SRI AUROBINDO
THE FUTURE EVOLUTION OF MAN
The Divine Life upon Earth
Compiled with a
summary and notes by P. B. SAINT-HILAIRE
Electronically typed and edited by Juan Schoch (pc93@phlo.net) ref. https://members.tripod.com/~pc93, http://www.enlightenment-engine.net.
Originally entered in circa 1995. This notice is not to be removed.
23
CHAPTER 1
THE HUMAN ASPIRATION
Man’s highest aspiration–his
seeking for perfection,
his longing for freedom and
mastery, his search after
pure truth and unmixed
delight–is in flagrant con-
tradiction with his present
existence and normal experience.
THE
earliest preoccupation of man in his awakened thoughts and, as it seems, his
inevitable and ultimate preoccupation,–for it survives the longest periods of
scepticism and returns after every banishment,–is also the highest which his
thought can envisage. It manifests itself in the divination of Godhead, the
impulse towards perfection, the search after pure Truth and unmixed Bliss, the
sense of a secret immortality. The ancient dawns of human knowledge have left
us their witness to this constant aspiration; today we see a humanity satiated
but not satisfied by victorious analysis of the externalities of Nature
preparing to return to its primeval longings. The earliest formula of Wisdom
promises to be its last,—God, Light, Freedom, Immortality.
These
persistent ideals of the race are at once the contradiction of its normal
experience and the affirmation of higher and deeper experiences which are
abnormal to humanity and only to be attained in their organized entirety, by a
revolutionary individual effort or an evolutionary general progression. To
know, possess and be the divine being in an animal and egoistic consciousness,
to convert our twilit or obscure physical mentality into the plenary
supramental illumination, to build peace and a self-existent bliss where there
is only a stress of transitory satisfactions besieged by physical pain and
emotional suffering, to establish an infinite freedom in a world which presents
itself as a group of mechanical necessities, to discover and realize the
immortal life in a body subjected to death and constant mutation,–this is
offered to us as the manifestation of God in Matter and the goal of Nature in
her terrestrial evolution. To the ordinary material intellect which takes its
present organization of consciousness for the limit of its
24
possibilities,
the direct contradiction of the unrealized ideals with the realized fact is a
final argument against their validity. But if we take a more deliberate view of
the world’s workings, that direct opposition appears rather as part of Nature’s
profoundest method and the seal of her completest sanction.
LD.I,
1
Such contradiction is part
of Nature’s general method;
it is a sign that she is
working towards a greater
harmony. The reconciliation
is achieved by an evolu-
tionary progress.
For
all problems of existence are essentially problems of harmony. They arise from
the perception of an unsolved discord and the instinct of an undiscovered
agreement or unity. To rest content with an unsolved discord is possible for
the practical and more animal part of man, but impossible for his fully
awakened mind, and usually even his practical parts only escape from the
general necessity either by shutting out the problem or by accepting a rough,
utilitarian and unillumined compromise. For essentially, all Nature seeks a
harmony, life and matter in their own sphere as much as mind in the arrangement
of its perceptions. The greater the apparent disorder of the materials offered
or the apparent disparateness, even to irreconcilable opposition, of the
elements that have to be utilized, the stronger is the spur, and it drives
towards a more subtle and puissant order than can normally be the result of a
less difficult endeavour. The accordance of active Life with a material of form
in which the condition of activity itself seems to be inertia, is one problem
of opposites that Nature has solved and seeks always to solve better with
greater complexities; for its perfect solution would be the material
immortality of a fully organized mind—supporting animal body. The accordance of
conscious mind and conscious will with a form and a life in themselves not
overtly self-conscious and capable at best of a mechanical or subconscious will
is another problem of opposites in which she has produced astonishing results
and aims always at higher marvels; for there her ultimate miracle would be an
animal consciousness no longer seeking but possessed of Truth and Light, with
the practical omnipotence which would result from the possession of a direct
and perfected knowledge. Not only, then, is the upward impulse of man towards
the accord-
25
ance
of yet higher opposites in itself, but it is the only logical completion of a
rule and an effort that seem to be a fundamental method of Nature and the very
sense of her universal strivings.
LD.I,
1
Life evolves out of Matter,
Mind out of Life, because
they are already involved
there: Matter is a form of
veiled Life, Life a form of
veiled Mind. May not Mind
be a form and veil of a
higher power, the Spirit, which
would be supramental in its
nature? Man’s highest
aspiration would then only
indicate the gradual un-
veiling of the Spirit
within, the preparation of a
higher life upon earth.
We
speak of the evolution of Life in Matter, the evolution of Mind in Matter; 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.3 And then there seems to be
little objection to a farther 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 or 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 organization 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
26
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
realization 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 realization
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 moral 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
realizable by the lower term, justify themselves to the deliberate reason as
well as to the persistent instinct or intuition of mankind.
LD.I,
1
27
CHAPTER II
THE PLACE OF MAN IN
EVOLUTION
An evolution of
consciousness is the central motive of
terrestrial existence. The
evolutionary working of
Nature has a double process:
an evolution of forms,
an evolution of the soul.
A
SPIRITUAL evolution, an evolution of consciousness in Matter is a constant
developing self-formation till the form can reveal the indwelling spirit, is .
. . the key-note, the central significant motive of the terrestrial existence.
This significance is concealed at the outset by the involution3 of the Spirit,1 the Divine Reality, in a
dense material Inconscience; a veil of Inconscience, a veil of insensibility of
Matter hides the universal Consciousness-Force2 which works within it, so
that the Energy, which is the first form the Force of creation assumes in the
physical universe, appears to be itself inconscient and yet does the works of a
vast occult intelligence. The obscure mysterious creatrix ends indeed by
delivering the secret consciousness out of its thick and tenebrous prison; but
she delivers it slowly, little by little, in minute infinitesimal drops, in
thin jets, in small vibrant concretions of energy and substance, of life, of
mind, as if that were all she could get out through the crass obstacle, the
dull reluctant medium of an inconscient stuff of existence. At first she houses
herself in forms of Matter which appear to be altogether unconscious, then
struggles towards mentality in the guise of living Matter and attains to it
imperfectly in the conscious animal. This consciousness is at first
rudimentary, mostly a half subconscious or just conscious instinct; it develops
slowly till in more organized forms of living Matter it reaches its climax of
intelligence and exceeds itself in Man, the thinking animal who develops into
the reasoning mental being but carries along with him even at his highest
elevation the mould of original animality, the dead weight of subconscience of
body, the downward pull of gravitation towards the original Inertia and
Nescience, the control of an inconscient material Nature over his conscious
evolution, its power for limitation,
28
its
law of difficult development, its immense force for retardation and
frustration. This control by the original Inconscience over the consciousness
emerging from it takes the general shape of a mentality struggling towards
knowledge but itself, in what seems to be its fundamental nature, an Ignorance.
Thus hampered and burdened, mental man has still to evolve out of himself the
fully conscious being, a divine manhood or a spiritual and supramental
supermanhood which shall be the next product of the evolution. That transition
will mark the passage from the evolution in the Ignorance to a greater
evolution in the Knowledge, founded and proceeding in the light of the
Superconscient and no longer in the darkness of the Ignorance and Inconscience.
This
terrestrial evolutionary working of Nature from Matter to Mind5 and beyond it has a double
process: there is an outward visible process of physical evolution with birth
as its machinery,—for each evolved form of body housing its own evolved power
of consciousness is maintained and kept in continuity by heredity; there is, at
the same time, an invisible process of soul evolution with rebirth into
ascending grades of form and consciousness as its machinery. The first by
itself would mean only a cosmic evolution; for the individual would be a
quickly perishing instrument, and the race, a more abiding collective
formulation, would be the real step in the progressive manifestation of the
cosmic Inhabitant, the universal Spirit:1 rebirth is an indispensable
condition for any long duration and evolution of the individual being in the
earth-existence. Each grade of cosmic manifestation, each type of form that can
house the indwelling spirit, is turned by rebirth into a means for the
individual soul, the psychic entity,4 to manifest more and more
of its concealed consciousness; each life becomes a step in a victory over
Matter by a greater progression of consciousness in it which shall make
eventually Matter itself a means for the full manifestation of the Spirit.
LD.II,
23
Man occupies the crest of
the evolutionary wave. With him
occurs the passage from an
unconscious to a conscious
evolution.
It
must be observed that the appearance of human mind and body on the earth marks
a crucial step, a decisive change in the
29
course
and process of the evolution; it is not merely a continuation of the old lines.
Up till this advent of a developed thinking mind in Matter evolution had been
effected, not by the self-aware aspiration, intention, will or seeking of the
living being, but subconsciously or subliminally6 by the automatic operation of
Nature. This was so because the evolution began from the Inconscience and the
secret Consciousness had not emerged sufficiently from it to operate through
the self-aware participating individual will of its living creature. But in man
the necessary change has been made,—the being has become awake and aware of
himself; there has been made manifest in Mind its will to develop, to grow in
knowledge, to deepen the inner and widen the outer existence, to increase the
capacities of the nature. Man has seen that there can be a higher status of
consciousness than his own; the evolutionary oestrus is there in his parts of
mind and life,5 the aspiration to exceed himself is delivered and
articulate within him: he has become conscious of a soul, discovered the self and
spirit. In him, then, the substitution of a conscious for a subconscious
evolution has become conceivable and practicable, and it may well be concluded
that the aspiration, the urge, the persistent endeavour in him is a sure sign
of Nature’s will for a higher way of fulfillment, the emergence of a greater
status.
LD.II,
23
At each step one receives an
intimation of what the
following step will be.
Already,
in what seems to be inconscient in Life, the signs of sensation coming towards
the surface are visible; in moving and breathing life the emergence of
sensitive mind is apparent and the preparation of thinking mind is not entirely
hidden, while in thinking mind, when it develops, there appear at an early
stage the rudimentary strivings and afterwards the more developed seekings of a
spiritual consciousness. As plant life contains in itself the obscure
possibility of the conscious animal, as the animal mind is astir with the
movements of feeling and perception and the rudiments of conception that are the
first ground for man the thinker, so man the mental being is sublimated by the
endeavour of the evolutionary Energy to develop out of him the spiritual man,
the fully con-
30
conscious
being, man exceeding his first material self and discoverer of his true self
and highest nature.
LD.II,
24
The nature of the next step
is indicated by the deep
aspirations awakening in the
human race.
The
action of the evolutionary Nature in a type of being and consciousness is first
to develop the type to its utmost capacity by just such a subtilization and
increasing complexity till it is ready for her bursting of the shell, the
ripened decisive emergence, reversal, turning over of consciousness on itself
that constitutes a new stage in the evolution. If it be supposed that her next
step is the spiritual and supramental being, the stress of spirituality in the
race may be taken as a sign that that is Nature’s intention, the sign too of
the capacity of man to operate in himself or aid her to operate the transition.
If the appearance in animal being of a type similar in some respects to the
ape-kind but already from the beginning endowed with the elements of humanity
was the method of the human evolution, the appearance in the human being of a
spiritual type resembling mental-animal humanity but already with the stamp of
the spiritual aspiration on it would be the obvious method of Nature for the
evolutionary production of the spiritual and supramental being.
It
is pertinently suggested that if such an evolutionary culmination is intended
and man is to be its medium, it will only be a few especially evolved human
beings who will form the new type and move towards the new life; that once
done, the rest of humanity will sink back from a spiritual aspiration no longer
necessary for Nature’s purpose and remain quiescent in its normal status. It
can equally be reasoned that the human gradation must be preserved if there is
really an ascent of the soul by reincarnation through the evolutionary degrees
towards the spiritual summit; for otherwise the most necessary of all the
intermediate steps will be lacking. It must be conceded at once that there is
not the least probability or possibility of the whole human race rising in a
block to the supramental level; what is suggested is nothing so revolutionary
and astonishing, but only the capacity in the human mentality, when it has
reached a certain level or a certain point of stress of the evolutionary
impetus, to press towards a higher plane of
31
consciousness
and its embodiment in the being. The being will necessarily undergo by this
embodiment a change from the normal constitution of its nature, a change
certainly of its mental and emotional and sensational constitution and also to
a great extent of the body-consciousness and the physical conditioning of our
life and energies; but the change of consciousness will be the chief factor,
the initial movement, the physical modification will be a subordinate factor, a
consequence. This transmutation of the consciousness will always remain
possible to the human being when the flame of the soul, the pyshic7 kindling,
becomes potent in heart and mind and the nature is ready. The spiritual
aspiration is innate in man; for he is, unlike the animal, aware of
imperfection and limitation and feels that there is something to be attained
beyond what he now is: this urge towards self-exceeding is not likely ever to
die out totally in the race. The human mental status will be always there, but
it will be there not only as a degree in the scale of rebirth, but as an open
step towards the spiritual and supramental status.
LD.II,
23
A change of consciousness is
the major fact of the next
evolutionary transformation,
and the consciousness itself,
by its own mutation, will
impose and effect any neces-
sary mutation of the body.
In
the previous stages of the evolution Nature’s first care and effort had to be
directed towards a change in the physical organization, for only so could there
be a change of consciousness; this was a necessity imposed by the insufficiency
of the force of consciousness already in formation to effect a change in the
body. But in man a reversal is possible, indeed inevitable; for it is through
consciousness, through its transmutation and no longer through a new bodily
organism as a first instrumentation that the evolution can and must be
effected. In the inner reality of things a change of consciousness was always
the major fact, the evolution has always had a spiritual significance and the
physical change was only instrumental; but this relation was concealed by the
first abnormal balance of the two factors, the body of the external
Inconscience outweighing and obscuring in importance the spiritual element, the
conscious being. But once the balance has been righted, it is no longer the
change of body that must precede the change of consciousness;
32
the
consciousness itself by its mutation will necessitate and operate whatever
mutation is needed for the body. It has to be noted that the human mind has
already shown a capacity to aid Nature in the evolution of new types of plant
and animal; it has created new forms of its environment, developed by knowledge
and discipline considerable changes in its own mentality. It is not an
impossibility that man should aid Nature consciously also in his own spiritual
and physical evolution and transformation. The urge to it is already there and
partly effective, though still incompletely understood and accepted by the
surface mentality; but one day it may understand, go deeper within itself and
discover the means, the secret energy, the intended operation of the
Consciousness-Force2 within which is the hidden reality of what we call
Nature.
All
these are conclusions that can be arrived at even from the observation of the
outward phenomena of Nature’s progression, her surface evolution of being and
of consciousness in the physical birth of the body. But there is the other, the
invisible factor; there is rebirth, the progress of the soul by ascent from
grade to grade of the evolving existence, and in the grades to higher and
higher types of bodily and mental instrumentation. In this progression the
psychic4 entity is still veiled, even in man the conscious mental being, by its
instruments, by mind and life and body; it is unable to manifest fully, held back
from coming to the front where it can stand out as the master of its nature,
obliged to submit to a certain determination by the instruments, to a
domination of Purusha by Prakriti.8 But in man the psychic part
of the personality is able to develop with a much greater rapidity than in the
inferior creation, and a time can arrive when the soul entity is close to the
point at which it will emerge from behind the veil into the open and become the
master of its instrumentation in Nature. But this will mean that the secret
indwelling spirit, the Daemon, the Godhead within is on the point of emergence;
and, when it emerges, it can hardly be doubted that its demand will be, as
indeed it already is in the mind itself when it undergoes the inner psychic
influence, for a diviner, a more spiritual existence. In the nature of the
earth life where the mind is an instrument of the Ignorance, this can only be
effected by a change of consciousness, a transition from a foundation in
Ignorance to a foundation in Knowledge, from the mental to a supramental
33
consciousness,
a supramental instrumentation of Nature.
LD.II,
23
There is no reason to
suppose that this transformation
is impossible on earth. In
fact, it would give the
truest meaning to earthly
existence.
There
is no conclusive validity in the reasoning that because this is a world of
Ignorance, such a transformation can only be achieved by a passage to a heaven
beyond or cannot be achieved at all and the demand of the psychic entity is
itself ignorant and must be replaced by a merger of the soul in the Absolute.
This conclusion could only be solely valid if Ignorance were the whole meaning,
substance and power of the world-manifestation or if there were no element in
World-Nature itself through which there could be an exceeding of the ignorant
mentality that still burdens our present status of being. But the Ignorance is
only a portion of this World-Nature; it is not the whole of it, not the
original power or creator: it is in its higher origin a self-limiting Knowledge
and even in its lower origin, its emergence out of the sheer material
Inconscience, it is a suppressed Consciousness labouring to find, to recover
itself, to manifest Knowledge, which is its true character, as the foundation
of existence. In universal Mind itself there are ranges above our mentality
which are instruments of the cosmic truth-cognition, and into these the mental
being can surely rise; for already it rises towards them in supernormal
conditions or receives from them without yet knowing or possessing them
intuitions, spiritual intimations, large influxes of illumination or spiritual
capacity. All these ranges are conscious of what is beyond them, and the
highest of them is directly open to the Supermind,9 aware of the
Truth-consciousness which exceeds it. Moreover, in the evolving being itself,
those greater powers of consciousness are here, supporting mind-truth,
underlying its action which screens them; this Supermind and those Truth-powers
uphold Nature by their secret presence: even, truth of mind is their result, a
diminished operation, a representation in partial figures. It is, therefore,
not only natural but seems inevitable that these higher powers of Existence
should manifest here in Mind as Mind itself has manifested in Life and Matter.
LD.II,
23
c
34
Man’s urge towards
spirituality is an undeniable indi-
cation of the inner drive of
the Spirit within towards
emergence, its insistence
towards the next step of its
manifestation.
If
a spiritual unfolding on earth is the hidden truth of our birth into Matter, if
it is fundamentally an evolution of consciousness that has been taking place in
Nature, then man as he is cannot be the last term of that evolution: he is too
imperfect an expression of the spirit, mind itself a too limited form and
instrumentation; mind is only a middle term of consciousness, the mental being
can only be a transitional being. If, then, man is incapable of exceeding
mentality, he must be surpassed and supermind9 and superman must manifest
and take the lead of the creation. But if his mind is capable of opening to
what exceeds it, then there is no reason why man himself should not arrive at
supermind and supermanhood or at least lend his mentality, life and body to an
evolution of that greater term of the Spirit manifesting in Nature.
LD.II,
23
35
CHAPTER III
THE PRESENT EVOLUTIONARY
CRISIS
It is often claimed that
reason is the highest faculty
of man and that it has
enabled him to master himself
and to master Nature. Has
reason really succeeded?
. .
. Apart from the stumbling action of the world, there has been a labour of the
individual thinker in man and this has achieved a higher quality and risen to a
loftier and clearer atmosphere above the general human thought-levels. Here
there has been the work of a reason that seeks always after knowledge and
strives patiently to find out truth for itself, without bias, without the
interference of distorting interests, to study everything, to analyse
everything, to know the principle and process of everything. Philosophy,
Science, learning, the reasoned arts, all the agelong labour of the critical
reason in man have been the result of this effort. In the modern era under the
impulsion of Science this effort assumed enormous proportions and claimed for a
time to examine successfully and lay down finally the true principle and the
sufficient rule of process not only for all the activities of Nature, but for
all the activities of man. It has done great things, but it has not been in the
end a success. The human mind is beginning to perceive that it has left the
heart of almost every problem untouched and illumined only outsides and a
certain range of processes. There has been a great and ordered classification
and mechanization, a great discovery and practical result of increasing
knowledge, but only on the physical surface of things. Vast abysses of Truth
lie below in which are concealed the real springs, the mysterious powers and
secretly decisive influences of existence. It is a question whether the
intellectual reason will ever be able to give us an adequate account of these
deeper and greater things or subject them to the intelligent will as it has
succeeded in explaining and canalizing, through still imperfectly, yet with
much show of triumphant result, the forces of physical Nature. But these other
powers are much larger,
36
subtler,
deeper down, more hidden, elusive and variable than those of physical Nature.
The
whole difficulty of the reason in trying to govern our existence is that
because of its own inherent limitations it is unable to deal with life in its
complexity, or in its integral movements; it is compelled to break it up into
parts, to make more or less artificial classifications, to build systems with
limited data which are contradicted, upset or have to be continually modified
by other data, to work out a selection of regulated potentialities which is
broken down by the bursting of a new wave of yet unregulated potentialities.
HC.
11
When reason applies itself
to life and action it becomes
partial and passionate and
the servant of other forces
than the pure truth.
But
even if the intellect keeps itself as impartial and disinterested as
possible,–and altogether impartial, altogether disinterested the human
intellect cannot be unless it is content to arrive at an entire divorce from
practice or a sort of large but ineffective tolerantism, eclecticism or
sceptical curiosity,–still the truths it discovers or the ideas it promulgates
become, the moment they are applied to life, the plaything of forces over which
the reason has little control. Science pursuing its cold and even way has made
discoveries which have served on one side a practical humanitarianism, on the
other supplied monstrous weapons to egoism and mutual destruction; it has made
possible a gigantic efficiency of organization which has been used on one side
for the economic and social amelioration of the nations and on the other for
turning each into a colossal battering-ram of aggression, ruin and slaughter.
It has given rise on the one side to a large rationalistic and altruistic
humanitarianism, on the other it has justified a godless egoism, vitalism,
vulgar will to power and success. It has drawn mankind together and given it a
new hope and at the same time crushed it with the burden of a monstrous
commercialism. Nor is this due, as is so often asserted, to its divorce from
religion or to any lack of idealism. Idealistic philosophy has been equally at
the service of the powers of good and evil and provided an intellectual
conviction both for reaction and for progress. Organized religion itself has
often enough in the past hounded
37
men
to crime and massacre and justified obscurantism and oppression.
The
truth is that upon which we are now insisting, that reason is in its nature an imperfect
light with a large but still restricted mission and that once it applies itself
to life and action it becomes subject to what it studies and the servant and
counsellor of the forces in whose obscure and ill-understood struggle it
intervenes. It can in its nature be used and has always been used to justify
any idea, theory of life, system of society or government, ideal of individual
or collective action to which the will of man attaches itself for the moment or
through the centuries. In philosophy it gives equally good reasons for monism
and pluralism or for any halting-place between them, for the belief in Being or
for the belief in Becoming, for optimism and pessimism, for activism and
quietism. It can justify the most mystic religionism and the most positive
atheism, get rid of God or see nothing else. In aesthetics it supplies the
basis equally for classicism and romanticism, for an idealistic, religious or
mystic theory of art or for the most earthy realism. It can with equal power
base austerely a strict and narrow moralism or prove triumphantly the thesis of
the antinomian. It has been the sufficient and convincing prophet of every kind
of autocracy or oligarchy and of every species of democracy; it supplies
excellent and satisfying reasons for competitive individualism and equally
excellent and satisfying reasons for communism or against communism and for
State socialism or for one variety of socialism against another. It can place
itself with equal effectivity at the service of utilitarianism, economism,
hedonism, aestheticism, sensualism, ethicism, idealism, or any other essential
need or activity of man and build around it a philosophy, a political and
social system, a theory of conduct and life. Ask it not to lean to one idea
alone, but to make an eclectic combination or a synthetic harmony and it will
satisfy you; only, there being any number of possible combinations or
harmonies, it will equally well justify the one or the other and set up or
throw down any one of them according as the spirit in man is attracted to or
withdraws from it. For it is really that which decides and the reason is only a
brilliant servant and minister of this veiled and secret sovereign.
HC.
12
38
Why does man have faith in
reason? Because reason has a
legitimate function to
fulfil, for which it is perfectly
adapted; and this is to
justify and illumine for man his
various experiences and to
give him faith and conviction
in holding on to the
enlarging of his consciousness.
This
truth is hidden from the rationalist because he is supported by two constant
articles of faith, first that his own reason is right and the reason of others
who differ from him is wrong, and secondly that whatever may be the present
deficiencies of the human intellect, the collective human reason will
eventually arrive at purity and be able to found human thoughts and life
securely on a clear rational basis entirely satisfying to the intelligence. His
first article of faith is no doubt the common expression of our egoism and
arrogant fallibility, but it is something more; it expresses this truth that it
is the legitimate function of the reason to justify to man his action and his
hope and the faith that is in him and to give him that idea and knowledge,
however restricted, and that dynamic conviction, however narrow and intolerant,
which he needs in order that he may live, act and grow in the highest light
available to him. The reason cannot grasp all truth in its embrace because
truth is too infinite for it; but still it does grasp the something of it which
we immediately need, and its insufficiency does not detract from the value of
its work, but is rather the measure of its value. For man is not intended to
grasp the whole truth of his being at once, but to move towards it through a
succession of experiences and a constant, though not by any means perfectly
continuous self-enlargement. The first business of reason then is to justify
and enlighten to him his various experiences and to give him faith and
conviction in holding on to his self-enlargings. It justifies to him now this,
now that, the experiences of the moment, the receding light of the past, the
half-seen vision of the future. Its inconstancy, its divisibility against
itself, its power of sustaining opposite views are the whole secret of its
value. It would not do indeed for it to support too conflicting views in the
same individual, except at moments of awakening and transition, but in the
collective body of men and in the successions of Time that is its whole
business. For so man moves towards the infinity of Truth by the experience of
its variety; so his reason helps him to build, change, destroy what he has
built and prepare a new construc-
39
tion,
in a word, to progress, grow, enlarge himself in his self-knowledge and
world-knowledge and their works.
