accept or refuse, nobody
to accept or refuse it.
All the time it was only the immutable superconscient
Reality that at all existed; the bondage and release were only appearances, not
a reality. All attachment to world-existence is an illusion, but the call for
liberation is also a circumstance of the illusion; it is something that was
created in Maya which by its liberation is extinguished in Maya. But this
nullification cannot be compelled to stop short in its devastating advance at
the boundary fixed for it by a spiritual Illusionism. For if all other
experiences of the individual consciousness in the universe are illusions, then
what guarantee is there that its spiritual experiences are not illusions,
including even its absorbed self-experience of the supreme Self which is
conceded to us as utterly real?
For if cosmos is untrue, our experience of the
cosmic consciousness, of the universal Self, of Brahman as all these beings or
as the self of all these beings, the One in all, all in the One has no secure
foundation, since it reposes in one of its terms on an illusion, on a
construction of Maya. That term, the cosmic term, has to crumble, for all these
beings which we saw as the Brahman were illusions; then what is our assurance of
our experience of the other term, the pure Self, the silent, static or absolute
Reality, since that too comes to us in a mind moulded of delusion and formed in
a body created by an Illusion?
An overwhelming self-evident convincingness, an
experience of absolute authenticity in the realisation or experience is not an
unanswerable proof of sole reality or sole finality: for other spiritual
experiences such as that of the omnipresent Divine Person, Lord of a real
Universe, have the same convincing, authentic and final character. It is open to
the intellect which has once arrived at the conviction of the unreality of all
other things, to take a farther step and deny the reality of Self and of all
existence. The Buddhists took this last step and refused reality to the Self on
the ground that it was as much as the rest a construction of the mind; they cut
not only God but the eternal Self and impersonal Brahman out of the picture.
An uncompromising theory of Illusion solves no problem of our existence; it
only cuts the problem out for the individual by showing him a way of exit: in
its extreme form and effect, our being and its action become null and without
sanction, its experience, aspiration, endeavour lose their significance; all,
the one incommunicable relationless Truth excepted and the turning away to it,
become equated with illusion of being, are part of a universal Illusion and
themselves illusions. God and our-selves and the universe become myths of Maya;
for God is only a reflection of Brahman in Maya, ourselves are only a reflection
of Brahman in illusory individuality, the world is only an imposition on the
Brahman's incommunicable self-existence.
There is a less drastic nullification
if a certain reality is admitted for the being even within the illusion, a
certain validity for the experience and knowledge by which we grow into the
spirit: but this is only if the temporal has a valid reality and the experience
in it has a real validity, and in that case what we are in front of is not an
illusion taking the unreal for real but an ignorance misapprehending the real.
Otherwise if the beings of whom Brahman is the self are illusory, its selfhood
is not valid, it is part of an illusion; the experience of self is also an
illusion: the experience "I am That" is vitiated by an ignorant
conception, for there is no I, only That; the experience "I am He" is
doubly ignorant, for it assumes a conscious Eternal, a Lord of the universe, a
Cosmic Being, but there can be no such thing if there is no reality in the
universe.
A real solution of existence can only stand upon a truth that accounts
for our existence and world-existence, reconciles their truth, their right
relation and the truth of their relation to whatever transcendent Reality is the
source of everything. But this implies some reality of individual and cosmos,
some true relation of the One Existence and all existences, of relative
experience and of the Absolute.
The theory of Illusion cuts the knot of the world problem, it does not
disentangle it; it is an escape, not a solution: a flight of the spirit is not a
sufficient victory for the being embodied in this world of the becoming; it
effects a separation from Nature, not a liberation and fulfilment of our nature.
This eventual outcome satisfies only one element, sublimates only one impulse of
our being; it leaves the rest out in the cold to perish in the twilight of the
unreal reality of Maya.
As in Science, so in metaphysical thought, that general
and ultimate solution is likely to be the best which includes and accounts for
all so that each truth of experience takes its place in the whole: that
knowledge is likely to be the highest knowledge which illumines, integralises,
harmonises the significance of all knowledge and accounts for, finds the basic
and, one might almost say, the justifying reason of our ignorance and illusion
while it cures them; this is the supreme experience which gathers together all
experience in the truth of a supreme and all-reconciling oneness. Illusionism
unifies by elimination; it deprives all knowledge and experience, except the one
supreme merger, of reality and significance.
—The Life Divine —Reality and the Cosmic Illusion,
pg. 466-9
This then is the origin, this the nature, these the boundaries of the Ignorance.
Its origin is a limitation of knowledge, its distinctive character a separation
of the being from its own integrality and entire reality; its boundaries are
determined by this separative development of the consciousness, for it shuts us
to our true self and to the true self and whole nature of things and obliges us
to live in an apparent surface existence. A return or a progress to integrality,
a disappearance of the limitation, a breaking down of separativeness, an
overpassing of boundaries, a recovery of our essential and whole reality must be
the sign and opposite character of the inner turn towards Knowledge. There must
be a replacement of a limited and separative by an essential and integral
consciousness identified with the original truth and the whole truth of self and
existence.
The integral Knowledge is something that is already there in the
integral Reality: it is not a new or still non-existent thing that has to be
created, acquired, learned, or uncovered, it is a Truth that is self-revealed to
a spiritual endeavour: for it is there veiled in our deeper and greater self; it
is the very stuff of our own spiritual consciousness, and it is by awaking to it
even in our surface self that we have to possess it. There is an integral
self-knowledge that we have to recover and, because the world-self also is our
self, an integral world-knowledge. A knowledge that can be learned or
constructed by the mind exists and has its value, but is not what is meant when
we speak of the Knowledge and the Ignorance.
—The Life Divine —Reality and the Integral Knowledge, pg.
635
