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