HC.
12
But reason cannot arrive at
any final truth because it
can neither get to the root
of things nor embrace their
totality. It deals with the
finite, the separate and
has no measure for the all
and the infinite.
The
second article of faith of the believer in reason is also an error and yet
contains a truth. The reason cannot arrive at any final truth because it can
neither get to the root of things nor embrace the totality of their secrets; it
deals with the finite, the separate, the limited aggregate, and has no measure
for the all and the infinite. Nor can reason found a perfect life for man or a
perfect society. A purely rational human life would be a life baulked and
deprived of its most powerful dynamic sources; it would be a substitution of
the minister for the sovereign. A purely rational society could not come into
being and, if it could be born, either could not live or would sterilize and
petrify human existence. The root powers of human life, its intimate causes are
below, irrational, and they are above, suprarational. But this is true that by
constant enlargement, purification, openness the reason of man is bound to
arrive at an intelligent sense even of that which is hidden from it, a power of
passive yet sympathetic reflection of the Light that surpasses it. Its limit is
reached, its function is finished when it can say to man, ‘There is a Soul, a
Self, a God in the world and in man who works concealed and all is his
self-concealing and gradual self-unfolding. His minister I have been, slowly to
unseal your eyes, remove the thick integuments of your vision until there is
only my own luminous veil between you and him. Remove that and make the soul of
man one in fact and nature with this Divine; then you will know yourself,
discover the highest and widest law of your being, become the possessors or at
least the receivers and instruments of a higher will and knowledge than mine
and lay hold at last on the true secret and the whole sense of a human and yet
divine living.’
HC.
12
The limitations of reason
become very strikingly apparent
when it is confronted with
the religious life.
Here
is a realm at which the intellectual reason gazes with the
40
bewildered
mind of a foreigner who hears a language of which the words and the spirit are
unintelligible to him and sees everywhere forms of life and principles of
thought and action which are absolutely strange to his experience.
The
unaided intellectual reason faced with the phenomena of the religious life is
naturally apt to adopt one of two attitudes, both of them shallow in the
extreme, hastily presumptuous and erroneous. Either it views the whole thing as
a mass of superstition, a mystical nonsense, a farrago of ignorant barbaric
survivals,–that was the extreme spirit of the rationalist now happily, though
not dead, yet much weakened and almost moribund,–or it patronizes religion,
tries to explain its origins, to get rid of it by the process of explaining it
away; or it labours gently or forcefully to reject or correct its
superstitions, crudities, absurdities, to purify it into an abstract
nothingness or persuade it to purify itself in the light of the reasoning
intelligence; or it allows it a role, leaves it perhaps for the edification of
the ignorant, admits its value as a moralizing influence or its utility to the
State for keeping the lower classes in order, even perhaps tries to invent that
strange chimera, a rational religion.
HC.
13
What is religion really and
essentially and why is it
outside the realm of reason?
The
deepest heart, the inmost essence of religion, apart from its outward machinery
of creed, cult, ceremony and symbol, is the search for God and the finding of
God. Its aspiration is to discover the Infinite, the Absolute, the One, the
Divine, who is all these things and yet no abstraction but a Being. Its work is
a sincere living out of the true and intimate relations between man and God,
relations of unity, relations of difference, relations of an illuminated
knowledge, an ecstatic love and delight, an absolute surrender and service, a
casting of every part of our existence out of its normal status into an uprush
of man towards the Divine and a descent of the Divine into man. All this has
nothing to do with the realm of reason or its normal activities; its aim, its
sphere, its process is suprarational. The knowledge of God is not to be gained
by weighing the feeble arguments of reason for or against his
41
existence:
it is to be gained only by a self-transcending and absolute consecration,
aspiration and experience. Nor does that experience proceed by anything like
rational scientific experiment or rational philosophic thinking. Even in those
parts of religious discipline which seem most to resemble scientific
experiment, the method is a verification of things which exceed the reason and
its timid scope. Even in those parts of religious knowledge which seem most to
resemble intellectual operations, the illuminating faculties are not
imagination, logic and rational judgment, but revelations, inspirations,
intuitions, intuitive discernments that leap down to us from a plane of
suprarational light. The love of God is an infinite and absolute feeling which
does not use a language of rational worship and adoration; the delight in God
is that peace and bliss which passes all understanding. The surrender to God is
the surrender of the whole being to a suprarational light, will, power and love
and his service takes no account of the compromises with life which the
practical reason of man uses as the best part of its method in the ordinary
conduct of mundane existence. Wherever religion really finds itself, wherever
it opens itself to its own spirit,–there is plenty of that sort of religious
practice which is halting, imperfect, half-sincere, only half-sure of itself
and in which reason can get in a word,–its way is absolute and its fruits are
ineffable.
HC.
13
Can religion then be the
guide of human life? It is
a fact that in ancient times
society gave a pre-eminent
place to religion.
Since
the infinite, the absolute and transcendent, the universal, the One is the
secret summit of existence and to reach the spiritual consciousness and the
Divine the ultimate goal and aim of our being and therefore of the whole
development of the individual and the collectivity in all its parts and all its
activities, reason cannot be the last and highest guide . . . For reason stops
short of the Divine and only compromises with the problems of life . . . Where
then are we to find the directing light and the regulating and harmonizing
principle?
The
first answer which will suggest itself, the answer con-
42
stantly
given by the Asiatic mind, is that we shall find it directly and immediately in
religion.
A
certain pre-eminence of religion, the overshadowing or at least the colouring
of life, an overtopping of all the other instincts and fundamental ideas by the
religious instinct and the religious ideas is, we may note, not peculiar to
Asiatic civilizations, but has always been more or less the normal state of the
human mind and of human societies . . . We must suppose then that in this
leading, this predominant part assigned to religion by the normal human
collectivity there is some great need and truth of our natural being to which
we must always after however long an infidelity return.
HC.
17
But, on the other hand,
humanity–and in particular
that portion of humanity
which was the standard-bearer of
progress–has revolted
against the predominance of
religion.
On
the other hand, we must recognize the fact that in a time of great activity, of
high aspiration, of deep sowing, of rich fruit-bearing, such as the modern age
with all its faults and errors has been, a time especially when humanity got
rid of much that was cruel, evil, ignorant, dark, odious, not by the power of
religion, but by the power of the awakened intelligence and of human idealism
and sympathy, this predominance of religion has been violently attacked and
rejected by that portion of humanity which was for that time the
standard-bearer of thought and progress, Europe after the Renascence, modern
Europe.
HC.
17
Very often the accredited
religions have opposed progress
and sided with the forces of
obscurity and oppression.
And it has needed a denial,
a revolt of the oppressed
human mind and heart to
correct these errors and set
religion right. This would
not have been so if religion were
the true and sufficient
guide of the whole of human life.
We
need not follow the rationalistic or atheistic mind through all its aggressive
indictment of religion. We need not for instance lay a too excessive stress on
the superstitions, aberrations, violences, crimes even, which Churches and
cults and
43
creeds
have favoured, admitted, sanctioned, supported or exploited for their own
benefit . . . As well might one cite the crimes and errors which have been
committed in the name of liberty or of order as a sufficient condemnation of
the ideal of liberty or the ideal of social order. But we have to note the fact
that such a thing was possible and to find its explanation . . . We must
observe the root of this evil, which is not in true religion itself, but in its
infrarational parts, not in spiritual faith and aspiration, but in our ignorant
human confusion of religion with a particular creed, sect, cult, religious
society or Church. . . .
The
whole root of the historic insufficiency of religion as a guide and control of
human society lies there. Churches and creeds have, for example, stood
violently in the way of philosophy and science, burned a Giordano Bruno,
imprisoned a Galileo, and so generally misconducted themselves in this matter
that philosophy and science had in self-defense to turn upon Religion and rend
her to pieces in order to get a free field for their legitimate development;
and this because men in the passion and darkness of their vital nature had
chosen to think that religion was bound up with certain fixed intellectual
conceptions about God and the world which could not stand scrutiny, and
therefore scrutiny had to be put down by fire and sword; scientific and philosophical
truth had to be denied in order that religious error might survive. We see too
that a narrow religious spirit often oppresses and impoverishes the joy and
beauty of life, either from an intolerant asceticism or, as the Puritans
attempted it, because they could not see that religious austerity is not the
whole of religion, though it may be an important side of it, is not the sole
ethico-religious approach to God, since love, charity, gentleness, tolerance,
kindliness are also and even more divine, and they forgot or never knew that
God is love and beauty as well as purity. In politics religion has often thrown
itself on the side of power and resisted the coming of larger political ideals,
because it was itself, in the form of a Church, supported by power and because
it confused religion with the Church, or because it stood for a false
theocracy, forgetting that true theocracy is the kingdom of God in man and not
the kingdom of a Pope, a priesthood or a sacerdotal class. So too it has often
supported a rigid and outworn social system, because it thought its own life
bound up
44
with
social forms with which it happened to have been associated during a long
portion of its own history and erroneously concluded that even a necessary
change there would be a violation of religion and a danger to its existence. As
if so mighty and inward a power as the religious spirit in man could be
destroyed by anything so small as the change of a social form or so outward as
a social readjustment! This error in its many shapes has been the great
weakness of religion as practised in the past and the opportunity and
justification for the revolt of the intelligence, the aesthetic sense, the
social and political idealism, even the ethical spirit of the human being
against what should have been its own highest tendency and law.
HC.
17
If religion has failed, it
is because it has confused the
essential with the
adventitious. True religion is spiri-
tual religion, it is a
seeking after God, the opening of
the deepest life of the soul
to the indwelling Godhead,
the eternal Omnipresence.
Dogmas, cults, moral codes are
aids and props; they may be
offered to man but not im-
posed on him.
It
is true in a sense that religion should be the dominant thing in life, its
light and law, but religion as it should be and is in its inner nature, its
fundamental law of being, a seeking after God, the cult of spirituality, the
opening of the deepest life of the soul to the indwelling Godhead, the eternal
Omnipresence. On the other hand, it is true that religion when it identifies
itself only with a creed, a cult, a Church, a system of ceremonial forms, may
well become a retarding force and there may therefore arise a necessity for the
human spirit to reject its control over the varied activities of life. There
are two aspects of religion, true religion and religionism. True religion is
spiritual religion, that which seeks to live in the spirit, in what is beyond
the intellect, beyond the aesthetic and ethical and practical being of man, and
to inform and govern these members of our being by the higher light and law of
the spirit. Religionism, on the contrary, entrenches itself in some narrow
pietistic exaltation of the lower members or lays exclusive stress on
intellectual dogmas, forms and ceremonies, on some fixed and rigid moral code,
on some religio-political, or religio-social system. Not that these things are
altogether negligible or that they
45
must
be unworthy or unnecessary or that a spiritual religion need disdain the aid of
forms, ceremonies, creeds or systems. On the contrary, they are needed by man
because the lower members have to be exalted and raised before they can be
fully spiritualized, before they can directly feel the spirit obey its law. An
intellectual formula is often needed by the thinking temperament or other parts
of the infrarational being, a set moral code by man’s vital nature in their
turn towards the inner life. But these things are aids and supports, not the
essence; precisely because they belong to the rational and infrarational parts,
they can be nothing more and, if too blindly insisted on, may even hamper the
suprarational light. Such as they are, they have to be offered to man and used
by him, but not to be imposed on him as his sole law by a forced and inflexible
domination. In the use of them toleration and free permission of variation is
the first rule which should be observed. The spiritual essence of religion is
alone the one thing supremely needful, the thing to which we have always to
hold and subordinate to it every other element or motive.
HC.
17
Moreover, religion often
considers spiritual life as made
up of renunciation and
mortification. Religion thus becomes
a force that discourages
life and it cannot, therefore,
be a true law and guide for
life.
But
here comes in an ambiguity which brings in a deeper source of divergence. For
by spirituality religion seems often to mean something remote from earthly
life, different from it, hostile to it. It seems to condemn the pursuit of
earthly aims as a trend opposed to the turn to a spiritual life and the hopes
of man on earth as an illusion or a vanity incompatible with the hopes of man
in heaven. The spirit then becomes something aloof which man can only reach by
throwing away the life of his lower members. Either he must abandon this nether
life after a certain point, when it has served its purpose, or must
persistently discourage, mortify and kill it. If that be the true sense of
religion, then obviously religion has no positive message for human society in the
proper field of social effort, hope and aspiration or for the individual in any
of the lower members of his being. For each principle of our nature seeks
naturally
46
for
perfection in its own sphere and, if it is to obey a higher power, it must be
because that power gives it a greater perfection and a fuller satisfaction even
in its own field. But if perfectibility is denied to it and therefore the
aspiration to perfection taken away by the spiritual urge, then it must either
lose faith in itself and the power to pursue the natural expansion of its
energies and activities or it must reject the call of the spirit in order to
follow its own bend and law, dharma.10 This quarrel between earth
and heaven, between the spirit and its members becomes still more sterilizing
if spirituality takes the form of a religion of sorrow and suffering and
austere mortification and the gospel of the vanity of things; in its
exaggeration it leads to such nightmares of the soul as that terrible gloom and
hopelessness of the Middle Ages in their worst moment when the one hope of
mankind seemed to be in the approaching and expected end of the world, an
inevitable and desirable Pralaya.11 But even in less pronounced
and intolerant forms of this pessimistic attitude with regard to the world, it
becomes a force for the discouragement of life and cannot, therefore, be a true
law and guide for life. All pessimism is to that extent a denial of the Spirit,
of its fullness and power, an impatience with the ways of God in the world, an insufficient
faith in the divine Wisdom and Will that created the world and for ever guide
it. It admits a wrong notion about that supreme Wisdom and Power and therefore
cannot itself be the supreme wisdom and power of the spirit to which the world
can look for guidance and for the uplifting of its whole life towards the
Divine. . . .
The
world-shunning monk, the mere ascetic may indeed well find by this turn his own
individual and peculiar salvation, the spiritual recompense of his renunciation
and tapasya,12 as the materialist may find by his own exclusive method the
appropriate rewards of his energy and concentrated seeking; but neither can be
the true guide of mankind and its law-giver. The monastic attitude implies
fear, an aversion, a distrust of life and its aspirations, and one cannot
wisely guide that with which one is entirely out of sympathy, that which one
wishes to minimize and discourage. The sheer ascetic spirit, if it directed
life and human society, could only prepare it to be a means for denying itself
and getting away from its own motives. An ascetic guidance might tolerate the
lower activities, but
47
only
with a view to persuade them in the end to minimize and finally cease from
their own action.
In
spirituality then, restored to its true sense, we
must
seek for the directing light and the harmonizing
law.
But
a spirituality which draws back from life to envelop it without being dominated
by it does not labour under this disability. The spiritual man who can guide
human life towards its perfection is typified in the ancient Indian idea of the
Rishi,13 one who has lived fully the life of man and found the word of the
supra-intellectual, supramental, spiritual truth. He has risen above these
lower limitations and can view all things from above, but also he is in
sympathy with their effort and can view them from within; he has the complete
inner knowledge and the higher surpassing knowledge. Therefore he can guide the
world humanly as God guides it divinely, because like the Divine he is in the
life of the world and yet above it.
In
spirituality, then, understood in this sense, we must seek for the directing
light and the harmonizing law, and in religion only in proportion as it
identifies itself with this spirituality. So long as it falls short of this, it
is one human activity and power among others, and, even if it be considered the
most important and the most powerful, it cannot wholly guide the others. If it
seeks always to fix them into the limits of a creed, an unchangeable law, a particular
system, it must be prepared to see them revolting from its control; for
although they may accept this impress for a time and greatly profit by it in
the end they must move by the law of their being towards a freer activity and
an untrammelled movement. Spirituality respects the freedom of the human soul,
because it is itself fulfilled by freedom; and the deepest meaning of freedom
is the power to expand and grow towards perfection by the law of one’s own
nature, dharma.10
HC.
17
On the other hand, modern
man has not solved the problem
of the relation of the
individual to the society. What
are their respective roles
in the spiritual progress of
mankind?
In
our human aspiration towards a personal perfection and the
48
perfection
of the life of the race the elements of the future evolution are foreshadowed
and striven after, but in a confusion of half-enlightened knowledge; there is a
discord between the necessary elements, an opposing emphasis, a profusion of
rudimentary unsatisfying and ill-accorded solutions. These sway between the
three principal preoccupations of our idealism,–the complete single development
of the human being in himself, the perfectibility of the individual, a full
development pragmatically restricted, the perfect or best possible relations of
individual with individual and society and of community with community. An
exclusive or dominant emphasis is laid sometimes on the individual, sometimes
on the collectivity or society, sometimes on a right and balanced relation
between the individual and the collective human whole.
In
recent times the whole stress has passed to the life of the race, to a search
for the perfect society, and latterly to a concentration on the right
organization and scientific mechanization of the life of mankind as a whole;
the individual now tends more to be regarded only as a member of the
collectivity, a unit of the race whose existence must be subordinated to the
common aims and total interest of the organized society, and much less or not
at all as a mental or spiritual being with his own right and power of
existence. This tendency has not yet reached its acme everywhere, but
everywhere it is rapidly increasing and heading towards dominance.
Thus,
in the vicissitudes of human thought, on one side the individual is moved or
invited to discover and pursue his own self-affirmation, his own development of
mind and life and body, his own spiritual perfection; on the other he is called
on to efface and subordinate himself and to accept the ideas, ideals, will, instincts,
interests of the community as his own. He is moved by Nature to live for
himself and by something deep within him to affirm his individuality; he is
called upon by society and by a certain mental idealism to live for humanity or
for the greater good of the community. The principle of self and its interest
is met and opposed by the principle of altruism. The State erects its godhead
and demands his obedience, submission, subordination, self-immolation; the
individual has to affirm against this exorbitant claim the rights of his
ideals, his ideas, his personality, his conscience. It is evident that all this
49
conflict
of standards is a groping of the mental Ignorance of man seeking to find its
way and grasping different sides of the truth but unable by its want of
integrality in knowledge to harmonize them together. A unifying and harmonizing
knowledge can alone find the way, but that knowledge belongs to a deeper
principle of our being to which oneness and integrality are native. It is only
by finding that in ourselves that we can solve the problem of our existence and
with it the problem of the true way of individual and communal living.
There
is a Reality, a truth of all existence which is greater and more abiding than
all its formations and manifestations; to find that truth and Reality and live
in it, achieve the most perfect manifestation and formation possible of it,
must be the secret of perfection whether of individual or communal being. This
Reality is there within each thing and gives to each of its formations its
power of being and value of being. The universe is a manifestation of the
Reality, and there is a truth of the universal existence, a Power of cosmic
being, an all-self or world-spirit. Humanity is a formation or manifestation of
the Reality in the universe, and there is a truth and self of humanity, a human
spirit, a destiny of human life. The community is a formation of the Reality, a
manifestation of the spirit of man, and there is a truth, a self, a power of
this collective being. The individual is a formation of the Reality, and there
is a truth of the individual, an individual self, soul or spirit that expresses
itself through the individual mind, life and body and can express itself too in
something that goes beyond mind, life and body, something even that goes beyond
humanity. For our humanity is not the whole of the Reality or its best possible
self-formation or self-expression,—the Reality has assumed before man existed
an infra-human formation and self-creation and can assume after him or in him a
suprahuman formation and self-creation.
LD.II,
28
It is wrong to demand that
the individual subordinate
himself to the collectivity
or merge in it, because
it is by its most advanced
individuals that the col-
lectivity progresses and
they can really advance
only if they are free. But
it is true that as the
D
50
individual advances
spiritually, he finds himself more
and more united with the
collectivity and the All.
The
individual is indeed the key of the evolutionary movement; for it is the
individual who finds himself, who becomes conscious of the Reality. The
movement of the collectivity is a largely subconscious mass movement; it has to
formulate and express itself through the individuals to become conscious: its
general mass consciousness is always less evolved than the consciousness of its
most developed individuals, and it progresses in so far as it accepts their
impress or develops what they develop. The individual does not owe his ultimate
allegiance either to the State which is a machine or to the community which is
a part of life and not the whole life: his allegiance must be to the Truth, the
Self, the Spirit, the Divine which is in him and in all; not to subordinate or
lose himself in the mass, but to find and express that truth of being in
himself and help the community and humanity in its seeking for its own truth
and fullness of being must be his real object of existence. But the extent to
which the power of the individual life or the spiritual Reality within it
becomes operative, depends on his own development: so long as he is
undeveloped, he has to subordinate in many ways his undeveloped self to
whatever is greater than it. As he develops, he moves towards a spiritual
freedom, but this freedom is not something entirely separate from
all-existence; it has a solidarity with it because that too is the self, the
same spirit. As he moves towards spiritual freedom, he moves also towards
spiritual oneness. The spiritually realized, the liberated man is preoccupied,
says the Gita,14 with the good of all beings; Buddha discovering the
way of Nirvana16 must turn back to open that way to those who are
still under the delusion of their constructive instead of their real being—or
non-being; Vivekananda,15 drawn by the Absolute, feels also the call of the
disguised Godhead in humanity and most the call of the fallen and the
suffering, the call of the self to the self in the obscure body of the
universe. For the awakened individual the realization of his truth of being and
his inner liberation and perfection must be his primary seeking,—first, because
that is the call of the Spirit within him, but also because it is only by
liberation and perfection and realization of the truth of being that man can
arrive at truth of living. A perfected community also can exist only by the
perfection of its individuals, and perfection can
51
come
only by the discovery and affirmation in life by each of his own spiritual
being and the discovery by all of their spiritual unity and a resultant life
unity.
LD.II,
28
The present evolutionary
crisis comes from a disparity
between the limited
faculties of man–mental, ethical
and spiritual–and the
technical and economical means
at his disposal.
At
present mankind is undergoing an evolutionary crisis in which is concealed a
choice of its destiny; for a stage has been reached in which the human mind has
achieved in certain directions an enormous development while in others it
stands arrested and bewildered and can no longer find its way. A structure of
the external life has been raised up by man’s ever-active mind and life-will, a
structure of an unmanageable hugeness and complexity, for the service of his
mental, vital, physical claims and urges, a complex political, social,
administrative, economic, cultural machinery, an organized collective means for
his intellectual, sensational, aesthetic and material satisfaction. Man has
created a system of civilization which has become too big for his limited
mental capacity and understanding and his still more limited spiritual and
moral capacity to utilize and manage, a too dangerous servant of his blundering
ego17 and its appetites. For no greater seeing mind, no intuitive soul of
knowledge has yet come to his surface of consciousness which could make this basic
fullness of life a condition for the free growth of something that exceeded it.
This new fullness of the means of life might be, by its power for a release
from the incessant unsatisfied stress of his economic and physical needs, an
opportunity for the full pursuit of other and greater aims surpassing the
material existence, for the discovery of a greater and diviner spirit which
would intervene and use life for a higher perfection of the being: but it is
being used instead for the multiplication of new wants and an aggressive
expansion of the collective ego. At the same time Science has put at his
disposal many potencies of the universal Force and has made the life of
humanity materially one; but what uses this universal Force is a little human
individual or communal ego17 with nothing universal in its light of knowledge or
its movements, no inner
52
sense
or power which would create in this physical drawing together of the human
world a true life unity, a mental unity or a spiritual oneness. All that is
there is a chaos of clashing mental ideas, urges of individual and collective
physical want and need, vital claims and desires, impulses of an ignorant
life-push, hungers and calls for life satisfaction of individuals, classes,
nations, a rich fungus of political and social and economic nostrums and
notions, a hustling medley of slogans and panaceas for which men are ready to
oppress and be oppressed, to kill and be killed, to impose them somehow or
other by the immense and too formidable means placed at his disposal, in the
belief that this is his way out to something ideal. The evolution of human mind
and life must necessarily lead towards an increasing universality; but on a
basis of ego and segmenting and dividing mind this opening to the universal can
only create a vast pollulation of unaccorded ideas and impulses, a surge of
enormous powers and desires, a chaotic mass of unassimilated and intermixed
mental, vital and physical material of a larger existence which, because it is
not taken up by a creative harmonizing light of the spirit, must welter in a
universalized confusion and discord out of which it is impossible to build a
greater harmonic life.
LD.II,
28
Without an inner change man
can no longer cope with
the gigantic development of
the outer life.
A
life unity, mutuality and harmony born of a deeper and wider truth of our being
is the only truth of life that can successfully replace the imperfect mental
constructions of the past which were a combination of association and regulated
conflict, an accommodation of egos and interests grouped or dovetailed into
each other to form a society, a consolidation by common general life-motives, a
unification by need and the pressure of struggle with outside forces. It is
such a change and such a reshaping of life for which humanity is blindly
beginning to seek, now more and more with a sense that its very existence
depends upon finding the way. The evolution of mind working upon life has
developed an organization of the activity of mind and use of matter which can
no longer be supported by human capacity without an inner change. An
accommodation of the ego-centric human individuality, separative even in asso-
53
ciation,
to a system of living which demands unity, perfect mutuality, harmony, is
imperative. But because the burden which is being laid on mankind is too great
for the present littleness of the human personality and its petty mind and
small life-instincts, because it cannot operate the needed change, because it
is using this new apparatus and organization to serve the old infraspiritual
and infrarational life-self of humanity, the destiny of the race seems to be
heading dangerously, as if impatiently and in spite of itself, under the drive
of the vital ego seized by colossal forces which are on the same scale as the
huge mechanical organization of life and scientific knowledge which it has
evolved, a scale too large for its reason and will to handle, into a prolonged
confusion and perilous crisis and darkness of violent shifting incertitude.
Even if this turns out to be a passing phase or appearance and a tolerable
structural accommodation is found which will enable mankind to proceed less
catastrophically on its uncertain journey, this can only be a respite. For the
problem is fundamental and in putting it evolutionary Nature in man is
confronting herself with a critical choice which must one day be solved in the
true sense if the race is to arrive or even to survive.
LD.II,
28
The exaltation of the
collectivity, of the State, only
substitutes the collective
ego for the individual ego.
A
rational and scientific formula of the vitalistic and materialistic human being
and his life, a search for a perfected economic society and the democratic
cultus of the average man are all that the modern mind presents us in this
crisis as a light for its solution. Whatever the truth supporting these ideas,
this is clearly not enough to meet the need of a humanity which is missioned to
evolve beyond itself or, at any rate, if it is to live, must evolve far beyond
anything that it at present is. A life-instinct in the race and in the average
man himself has felt the inadequacy and has been driving towards a reversal of
values or a discovery of new values and a transfer of life to a new foundation.
This has taken the form of an attempt to find a simple and ready-made basis of
unity, mutuality, harmony for the common life, to enforce it by a suppression
of the competitive clash of egos and so to arrive at a life of identity for the
community in place of a life of difference. But to realize these
54
desirable
ends the means adopted have been the forcible and successful materialization of
a few restricted ideas or slogans enthroned to the exclusion of all other
thought, the suppression of the mind of the individual, a mechanized
compression of the elements of life, a mechanized unity and drive of the
life-force, a coercion of man by the State, the substitution of the communal
for the individual ego. The communal ego is idealized as the soul of the
nation, the race, the community; but this is a colossal and may turn out to be
a fatal error. A forced and imposed unanimity of mind, life, action raised to
their highest tension under the drive of something which is thought to be
greater, the collective soul, the collective life, is the formula found. But
this obscure collective being is not the soul or self of the community; it is a
life-force that rises from the subconscient and, if denied the light of
guidance by the reason, can be driven only by dark massive forces which are powerful
but dangerous for the race because they are alien to the conscious evolution of
which man is the trustee and bearer. It is not in this direction that
evolutionary Nature has pointed mankind; this is a reversion towards something
that she had left behind her.
LD.II,
28
If humanity is to survive, a
radical transformation of
human nature is
indispensable.
But
it has not been found in experience, whatever might have once been hoped, that
education and intellectual training by itself can change man; it only provides
the human individual and collective ego17 with better information and
a more efficient machinery for its self-affirmation, but leaves it the same
unchanged human ego. Nor can human mind and life be cut into perfection–even
into what is thought to be perfection, a constructed substitute,–by any kind of
social machinery; matter can be so cut, thought can be so cut, but in our human
existence matter and thought are only instruments for the soul and the
life-force. Machinery cannot form the soul and life-force into standardized
shapes; it can at best coerce them, make soul and mind inert and stationary and
regulate the life’s outward action; but if this is to be effectively done,
coercion and compression of the mind and life are indispensable and that again
spells either unprogressive stability or decadence.
55
There
is the possibility that in the swing back from a mechanistic idea of life and
society the human mind may seek refuge in a return to the religious idea and a
society governed or sanctioned by religion. But organized religion, though it
can provide a means of inner uplift for the individual and preserve in it or
behind it a way for his opening to spiritual experience, has not changed human
life and society; it could not do so because, in governing society, it had to
compromise with the lower parts of life and could not insist on the inner
change of the whole being; it could insist only on a credal adherence, a formal
acceptance of its ethical standards and a conformity to institution, ceremony
and ritual. Religion so conceived can give a religio-ethical colour or surface
tinge,—sometimes, if it maintains a strong kernel of inner experience, it can
generalize to some extent an incomplete spiritual tendency; but it does not
transform the race, it cannot create a new principle of the human existence. A
total spiritual direction given to the whole life and the whole nature can
alone lift humanity beyond itself. Another possible conception akin to the
religious solution is the guidance of society by men of spiritual attainment,
the brotherhood or unity of all in the faith or in the discipline, the
spiritualization of life and society by the taking up of the old machinery of
life into such a unification or inventing a new machinery. This too has been
attempted before without success; it was the original founding idea of more
than one religion: but the human ego and vital nature were too strong for a
religious idea working on the mind and by the mind to overcome its resistance.
It is only the full emergence of the soul,4 the full descent of the
native light and power of the Spirit and the consequent replacement or
transformation and uplifting of our insufficient mental and vital nature by a
spiritual and supramental supernature that can effect this evolutionary
miracle.
At
first sight this insistence on a radical change of nature might seem to put off
all the hope of humanity to a distant evolutionary future; for the
transcendence of our normal human nature, a transcendence of our mental, vital
and physical being, has the appearance of an endeavour too high and difficult
and at present, for man as he is, impossible. Even if it were so, it would
still remain the sole possibility for the transmutation of life; for to hope
for a true change of human life without a change of human nature is an
irrational and un-
56
spiritual
proposition; it is to ask for something unnatural and unreal, an impossible
miracle. But what is demanded by this change is not something altogether
distant, alien to our existence and radically impossible; for what has to be
developed is there in our being and not something outside it: what evolutionary
Nature presses for, is an awakening to the knowledge of self, the discovery of
self, the manifestation of the self and spirit within us and the release of its
self-knowledge, its self-power, its native self-instrumentation. It is, besides
a step for which the whole of evolution has been a preparation and which is
brought closer at each crisis of human destiny when the mental and vital
evolution of the being touches a point where intellect and vital force reach
some acme of tension and there is a need either for them to collapse, to sink
back into a torpor of defeat or a repose of unprogressive quiescence or to rend
their way through the veil against which they are straining. What is necessary
is that there should be a turn in humanity felt by some or many towards the
vision of this change, a feeling of its imperative need, the sense of its
possibility, the will to make it possible in themselves and to find the way.
That trend is not absent and it must increase with the tension of the crisis in
human world-destiny; the need of an escape or a solution, the feeling that
there is no other solution than the spiritual cannot but grow and become more
imperative under the urgency of critical circumstance. To that call in the
being there must always be some answer in the Divine Reality and in Nature.
LD.II,
28
57
CHAPTER IV
STANDARDS OF CONDUCT AND
SPIRITUAL FREEDOM
Since perfection is progressive,
good and evil are shifting
quantities and change from
time to time their meaning
and value.
IF
we are to be free in the Spirit, if we are to be subject only to the supreme
Truth, we must discard the idea that our mental or moral laws are binding on
the Infinite or that there can be anything sacrosanct, absolute or eternal even
in the highest of our existing standards of conduct. To form higher and higher
temporary standards as long as they are needed is to serve the Divine in his
world march; to erect rigidly an absolute standard is to attempt the erection
of a barrier against the eternal waters in their outflow. Once the nature-bound
soul realizes this truth, it is delivered from the duality of good and evil.
For good is all that helps the individual and the world towards their divine
fullness, and evil is all that retards or breaks up that increasing perfection.
But since the perfection is progressive, evolutive in Time, good and evil are
also shifting quantities and change from time to time their meaning and value.
This thing which is evil now and in its present shape must be abandoned was
once helpful and necessary to the general and individual progress. That other
thing which we now regard as evil may well become in another form and
arrangement an element in some future perfection. And on the spiritual level we
transcend even this distinction, for we discover the purpose and divine utility
of all these things that we call good and evil. Then we have to reject the
falsehood in them and all that is distorted, ignorant and obscure in that which
is called good no less than in that which is called evil. For we have then to
accept only the true and the divine, but to make no other distinction in the
eternal processes.
To
those who can act only on a rigid standard, to those who can feel only the
human and not the divine values, this truth
58
may
seem to be a dangerous concession which is likely to destroy the very
foundation of morality, confuse all conduct and establish only chaos.
Certainly, if the choice must be between an eternal and unchanging ethics and
no ethics at all, it would have that result for man in his ignorance. But even
on the human level, if we have light enough and flexibility enough to recognize
that a standard of conduct may be temporary and yet necessary for its time and
to observe it faithfully until it can be replaced by a better, then we suffer
no such loss, but lose only the fanaticism of an imperfect and intolerant
virtue. In its place we gain openness and a power of continual moral
progression, charity, the capacity to enter into an understanding sympathy with
all this world of struggling and stumbling creatures and by that charity a
better right and a greater strength to help it upon its way. In the end where
the human closes and the divine commences, where the mental disappears into the
supramental consciousness and the finite precipitates itself into the infinite,
all evil disappears into a transcendent divine Good which becomes universal on
every plane of consciousness that it touches.
This,
then, stands fixed for us that all standards by which we may seek to govern our
conduct are only our temporary, imperfect and evolutive attempts to represent
to ourselves our stumbling mental progress in the universal self-realization towards
which Nature moves. But the divine manifestation cannot be bound by our little
rules and fragile sanctities; for the consciousness behind it is too vast for
these things. Once we have grasped this fact, disconcerting enough to the
absolutism of our reason, we shall better be able to put in their right place
in regard to each other the successive standards that govern the different
stages in the growth of the individual and the collective march of mankind. At
the most general of them we may cast a passing glance. For we have to see how
they stand in relation to that other standardless, spiritual and supramental
mode of working for which Yoga13 seeks and to which it moves
by the surrender of the individual to the divine Will and, more effectively,
through his ascent by this surrender to the greater consciousness in which a
certain identity with the dynamic Eternal becomes possible.
SY.I,
7
Four main principles
successively govern human conduct.
The first two are personal
need and the good of the
collectivity.
There
are four main standards of human conduct that make an ascending scale. The
first is personal need, preference and desire; the second is the law and good
of the collectivity; the third is an ideal ethic; the last is the highest
divine law of the nature.
Man
starts on the long career of his evolution with only the first two of these
four to enlighten and lead him; for they constitute the law of his animal and
vital existence, and it is as the vital and physical animal man that he begins
his progress. The true business of man upon earth is to express in the type of
humanity a growing image of the Divine; whether knowingly or unknowingly, it is
to this end that Nature is working in him under the thick veil of her inner and
outer processes. But the material or animal man is ignorant of the inner aim of
life; he knows only its needs and its desires and he has necessarily no other
guide to what is required of him than his own perception of need and his own
stirrings and pointings of desire. To satisfy his physical and vital demands
and necessities before all things else and, in the next rank, whatever
emotional or mental cravings or imaginations or dynamic notions rise in him
must be the first natural rule of his conduct. The sole balancing or overpowering
law that can modify or contradict this pressing natural claim is the demand put
on him by the ideas, needs and desires of his family, community or tribe, the
herd, the pack of which he is a member.
In
itself this seemingly larger and overriding law is no more than an extension of
the vital and animal principle that governs the individual elementary man; it
is the law of the pack or herd. The individual identifies partially his life
with the life of a certain number of other individuals with whom he is
associated by birth, choice or circumstance. And since the existence of the
group is necessary for his own existence and satisfaction, in time, if not from
the first, its preservation, the fulfillment of its needs and the satisfaction
of its collective notions, desires, habits of living, without which it would
not hold together, must come to take a primary place. The satisfaction of
personal idea and feeling, need and desire, propensity and habit has to be
constantly subordinated, by the necessity of the situation
60
and
not from any moral or altruistic motive, to the satisfaction of the ideas and
feelings, needs and desires, propensities and habits, not of this or that other
individual or number of individuals, but of the society as a whole. This social
need is the obscure matrix of morality and of man’s ethical impulse.
Man
has in him two distinct master impulses, the individualistic and the communal,
a personal life and a social life, a personal motive of conduct and a social
motive of conduct. The possibility of their opposition and the attempt to find
their equation lie at the very roots of human civilization and persist in other
figures when he has passed beyond the vital animal into a highly individualized
mental and spiritual progress.
The
existence of a social law external to the individual is at different times a
considerable advantage and a disadvantage to the development of the divine in
man. It is an advantage at first when man is crude and incapable of
self-control and self-finding, because it erects a power other than that of his
personal egoism through which that egoism may be induced or compelled to
moderate its savage demands, to discipline its irrational and often violent
movements and even to lose itself sometimes in a larger and less personal
egoism. It is a disadvantage to the adult spirit ready to transcend the human
formula because it is an external standard which seeks to impose itself on him
from outside, and the condition of his perfection is that he shall grow from
within and in an increasing freedom, not by the suppression but by the
transcendence of his perfected individuality, not any longer by a law imposed
on him that trains and disciplines his members but by the soul from within
breaking through all previous forms to possess with its light and transmute his
members.
SY.I,
7
A conflict is born of the
opposition of the two instinc-
tive tendencies which govern
human action: the indivi-
dualist and the gregarious.
In
the conflict of the claims of society with the claims of the individual two
ideal and absolute solutions confront one another. There is the demand of the
group that the individual should subordinate himself more or less completely or
even lose his independent existence in the community, the smaller must
6I
be
immolated or self-offered to the larger unit. He must accept the need of the
society as his own need, the desire of the society as his own desire; he must
live not for himself but for the tribe, clan, commune or nation of which he is
a member. The ideal and absolute solution from the individual’s standpoint
would be a society that existed not for itself, for its all-overriding
collective purpose, but for the good of the individual and his fulfilment, for
the greater and more perfect life of all its members. Representing as far as
possible his best self and helping him to realize it, it would respect the
freedom of each of its members and maintain itself not by law and force but by
the free and spontaneous consent of its constituent persons.
And
in the present balance of humanity there is seldom any real danger of
exaggerated individualism breaking up the social integer. There is continually
a danger that the exaggerated pressure of the social mass by its heavy
unenlightened mechanical weight may suppress or unduly discourage the free
development of the individual spirit. For man in the individual can be more
easily enlightened, conscious, open to clear influences; man in the mass is
still obscure, half-conscious, ruled by universal forces that escape its mastery
and its knowledge.
SY.I,
7
In order to settle this
conflict, a new principle comes
in, other and higher than
the two conflicting instincts,
and aiming both to override
and to reconcile them. This
third principle is the
ethical idea.
Above
the natural individual law which sets up as our one standard of conduct the
satisfaction of our individual needs, preferences and desires and the natural
communal law which sets up as a superior standard the satisfaction of the
needs, preferences and desires of the community as a whole, there had to arise
the notion of an ideal moral law which is not the satisfaction of need and
desire, but controls and even coerces or annuls them in the interests of an
ideal order that is not animal, not vital and physical, but mental, a creation
of the mind’s seeking for light and knowledge and right rule and right movement
and true order. The moment this notion becomes powerful in man, he begins to
escape from the engrossing vital and
62
material
into the mental life . . . It is therefore essentially an individual standard;
it is not a creation of the mass mind. The thinker is the individual; it is he
who calls out and throws into forms that which would otherwise remain
subconscious in the amorphous human whole. The moral striver is also the
individual; self-discipline, not under the yoke of an outer law, but in
obedience to an internal light, is essentially an individual effort. But by
positing his personal standard as the translation of an absolute moral ideal
the thinker imposes it, not on himself alone, but on all the individuals whom
his thought can reach and penetrate. And as the mass of individuals come more
and more to accept it in idea if only in an imperfect practice or no practice,
society also is compelled to obey the new orientation. It absorbs the ideative
influence and tries, not with any striking success, to mould its institutions
into new forms touched by these higher ideals. But always its instinct is to
translate them into binding law, into pattern forms, into mechanic custom, into
an external social compulsion upon its living units.
For,
long after the individual has become partially free, a moral organism capable
of conscious growth, aware of an inward life, eager for spiritual progress,
society continues to be mechanical, more intent upon status and
self-preservation than on growth and self-perfection. The greatest triumph of
the thinking and progressive individual over the instinctive and static society
has been the power he has acquired by his thought-will to compel it to think
also, to open itself to the idea of social justice and righteousness, communal
sympathy and mutual compassion, to feel after the rule of reason rather than
blind custom as the test of its institutions and to look on the mental and
moral assent of its individuals as at least one essential element in the
validity of its laws. Ideally at least, to consider light rather than force as
its sanction, moral development and not vengeance or restraint as the object
even of its penal action, is becoming just possible to the communal mind. The
greatest future triumph of the thinker will come when he can persuade the
individual integer and the collective whole to rest their life-relation and its
union and stability upon a free and harmonious consent and self-adaptation, and
shape and govern the external by the internal truth rather than to constrain
the
63
inner
spirit by the tyranny of the external form and structure.
SY.I,
7
But conflicts do not
subside; they seem rather to multiply.
Moral laws are arbitrary and
rigid; when applied to life,
they are obliged to come to
terms with it and end in com-
promises which deprive them
of all power.
But
even this success that he has gained is rather a thing in potentiality than in
actual accomplishment. There is always a disharmony and a discord between the
moral law in the individual and the law of his needs and desires, between the
moral law proposed to society and the physical and vital needs, desires,
customs, prejudices, interests and passions of the caste, the clan, the
religious community, the society, the nation. The moralist erects in vain his
absolute ethical standard and calls upon all to be faithful to it without
regard to consequences.
The
first reason is that our moral ideals are themselves for the most part
ill-evolved, ignorant and arbitrary, mental constructions rather than
transcriptions of the eternal truths of the spirit. Authoritative and dogmatic,
they assert certain absolute standards in theory, but in practice every
existing system of ethics proves either in application unworkable or is in fact
a constant coming short of the absolute standard to which the ideal pretends.
If our ethical system is a compromise or a makeshift, it gives at once a
principle of justification to the further sterilizing compromises which society
and the individual hasten to make with it. And if it insists on absolute love,
justice, right with an uncompromising insistence, it soars above the head of
human possibility and is professed with lip homage but ignored in practice.
Even it is found that it ignores other elements in humanity which equally
insist on survival but refuse to come within the moral formula. For just as the
individual law of desire contains within it invaluable elements of the infinite
whole which have to be protected against the tyranny of the absorbing social
idea, the innate impulses too both of individual and of collective man contain
in them invaluable elements which escape the limits of any ethical formula yet
discovered and are yet necessary to the fullness and harmony of an eventual
divine perfection.
Moreover,
absolute love, absolute justice, absolute right
64
reason
in their present application by a bewildered and imperfect humanity come easily
to be conflicting principles. Justice often demands what love abhors. Right
reason dispassionately considering the facts of nature and human relations in
search of a satisfying norm or rule is unable to admit without modification
either any reign of absolute justice or any reign of absolute love. And in fact
man’s absolute justice easily turns out to be in practice a sovereign
injustice; for his mind, one-sided and rigid in its constructions, puts forward
a one-sided partial and rigorous scheme or figure and claims for it totality
and absoluteness and an application that ignores the subtler truth of things
and the plasticity of life. All our standards turned into action either waver
on a flux of compromises or err by this partiality and unelastic structure.
Humanity sways from one orientation to another; the race moves upon a zigzag
path led by conflicting claims and, on the whole, works out instinctively what
Nature intends, but with much waste and suffering, rather than either what it
desires or what it holds to be right or what the highest light from above
demands from the embodied spirit.
SY.I,
7
Behind the ethical law,
which is a false image, a greater
truth of a vast
consciousness without fetters unveils itself,
the supreme law of our
divine nature. It determines per-
fectly our relations with each
being and with the totality
of the universe, and it also
reveals the exact rhythm of the
direct expression of the
Divine in us. It is the fourth and
supreme principle of action,
which is at the same time
imperative law and absolute
freedom.
The
fact is that when we have reached the cult of absolute ethical qualities and
erected the categorical imperative of an ideal law, we have not come to the end
of our search or touched the truth that delivers . . . And behind the
inadequacy of these ethical conceptions something too is concealed that does
attach to a supreme Truth; there is here the glimmer of a light and power that
are part of a yet unreached divine Nature. But the mental idea of these things
is not that light and the moral formulation of them is not that power. These
are only representative constructions of the mind that cannot embody the divine
spirit which they vainly endeavour to imprison in their
65
categorical
formulas. Beyond the mental and moral being in us is a greater divine being
that is spiritual and supramental; for it is only through a large spiritual
plane where the mind’s formulas dissolve in a white flame of direct inner
experience that we can reach beyond mind and pass from its constructions to the
vastness and freedom of the supramental realities. There alone can we touch the
harmony of the divine powers that are poorly mispresented to our mind or framed
into a false figure by the conflicting or wavering elements of the moral law.
There alone the unification of the transformed vital and physical and the
illumined mental man becomes possible in that supramental spirit which is at
once the secret source and goal of our mind and life and body. There alone is
there any possibility of an absolute justice, love and right–far other than that
which we imagine–at one with each other in the light of a supreme divine
knowledge. There alone can there be a reconciliation of the conflict between
our members.
In
other words there is, above society’s external law and man’s moral law and
beyond them, though feebly and ignorantly aimed at by something within them, a
larger truth of a vast unbound consciousness, a law divine towards which both
these blind and gross formulations are progressive faltering steps that try to
escape from the natural law of the animal to a more exalted light or universal
rule. That divine standard, since the godhead in us is our spirit moving
towards its own concealed perfection, must be a supreme spiritual law and truth
of our nature. Again, as we are embodied beings in the world with a common
existence and nature yet individual souls capable of direct touch with the
Transcendent, this supreme truth of ourselves must have a double character. It
must be a law and truth that discovers the perfect movement, harmony, rhythm of
a great spiritualized collective life and determines perfectly our relations
with each being and all beings in Nature’s varied oneness. It must be at the
same time a law and truth that discovers to us at each moment the rhythm and
exact steps of the direct expression of the Divine in the soul, mind, life,
body of the individual creature. And we find in experience that this supreme
light and force of action in its highest expression is at once an imperative
law and an absolute freedom. It is an imperative law because it governs by
immutable Truth our every inner and outer movement. And yet at each moment and
in
66
each
movement the absolute freedom of the Supreme handles the perfect plasticity of
our conscious and liberated nature.
SY.I,
7
67
CHAPTER V
THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE
SPIRITUAL MAN
Spirituality is something
else than intellectuality;
its appearance is the sign
that a Power greater than
mind is striving to emerge
in its turn.
It
is quite true that to a surface view life seems only an operation of Matter,
mind an activity of life, and it might seem to follow that what we call the
soul or spirit is only a power of mentality, soul a fine form of mind,
spirituality a high activity of the embodied mental being. But this is a
superficial view of things due to the thought’s concentrating on the appearance
and process and not looking at what lies behind the process. One might as well
on the same lines have concluded that electricity is only a product or
operation of water and cloud matter, because it is in such a field that
lightning emerges; but a deeper inquiry has shown that both cloud and water
have, on the contrary, the energy of electricity as their foundation, their
constituent power or energy-substance: that which seems to be a result is–in
reality, though not in its form–the origin; the effect is in the essence
pre-existent to the apparent cause, the principle of the emergent activity
precedent to its present field of action. So it is throughout evolutionary
Nature; Matter could not have become animate if the principle of life had not
been there constituting Matter and emerging as a phenomenon of life-in-matter;
life-in-matter could not have begun to feel, perceive, think, reason, if the
principle of mind had not been there behind life and substance, constituting it
as its field of operation and emergent in the phenomenon of a thinking life and
body: so too spirituality emerging in mind is the sign of a power which itself
has founded and constituted life, mind and body and is now emerging as a
spiritual being in a living and thinking body. How far this emergence will go,
whether it will become dominant and transform its instrument, is a subsequent
question; but what is necessary first to posit is the existence of spirit as
something else than mind and greater than mind, spirituality as something other
than mentality and the spiritual
68
being
therefore as something distinct from the mental being: spirit is a final
evolutionary emergence because it is the original involutionary element and
factor. Evolution is an inverse action of the involution3: what is an ultimate and
last derivation in the involution is the first to appear in the evolution; what
was original and primal in the involution is in the evolution the last and
supreme emergence.
LD.II,
24
Spirituality is a
progressive awakening to the inner reality
of our being, to a spirit,
self, soul which is other than our
mind, life and body. It is
an inner aspiration to know, to
enter into contact and union
with the greater Reality beyond,
which also pervades the
universe and dwells in us, and, as a
result of that aspiration,
that contact and that union, a
turning, a conversion, a
birth into a new being.
In
the animal mind is not quite distinct from its own life-matrix and life-matter;
its movements are so involved in the life movements that it cannot detach
itself from them, cannot stand separate and observe them; but in man mind has
become separate, he can become aware of his mental operations as distinct from
his life operations, his thought and will can disengage themselves from his
sensations and impulses, desires and emotional reactions, can become detached
from them, observe and control them, sanction or cancel their functioning: he
does not as yet know the secrets of his being well enough to be aware of
himself decisively and with certitude as a mental being in a life and body, but
he has that impression and can take inwardly that position. So too at first
soul in man does not appear as something quite distinct from mind and from
mentalised life; its movements are involved in the mind movements, its
operations seem to be mental and emotional activities; the mental human being
is not aware of a soul in him standing back from the mind and life and body,
detaching itself, seeing and controlling and moulding their action and
formation: but, as the inner evolution proceeds, this is precisely what can,
must and does happen,—it is the long-delayed but inevitable next step in our
evolutionary destiny. There can be a decisive emergence in which the being separates
itself from thought and sees itself in an inner silence as the spirit in mind,
or separates itself from the life movements, desires, sensations, kinetic
69
impulses
and is aware of itself as the spirit supporting life, or separates itself from
the body sense and knows itself as a spirit ensouling Matter: this is the
discovery of ourselves as the Purusha,8 a mental being or a
life-soul or a subtle self supporting the body. This is taken by many as a
sufficient discovery of the true self and in a certain sense they are right;
for it is the self or spirit that so represents itself in regard to the
activities of Nature, and this revelation of its presence is enough to
disengage the spiritual element: but self-discovery can go farther, it can even
put aside all relation to form or action of Nature. For it is seen that these
selves are representations of a divine Entity to which mind, life and body are
only forms and instruments: we are then the Soul looking at Nature, knowing all
her dynamisms in us, not by mental perception and observation, but by an
intrinsic consciousness and its direct sense of things and its intimate exact
vision, able therefore by its emergence to put a close control on our nature
and change it. When there is a complete silence in the being, either a
stillness of the whole being or a stillness behind unaffected by surface
movements, then we can become aware of a Self, a spiritual substance of our
being, an existence exceeding even the soul individuality, spreading itself
into universality, surpassing all dependence on any natural form or action,
extending itself upward into a transcendence of which the limits are not
visible. It is these liberations of the spiritual part in us which are the
decisive steps of the spiritual evolution in Nature.
When
there is the decisive emergence, one sign of it is the status or action in us
of an inherent, intrinsic, self-existent consciousness which knows itself by
the mere fact of being, knows all that is in itself in the same way, by
identity with it, begins even to see all that to our mind seems external in the
same manner, by a movement of identity or by an intrinsic direct consciousness
which envelops, penetrates, enters into its object, discovers itself in the
object, is aware in it of something that is not mind or life or body. There is,
then, evidently a spiritual consciousness which is other than the mental, and
it testifies to the existence of a spiritual being in us which is other than
our surface mental personality. But at first this consciousness may confine
itself to a status of being separate from the action of our ignorant surface
nature, observing it, limiting
70
itself
to knowledge, to a seeing of things with a spiritual sense and vision of
existence. For action it may still depend upon the mental, vital, bodily
instruments, or it may allow them to act according to their own nature and
itself remain satisfied with self-experience and self-knowledge, with an inner
liberation, an eventual freedom: but it may also and usually does exercise a
certain authority, governance, influence on thought, life movement, physical
action, a purifying uplifting control compelling them to move in a higher and
purer truth of themselves, to obey or be an instrumentation of an influx of
some diviner Power or a luminous direction which is not mental but spiritual
and can be recognized as having a certain divine character,—the inspiration of
a greater Self or the command of the Ruler of all being, the Ishwara.18 Or the nature may obey the
psychic4 entity’s intimations, move in an inner light, follow an inner
guidance. This is already a considerable evolution and amounts to a beginning
at least of a psychic and spiritual transformation. But it is possible to go
farther; for the spiritual being, once inwardly liberated, can develop in mind
the higher states of being that are its own natural atmosphere and bring down a
supramental energy and action which are proper to the Truth-consciousness; the
ordinary mental instrumentation, life-instrumentation, physical instrumentation
even, could then be entirely transformed and become parts no longer of an
ignorance however much illumined, but of a supramental creation which would be
the true action of a spiritual truth-consciousness and knowledge.
It
must therefore be emphasized that spirituality is not a high intellectuality,
not idealism, not an ethical turn of mind or moral purity and austerity, not
religiosity or an ardent and exalted emotional fervour, not even a compound of
all these excellent things; a mental belief, creed or faith, an emotional
aspiration, a regulation of conduct according to a religious or ethical formula
are not spiritual achievement and experience. These things are of considerable
value to mind and life; they are of value to the spiritual evolution itself as
preparatory movements disciplining, purifying or giving a suitable form to the
nature; but they still belong to the mental evolution,—the beginning of a
spiritual realization, experience, change is not yet there. Spirituality is in
its essence an awakening to the inner reality of our being, to a spirit, self,
soul which is other than
71
our
mind, life and body, an inner aspiration to know, to feel, to be that, to enter
into contact with the greater Reality beyond and pervading the universe which
inhabits also our own being, to be in communion with It and union with It, and
a turning, a conversion, a transformation of our whole being as a result of the
aspiration, the contact, the union, a growth or waking into a new becoming or
new being, a new self, a new nature.
LD.II,
24
In her attempt to open up
the inner being, Nature has fol-
lowed four main
lines—religion, occultism, spiritual
thought and an inner
spiritual realization and experience.
There
are four main lines which Nature has followed in her attempt to open up the
inner being,—religion, occultism, spiritual thought and an inner spiritual
realization and experience: the three first are approaches, the last is the
decisive avenue of entry. All these four powers have worked by a simultaneous
action, more or less connected, sometimes in a variable collaboration,
sometimes in dispute with each other, sometimes in a separate independence.
Religion has admitted an occult element in its ritual, ceremony, sacraments; it
has leaned upon spiritual thinking, deriving from it sometimes a creed or
theology, sometimes its supporting spiritual philosophy,—the former,
ordinarily, is the occidental method, the latter the oriental: but spiritual
experience is the final aim and achievement of religion, its sky and summit.
Each
of these means or approaches corresponds to something in our total being and
therefore to something necessary to the total aim of her evolution. There are
four necessities of man’s self-expansion if he is not to remain this being of
the surface ignorance seeking obscurely after the truth of things and
collecting and systematizing fragments and sections of knowledge, the small
limited and half-competent creature of the cosmic Force which he now is in his
phenomenal nature. He must know himself and discover and utilize all his
potentialities: but to know himself and the world completely he must go behind
his own and its exterior, he must dive deep below his own mental surface and
the physical surface of Nature. This he can only do by knowing his inner
mental, vital, physical and psychic being6 and its powers and
movements and the universal
72
laws
and processes of the occult Mind and Life which stand behind the material front
of the universe: that is the field of occultism, if we take the word in its
widest significance. He must know also the hidden Power or Powers that control
the world: if there is a Cosmic Self or Spirit or a Creator, he must be able to
enter into relation with It or Him and be able to remain in whatever contact or
communion is possible, get into some kind of tune with the master Beings of the
universe or with the universal Being and its universal will or a supreme Being
and His supreme will, follow the law It gives him and the assigned or revealed
aim of his life and conduct, raise himself towards the highest height that It
demands of him in his life now or in his existence hereafter; if there is no
such universal or supreme Spirit or Being, he must know what there is and how
to lift himself to it out of his present imperfection and impotence. This
approach is the aim of religion: its purpose is to link the human with the
Divine and in so doing sublimate the thought and life and flesh so that they
may admit the rule of the soul and spirit. But this knowledge must be something
more than a creed or a mystic revelation; his thinking mind must be able to
accept it, to correlate it with the principle of things and the observed truth
of the universe: this is the work of philosophy, and in the field of the truth
of the spirit it can only be done by a spiritual philosophy, whether
intellectual in its method or intuitive. But all knowledge and endeavour can
reach its fruition only if it is turned into experience and has become a part
of the consciousness and its established operations; in the spiritual field of
all this religious, occult or philosophical knowledge and endeavour must, to
bear fruition, end in an opening up of the spiritual consciousness, in
experiences that found and continually heighten, expand and enrich that consciousness
with the truth of the spirit: this is the work of spiritual realization and
experience.
LD.II,
24
Only spiritual realization
and experience can achieve the
change of the mental being
into a spiritual being.
But
none of these [first] three lines of approach can by themselves entirely fulfil
the greater and ulterior intention of Nature; they cannot create in mental man
the spiritual being, unless
73
and
until they open the door to spiritual experience. It is only by an inner
realization of what these approaches are seeking after, by an overwhelming
experience or by many experiences building up an inner change, by a
transmutation of the consciousness, by a liberation of the spirit from its
present veil of mind, life and body that there can emerge the spiritual being.
That is the final line of the soul’s progress towards which the others are
pointing and, when it is ready to disengage itself from the preliminary
approaches, then the real work has begun and the turning-point of the change is
no longer distant. Till then all that the human mental being has reached is a
familiarity with the idea of things beyond him, with the possibility of an
other-worldly movement, with the ideal of some ethical perfection; he may have
made too some contact with greater Powers or Realities which help his mind or
heart or life. A change there may be, but not the transmutation of the mental
into the spiritual being. Religion and its thought and ethics and occult
mysticism in ancient times produced the priest and the mage, the man of piety,
the just man, the man of wisdom, many high points of mental manhood; but it is
only after spiritual experience through the heart and mind began that we see
arise the saint, the prophet, the Rishi,13 the Yogi, the seer, the
spiritual sage and the mystic, and it is the religions in which these types of
spiritual manhood came into being that have endured, covered the globe and
given mankind all its spiritual aspiration and culture.
The
last or highest emergence is the liberated man who has realized the Self and
Spirit within him, entered into the cosmic consciousness, passed into union
with the Eternal and, so far as he still accepts life and action, acts by the
light and energy of the Power within him working through his human instruments of
Nature. The largest formulation of this spiritual change and achievement is a
total liberation of soul, mind, heart and action, a casting of them all into
the sense of the cosmic Self and the Divine Reality. The spiritual evolution of
the individual has then found its way and thrown up its range of Himalayan
eminence and its peaks of highest nature. Beyond this height and largeness
there opens only the supramental ascent or the incommunicable Transcendence.
LD.II,
24
74
Mysticism and spirituality
have been criticized from two
points of view. These
criticisms should be examined before
proceeding further.
1. The mystic turns away from life.
. .
. The mystic in this view is the man who turns aside into the unreal, into
occult regions of a self-constructed land of chimeras and loses his way there .
. . The mystic either detaches himself from life as the other-worldly ascetic
or the aloof visionary and therefore cannot help life, or else he brings no
better solution or result than the practical man or the man of intellect and
reason.
[To
this kind of criticism one can reply that the true task of spirituality] is not
to solve human problems on the past or present mental basis, but to create a
new foundation of our being and our life and knowledge. The ascetic or
other-worldly tendency of the mystic is an extreme affirmation of his refusal
to accept the limitations imposed by material Nature: for his very reason of
being is to go beyond her; if he cannot transform her, he must leave her. At
the same time the spiritual man has not stood back altogether from the life of
humanity; for the sense of unity with all beings, the stress of a universal
love and compassion, the will to spend the energies for the good of all
creatures,* are central to the dynamic outflowering of the spirit: he has
turned therefore to help, he has guided as did the ancient Rishis or the
prophets, or stooped to create and, where he has done so with something of the
direct power of the Spirit, the results have been prodigious. But the solution of
the problem which spirituality offers is not a solution by external means,
though these also have to be used, but by an inner change, a transformation of
the consciousness and nature.
If
no decisive but only a contributory result, an accretion of some new finer
elements to the sum of the consciousness, has been the general consequence and
there has been no life-transformation, it is because man in the mass has always
deflected the spiritual impulsion, recanted from the spiritual ideal or held it
only as a form and rejected the inward change.
* Bhagavad-Gita.14 The Buddhist elevation of universal
compassion, karuna, and sympathy (vasudhaiva kutumbakam, ‘the whole earth
is my family’), to be the highest principle of action, the Christian emphasis
on love indicate this dynamic side of the spiritual being.
75
Spirituality
cannot be called upon to deal with life by a non-spiritual method or attempt to
cure its ills by the panaceas, the political, social or other mechanical
remedies which the mind is constantly attempting and which have always failed
and will continue to fail to solve anything. The most drastic changes made by
these means change nothing; for the old ills exist in a new form: the aspect of
the outward environment is altered, but man remains what he was; he is still an
ignorant mental being misusing or not effectively using his knowledge, moved by
ego and governed by vital desires and passions and the needs of the body,
unspiritual and superficial in his outlook, ignorant of his own self and the
forces that drive and use him. His life constructions have a value as
expressions of his individual and collective being in the stage to which they
have reached or as a machinery for the convenience and welfare of his vital and
physical parts and a field and medium for his mental growth, but they cannot
take him beyond his present self or serve as a machinery to transform him; his
and their perfection can only come by his farther evolution. Only a spiritual
change, an evolution of his being from the superficial mental towards the
deeper spiritual consciousness, can make a real and effective difference. To
discover the spiritual being in himself is the main business of the spiritual
man and to help others towards the same evolution is his real service to the
race; till that is done, an outward help can succour and alleviate, but nothing
or very little more is possible.
It
is true that the spiritual tendency has been to look more beyond life than
towards life. It is true also that the spiritual change has been individual and
not collective; its result has been successful in the man, but unsuccessful or
only indirectly operative in the human mass. The spiritual evolution of Nature
is still in process and incomplete,–one might almost say, still only beginning,–and
its main preoccupation has been to affirm and develop a basis of spiritual
consciousness and knowledge and to create more and more a foundation or
formation for the vision of that which is eternal in the truth of the spirit.
2. Mystical knowledge is purely subjective.
Another
objection to the mystic and his knowledge is urged,
76
not
against its effect upon life but against his method of the discovery of Truth
and against the Truth that he discovers . . . But it is urged that the actual
result of this method is not one truth common to all, there are great
differences; the conclusion suggested is that this knowledge is not truth at
all but a subjective mental formation. But this objection is based on a
mis-understanding of the nature of spiritual knowledge. Spiritual truth is a
truth of the spirit, not a truth of the intellect, not a mathematical theorem
or a logical formula. It is a truth of the Infinite, one in an infinite
diversity, and it can assume an infinite variety of aspects and formations: in the
spiritual evolution it is inevitable that there should be a many-sided passage
and reaching to the one Truth, many-sided seizing of it; this many-sidedness is
the sign of the approach of the soul to a living reality, not to an abstraction
or a constructed figure of things that can be petrified into a dead or stony
formula. The hard logical and intellectual notion of truth as a single idea
which all must accept, one idea or system of ideas defeating all other ideas or
systems, or a single limited fact or single formula of facts which all must
recognize, is an illegitimate transference from the limited truth of the
physical field to the much more complex and plastic field of life and mind and
spirit.
This
transference has been responsible for much harm; it brings into thought
narrowness, limitation, an intolerance of the necessary variation and
multiplicity of view-points without which there can be no totality of
truth-finding, and by the narrowness and limitation much obstinacy in error. It
reduces philosophy to an endless maze of sterile disputes; religion has been
invaded by this misprision and infected with credal dogmatism, bigotry and
intolerance. The truth of the spirit is a truth of being and consciousness and
not a truth of thought: mental ideas can only represent or formulate some
facet, some mind-translated principle or power of it or enumerate its aspects,
but to know it one has to grow into it and be it; without that growing and
being there can be no true spiritual knowledge. The fundamental truth of
spiritual experience is one, its consciousness is one, everywhere it follows
the same general lines and tendencies of awakening and growth into spiritual
being; for these are the imperatives of the spiritual consciousness. But also
there are, based on those imperatives, numberless possibilities of variation of
experience and expression: the
77
centralization
and harmonization of these possibilities, but also the intensive sole following
out of any line of experience are both of them necessary movements of the
emerging spiritual Consciousness-Force within us. Moreover, the accommodation
of mind and life to the spiritual truth, its expression in them, must vary with
the mentality of the seeker so long as he has not risen above all need of such
accommodation or such limiting expression. It is this mental and vital element
which has created the oppositions that still divide spiritual seekers or enter
into their differing affirmations of the truth that they experience. This
difference and variation is needed for the freedom of spiritual search and
spiritual growth: to overpass differences is quite possible, but that is most
easily done in pure experience; in mental formulation the difference must
remain until one can exceed mind altogether and in a highest consciousness
integralize, unify and harmonize the many-sided truth of the Spirit.
The
supreme Self is one, but the souls of the Self are many and as is the soul’s
formation of nature, so will be its spiritual self-expression. A diversity in
oneness is the law of the manifestation; the supramental unification and
integration must harmonize these diversities, but to abolish them is not the
intention of the Spirit in Nature.
LD.II,
24
78
CHAPTER VI
THE TRIPLE TRANSFORMATION
If the final goal of
terrestrial evolution were only to
awaken man to the supreme
Reality and to release him
from ignorance and bondage,
so that the liberated soul
could find elsewhere a
higher state of being or merge
into this supreme Reality,
the task would be accom-
plished with the advent of
the spiritual man. But there
is also in us an aspiration
for the mastery of Nature
and her transformation, for
a greater perfection in the
earthly existence itself.
If
it is the sole intention of Nature in the evolution of the spiritual man to
awaken him to the supreme Reality and release him from herself, or from the
Ignorance in which she as the Power of the Eternal has masked herself, by a
departure into a higher status of being elsewhere, if this step in the
evolution is a close and an exit, then in the essence her work has been already
accomplished and there is nothing more to be done. The ways have been built,
the capacity to follow them has been developed, the goal or last height of the
creation is manifest; all that is left is for each soul to reach individually
the right stage and turn of its development, enter into the spiritual ways and
pass by its own chosen path out of this inferior existence. But we have
supposed that there is a farther intention,—not only a revelation of the Spirit,
but a radical and integral transformation of Nature. There is a will in her to
effectuate a true manifestation of the embodied life of the Spirit, to complete
what she has begun by a passage from the Ignorance to the Knowledge, to throw
off her mask and to reveal herself as the luminous Consciousness-Force18 carrying in her the eternal
Existence and its universal Delight of being. It then becomes obvious that
there is something not yet accomplished, there becomes clear to view the much
that has still to be done . . . there is a height still to be reached, a
wideness still to be covered by the eye of vision, the wing of the will, the
self-affirmation of the spirit in the material universe. What the
79
evolutionary
Power has done is to make a few individuals aware of their souls, conscious of
their selves, aware of the eternal being that they are, to put them into
communion with the Divinity or the reality which is concealed by her
appearances: a certain change of nature prepares, accompanies or follows upon
this illumination, but it is not the complete and radical change which
established a secure and settled new principle, a new creation, a permanent new
order of being in the field of terrestrial Nature. The spiritual man has
evolved, but not the supramental being who shall thenceforward be the leader of
that Nature.
LD.II,
25
To be established
permanently, this new order of existence
demands a radical change of
the entire human nature. In
this transformation, there
are three phases.
It
must become the normal nature of a new type of being; as mind is established
here on a basis of Ignorance seeking for Knowledge and growing into Knowledge,
so supermind must be established here on a basis of Knowledge growing into its
own greater Light. But this cannot be so long as the spiritual-mental being has
not risen fully to supermind and brought down its powers into terrestrial
existence. For the gulf between mind and supermind has to be bridged, the
closed passages opened and roads of ascent and descent created where there is
now a void and a silence . . . There must first be the psychic change, the
conversion of our whole present nature into a soul-instrumentation; on that or
along with that there must be the spiritual change, the descent of a higher
Light, Knowledge, Power, Force, Bliss, Purity into the whole being, even into
the lowest recesses of the life and body, even into the darkness of our
subconscience; last, there must supervene the supramental transmutation,—there
must take place as the crowning movement the ascent into the supermind and the
transforming descent of the supramental Consciousness into our entire being and
nature.
LD.II,
25
The first phase of this
transformation can be called
psychic: the soul, or
psychic being, has to come for-
ward and take the lead of
the whole being.
At
the beginning the soul in Nature, the psychic4 entity, whose
80
unfolding
is the first step towards a spiritual change, is an entirely veiled part of us,
although it is that by which we exist and persist as individual beings in
Nature. The other parts of our natural composition are not only mutable but
perishable; but the psychic entity in us persists and is fundamentally the same
always: it contains all essential possibilities of our manifestation but is not
constituted by them; it is not limited by what it manifests, not contained by
the incomplete forms of the manifestation, not tarnished by the imperfections
and impurities, the defects and deprivations of the surface being. It is an
ever-pure flame of the divinity in things and nothing that comes to it, nothing
that enters into our experience can pollute its purity or extinguish the flame.
This spiritual stuff is immaculate and luminous and, because it is perfectly
luminous, it is immediately, intimately, directly aware of truth of being and
truth of nature; it is deeply conscious of truth and good and beauty because
truth and good and beauty are akin to its own native character, forms of
something that is inherent in its own substance. It is aware also of all that contradicts
these things, of all that deviates from its own native character, of falsehood
and evil and the ugly and the unseemly; but it does not become these things nor
is it touched or changed by these opposites of itself which so powerfully
affect its outer instrumentation of mind, life and body. For the soul, the
permanent being in us, puts forth and uses mind, life and body as its
instruments, undergoes the envelopment of their conditions, but it is other and
greater than its members.
If
the psychic entity had been from the beginning unveiled and known to its
ministers, not a secluded King in a screened chamber, the human evolution would
have been a rapid soul-outflowering, not the difficult, chequered and
disfigured development it now is; but the veil is thick and we know not the
secret Light within us, the light in the hidden crypt of the heart’s innermost
sanctuary. Intimations rise to our surface heart’s innermost sanctuary.
Intimations rise to our surface from the psyche, but our mind does not detect
their source; it takes them for its own activities because, before even they
come to the surface, they are clothed in mental substance: thus ignorant of
their authority, it follows or does not follow them according to its bent or
turn at the moment. If the mind obeys the urge of the vital ego, then there is
little chance of the psychic at all controlling the nature or manifesting in us
some-
81
thing
of its secret spiritual stuff and native movement; or, if the mind is
over-confident to act in its own smaller light, attached to its own judgment,
will and action of knowledge, then also the soul will remain veiled and
quiescent and wait for the mind’s farther evolution. For the psychic part
within is there to support the natural evolution, and the first natural
evolution must be the development of body, life and mind, successively, and
these must act each in its own kind or together in their ill-assorted
partnership in order to grow and have experience and evolve. The soul gathers
the essence of all our mental, vital and bodily experience and assimilates it
for the farther evolution of our existence in Nature; but this action is occult
and not obtruded on the surface. In the early material and vital stages of the
evolution of being there is indeed no consciousness of soul; there are psychic
activities, but the instrumentation, the form of these activities are vital and
physical—or mental when the mind is active. For even the mind, so long as it is
primitive or is developed but still too external, does not recognize their
deeper character.
Man
is in his self a unique Person, but he is also in his manifestation of self a
multiperson; he will never succeed in being master of himself until the Person
imposes itself on his multipersonality and governs it: but this can only be
imperfectly done by the surface mental will and reason; it can be perfectly
done only if he goes within and finds whatever central being is by its
predominant influence at the head of all his expression and action. In inmost
truth it is his soul that is this central being, but in outer fact it is often
one or other of the part beings in him that rules, and this representative of
the soul, this deputy self he can mistake for the inmost soul principle.
LD.II,
25
In the course of evolution,
the soul, in order to emerge
successfully and turn the
being towards the supreme Reality,
uses three dynamic images of
this supreme Reality: Truth,
Beauty and Good. Three ways
thus open before the
seeker.
A
first condition of the soul’s complete emergence is a direct contact in the
surface being with the spiritual Reality. Because it comes from that, the
psychic element in us turns always
82
towards
whatever in phenomenal Nature seems to belong to a higher Reality and can be
accepted as its sign and character. At first, it seeks this Reality through the
good, the true, the beautiful, through all that is pure and fine and high and
noble: but although this touch through outer signs and characters can modify
and prepare the nature, it cannot entirely or most inwardly and profoundly
change it. For such an inmost change the direct contact with the Reality itself
is indispensable since nothing else can so deeply touch the foundations of our
being and stir it or cast the nature by its stir into a ferment of transmutation.
Mental representations, emotional and dynamic figures have their use and value;
Truth, Good and Beauty are in themselves primary and potent figures of the
Reality, and even in their forms as seen by the mind, as felt by the heart, as
realized in the life can be lines of an ascent: but it is in a spiritual
substance and being of them and of itself that That which they represent has to
come into our experience.
LD.II,
25
1. The way of the intellect or of knowledge.
The
soul may attempt to achieve this contact mainly through the thinking mind as
intermediary and instrument; it puts a psychic impression on the intellect and
the larger mind of insight and intuitional intelligence and turns them in that
direction. At its highest the thinking mind is drawn always towards the
impersonal; in its search it becomes conscious of a spiritual essence, an
impersonal Reality which expresses itself in all these outward signs and
characters but is more than any formulation or manifesting figure. It feels
something of which it becomes intimately and invisibly aware,—a supreme Truth,
a supreme Good, a supreme Beauty, a supreme Purity, a supreme Bliss; it bears
the increasing touch, less and less impalpable and abstract, more and more
spiritually real and concrete, the touch and pressure of an Eternity and
Infinity which is all this that is and more. There is a pressure from this
Impersonality that seeks to mould the whole mind into a form of itself; at the
same time the impersonal secret and law of things becomes more and more
visible. The mind develops into the mind of the sage, at first the high mental
thinker, then the spiritual sage who has gone beyond the abstractions of
thought to the beginnings of a direct experience. As a result the mind becomes
pure,
83
large,
tranquil, impersonal; there is a similar tranquillizing influence on the parts
of life: but otherwise the result may remain incomplete; for the mental change
leads more naturally towards an inner status and an outer quietude, but, poised
in this purifying quietism, not drawn like the vital parts towards a discovery
of new life-energies, does not press for a full dynamic effect on the nature.
A
higher endeavour through the mind does not change this balance; for the
tendency of the spiritualized mind is to go on upwards and, since above itself
the mind loses its hold on forms, it is into a vast formless and featureless
impersonality that it enters. It becomes aware of the unchanging Self, the
sheer Spirit, the pure bareness of an essential Existence, the formless
Infinite and the nameless Absolute. This culmination can be arrived at more
directly by tending immediately beyond all forms and figures, beyond all ideas
of good or evil or true or false or beautiful or unbeautiful to That which
exceeds all dualities, to the experience of a supreme oneness, infinity,
eternity or other ineffable sublimation of the mind’s ultimate and extreme
percept of Self or Spirit. A spiritualized consciousness is achieved and the
life falls quiet, the body ceases to need and to clamour, the soul itself
merges into the spiritual silence. But this transformation through the mind
does not give us the integral transformation; the psychic transmutation is
replaced by a spiritual change on the rare and high summits, but this is not
the complete divine dynamization of Nature.
LD.II,
25
2. The way of the heart or of emotion.
A
second approach made by the soul to the direct contact is through the heart:
this is its own more close and rapid way because its occult seat is there, just
behind in the heart-centre, in close contact with the emotional being in us; it
is consequently through the emotions that it can act best at the beginning with
its native power, with its living force of concrete experience. It is through a
love and adoration of the All-beautiful and All-blissful, the All-Good, the
True, the spiritual Reality of love, that the approach is made; the aesthetic
and emotional parts join together to offer the soul, the life, the whole nature
to that which they worship. This approach through adoration can get its full
power and impetus only
84
when
the mind goes beyond impersonality to the awareness of a supreme Personal
Being: then all becomes intense, vivid, concrete; the heart’s emotion, feeling,
spiritualized sense reach their absolute; an entire self-giving becomes
possible, imperative. The nascent spiritual man makes his appearance in the
emotional nature as the devotee, the bhakta;19 if, in addition, he becomes
directly aware of his soul and its dictates, unites his emotional with his
psychic personality and changes his life and vital parts by purity,
God-ecstasy, the love of God and men and all creatures into a thing of
spiritual beauty, full of divine light and good, he develops into the saint and
reaches the nature proper to this way of approach to the Divine Being. But for
the purpose of an integral transformation this too is not enough; there must be
a transmutation of the thinking mind and all the vital and physical parts of
consciousness in their own character.
LD.II,
25
3. The way of the will or action.
This
larger change can be partly attained by adding to the experiences of the heart
a consecration of the pragmatic will which must succeed in carrying with it–for
otherwise it cannot be effective–the adhesion of the dynamic vital part which
supports the mental dynamis and is our first instrument of outer action. This
consecration of the will in works proceeds by a gradual elimination of the
ego-will and its motive-power of desire; the ego subjects itself to some higher
law and finally effaces itself, seems not to exist or exists only to serve a
higher Power or a higher Truth or to offer its will and acts to the Divine
Being as an instrument. The law of being and action or the light of Truth which
then guides the seeker, may be a clarity or power or principle which he
perceives on the highest height of which his mind is capable; or it may be a
truth of the divine Will which he feels present and working within him or
guiding him by a Light or a Voice or a Force or a Divine Person or Presence. In
the end by this way one arrives at a consciousness in which one feels the Force
or Presence acting within and moving or governing all the actions and the
personal will is
85
entirely
surrendered or identified with that greater Truth-Will, Truth-Power or
Truth-Presence.
LD.II,
25
These three ways, combined
and followed concurrently,
have a most powerful effect.
A
combination of all these three approaches, the approach of the mind, the
approach of the will, the approach of the heart, creates a spiritual or psychic
condition of the surface being and nature in which there is a larger and more
complex openness to the psychic light within us and to the spiritual Self or
the Ishwara,18 to the Reality now felt above the enveloping and penetrating us. In
the nature there is a more powerful and many-sided change, a spiritual building
and self-creation, the appearance of a composite perfection of the saint, the
selfless worker and the man of spiritual knowledge.
LD.II,
25
A shifting of the consciousness,
a withdrawal within,
become imperative at this
stage, in order to reach
the central being, the true
Soul, and to allow it to
become the guide and
sovereign of the nature.
But,
for this change to arrive at its widest totality and profound completeness, the
consciousness has to shift its centre and its static and dynamic position from
the surface to the inner being; it is there that we must find the foundation
for our thought, life and action. For to stand outside on our surface and to
receive from the inner being and follow its intimations is not a sufficient
transformation; one must cease to be the surface personality and become the
inner Person, the Purusha8 . . . It then becomes possible to pass through to
the depths of our being and from the depths so reached a new consciousness can
be formed, both behind the exterior self and in it, joining the depths to the
surface. There must grow up within us or there must manifest a consciousness
more and more open to the deeper and the higher being, more and more laid bare
to the cosmic Self and Power and to what comes down from the Transcendence,
turned to a higher Peace, permeable to a greater light, force and ecstasy, a
consciousness that exceeds the small personality and surpasses the limited
light and experience of the surface mind, the limited force and aspiration of
the normal
86
life
consciousness, the obscure and limited responsiveness of the body.
For
this penetration into the luminous crypt of the soul one has to get through all
the intervening vital stuff to the psychic centre within us, however long,
tedious or difficult may be the process. The method of detachment from the
insistence of all mental and vital and physical claims and calls and
impulsions, a concentration in the heart, austerity, self-purification and
rejection of the old mind movements and life movements, rejection of the ego of
desire, rejection of the false needs and false habits, are all useful aids to
this difficult passage: but the strongest, most central way is to found all such
or other methods on a self-offering and surrender of ourselves and our parts of
nature to the Divine Being, the Ishwara. A strict obedience to the wise and
intuitive leading of a Guide is also normal and necessary for all but a few
specially gifted seekers.
LD.II,
25
Two principal results follow
this emergence: first an
effective guidance and
mastery which unmask and reject
all that is false and
obscure or all that opposes the divine
realization; then, a
spontaneous influx of spiritual
experiences of all kinds.
As
the crust of the outer nature cracks, as the walls of inner separation break
down, the inner light gets through, the inner fire burns in the heart, the
substance of the nature and the stuff of consciousness refine to a greater
subtlety and purity, and the deeper psychic experiences, those which are not
solely of an inner mental or inner vital character, become possible in this
subtler, purer, finer substance; the soul begins to unveil itself, the psychic
personality reaches its full stature. The soul, the psychic entity, then
manifests itself as the central being which upholds mind and life and body and
supports all the other powers and functions of the Spirit; it takes up its
greater function as the guide and ruler of the nature. A guidance, a governance
begins from within which exposes every movement to the light of Truth, repels
what is false, obscure, opposed to the divine realization: every region of the
being, every nook and corner of it, every movement, formation, direction,
inclination
87
of
thought, will, emotion, sensation, action, reaction, motive, disposition,
propensity, desire, habit of the conscious or subconscious physical, even the
most concealed, camouflaged, mute, recondite, is lighted up with the unerring
psychic light, their confusions dissipated, their tangles disentangled, their
obscurities, deceptions, self-deceptions precisely indicated and removed; all
is purified, set right, the whole nature harmonized, modulated in the psychic
key, put in spiritual order.
This
is the first result, but the second is a free inflow of all kinds of spiritual
experience, experience of the Self, experience of the Ishwara and the Divine
Shakti,18 experience of cosmic consciousness, a direct touch with cosmic forces
and with the occult movements of universal Nature, a psychic sympathy and unity
and inner communication and interchanges of all kinds with other beings and
with Nature, illuminations of the mind by knowledge, illuminations of the heart
by love and devotion and spiritual joy and ecstasy, illuminations of the sense
and the body by higher experience, illuminations of dynamic action in the truth
and largeness of a purified mind and heart and soul, the certitudes of the
divine light and guidance, the joy and power of the divine force working in the
will and the conduct. These experiences are the result of an opening outward of
the inner and inmost being and nature; for then there comes into play the
soul’s power of unerring inherent consciousness, its vision, its touch on
things which is superior to any mental cognition; there is there, native to the
psychic consciousness in its pure working, an immediate sense of the world and
its beings, a direct inner contact with them and a direct contact with the Self
and with the Divine,—a direct knowledge, a direct sight of Truth and of all
truths, a direct penetrating spiritual emotion and feeling, a direct intuition
of right will and right action, a power to rule and to create an order of the
being not by the gropings of the superficial self, but from within, from the
inner truth of self and things and the occult realities of Nature.
LD.II,
25
The second phase of the
transformation may be called
spiritual; it is an opening
to an Infinity above us,
an eternal Presence, a
boundless Self, an infinite
88
Existence, an infinity of
Consciousness, an infinity
of Bliss, an All-Power.
But
all this change and all this experience, though psychic and spiritual in
essence and character, would still be, in its parts of life-effectuation, on
the mental, vital and physical level . . . A highest spiritual transformation
must intervene on the psychic or psycho-spiritual change; the psychic movement
inward to the inner being, the Self or Divinity within us, must be completed by
an opening upward to a supreme spiritual status or a higher existence. This can
be done by our opening into what is above us, by an ascent of consciousness
into the ranges of overmind20 and supramental nature in
which the sense of self and spirit is ever unveiled and permanent and in which
the self-luminous instrumentation of the self and spirit is not restricted or
divided as in our mind-nature, life-nature, body-nature. This also the psychic
change makes possible; for as it opens us to the cosmic consciousness now
hidden from us by many walls of limiting individuality, so also it opens us to
what is now superconscient to our normality because it is hidden from us by the
strong, hard and bright lid of mind,—mind constricting, dividing and
separative. The lid thins, is slit, breaks asunder or opens and disappears
under the pressure of the psycho-spiritual change and the natural urge of the
new spiritualized consciousness towards that of which it is an expression here.
If
the rift in the lid of mind is made, what happens is an opening of vision to
something above us or a rising up towards it or a descent of its powers into
our being. What we see by the opening of vision is an Infinity above us, an
eternal Presence or an infinite Existence, an infinity of consciousness, an
infinity of bliss,—a boundless Self, a boundless Light, a boundless Power, a
boundless Ecstasy. It may be that for a long time all that is obtained is the
occasional or frequent or constant vision of it and a longing and aspiration,
but without anything further, because, although something in the mind, heart or
other part of the being has opened to this experience, the lower nature as a
whole is too heavy and obscure as yet for more. But there may be, instead of
this first wide awareness from below or subsequently to it, an ascension of the
mind to heights above:
89
the
nature of these heights we may not know or clearly discern, but some
consequence of the ascent is felt; there is often too an awareness of infinite
ascension and return but no record or translation of that higher state.
LD.II,
25
The spiritual change
culminates in a permanent ascension
from the lower consciousness
to the higher consciousness,
followed by an effective
permanent descent of the higher
nature into the lower.
In
time the ascent comes to be made at will and the consciousness brings back and
retains some effect or some gain of its temporary sojourn in these higher
countries of the spirit. These ascents take place for many in trance, but are
perfectly possible in a concentration of the waking consciousness or, where
that consciousness has become sufficiently psychic, at any unconcentrated
moment by an upward attraction or affinity. But these two types of contact with
the superconscient, though they can be powerfully illuminating, ecstatic or
liberating, are by themselves insufficiently effective: for the full spiritual
transformation more is needed, a permanent ascension from the lower into the
higher consciousness and an effectual permanent descent of the higher into the
lower nature.
LD.II,
25
A new consciousness begins
to form with new forces of
thought and sight, and a
power of direct spiritual
realization which is more
than thought or sight.
This
experience of descent can take place as a result of the other two movements or
automatically before either has happened, through a sudden rift in the lid or a
percolation, a downpour or an influx. A light descends and touches or envelops
or penetrates the lower being, the mind, the life or the body; or a presence or
a power or a stream of knowledge pours in waves or currents, or there is a
flood of bliss or a sudden ecstasy; the contact with the superconscient has
been established. For such experiences repeat themselves till they become
normal, familiar and well-understood, revelatory of their contents and their
significance which may have at first been involved and wrapped into secrecy by
the figure of the covering experience. For a
90
knowledge
from above begins to descend, frequently, constantly, then uninterruptedly, and
to manifest in the mind’s quietude or silence; intuitions and inspirations,
revelations born of a greater sight, a higher truth and wisdom, enter into the
being, a luminous intuitive discrimination works which dispels all darkness of
understanding or dazzling confusions, puts all in order; a new consciousness
begins to form, the mind of a high wide self-existent thinking knowledge or an
illumined or an intuitive or an overmental consciousness with new forces of
thought or sight and a greater power of direct spiritual realization which is
more than thought or sight, a greater becoming in the spiritual substance of
our present being; the heart and the sense become subtle, intense, large to
embrace all existence, to see God, to feel and hear and touch the Eternal, to
make a deeper and a closer unity of self and the world in a transcendent
realization. Other decisive experiences, other changes of consciousness
determine themselves which are corollaries and consequences of this fundamental
change. No limit can be fixed to this revolution; for it is in its nature an
invasion by the Infinite.
For
this new consciousness has itself the nature of infinity: it brings to us the
abiding spiritual sense and awareness of the infinite and eternal with a great
largeness of the nature and a breaking down of its limitations; immortality
becomes no longer a belief or an experience but a normal self-awareness; the
close presence of the Divine Being, his rule of the world and of our self and
natural members, his force working in us and everywhere, the peace of the
infinite, the joy of the infinite are now concrete and constant in the being;
in all sights and forms one sees the Eternal, the Reality, in all sounds one
hears it, in all touches feels it; there is nothing else but its forms and
personalities and manifestations; the joy or adoration of the heart, the
embrace of all existence, the unity of the spirit are abiding realities. The
consciousness of the mental creature is turning or has been already turned
wholly into the consciousness of the spiritual being. This is the second of the
three transformations; uniting the manifested existence with what is above it,
it is the middle step of the three, the decisive transition of the spiritually
evolving nature.
LD.II,
25
91
To make this new creation
permanent and perfect, the very
foundation of our nature of
ignorance must be transfigured
and a greater power, a
supramental Force must intervene to
accomplish that
transfiguration. This is the third phase:
the supramental
transformation.
As
the psychic change has to call in the spiritual to complete it, so the first
spiritual change has to call in the supramental transformation to complete it.
For all these steps forward are, like those before them, transitional; the
whole radical change in the evolution from a basis of Ignorance to a basis of
Knowledge can only come by the intervention of the supramental Power and its
direct action in earth-existence.
This
then must be the nature of the third and final transformation which finishes
the passage of the soul through the Ignorance and bases its consciousness, its
life, its power and form of manifestation on a complete and completely
effective self-knowledge. The Truth-Consciousness, finding evolutionary Nature
ready, has to descend into her and enable her to liberate the supramental
principle within her; so must be created the supramental and spiritual being as
the first unveiled manifestation of the truth of the Self and Spirit in the
material universe.
LD.II,
25
92
CHAPTER VII
THE ASCENT TOWARDS SUPERMIND
It is difficult to conceive
intellectually what the Super-
mind is; and to describe it,
another language would be
needed than the poor
abstract counters of the mind.
The
psychic transformation and the first stages of the spiritual transformation are
well within our conception; their perfection would be the perfection,
wholeness, consummated unity of a knowledge and experience which is already
part of things realized, though only by a small number of human beings. But the
supramental change in its process carries us into less explored regions; it
initiates a vision of heights of consciousness which have indeed been glimpsed
and visited, but have yet to be discovered and mapped in their completeness.
The highest of these peaks or elevated plateaus of consciousness, the
supramental, lies far beyond the possibility of any satisfying mental scheme or
map of it or any grasp of mental seeing and description. It would be difficult
for the normal unillumined or untransformed mental conception to express or
enter into something that is based on so different a consciousness with a
radically different awareness of things; even if they were seen or conceived by
some enlightenment or opening of vision, another language than the poor
abstract counters used by our mind would be needed to translate them into terms
by which their reality could become at all seizable by us. As the summits of
human mind are beyond animal perception, so the movements of supermind are
beyond the ordinary human mental conception: it is only when we have already
had experience of a higher intermediate consciousness that any terms attempting
to describe supramental being could convey a true meaning to our intelligence;
for then, having experienced something akin to what is described, we could
translate an inadequate language into a figure of what we knew. If the mind
cannot enter into the nature of supermind, it can look towards it through these
high and luminous approaches and catch some
93
reflected
impression of the Truth, the Right, the Vast which is the native kingdom of the
free Spirit.
LD.II,
26
The transition from mind to
Supermind is a passage from
Nature into Supernature. For
that very reason it cannot
be achieved by a mere effort
of our mind or our unaided
aspiration. Overmind and
Supermind are involved and
hidden in the earth-nature;
but, in order that they may
emerge in us, there is
needed a pressure of the same
powers already formulated in
their full natural force on
their own superconscient
planes. The powers of the Super-
conscience must descend into
us and uplift us and trans-
form our being.
The
transition to Supermind through overmind is a passage from Nature as we know it
into Super-Nature.8 It is by that very fact impossible for any effort
of the mere Mind to achieve; our unaided personal aspiration and endeavour
cannot reach it: our effort belongs to the inferior power of Nature; a power of
the Ignorance cannot achieve by its own strength or characteristic or available
methods what is beyond its own domain of nature. All the previous ascensions
have been effectuated by a secret Consciousness-Force2 operating first in
Inconscience and then in the Ignorance: it has worked by an emergence of its
involved powers to the surface, powers concealed behind the veil and superior
to the past formulations of Nature, but even so there is needed a pressure of
the same superior powers already formulated in their full natural force on
their own planes; these superior planes create their own foundation in our
subliminal6 parts and from there are able to influence the evolutionary process on
the surface. Overmind and Supermind are also involved and occult in
earth-Nature, but they have no formations on the accessible levels of our
subliminal inner consciousness; there is as yet no overmind being or organized
overmind nature, no supramental being or organized supermind nature acting
either on our surface or in our normal subliminal parts: for these greater
powers of consciousness are superconscient to the level of our ignorance. In
order that the involved principles of Overmind and Supermind should emerge from
their veiled secrecy, the being and powers of the superconscience must descend
into us and uplift us and formulate them-
94
selves
in our being and powers; this descent is a sine qua non of the transition and
transformation.
For
a real transformation there must be a direct and unveiled intervention from
above; there would be necessary too a total submission and surrender of the
lower consciousness, a cessation of its insistence, a will in it for its separate
law of action to be completely annulled by transformation and lose all rights
over our being. If these two conditions can be achieved even now by a conscious
call and will in the spirit and a participation of our whole manifested and
inner being in its change and elevation, the evolution, the transformation can
take place by a comparatively swift conscious change; the supramental
Consciousness-Force from above and the evolving Consciousness-Force from behind
the veil acting on the awakened awareness and will of the mental human being
would accomplish by their united power the momentous transition. There would be
no farther need of a slow evolution counting many millenniums for each step,
the halting and difficult evolution operated by Nature in the past in the
unconscious creatures of the Ignorance.
LD.II,
26
What should be the
preparation for the supramental trans-
formation? First, an
increasing control of the individual
over his own nature and a
more and more conscious partici-
pation in the action of the
Supernature.
It
is a first condition of this change that the mental Man we now are should
become inwardly aware and in possession of his own deeper law of being and its
processes; he must become the psychic and inner mental being master of his energies,
no longer a slave of the movements of the lower Prakriti,8 in control of it, seated
securely in a free harmony with a higher law of Nature.
In
human mind there is the first appearance of an observing intelligence that
regards what is being done and of a will and choice that have become conscious;
but the consciousness is still limited and superficial: the knowledge also is
limited and imperfect, it is a partial intelligence, a half understanding,
groping and empirical in great part or, if rational, then rational by
constructions, theories, formulas. There is not as yet a luminous seeing which
knows things by a direct grasp and
95
arranges
them with a spontaneous precision according to the seeing, according to the
scheme of their inherent truth; although there is a certain element of instinct
and intuition and insight which has some beginning of this power, the normal
character of human intelligence is an inquiring reason or reflective thought
which observes, supposes, infers, concludes, arrives by labour at a constructed
truth, a constructed scheme of knowledge, a deliberately arranged action of its
own making.
It
is only a free and entire intuitive consciousness which would be able to see
and to grasp things by direct contact and penetrating vision or a spontaneous
truth-sense born of an underlying unity or identity and arrange an action of
Nature according to the truth of Nature. This would be a real participation by
the individual in the working of the universal Consciousness-Force; the
individual Purusha8 would become the master of his own executive energy
and at the same time a conscious partner, agent, instrument of the Cosmic
Spirit in the working of the universal Energy: the universal Energy would work
through him, but he also would work through her and the harmony of the
intuitive truth would make this double working a single action. A growing
conscious participation of this higher and more intimate kind must be one
accompaniment of the transition from our present state of being to a state of supernature.
Thus
the individuality would become more and more powerful and effective in
proportion as it realized itself as a centre and formation of the universal and
transcendent Being and Nature. For as the progression of the change proceeded,
the energy of the liberated individual would be no longer the limited energy of
mind, life and body, with which it started; the being would emerge into and put
on–even as there would emerge in him and descend into him, assuming him into
it–a greater light of Consciousness and a greater action of Force: his natural
existence would be the instrumentation of a superior Power, an overmental and
supramental Consciousness-Force, the power of the original Divine Shakti.18 All the processes of the
evolution would be felt as the action of a supreme and universal Consciousness,
a supreme and universal Force working in whatever way it chose, on whatever
level, within whatever self-determined limits, a conscious working of the
96
transcendent
and cosmic Being, the action of the omnipotent and omniscient World-Mother
raising the being into herself, into her supernature. In place of the Nature of
Ignorance with the individual as its closed field and unconscious or
half-conscious instrument, there would be a Super-Nature of the divine Gnosis9 and the individual soul
would be its conscious, open and free field and instrument, a participant in
its action, aware of its purpose and process, aware too of its own greater
Self, the universal, the transcendent Reality, and of its own Person as
illimitably one with that and yet an individual being of Its being, an
instrument and a spiritual centre.
A
first opening toward this participation in an action of Supernature is a
condition of the turn towards the last, the supramental transformation: for
this transformation is the completion of a passage from the obscure harmony of
a blind automatism with which Nature sets out to the luminous authentic
spontaneity, the infallible motion of the self-existent truth of the Spirit.
The evolution begins with the automatism of Matter and of a lower life in which
all obeys implicitly the drive of Nature, fulfils mechanically its law of being
and therefore succeeds in maintaining a harmony of its limited type of
existence and action; it proceeds through the pregnant confusion of the mind
and life of a humanity driven by this inferior Nature but struggling to escape
from her limitations, to master and drive and use her; it emerges into a
greater spontaneous harmony and automatic self-fulfilling action founded on the
spiritual Truth of things. In this higher state the consciousness will see that
Truth and follow the line of its energies with a full knowledge, with a strong
participation and instrumental mastery, a complete delight in action and
existence. There will be a luminous and enjoyed perfection of unity with all
instead of a blind and suffered subjection of the individual to the universal,
and at every moment the action of the universal in the individual and the
individual in the universal will be enlightened and governed by the rule of the
transcendent Supernature.
LD.II,
26
97
A second condition consists
in a conscious obedience,
a surrender of our whole
being, to the light, the truth
and force from above.
But
this highest condition is difficult and must evidently take long to bring
about; for the participation and consent of the Purusha to the transition is
not sufficient, there must be also the consent and participation of the
Prakriti. It is not only the central thought and will that have to acquiesce,
but all the parts of our being must assent and surrender to the law of the
spiritual Truth; all has to learn to obey the government of the conscious
Divine Power in the members. There are obstinate difficulties in our being born
of its evolutionary constitution which militate against this assent. For some
of these parts are still subject to the inconscience and subconscience and to
the lower automatism of habit or so-called law of the nature,—mechanical habit
of mind, habit of life, habit of instinct, habit of personality, habit of
character, the ingrained mental, vital, physical needs, impulses, desires of
the natural man, the old functionings of all kinds that are rooted there so
deep that it would seem as if we had to dig to abysmal foundations in order to
get them out . . . At each step of the transition the assent of the Purusha is
needed and there must be too the consent of each part of the nature to the
action of the higher power for its change. There must be then a conscious
self-direction of the mental being in us towards this change, this substitution
of Supernature for the old nature, this transcendence. The rule of conscious
obedience to the higher truth of the spirit, the surrender of the whole being
to the light and power that come from the Supernature, is a second condition
which has to be accomplished slowly and with difficulty by the being itself
before the supramental transformation can become at all possible.
It
follows that the psychic and the spiritual transformation must be far advanced,
even as complete as may be, before there can be any beginning of the third and
consummating supramental change; for it is only by this double transmutation
that the self-will of the Ignorance can be totally altered into a spiritual
obedience to the remoulding truth and will of the greater Consciousness of the
Infinite. A long, difficult stage of constant effort, energism, austerity of
the personal will, tapasya,12 has ordinarily to be
traversed before a more decisive
98
stage
can be reached in which a state of self-giving of all the being to the Supreme
Being and the Supreme Nature can become total and absolute.
LD.II,
26
A third condition is the
unification of the whole being
around the true self and the
opening of the individual
to the cosmic consciousness.
A
unification of the entire being by a breaking down of the wall between the
inner and outer nature,–a shifting of the wall between the inner and outer
nature,–a shifting of the position and centration of the consciousness from the
outer to the inner self, a firm foundation on this new basis, a habitual action
from this inner self and its will and vision and an opening up of the
individual into the cosmic consciousness,—is another necessary condition for
the supramental change. It would be chimerical to hope that the supreme
Truth-consciousness9 can establish itself in the narrow formulation of
our surface mind and heart and life, however turned towards spirituality. All
the inner centers27 must have burst open and released into action their
capacities; the psychic4 entity must be unveiled and in control. If this
first change establishing the being in the inner and larger, a Yogic in place
of an ordinary consciousness has not been done, the greater transmutation is
impossible. Moreover the individual must have sufficiently universalized
himself, he must have recast his individual mind in the boundlessness of a
cosmic mentality, enlarged and vivified his individual life into the immediate
sense and direct experience of the dynamic motion of the universal life, opened
up the communications of his body with the forces of universal Nature, before
he can be capable of a change which transcends the present cosmic formulation
and lifts him beyond the lower hemisphere of universality into a consciousness
belonging to its spiritual upper hemisphere. Besides he must have already
become aware of what is now to him superconscient; he must be already a being
conscious of the higher spiritual Light, Power, Knowledge, Ananda,2 penetrated by its
descending influences, new-made by a spiritual change.
The
spiritual evolution obeys the logic of a successive unfolding; it can take a
new decisive main step only when the previous main step has been sufficiently
conquered: even if certain minor stages can be swallowed up or leaped over by a
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rapid
and brusque ascension, the consciousness has to turn back to assure itself that
the ground passed over is securely annexed to the new condition. It is true
that the conquest of the spirit supposes the execution in one life or a few
lives of a process that in the ordinary course of Nature would involve a slow
and uncertain procedure of centuries or even of millenniums: but this is a
question of the speed with which the steps are traversed; a greater or
concentrated speed does not eliminate the steps themselves or the necessity of
their successive surmounting. The increased rapidity is possible only because
the conscious participation of the inner being is there and the power of the
Supernature is already at work in the half-transformed lower nature, so that
the steps which would otherwise have had to be taken tentatively in the night
of Inconscience or Ignorance can now be taken in an increasing light and power
of Knowledge.
LD.II,
26
Four steps of ascent lead
from the human intelligence to
the Supermind; these are:
1. Higher Mind
Our
first decisive step out of our human intelligence, our normal mentality, is an
ascent into a higher Mind, a mind no longer of mingled light and obscurity or
half-light, but a large clarity of the spirit. Its basic substance is a
unitarian sense of being with a powerful multiple dynamization capable of the
formation of a multitude of aspects of knowledge, ways of action, forms and
significances of becoming, of all of which there is a spontaneous inherent
knowledge . . . It is a luminous thought-mind, a mind of spirit-born conceptual
knowledge.
But
here in this greater Thought there is no need of a seeking and self-critical
ratiocination, no logical motion step by step towards a conclusion, no mechanism
of express or implied
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deductions
and inferences, no building or deliberate concatenation of idea with idea in
order to arrive at an ordered sum or outcome of knowledge . . .
This
higher consciousness is a Knowledge formulating itself on a basis of
self-existent all-awareness and manifesting some part of its integrality, a
harmony of its significances put into thought-form. It can freely express
itself in single ideas, but its most characteristic movement is a mass
ideation, a system or totality of truth-seeing at a single view; the relations
of idea with idea, of truth with truth are not established by logic but
pre-exist and emerge already self-seen in the integral whole. There is an
initiation into forms of an ever-present but till now inactive knowledge, not a
system of conclusions from premises or data; this thought is a self-revelation
of eternal Wisdom, not an acquired knowledge.
This
is the Higher Mind in its aspect of cognition; but there is also the aspect of
will, of dynamic effectuation of the Truth: here we find that this greater more
brilliant Mind works always on the rest of the being, the mental will, the
heart and its feelings, the life, the body, through the power of thought,
through the idea-force. It seeks to purify through knowledge, to deliver
through knowledge, to create by the innate power of knowledge. The idea is put
into the heart or the life as a force to be accepted and worked out; the heart
and life become conscious of the idea and respond to its dynamisms and their substance
begins to modify itself in that sense, so that the feelings and actions become
the vibrations of this higher wisdom, are informed with it, filled with the
emotion and the sense of it: the will and the life impulses are similarly
charged with its power and its urge of self-effectuation; even in the body the
idea works so that, for example, the potent thought and will of health replaces
its faith in illness and its consent to illness, or the idea* of strength calls
in the substance, power, motion, vibration of strength; the idea generates the
force and form proper to the idea and imposes it on our substance of mind, life
or matter. It is in this way that the first working proceeds; it
* The word expressing the idea has the same power if it is
surcharged with the spiritual force; that is the rationale of the Indian use of
the mantra.21
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charges
the whole being with a new and superior consciousness, lays a foundation of
change, prepares it for a superior truth of existence.
LD.II,
26
2. Illumined Mind
This
greater Force is that of the Illumined Mind, a Mind no longer of higher
Thought, but of spiritual light. Here the clarity of the spiritual
intelligence, its tranquil day-light, gives place or subordinates itself to an
intense lustre, a splendour and illumination of the spirit: a play of
lightnings of spiritual truth and power breaks from above into the
consciousness and adds to the calm and wide enlightenment and the vast descent
of peace which characterize or accompany the action of the larger conceptual-spiritual
principle, a fiery ardour of realization and a rapturous ecstasy of knowledge.
A downpour of inwardly visible Light very usually envelops this action; for it
must be noted that, contrary to our ordinary conceptions, light is not primarily
a material creation and the sense or vision of light accompanying the inner
illumination is not merely a subjective visual image or a symbolic phenomenon:
light is primarily a spiritual manifestation of the Divine Reality illuminative
and creative; material light is a subsequent representation or conversion of it
into Matter for the purposes of the material Energy. There is also in this
descent the arrival of a greater dynamic, a golden drive, a luminous
enthousiasmos’ of inner force and power which replaces the comparatively slow
and deliberate process of the Higher Mind by a swift, sometimes a vehement,
almost a violent impetus of rapid transformation.
The
Illumined Mind does not work primarily by thought, but by vision; thought is
here only a subordinate movement expressive of sight. The human mind, which
relies mainly on thought, conceives that to be the highest or the main process
of knowledge, but in the spiritual order thought is a secondary and a not
indispensable process.
A
consciousness that proceeds by sight, the consciousness of the seer, is a
greater power for knowledge than the consciousness of the thinker. The
perceptual power of the inner sight is greater and more direct than the
perceptual power of thought: it is a spiritual sense that seizes something of
the substance of
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Truth
and not only her figure; but it outlines the figure also and at the same time
catches the significance of the figure, and it can embody her with a finer and
bolder revealing outline and a larger comprehension and power of totality than
thought-conception can manage.
LD.II,
26
3. Intuitive Mind
But these two stages of the ascent enjoy their authority and can get their own united completeness only by a reference to a third level; for it is from the higher summits where dwells the intuitional being that they derive the knowledge which they turn into thought or sight and bring down to us for the mind’s transmutation. Intuition is a power of consciousness nearer and more intimate to the original knowledge by identity; for it is always something that leaps out direct from a concealed identity . . .
This
close perception is more than sight, more than conception: it is the result of
a penetrating and revealing touch which carries in it sight and conception as
part of itself or as its natural consequence. A concealed or slumbering
identity, not yet recovering itself, still remembers or conveys by the
intuition its own contents and the intimacy of its self-feeling and self-vision
of things, its light of truth, its overwhelming and automatic certitude.
In
the human mind the intuition is even such a truth-remembrance or
truth-conveyance, or such a revealing flash or blaze breaking into a great mass
of ignorance or through a veil of nescience: but we have seen that it is subject
there to an invading mixture or a mental coating or an interception and
substitution; there is too a manifold possibility of misinterpretation which
comes in the way of the purity and fullness of its action. Moreover, there are
seeming intuitions on all levels of the being which are communications rather
than intuitions, and these have a very various provenance, value and character.
The infrarational ‘mystic’, so styled,–for to be a true mystic it is not
sufficient to reject reason and rely on sources of thought or action of which
one has no understanding,–is often inspired by such communications on the vital
level from a dark and dangerous source. In these circumstances we are driven to
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rely
mainly on the reason and are disposed even to control the suggestions of the
intuition–or the pseudo-intuition, which is the more frequent phenomenon,–by
the observing and discriminating intelligence; for we feel in our intellectual
part that we cannot be sure otherwise what is the true thing and what the mixed
or adulterated article or false substitute. But this largely discounts for us
the utility of the intuition: for the reason is not in this field a reliable
arbiter, since its methods are different, tentative, uncertain, an intellectual
seeking; even though it itself really relies on a camouflaged intuition for its
conclusions,–for without that help it could not choose its course or arrive at
any assured finding,–it hides this dependence from itself under the process of
a reasoned conclusion or a verified conjecture. An intuition passed in judicial
review by the reason ceases to be an intuition and can only have the authority
of the reason for which there is no inner source of direct certitude. But even
if the mind became predominantly an intuitive mind reliant upon its portion of
the higher faculty, the co-ordination of its cognitions and its separated
activities,–for in mind these would always be apt to appear as a series of
imperfectly connected flashes,–would remain difficult so long as this new mentality
has not a conscious liaison with its suprarational source or a self-uplifting
access to a higher plane of consciousness in which an intuitive action is pure
and native.
Intuition
is always an edge or ray or outleap of a superior light; it is in us a projecting
blade, edge or point of a far-off supermind light entering into and modified by
some intermediate truth-mind substance above us and, so modified, again
entering into and very much blinded by our ordinary or ignorant mind substance;
but on that higher level to which it is native its light is unmixed and
therefore entirely and purely veridical, and its rays are not separated but
connected or massed together in a play of waves of what might almost be called
in the Sanskrit poetic figure a sea or mass of ‘stable lightnings’. When this
original or native Intuition begins to descend into us in answer to an
ascension of our consciousness to its level or as a result of our finding of a
clear way of communication with it, it may continue to come as a play of
lightning-flashes, isolated or in constant action; but at this stage the
judgment of reason becomes quite inapplicable, it can only act as an observer
or registrar understanding or recording the more luminous
104
intimations,
judgments and discriminations of the higher power. To complete or verify an
isolated intuition or discriminate its nature, its application, its
limitations, the receiving consciousness must rely on another completing
intuition or be able to call down a massed intuition capable of putting all in
place. For once the process of the change has begun, a complete transmutation
of the stuff and activities of the mind into the substance, form and power of
intuition is imperative; until then, so long as the process of consciousness
depends upon the lower intelligence serving or helping out or using the
intuition, the result can only be a survival of the mixed Knowledge-Ignorance
uplifted or relieved by a higher light and force acting in its parts of
Knowledge.
Intuition
has a fourfold power. A power of revelatory truth-seeing, a power of
inspiration or truth-hearing, a power of truth-touch or immediate seizing of
significance, which is akin to the ordinary nature of its intervention in our
mental intelligence, a power of true and automatic discrimination of the
orderly and exact relation of truth to truth,—these are the fourfold potencies
of Intuition. Intuition can therefore perform all the action of
reason–including the function of logical intelligence, which is to work out the
right relation of things and the right relation of idea with idea,–but by its
own superior process and with steps that do not fail or falter.
LD.II,
26
4. Overmind
The next step of the ascent brings us to the Overmind; the intuitional change can only be an introduction to this higher spiritual overture. But we have seen that the Overmind, even when it is selective and not total in its action, is still a power of cosmic consciousness, a principle of global knowledge which carries in it a delegated light from the supramental gnosis.9 It is, therefore, only by an opening into the cosmic consciousness that the overmind ascent and descent can be made wholly possible: a high and intense individual opening upwards is not sufficient,—to that vertical ascent towards summit Light there must be added a vast horizontal expansion of the consciousness into some totality of the Spirit.
When
the overmind descends, the predominance of the
105
centralizing
ego-sense is entirely subordinated, lost in largeness of being and finally abolished;
a wide cosmic perception and feeling of a boundless universal self and movement
replaces it: many motions that were formerly ego-centric may still continue,
but they occur as currents or ripples in the cosmic wideness. Thought, for the
most part, no longer seems to originate individually in the body or the person
but manifests from above or comes in upon the cosmic mind-waves: all inner
individual sight or intelligence of things is now a revelation or illumination
of what is seen or comprehended, but the source of the revelation is not in
one’s separate self but in the universal knowledge; the feelings, emotions,
sensations are similarly felt as waves from the same cosmic immensity breaking
upon the subtle and the gross body and responded to in kind by the individual
centre of the universality; for the body is only a small support or even less,
a point of relation, for the action of a vast cosmic instrumentation. In this
boundless largeness, not only the separate ego but all sense of individuality, even
of a subordinated or instrumental individuality, may entirely disappear; the
cosmic existence, the cosmic consciousness, the cosmic delight, the play of
cosmic forces are alone left: if the delight or the centre of Force is felt in
what was the personal mind, life or body, it is not with a sense of personality
but as a field of manifestation, and this sense of delight or of the action of
Force is not confined to the person or the body but can be felt at all points
in an unlimited consciousness of unity which pervades everywhere.
But
there can be many formulations of overmind consciousness and experience; for
the overmind has a great plasticity and is a field of multiple possibilities.
In place of an uncentered and unplaced diffusion there may be the sense of the
universe in oneself or as oneself: but there too this self is not the ego; it
is an extension of a free and pure essential self-consciousness or it is an
identification constituting a cosmic being, a universal individual . . . In the
transition towards the supermind this centralizing action tends towards the
discovery of a true individual replacing the dead ego, a being who is in his
essence one with the supreme Self, one with the universe in extension and yet a
cosmic centre and circumference of the specialized action of the Infinite.
106
The
overmind change is the final consummating movement of the dynamic spiritual
transformation; it is the highest possible status-dynamis of the spirit in the
spiritual-mind plane. It takes up all that is in the three steps below it and
raises their characteristic workings to their highest and largest power, adding
to them a universal wideness of consciousness and force, a harmonious concert
of knowledge, a more manifold delight of being. But there are certain reasons
arising from its own characteristic status and power that prevent it from being
the final possibility of the spiritual evolution. It is a power, though the
highest power, of the lower hemisphere;20 although its basis is a
cosmic unity, its action is an action of division and interaction, an action
taking its stand on the play of the multiplicity. Its play is, like that of all
Mind, a play of possibilities; although it acts not in the Ignorance but with
the knowledge of the truth of these possibilities, yet it works them out
through their own independent evolution of their powers.
LD.II,
26
The Overmind descent is not
sufficient to transform wholly
the Inconscience, the
Supramental Force alone is capable
of achieving this.
In the terrestrial evolution itself the overmind descent would not be able to transform in each man it touched the whole conscious being, inner and outer, personal and universally impersonal, into its own stuff and impose that upon the Ignorance illumining it into cosmic truth and knowledge. But a basis of Nescience would remain; it would be as if a sun and its system were to shine out in an original darkness of Space and illumine everything as far as its rays could reach so that all that dwelt in the light would feel as if no darkness were there at all in their experience of existence. But outside that sphere or expanse of experience the original darkness would still be there and, since all things are possible in an overmind structure, could reinvade the island of light created within its empire . . .
Also
by this much evolution there could be no security against the downward pull of
gravitation of the Inconscience which dissolves all the formations that life
and mind build in it, swallows all things that arise out of it or are imposed
upon it
107
and
disintegrates them into their original matter. The liberation from this pull of
the Inconscience and a secured basis for a continuous divine or gnostic
evolution would only be achieved by a descent of the Supermind into the
terrestrial formula, bringing into it the supreme law and light and dynamis of
the spirit and penetrating with it and transforming the inconscience of the
material basis. A last transition from Overmind to Supermind and a descent of
Supermind must therefore intervene at this stage of evolutionary Nature.
A
transformation of human nature can only be achieved when the substance of the
being is so steeped in the spiritual principle that all its movements are a
spontaneous dynamism and a harmonized process of the spirit. But even when the
higher powers and their intensities enter into the substance of the
Inconscience, they are met by this blind opposing Necessity and are subjected
to this circumscribing and diminishing law of the nescient substance. It
opposes them with its strong titles of an established and inexorable Law, meets
always the claim of life with the law of death, the demand of Light with the
need of a relief of shadow and a background of darkness, the sovereignty and
freedom and dynamism of the spirit with its own force of adjustment by
limitation, demarcation by incapacity, foundation of energy on the repose of an
original Inertia. There is an occult truth behind its negations which only the
Supermind with its reconciliation of contraries in the original Reality can
take up and so discover the pragmatic solution of the enigma. Only the
supramental Force can entirely overcome this difficulty of the fundamental
Nescience; for with it enters an opposite and luminous imperative Necessity
which underlies all things and is the original and final self-determining
truth-force of the self-existent Infinite. This greater luminous spiritual
Necessity and its sovereign imperative alone can displace or entirely
penetrate, transform into itself and so replace the blind Ananke of the Inconscience.
LD.II,
26
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CHAPTER VIII
THE GNOSTIC BEING
The difficulty in
understanding and describing the supra-
mental nature comes from the
fact that in its very essence,
it is consciousness and
power of the Infinite.
As we reach in our thought the line at which the evolution of mind into overmind passes over into an evolution of overmind into supermind, we are faced with a difficulty which amounts almost to an impossibility. For we are moved to seek for some precise idea, some clear mental description of the supramental or gnostic existence of which evolutionary Nature in the Ignorance is in travail; but by crossing this extreme line of sublimated mind the consciousness passes out of the sphere, exceeds the characteristic action and escapes from the grasp of mental perception and knowledge . . . Our normal perception or imagination or formulation of things spiritual and things mundane is mental, but in the gnostic change the evolution crosses a line beyond which there is a supreme and radical reversal of consciousness and the standards and forms of mental cognition are no longer sufficient: it is difficult for mental thought to understand or describe supramental nature.
Mental
nature and mental thought are based on a consciousness of the finite;
supramental nature is in its very grain a consciousness and power of the
Infinite. Supramental Nature sees everything from the stand-point of oneness
and regards all things, even the greatest multiplicity and diversity, even what
are to the mind the strongest contradictions, in the light of that oneness, its
will, ideas, feelings, sense are made of the stuff of oneness, its actions
proceed upon that basis. Mental Nature, on the contrary, thinks, sees, wills,
feels, senses with division as a starting-point and has only a constructed
understanding of unity; even when it experiences oneness, it has to act from
the oneness on a basis of limitation and difference. But the supramental, the
divine life is a life of essential, spontaneous and inherent unity. It is
impossible for the mind to forecast in detail what the supramental change must
be in its parts of life
109
action
and outward behaviour or lay down for it what forms it shall create for the
individual or the collective existence.
LD.II,
27
One can, however, describe
in a general way the passage
from the Overmind to the
Supermind and form an idea of
the supramental existence in
its initial step.
This
passage is the stage at which the supermind gnosis9 can take over the lead of
the evolution from the overmind and build the first foundations of its own
characteristic manifestation and unveiled activities; it must be marked
therefore by a decisive but long-prepared transition from an evolution in the
Ignorance to an always progressive evolution in the Knowledge. It will not be a
sudden revelation and effectuation of the absolute Supermind and the
supramental being as they are in their own plane, the swift apocalypse of a
truth-conscious existence ever self-fulfilled and complete in self-knowledge; it
will be the phenomenon of the supramental being descending into a world of
evolutionary becoming and forming itself there, unfolding the powers of the
gnosis within the terrestrial nature.
[This
revelation] can assume the formula of a truth-conscious existence founded in an
inherent self-knowledge but at the same time taking up into itself mental
nature and nature of life and material body. For the supermind as the truth
consciousness of the Infinite has in its dynamic principle the infinite power
of a free self-determination. It can hold all knowledge in itself and yet put
forward in formulation only what is needed at each stage of an evolution; it
formulates whatever is in accordance with the Divine Will in manifestation and
the truth of the thing to be manifested. It is by this power that it is able to
hold back its knowledge, hide its own character and law of action and manifest
overmind and under overmind a world or ignorance in which the being wills on
its surface not to know and even puts itself under the control of a pervading
Nescience. But in this new stage the veil thus put on will be lifted.
LD.II,
27
The supramental or gnostic
being will be the perfect
consummation of the
spiritual man.
In the Ignorance one is there primarily to grow, to know and to do, or, more exactly to grow into something, to arrive by
110
knowledge
at something, to get something done. Imperfect, we have no satisfaction of our
being, we must perforce strive with labour and difficulty to grow into
something we are not; ignorant and burdened with a consciousness of our
ignorance, we have to arrive at something by which we can feel that we know;
bounded with incapacity, we have to hunt after strength and power; afflicted
with a consciousness of suffering, we have to try to get something done by
which we catch at some pleasure or lay hold on some satisfying reality to life.
To maintain existence is, indeed, our first occupation and necessity, but it is
only a starting-point: for the mere maintenance of an imperfect existence
chequered with suffering cannot be sufficient as an aim of our being; the
instinctive will of existence, the pleasure of existence, which is all that the
Ignorance can make out of the secret underlying Power and Ananda, has to be
supplemented by the need to do and become. But what to do and what to become is
not clearly known to us; we get what knowledge we can, what power, strength,
purity, peace we can, what delight we can, become what we can. But our aims and
our effort toward their achievement and the little we can hold as our gains
turn into meshes by which we are bound; it is these things that become for us
the object of life: to know our souls and to be our selves, which must be the
foundation of our true way of being, is a secret that escapes us in our
preoccupation with an external learning, an external construction of knowledge,
the achievement of an external action, an external delight and pleasure. The
spiritual man is one who has discovered his soul: he has found his self and
lives in that, is conscious of it, has the joy of it; he needs nothing external
for his completeness of existence. The gnostic being starting from this new
basis takes up our ignorant becoming and turns it into a luminous becoming of
knowledge and a realized power of being. All therefore that is our attempt to
be in the Ignorance, he will fulfil in the Knowledge. All knowledge he will
turn into a manifestation of the self-knowledge of being, all power and action
into a power and action of the self-force of being, all delight into a
universal delight of self-existence. Attachment and bondage will fall away,
because at each step and in each thing there will be the full satisfaction of
self-existence, the light of the consciousness fulfilling itself, the ecstasy
of delight of existence finding itself. Each stage of the evolution in the
111
knowledge
will be an unfolding of this power and will of being and this joy to be, a free
becoming supported by the sense of the Infinite, the bliss of the Brahman,22 the luminous sanction of the
Transcendence.
The
gnosis is the effective principle of the Spirit, a highest dynamis of the
spiritual existence. The gnostic individual would be the consummation of the
spiritual man; his whole way of being, thinking, living, acting would be
governed by the power of a vast universal spirituality. All the trinities23 of the Spirit would be real
to his self-awareness and realized in his inner life. All his existence would
be fused into oneness with the transcendent and universal Self and Spirit; all
his action would originate from and obey the supreme Self and Spirit’s divine
governance of Nature. All life would have to him the sense of the Conscious
Being, the Purusha8 within, finding its self-expression in Nature; his
life and all its thoughts, feelings, acts would be filled for him with that
significance and built upon that foundation of its reality. He would feel the
presence of the Divine in every centre of his consciousness, in every vibration
of his life-force, in every cell of his body. In all the workings of his force
of Nature he would be aware of the workings of the supreme World-Mother,18 the Supernature; he would
see his natural being as the becoming and manifestation of the power of the
World-Mother. In this consciousness he would live and act in an entire
transcendent freedom, a complete joy of the spirit, an entire identity with the
cosmic self and a spontaneous sympathy with all in the universe. All beings
would be to him his own selves, all ways and powers of consciousness would be
felt as the ways and powers of his own universality. But in that inclusive
universality there would be no bondage to inferior forces, no deflection from
his own highest truth: for this truth would envelop all truth of things and
keep each in its own place, in a relation of diversified harmony,—it would not
admit any confusion, clash, infringing of boundaries, any distortion of the
different harmonies that constitute the total harmony. His own life and the
world life would be to him like a perfect work of art; it would be as if the
creation of a cosmic and spontaneous genius infallible in its working out of a
multitudinous order. The gnostic individual would be in the world and of the
world, but would also exceed it in his consciousness and live in his self
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of
transcendence above it; he would be universal but free in the universe,
individual but not limited by a separative individuality. The True Person is
not an isolated entity, his individuality is universal; for he individualizes
the universe: it is at the same time divinely emergent in a spiritual air of
transcendental infinity, like a high cloud-surpassing summit; for he
individualizes the divine Transcendence.
LD.II,
27
The law of the Supermind is
unity fulfilled in diversity;
unity does not imply uniformity.
A supramental or gnostic race of beings would not be a race made according to a single type, moulded in a single fixed pattern; for the law of the supermind is unity fulfilled in diversity, and therefore there would be an infinite diversity in the manifestation of the gnostic consciousness although that consciousness would still be one in its basis, in its constitution, in its all-revealing and all-uniting order . . . In the supramental race itself, in the variation of its degrees, the individuals would not be cast according to a single type of individuality; each would be different from the other, a unique formation of the Being, although one with all the rest in foundation of self and sense of oneness and in the principle of his being.
In
the lower grades of gnostic being, there would be a limitation of
self-expression according to the variety of the nature, a limited perfection in
order to formulate some side, element or combined harmony of elements of some
Divine Totality, a restricted selection of powers from the cosmic figure of the
infinitely manifold One. But in the supramental being this need of limitation
for perfection would disappear; the diversity would not be secured by
limitation but by a diversity in the power and hue of the Supernature: the same
whole of being and the same whole of nature would express themselves in an
infinitely diverse fashion; for each being would be a new totality, harmony,
self-equation of the One Being. What would be expressed in front or held behind
at any moment would depend not on capacity or incapacity, but on the dynamic
self-choice of the Spirit, its delight of self-expression, on the truth of the
Divine’s will and joy of itself in the individual and, subordinately, on the
truth of the thing that had to be done
113
through the individual in the harmony of the totality. For the complete individual is the cosmic individual, since only when we have taken the universe into ourselves–and transcended it–can our individuality be complete.
LD.II,
27
The supramental being will
realize the harmony of his
individual self with the
cosmic Self, of his individual
will and action with the
cosmic Will and Action.
The
supramental being in his cosmic consciousness seeing and feeling all as himself
would act in that sense; he would act in a universal awareness and a harmony of
his individual self with the total self, of his individual will with the total
will, of his individual action with the total action. For what we most suffer
from in our outer life and its reactions upon our inner life is the
imperfection of our relations with the world, our ignorance of others, our
disharmony with the whole of things, our inability to equate our demand on the
world with the world’s demand on us. There is a conflict–a conflict from which there
seems to be no ultimate issue except an escape from both world and self–between
our self-affirmation and a world on which we have to impose that affirmation, a
world which seems to be too large for us and to pass indifferently over our
soul, mind, life, body in the sweep of its course to its goal. The relation of
our course and goal to the world’s is unapparent to us, and to harmonize
ourselves with it we have either to enforce ourselves upon it and make it
subservient to us or suppress ourselves and become subservient to it or else to
compass a difficult balance between these two necessities of the relation
between the individual personal destiny and the cosmic whole and its hidden
purpose. But for the supramental being living in a cosmic consciousness the
difficulty would not exist, since he has no ego; his cosmic individuality would
know the cosmic forces and their movement and their significance as part of
himself, and the truth-consciousness in him would see the right relation at
each step and find the dynamic right expression of that relation.
For
in fact both individual and universe are simultaneous and interrelated
expressions of the same transcendent Being . . .
One
in self with all, the supramental being will seek the delight of self-manifestation
of the Spirit in himself but equally
114
the
delight of the Divine in all: he will have the cosmic joy and will be a power
for bringing the bliss of the spirit, the joy of being to others; for their joy
will be part of his own joy of existence. To be occupied with the good of all
beings, to make the joy and grief of others one’s own has been described as a
sign of the liberated and fulfilled spiritual man. The supramental being will
have no need for that, of an altruistic self-effacement, since this occupation
will be intimate to his self-fulfillment, the fulfilment of the One in all, and
there will be no contradiction or strife between his own good and the good of
others: nor will he have any need to acquire a universal sympathy by subjecting
himself to the joys and griefs of creatures in the Ignorance; his cosmic
sympathy will be part of his inborn truth of being and not dependent on a
personal participation in the lesser joy and suffering; it will transcend what
it embraces and in that transcendence will be its power. His feeling of
universality, his action of universality will be always a spontaneous state and
natural movement, an automatic expression of the Truth, an act of the joy of
the spirit’s self-existence. There could be in it no place for limited self or
desire or for the satisfaction or frustration of the limited self or the
satisfaction or frustration of desire, no place for the relative and dependent
happiness and grief that visit and afflict our limited nature; for these are
things that belong to the ego and the Ignorance, not to the freedom and truth
of the Spirit . . . The gnostic existence and delight of existence is a
universal and total being and delight, and there will be the presence of that
totality and universality in each separate movement: in each there will be, not
a partial experience of self or a fractional bit of its joy, but the sense of
the whole movement of an integral being and the presence of its entire and
integral bliss of being, Ananda.2
LD.II,
27
The transcendence aspect of
the spiritual life is indispens-
able for the freedom of the
Spirit; but it will harmonize
with the manifested
existence and give it an unshakable
foundation. For the gnostic
being, to act in the world
does not signify a lapse
from unity.
The gnostic life will be an inner life in which the antinomy of the inner and the outer, the self and the world will have been cured and exceeded. The gnostic being will have indeed an
115
inmost
existence in which he is alone with God, one with the Eternal, self-plunged
into the depths of the Infinite, in communion with its heights and its luminous
abysses of secrecy; nothing will be able to disturb or to invade these depths
or bring him down from the summits, neither the world’s contents nor his action
nor all that is around him. This is the transcendence aspect of the spiritual
life and it is necessary for the freedom of the spirit; for otherwise the
identity in Nature with the world would be a binding limitation and not a free
identity. But at the same time God-love and the delight of God will be the
heart’s expression of that inner communion and oneness, and that delight and
love will expand itself to embrace all gnostic experience of the universe into
a universal calm of equality not merely passive but dynamic, a calm of freedom
in oneness dominating all that meets it, tranquilizing all that enters into it,
imposing its law of peace on the supramental being’s relations with the world
in which he is living. Into all his acts the inner oneness, the inner communion
will attend him and enter into his relations with others, who will not be to
him others but selves of himself in the one existence, his own universal
existence. It is this poise and freedom in the spirit that will enable him to
take all life into himself while still remaining the spiritual self and to
embrace even the world of the Ignorance without himself entering into the
Ignorance.
The
gnostic being has the will of action but also the knowledge of what is to be
willed and the power to effectuate its knowledge; it will not be led from
ignorance to do what is not to be done. Moreover, its action is not the seeking
for a fruit or result; its joy is in being and doing, in pure state of spirit,
in pure act of spirit, in the pure bliss of the spirit . . . The gnostic
being’s knowledge self-realized in action will be, not an ideative knowledge,
but the Real-Idea24 of the supermind, the instrumentation of an
essential light of Consciousness; it will be the self-light of all the reality
of being and becoming pouring itself out continually and filling every
particular act and activity with the pure and whole delight of its
self-existence. For an infinite consciousness with its knowledge by identity
there is in each differentiation the joy and experience of the Identical, in
each finite is felt the Infinite.
LD.II,
27
116
The gnostic consciousness
will proceed towards an integral
knowledge. And that will not
be a revelation or a delivery
of light out of darkness,
but of light out of light.
Mind seeks for light, for knowledge,—for knowledge of the one truth basing all, an essential truth of self and things, but also of all truth of diversity of that oneness, all its detail, circumstance, manifold way of action, form, law of movement and happening, various manifestation and creation; for thinking mind the joy of existence is discovery and the penetration of the mystery of creation that comes with knowledge. This the gnostic change will fulfil in an ample measure; but it will give it a new character. It will act not by the discovery of the unknown, but by the bringing out of the known; all will be the finding ‘of the self by the self in the self’.
A
replacement of intellectual seeking by supramental identity and gnostic
intuition of the contents of the identity, an omnipresence of spirit with its
light penetrating the whole process of knowledge and all its use, so that there
is an integration between the knower, knowledge and the thing known, between
the operating consciousness, the instrumentation and the thing done, while the
single self watches over the whole integrated movement and fulfils itself
intimately in it, making it a flawless unit of self-effectuation, will be the
character of each gnostic movement of knowledge and action of knowledge. Mind,
observing and reasoning, labours to detach itself and see objectively and truly
what it has to know; it tries to know it as not-self, independent other-reality
not affected by process of personal thinking or by any presence of self: the
gnostic consciousness will at once intimately and exactly know its object by a
comprehending and penetrating identification with it. It will overpass what it
has to know, but it will include it in itself; it will know the object as part
of itself as it might know any part or movement of its own being, without any
narrowing of itself by the identification or snaring of its thought in it so as
to be bound or limited in knowledge. There will be the intimacy, accuracy,
fullness of a direct internal knowledge, but not that misleading by personal
mind by which we constantly err, because the consciousness will be that of a
universal and not a restricted and ego-bound person. It will proceed towards
all knowledge, not setting truth against truth to see which will
117
stand
and survive, but completing truth by truth in the light of the one Truth of
which all are the aspects . . . There will be an unfolding, not as a delivery
of light out of darkness, but as a delivery of light out of itself; for if an
evolving supramental Consciousness holds back part of its contents of
self-awareness behind in itself, it does this not as a step or by an act of
Ignorance, but as the movement of a deliberate bringing out of its timeless
knowledge into a process of Time-manifestation.
LD.II,
27
The joy of an intimate
self-revealing diversity of the One,
the multitudinous union and
happy interaction within
the One, will give a fully
perfected sense to the
gnostic life.
As mind seeks for light, for the discovery of knowledge and for mastery by knowledge, so life seeks for the development of its own force and for mastery by force: its quest is for growth, power, conquest, possession, satisfaction, creation, joy, love, beauty; its joy of existence is in a constant self-expression, development, diverse manifoldness of action, creation, enjoyment, an abundant and strong intensity of itself and its power. The gnostic evolution will lift that to its highest and fullest expression, but it will not act for the power, satisfaction, enjoyment of the mental or vital ego, for its narrow possession of itself and its eager ambitious grasp on others and on things or for its greater self-affirmation and magnified embodiment; for in that way no spiritual fulness and perfection can come. The gnostic life will exist and act for the Divine in itself and in the world, for the Divine in all; the increasing possession of the individual being and the world by the Divine Presence, Light, Power, Love, Delight, Beauty will be the sense of life to the gnostic being. In the more and more perfect satisfaction of that growing manifestation will be the individual’s satisfaction: his power will be the instrumentation of the power of Supernature for bringing in and extending that greater life and nature; whatever conquest and adventure will be there, will be for that only and not for the reign of any individual or collective ego. Love will be for him the contact, meeting, union of self with self, of spirit with spirit, a unification of being, a power and joy and intimacy and closeness of soul to soul, of the One to the One, a joy of identity and the consequences of a diverse identity. It
118
is
this joy of an intimate self-revealing diversity of the One, the multitudinous
union of the One and a happy interaction in the identity, that will be for him
the full revealed sense of life. Creation aesthetic or dynamic, mental
creation, life creation, material creation will have for him the same sense. It
will be the creation of significant forms of the Eternal Force, Light, Beauty,
Reality,—the beauty and truth of its forms and bodies, the beauty and truth of
its powers and qualities, the beauty and truth of its spirit, its formless
beauty of self and essence.
As
a consequence of the total change and reversal of consciousness establishing a
new relation of spirit with mind and life and matter, and a new significance
and perfection in the relation, there will be a reversal, a perfecting new
significance also of the relations between the spirit and the body it inhabits.
LD.II,
27
Matter will reveal itself as
an instrument of the manifesta-
tion of Spirit; a new
liberated and sovereign acceptance of
material Nature will then be
possible.
This
new relation of the spirit and the body assumes–and makes possible–a free
acceptance of the whole of material Nature in place of a rejection; the drawing
back from her, the refusal of all identification or acceptance, which is the
first normal necessity of the spiritual consciousness for its liberation, is no
longer imperative. To cease to be identified with the body, to separate oneself
from the body consciousness, is a recognized and necessary step whether towards
spiritual liberation or towards spiritual perfection and mastery over Nature.
But, this redemption once effected, the descent of the spiritual light and
force can invade and take up the body also and there can be a new liberated and
sovereign acceptance of material Nature. That is possible, indeed, only if
there is a changed communion of the Spirit with Matter, a control, a reversal
of the present balance of interaction which allows physical Nature to veil the
Spirit and affirm her own dominance. In the light of a larger knowledge Matter
also can be seen to be the Brahman,22 a self-energy put forth by the
Brahman, a form and substance of Brahman; aware of the secret consciousness
within material substance, secure in this larger knowledge, the gnostic light
and power can unite itself with Matter, so seen, and accept it as an instrument
of a spiritual manifestation. A certain reverence,
119
even,
for Matter and a sacramental attitude in all dealing with it is possible . . .
The
gnostic being, using Matter but using it without material or vital attachment
or desire, will feel that he is using the Spirit in this form of itself with
its consent and sanction for its own purpose. There will be in him a certain
respect for physical things, an awareness of the occult consciousness in them,
of its dumb will of utility and service, a worship of the Divine, the Brahman
in what he used, a care for a perfect and faultless use of his divine material,
for a true rhythm, ordered harmony, beauty in the life of Matter, in the
utilization of Matter.
LD.II,
27
The body will become a
faithful and capable instrument,
perfectly responsive to the
Spirit.
For
the law of the body arises from the subconscient or inconscient: but in the
gnostic being the subconscient will have become conscious and subject to the
supramental control, penetrated with its light and action; the basis of
inconscience with its obscurity and ambiguity, its obstruction or tardy
responses will have been transformed into a lower or supporting superconscience
by the supramental emergence. Already even in the realized higher-mind being
and in the intuitive and overmind being the body will have become sufficiently
conscious to respond to the influence of the Idea24 and the
Will-Force so that the action of mind on the physical parts, which is
rudimentary, chaotic and mostly involuntary in us, will have developed a
considerable potency: but in the supramental being it is the consciousness with
the Real-Idea24 in it which will govern everything. This real-idea
is a truth-perception which is self-effective; for it is the idea and will of
the spirit in direct action and originates a movement of the substance of being
which must inevitably effectuate itself in state and act of being. It is this
dynamic irresistible spiritual realism of the Truth-consciousness in the
highest degree of itself that will have here grown conscient and consciously
competent in the evolved gnostic being: it will not act as now, veiled in an
apparent inconscience and self-limited by law of mechanism, but as the
sovereign Reality in self-effectuating action. It is this that will rule the
existence with an entire knowledge and power and include in its rule the
functioning and action of the body. The
120
body
will be turned by the power of the spiritual consciousness into a true and fit
and perfectly responsive instrument of the Spirit.
LD.II,
27
Health, strength, duration,
bodily happiness and ease,
liberation from suffering,
are a part of the physical
perfection which the gnostic
evolution is called upon
to realize.
As
a result of this new relation between the Spirit and the body, the gnostic
evolution will effectuate the spiritualization, perfection and fulfilment of
the physical being; it will do for the body as for the mind and life. Apart
from the obscurity, frailties and limitations, which this change will overcome,
the body-consciousness is a patient servant and can be in its large reserve of
possibilities a potent instrument of the individual life, and it asks for
little on its own account: what it craves for is duration, health, strength,
physical perfection, bodily happiness, liberation from suffering, ease. These
demands are not in themselves unacceptable, mean or illegitimate, for they
render into the terms of Matter the perfection of form and substance, the power
and delight which should be the natural outflowing, the expressive
manifestation of the Spirit. When the gnostic Force can act in the body, these
things can be established; for their opposites come from a pressure of external
forces on the physical mind, on the nervous and material life, on the
body-organism, from an ignorance that does not know how to meet these forces or
is not able to meet them rightly or with power, and from some obscurity,
pervading the stuff of the physical consciousness and distorting its responses,
that reacts to them in a wrong way.
It
is the incompleteness and weakness of the Consciousness-Force manifested in the
mental, vital and physical being, its inability to receive or refuse at will,
or, receiving, to assimilate or harmonize the contacts of the universal Energy
cast upon it, that is the cause of pain and suffering. In the material realm
Nature starts with an entire insensibility, and it is a notable fact that
either a comparative insensibility or a deficient sensibility or, more often, a
greater endurance and hardness to suffering is found in the beginning of life,
in the animal, in
121
primitive
or less developed man; as the human being grows in evolution, he grows in
sensibility and suffers more keenly in mind and life and body. For the growth
in consciousness is not sufficiently supported by a growth in force; the body
becomes more subtle, more finely capable, but less solidly efficient in its
external energy: man has to call in his will, his mental power to dynamize,
correct and control his nervous being, force it to the strenuous tasks he
demands from his instruments, steel it against suffering and disaster. In the
spiritual ascent this power of the consciousness and its will over the
instruments, the control of spirit and inner mind over the outer mentality and
the nervous being and the body, increases immensely; a tranquil and wide
equality of the spirit to all shocks and contacts comes in and becomes the
habitual poise, and this can pass from the mind to the vital parts and
establish there too an immense and enduring largeness of strength and peace;
even in the body this state may form itself and meet inwardly the shocks of
grief and pain and all kinds of suffering. Even, a power of willed physical
insensibility can intervene or a power of mental separation from all shock and
injury can be acquired which shows that the ordinary reactions and the debile submission
of the bodily self to the normal habits of response of material Nature are not
obligatory or unalterable. Still more significant is the power that comes on
the level of spiritual mind or overmind to change the vibrations of pain into
vibrations of Ananda2: even if this were to go only up to a certain
point, it indicates the possibility of an entire reversal of the ordinary rule
of the reacting consciousness; it can be associated too with a power of
self-protection that turns away the shocks that are more difficult to transmute
or to endure. The gnostic evolution at a certain stage must bring about a
completeness of this reversal and of this power of self-protection which will
fulfil the claim of the body for immunity and serenity of its being and for
deliverance from suffering and build in it a power for the total delight of
existence. A spiritual Ananda can flow into the body and inundate cell and
tissue; a luminous materialization of this higher Ananda could of itself bring
about a total transformation of the deficient or adverse sensibilities of
physical Nature.
LD.II,
27
122
A vast calm and a deep
delight of the gnostic existence
rise together in a growing
intensity and culminate in an
eternal ecstasy. In the
universal phenomenon is revealed
the eternal Bliss, Ananda.
An
aspiration, a demand for the supreme and total delight of existence is there
secretly in the whole make of our being, but it is disguised by the separation
of our parts of nature and their differing urge and obscured by their inability
to conceive or seize anything more than a superficial pleasure. In the body
consciousness this demand takes shape as a need of bodily happiness, in our
life parts as a yearning for life happiness, a keen vibrant response to joy and
rapture of many kinds and to all surprise of satisfaction; in the mind it
shapes into a ready reception of all forms of mental delight; on a higher level
it becomes apparent in the spiritual mind’s call for peace and divine ecstasy.
This trend is founded in the truth of the being; for Ananda2 is the
very essence of the Brahman, it is the supreme nature of the omnipresent
Reality. The supermind itself in the descending degrees of the manifestation
emerges from the Ananda and in the evolutionary ascent merges into the Ananda.
It is not, indeed, merged in the sense of being extinguished or abolished but
is there inherent in it, indistinguishable from the self of awareness and the
self-effectuating force of the Bliss of Being. In the involutionary descent as
in the evolutionary return supermind is supported by the original Delight of
Existence and carries that in it in all its activities as their sustaining
essence; for Consciousness, we may say, is its parent power in the Spirit, but
Ananda is the spiritual matrix from which it manifests and the maintaining
source into which it carries back the soul in its return to the status of the
Spirit. A supramental manifestation in its ascent would have as a next sequence
and culmination of self-result a manifestation of the Bliss of the Brahman: the
evolution of the being of gnosis would be followed by an evolution of the being
of bliss; an embodiment of gnostic existence would have as its consequence an
embodiment of the beatific existence.
In
the liberation of the soul from the Ignorance the first foundation is peace,
calm, the silence and quietude of the Eternal and Infinite; but a consummate
power and greater formation of the spiritual ascension takes up this peace of
liberation into the bliss of a perfect experience and realization
123
of
the eternal beatitude, the bliss of the Eternal and Infinite . . .
Peace
and ecstasy cease to be different and become one. The supermind, reconciling
and fusing all differences as well as all contradictions, brings out this
unity; a wide calm and a deep delight of all-existence are among its first
steps of self-realization, but this calm and this delight rise together, as one
state, into an increasing intensity and culminate in the eternal ecstasy, the
bliss that is the Infinite. In the gnostic consciousness at any stage there
would be always in some degree this fundamental and spiritual conscious delight
of existence in the whole depth of the being; but also all the movements of
Nature would be pervaded by it, and all the actions and reactions of the life
and the body: none could escape the law of the Ananda. Even before the gnostic
change there can be a beginning of this fundamental ecstasy of being translated
into a calm of intense delight of spiritual perception and vision and
knowledge, in the heart into a wide or deep or passionate delight of universal
union and love and sympathy and the joy of beings and the joy of things. In the
will and vital parts it is felt as the energy of delight of a divine life-power
in action or a beatitude of the senses perceiving and meeting the One
everywhere, perceiving as their normal aesthesis of things a universal beauty
and a secret harmony of creation of which our mind can catch only imperfect
glimpses or a rare supernormal sense. In the body it reveals itself as an
ecstasy pouring into it from the heights of the spirit and the peace and bliss
of a pure and spiritualized physical existence. A universal beauty and glory of
being begins to manifest; all objects reveal hidden lines, vibrations, powers,
harmonic significances concealed from the normal mind and the physical sense.
In the universal phenomenon is revealed the eternal Ananda.
LD.II,
27
Two questions remain to be
examined, which are
important for the human
conception of life.
1. What is the place of personality in the gnostic being?
Ordinarily, in the common notion, the separative ego is our self and, if ego has to disappear in a transcendental or universal
124
Consciousness,
personal life and action must cease; for, the individual disappearing, there
can only be an impersonal consciousness, a cosmic self: but if the individual
is altogether extinguished, no further question of personality or
responsibility or ethical perfection can arise. According to another line of
ideas the spiritual person remains, but liberated, purified, perfected in
nature in a celestial existence. But here we are still on earth, and yet it is
supposed that the ego personality is extinguished and replaced by a
universalized spiritual individual who is a centre and power of the
transcendent Being. It might be deduced that this gnostic or supramental
individual is a self without personality, an impersonal Purusha. There could be
many gnostic individuals but there would be no personality, all would be the
same in being and nature.
LD.II,
27
In the gnostic consciousness
personality and impersonality
are not opposing principles;
they are inseparable aspects
of one and the same reality.
This reality is not the ego but the being, who is impersonal and universal in his stuff of nature, but forms out of it an expressive personality which is his form of self in the changes of Nature . . . The Divine, the Eternal, expresses himself as existence, consciousness, bliss, wisdom, knowledge, love, beauty, and we can think of him as these impersonal and universal powers of himself, regard them as the nature of the Divine and Eternal; we can say that God is Love, God is Wisdom, God is Truth or Righteousness: but he is not himself an impersonal state or abstract of states of qualities; he is the Being, at once absolute, universal and individual. If we look at it from this basis, there is, very clearly, no opposition, no incompatibility, no impossibility of a co-existence or one-existence of the Impersonal and the Person; they are each other, live in one another, melt into each other, and yet in a way can appear as if different ends, sides, obverse and reverse of the same Reality. The gnostic being is of the nature of the Divine and therefore repeats in himself this natural mystery of existence.
LD.II,
27
What will be the nature of
the gnostic person?
The
ordinary restricted personality can be grasped by a
125
description
of the characters stamped on its life and thought and action, its very definite
surface building and expression of self . . . But such a description would be
pitifully inadequate to express the Person when its Power of Self within
manifests more amply and puts forward its hidden daemonic force in the surface
composition and the life. We feel ourselves in presence of a light of consciousness,
a potency, a sea of energy, can distinguish and describe its free waves of
action and quality, but not fix itself; and yet there is an impression of
personality, the presence of a powerful being, a strong, high or beautiful
recognizable Someone, a Person, not a limited creature of Nature but a Self or
Soul, a Purusha.8 The gnostic Individual would be such an inner
Person unveiled, occupying both the depths–no longer self-hidden–and the
surface in a unified self-awareness; he would not be a surface personality
partly expressive of a larger secret being, he would be not the wave but the
ocean: he would be the Purusha, the inner conscious Existence self-revealed,
and would have no need of a carved expressive mask or persona.
This,
then, would be the nature of the gnostic Person, an infinite and universal
being revealing–or, to our mental ignorance, suggesting–its eternal self
through the significant form and expressive power of an individual and temporal
self-manifestation. But the individual nature-manifestation, whether strong and
distinct in outline or multitudinous and protean but still harmonic, would be
there as an index of the being, not as the whole being: that would be felt
behind, recognizable but indefinable, infinite. The consciousness also of the
gnostic Person would be an infinite consciousness throwing up forms of
self-expression, but aware always of its unbound infinity and universality and
conveying the power and sense of its infinity and universality even in the
finiteness of the expression,—by which, moreover, it would not be bound in the
next movement of farther self-revelation. But this would still not be an
unregulated un-recognizable flux but a process of self-revelation making
visible the inherent truth of its powers of existence according to the harmonic
law natural to all manifestation of the Infinite.
LD.II,
27
126
2. If there is a gnostic personality and if it
is in some
way responsible for its
acts, what is the place of
the ethical element in the
gnostic nature, what is
its perfection and its
fulfilment?
The
law, the standard has to be imposed on us now because there is in our natural
being an opposite force of separateness, a possibility of antagonism, a force
of discord, ill-will, strife. All ethics is a construction of good in a Nature
which has been smitten with evil by the powers of darkness born of the
Ignorance, even as it is expressed in the ancient legend of the Vedanta.25
But where all is self-determined by truth of consciousness and truth of being,
there can be no standard, no struggle to observe it, no virtue or merit, no sin
or demerit of the nature. The power of love, of truth, of right will be there,
not as a law mentally constructed but as the very substance and constitution of
the nature and, by the integration of the being, necessarily also the very
stuff and constituting nature of the action. To grow into this nature of our
true being, a nature of spiritual truth and oneness, is the liberation attained
by an evolution of the spiritual being: the gnostic evolution gives us the
complete dynamism of that return to ourselves. Once that is done, the need of
standards of virtue, dharmas,10
disappears; there is the law and self-order of the liberty of the spirit, there
can be no imposed or constructed law of conduct, dharma. All becomes a
self-flow of spiritual-nature, swadharma
of swabhava.26
LD.II,
27
The gnostic life will
reconcile freedom and order.
There will be an entire
accord between the free ex-
pression of the individual
and his obedience to the
inherent law of the supreme
and universal Truth of
things.
A separate self-existent being could be at odds with other separate beings, at variance with the universal All in which they co-exist, in a state of contradiction with any supreme Truth that was willing its self-expression in the universe; this is what happens to the individual in the Ignorance, because he takes his stand on the consciousness of a separate individuality. There can be a similar conflict, discord, disparity between the truths, the energies, qualities, powers, modes of being that act
127
as
separate forces in the individual and in the universe. A world full of
conflict, a conflict in ourselves, a conflict of the individual with the world
around him are normal and inevitable features of the separative consciousness
of the Ignorance and our ill-harmonized existence. But this cannot happen in
the gnostic consciousness because there each finds his complete self and all
find their own truth and the harmony of their different motions in that which
exceeds them and of which they are the expression. In the gnostic life,
therefore, there is an entire accord between the free self-expression of the
being and his automatic obedience to the inherent law of the supreme and
universal Truth of things. These are to him interconnected sides of the one
Truth; it is his own supreme truth of being which works itself out in the whole
united truth of himself and things in one supernature.
The
two principles of freedom and order, which in mind and life are constantly
representing themselves as contraries or incompatibles, though they have no
need to be that if freedom is guarded by knowledge and order based upon truth
of being, are in the supermind consciousness native of each other and even
fundamentally one. This is so because both are inseparable aspects of the inner
spiritual truth and therefore their determinations are one; they are inherent
in each other, for they arise from an identity and therefore in action coincide
in a natural identity. The gnostic being does not in any way or degree feel his
liberty infringed by the imperative order of his thought or actions, because
that order is intrinsic and spontaneous; he feels both his liberty and the
order of his liberty to be one truth of his being. His liberty of knowledge is
not a freedom to follow falsehood or error, for he does not need like the mind
to pass through the possibility of error in order to know,—on the contrary, any
such deviation would be a departure from his plenitude of the gnostic self, it
would be a diminution of his self-truth and alien and injurious to his being;
for his freedom is a freedom of light, not of darkness. His liberty of action
is not a licence to act upon wrong will or the impulsions of the Ignorance, for
that too would be alien to his being, a restriction and diminution of it, not a
liberation. A drive for fulfilment of falsehood or wrong will would be felt by
him, not as a movement towards freedom, but as a violence done to the
128
liberty
of the spirit, an invasion and imposition, an inroad upon his supernature, a
tyranny of some alien Nature.
A similar inevitability of the union of freedom and order would be the law of the collective life; it would be a freedom of the diverse play of the Infinite in divine souls, an order of the conscious unity of souls which is the law of the supramental Infinite. Our mental rendering of oneness brought about by the mental reason drives towards a thorough-going standardization as its one effective means,—only minor shades of differentiation would be allowed to operate: but the greater richness of diversity in the self-expression of oneness would be the law of the gnostic life. In the gnostic consciousness difference would not lead to discord but to a spontaneous natural adaptation, a sense of complementary plenitude, a rich many-sided execution of the thing to be collectively known, done, worked out in life.
LD.II,
27
All mental standards would
disappear because their necessity
would cease; the authentic
law of identity with the Divine
Self would have replaced
them.
On
this fact that the Divine Knowledge and Force, the supreme Supernature, would
act through the gnostic being with his full participation, is founded the
freedom of the gnostic being; it is this unity that gives him his liberty. The
freedom from law, including the moral law, so frequently affirmed of the
spiritual being, is founded on this unity of its will with the will of the
Eternal. All the mental standards would disappear because all necessity for
them would cease; the higher authentic law of identity with the Divine Self and
identity with all beings would have replaced them. There would be no question
of selfishness or altruism, of oneself and others, since all are seen and felt
as the one self and only what the supreme Truth and Good decided would be done.
There would be in the action a pervasive feeling of a self-existent universal
love, sympathy, oneness, but the feeling would penetrate, colour and move in
the act, not solely dominate or determine it: it would not stand for itself in
opposition to the larger truth of things or dictate a personally impelled
departure from the divinely willed true movement. This opposition and departure
can happen in the Ignor-
129
ance
where love or any other strong principle of the nature can be divorced from
wisdom even as it can be divorced from power; but in the supermind gnosis all
powers are intimate to each other and act as one. In the gnostic person the
Truth-Knowledge would lead and determine and all the other forces of the being
concur in the action: there would be no place for disharmony or conflict
between the powers of the nature.
LD.II,
27
130
CHAPTER IX
THE DIVINE LIFE UPON EARTH
To be wholly and integrally
conscious of oneself and of all
the truth of one’s being is
what is implied by the perfect
emergence of the individual
consciousness, and it is that
towards which evolution
tends. All being is one, and to
be fully conscious means to
be integrated with the con-
sciousness of all, with the
universal self and force and
action.
For the essence of consciousness is the power to be aware of itself and its objects, and in its true nature this power must be direct, self-fulfilled and complete: if it is in us indirect, incomplete, unfulfilled in its workings, dependent on constructed instruments, it is because consciousness here is emerging from an original veiling Inconscience and is yet burdened and enveloped with the first Nescience proper to the Inconscient; but it must have the power to emerge completely, its destiny must be to evolve into its own perfection which is its true nature. Its true nature is to be wholly aware of its objects, and of these objects the first is self, the being which is evolving its consciousness here, and the rest is what we see as not-self,—but if existence is indivisible, that too must in reality be self: the destiny of evolving consciousness must be, then, to become perfect in its awareness, entirely aware of self and all-aware. This perfect and natural condition of consciousness is to us a superconscience, a state which is beyond us and in which our mind, if suddenly transferred to it, could not at first function; but it is towards that superconscience that our conscious being must be evolving. But this evolution of our consciousness to a superconscience or a supreme of itself is possible only if the Inconscience which is our basis here is really itself an involved Superconscience; for what is to be in the becoming of the Reality in us must be already there involved or secret in its beginning. Such an involved Being or Power we can well conceive the Inconscient to be when we closely regard this material creation of an unconscious Energy and see it laboring out with
131
curious
construction and infinite device the work of a vast involved Intelligence and
see, too, that we ourselves are something of that Intelligence evolving out of
its involution, an emerging consciousness whose emergence cannot stop short on
the way until the Involved has evolved and revealed itself as a supreme totally
self-aware and all-aware Intelligence. It is this to which we have given the
name of Supermind9 or Gnosis. For that evidently must be the
consciousness of the Reality, the Being, the Spirit that is secret in us and
slowly manifesting here; of that Being we are the becomings and must grow into
its nature.
To
be and to be fully is Nature’s aim in us; but to be fully is to be wholly
conscious of one’s being: unconsciousness, half consciousness or deficient
consciousness is a state of being not in possession of itself; it is existence,
but not fullness of being. To be aware wholly and integrally of oneself and of
all the truth of one’s being is the necessary condition of true possession of
existence. This self-awareness is what is meant by spiritual knowledge: the
essence of spiritual knowledge is an intrinsic self-existent consciousness; all
its action of knowledge, indeed all its action of any kind, must be that
consciousness formulating itself. All other knowledge is consciousness
oblivious of itself and striving to return to its own awareness of itself and
its contents; it is self-ignorance labouring to transform itself back into
self-knowledge.
To
become complete in being, in consciousness of being, in force of being, in
delight of being and to live in this integrated completeness is the divine
living.
All
being is one and to be fully is to be all that is. To be in the being of all
and to include all in one’s being, to be conscious of the consciousness of all,
to be integrated in force with the universal force, to carry all action and
experience in oneself and feel it as one’s own action and experience, to feel
all selves as one’s own self, to feel all delight of being as one’s own delight
of being is a necessary condition of the integral divine living.
LD.II,
28
132
The plenitude of this
consciousness can only be attained
by realizing the identity of
the individual self with the
transcendent Self, the
supreme Reality.
But thus to be universally in the fullness and freedom of one’s universality, one must be also transcendentally. The spiritual fullness of the being is eternity; if one has not the consciousness of timeless eternal being, if one is dependent on body or embodied mind or embodied life, or dependent on this world or that world or on this condition of being or that condition of being, that is not the reality of self, not the fullness of our spiritual existence. To live only as a self of body or be only by the body is to be an ephemeral creature, subject to death and desire and pain and suffering and decay and decadence. To transcend, to exceed consciousness of body, not to be held in the body or by the body, to hold the body only as an instrument, a minor outward formation of self, is a first condition of divine living. Not to be a mind subject to ignorance and restriction of consciousness, to transcend mind and handle it as an instrument, to control it as a surface formation of self, is a second condition. To be by the self and spirit, not to depend upon life, not to be identified with it, to transcend it and control and use it as an expression and instrumentation of the self, is a third condition.
[The
individual] must enter into the supreme divine Reality, feel his oneness with
it, live in it, be its self-creation: all his mind, life, physicality must be converted
into terms of its Supernature; all his thought, feelings, actions must be
determined by it and be it, its self-formation. All this can become complete in
him only when he has evolved out of the Ignorance into the Knowledge and
through the Knowledge into the supreme Consciousness and its dynamis and
supreme delight of existence; but some essentiality of these things and their
sufficient instrumentation can come with the first spiritual change and
culminate in the life of the gnostic supernature.8
LD.II,
28
This realization demands a
turning of the consciousness
inward. The ordinary human
consciousness is turned out-
ward and sees the surface of
things only. It recoils
from entering the inner
depths which appear dark and
133
where it is afraid of losing
itself. Yet the entry into
this obscurity, this void,
this silence is only the
passage to a greater
existence.
These
things are impossible without an inward living; they cannot be reached by
remaining in an external consciousness turned always outwards, active only or
mainly on and from the surface. The individual being has to find himself, his
true existence; he can only do this by going inward, by living within and from
within . . . This movement of going inward and living inward is a difficult task
to lay upon the normal consciousness of the human being; yet there is no other
way of self-finding. The materialistic thinker, erecting an opposition between
the extrovert and the introvert, holds up the extrovert attitude for acceptance
as the only safety: to go inward is to enter into darkness or emptiness or to
lose the balance of the consciousness and become morbid; it is from outside
that such inner life as one can construct is created, and its health is assured
only by a strict reliance on its wholesome and nourishing outer sources,—the
balance of the personal mind and life can only be secured by a firm support on
external reality, for the material world is the sole fundamental reality. This
may be true for the physical man, the born extrovert, who feels himself to be a
creature of outward Nature; made by her and dependent on her, he would lose
himself if he went inward: for him there is no inner being, no inner living.
But the introvert of this distinction also has not the inner life; he is not a seer
of the true inner self and of inner things, but the small mental man who looks
superficially inside himself and sees there not his spiritual self but his
life-ego, his mind-ego and becomes unhealthily preoccupied with the movements
of this little pitiful dwarf creature. The idea or experience of an inner
darkness when looking inwards is the first reaction of a mentality which has
lived always on the surface and has no realized inner existence; it has only a
constructed internal experience which depends on the outside world for the
materials of its being. But to those into whose composition there has entered
the power of a more inner living, the movement of going within and living
within brings not a darkness or dull emptiness but an enlargement, a rush of
new experience, a greater vision, a larger capacity, an extended life
infinitely more real and various than the first pettiness of the life
constructed for itself by our normal physical humanity, a joy of
134
being
which is larger and richer than any delight in existence that the outer vital
man or the surface mental man can gain by their dynamic vital force and
activity or subtlety and expansion of the mental existence. A silence, an entry
into a wide or even immense or infinite emptiness is part of the inner
spiritual experience; of this silence and void the physical mind has a certain
fear, the small superficially active thinking or vital mind a shrinking from it
or dislike,—for it confuses the silence with mental and vital incapacity and
the void with cessation or non-existence: but this silence is the silence of
the spirit which is the condition of a greater knowledge, power and bliss, and
this emptiness is the emptying of the cup of our natural being, a liberation of
it from its turbid contents so that it may be filled with the wine of God; it
is the passage not into non-existence but to a greater existence. Even when the
being turns towards cessation, it is a cessation not in non-existence but into
some vast ineffable of spiritual being or the plunge into the incommunicable
superconscience of the Absolute.
LD.II,
28
Indeed, this inward-turning
movement is not an imprison-
ment in the personal self;
it is the first step towards a true
universality.
In
fact, this inward turning and movement is not an imprisonment in personal self,
it is the first step towards a true universality; it brings to us the truth of
our external as well as the truth of our internal existence. For this inner
living can extend itself and embrace the universal life, it can contact,
penetrate, englobe the life of all with a much greater reality and dynamic
force than is in our surface consciousness at all possible. Our outmost
universalization on the surface is a poor and limping endeavour,—it is a
construction, a make-believe and not the real thing: for in our surface
consciousness we are bound to separation of consciousness from others and wear
the fetters of the ego. There our very selflessness becomes more often than not
a subtle form of selfishness or turns into a larger affirmation of our ego;
content with our pose of altruism, we do not see that it is a veil for the
imposition of our individual self, our ideas, our mental and vital personality,
our need of ego-enlargement upon the others whom we take up into our expanded
orbit. So far as we really succeed in living for others, it
135
is
done by an inner spiritual force of love and sympathy; but the power and field
of effectuality of this force in us are small, the psychic movement that
prompts it is incomplete, its action often ignorant because there is contact of
mind and heart but our being does not embrace the being of others as ourselves.
An external unity with others must always be an outward joining and association
of external lives with a minor inner result; the mind and heart attach their
movements to this common life and the beings whom we meet there; but the common
external life remains the foundation,—the inward constructed unity, or so much
of it as can persist in spite of mutual ignorance and discordant egoisms, conflict
of minds, conflict of hearts, conflict of vital temperaments, conflict of
interests, is a partial and insecure superstructure. The spiritual
consciousness, the spiritual life reverses this principle of building; it bases
its action in the collective life upon an inner experience and inclusion of
others in our own being, an inner sense and reality of oneness. The spiritual
individual acts out of that sense of oneness which gives him immediate and
direct perception of the demand of self on other self, the need of the life,
the good, the work of love and sympathy that can truly be done. A realization
of spiritual unity, a dynamization of the intimate consciousness of one-being,
of one self in all beings, can alone found and govern by its truth the action
of the divine life.
LD.II,
28
The law of the divine life
is universality in action,
organized by an all-seeing
Will, with the sense of the
true oneness of all.
In
the gnostic or divine being, in the gnostic life, there will be a close and
complete consciousness of their mind, life, physical being which are felt as if
they were one’s own. The gnostic being will act, not out of a surface sentiment
of love and sympathy or any similar feeling, but out of this close mutual
consciousness, this intimate oneness. All his action in the world will be
enlightened by a truth of vision of what has to be done, a sense of the will of
the Divine Reality in him which is also the Divine Reality in others and it
will be done for the Divine in others and the Divine in all, for the
effectuation of the truth of purpose of the All as seen in the light of the
highest Consciousness and in the way
136
and
by the steps through which it must be effectuated in the power of the
Supernature. The gnostic being finds himself not only in his own fulfilment,
which is the fulfilment of the Divine Being and Will in him, but in the
fulfilment of others; his universal individuality effectuates itself in the
movement of the All in all beings towards its greater becoming. He sees a
divine working everywhere; what goes out from him into the sum of that divine
working, from the inner Light, Will, Force that works in him, is his action.
There is no separative ego in him to initiate anything; it is the Transcendent
and Universal that moves out through his universalized individuality into the
action of the universe. As he does not live for a separate ego, so too he does
not live for the purpose of any collective ego; he lives in and for the Divine
in himself, in and for the Divine in the collectivity, in and for the Divine in
all beings. This universality in action, organized by the all-seeing Will in
the sense of the realized oneness of all, is the law of his divine living.
It
is, then, this spiritual fulfilment of the urge to individual perfection and an
inner completeness of being that we mean first when we speak of a divine life.
It is the first essential condition of a perfected life on earth and we are
therefore right in making the utmost possible individual perfection our first
supreme business. The perfection of the spiritual and pragmatic relation of the
individual with all around him is our second preoccupation; the solution of
this second desideratum lies in a complete universality and oneness with all
life upon earth which is the other concomitant result of an evolution into the
gnostic consciousness and nature. But there still remains the third
desideratum, a new world, a change in the total life of humanity or, at the
least, a new perfected collective life in the earth-nature. This calls for the
appearance not only of isolated evolved individuals acting in the unevolved
mass, but of many gnostic individuals forming a new kind of beings and a new
common life superior to the present individual and common existence.
A
spiritual or gnostic being would feel his harmony with the whole gnostic life
around him, whatever his position in the whole. According to his place in it he
would know how to lead or to rule, but also how to subordinate himself; both
would be to him an equal delight: for the spirit’s freedom, because it is
137
eternal,
self-existent and inalienable, can be felt as much in service and willing
subordination and adjustment with other selves as in power and rule. An inner
spiritual freedom can accept its place in the truth of an inner spiritual
hierarchy as well as in the truth, not incompatible with it, of a fundamental
spiritual equality. It is this self-arrangement of Truth, a natural order of
the spirit, that would exist in a common life of different degrees and stages
of the evolving gnostic being. Unity is the basis of the gnostic consciousness,
mutuality the natural result of its direct awareness of oneness in diversity,
harmony the inevitable power of the working of its force. Unity, mutuality and
harmony must therefore be the inescapable law of a common or collective gnostic
life. What forms it might take would depend upon the will of evolutionary
manifestation of the Supernature, but this would be its general character and
principle.
LD.II,
28
New powers of consciousness
and new faculties will develop
in the gnostic being who
will use them in a natural, normal
and spontaneous way both for
knowledge and for action.
An
evolution of innate and latent but as yet unevolved powers of consciousness is
not considered admissible by the modern mind, because these exceed our present
formulation of Nature and, to our ignorant preconceptions founded on a limited
experience, they seem to belong to the supernatural, to the miraculous and
occult; for they surpass the known action of material Energy which is now
ordinarily accepted as the sole cause and mode of things and the sole
instrumentation of the World-Force. A human working of marvels, by the
conscious being discovering and developing an instrumentation of material
forces overpassing anything that Nature or man has yet organized is not
admitted as possible. But there would be nothing supernatural or miraculous in
such an evolution, except in so far as it would be a supernature or superior
nature to ours just as human nature is a supernature or superior nature to that
of animal or plant or material objects. Our mind and
138
its
powers, our use of reason, our mental intuition and insight, speech,
possibilities of philosophical, scientific, aesthetic discovery of the truths
and potencies of being and a control of its forces are an evolution that has
taken place: yet it would seem impossible if we took our stand on the limited
animal consciousness and its capacities; for there is nothing there to warrant
so prodigious a progression. But still there are vague initial manifestations,
rudimentary elements or arrested possibilities in the animal to which our
reason and intelligence with their extraordinary developments stand as an
unimaginable journey from a poor and unpromising point of departure. The
rudiments of spiritual powers belonging to the gnostic supernature are
similarly there even in our ordinary composition, but only occasionally and
sparsely active. It is not irrational to suppose that at this much higher stage
of the evolution a similar but greater progression starting from these
rudimentary beginnings might lead to another immense development and departure.
In
mystic experience,–when there is an opening of the inner centres,27 or in other ways,
spontaneously or by will or endeavour or in the very course of the spiritual
growth,–new powers of consciousness have been known to develop; they present
themselves as if an automatic consequence of some inner opening or in answer to
a call in the being, so much so that it has been found necessary to recommend
to the seeker not to hunt after these powers, not to accept or use them. This
rejection is logical for those who seek to withdraw from life; for all
acceptance of greater power would bind to life or be a burden on the bare and
pure urge towards liberation. An indifference to all other aims and issues is
natural for the God-lover who seeks God for His own sake and not for power or
any other inferior attraction; the pursuit of these alluring but often
dangerous forces would be a deviation from his purpose. A similar rejection is
a necessary self-restraint and a spiritual discipline for the immature seeker,
since such powers may be a great, even a deadly peril; for their supernormality
may easily feed in him an abnormal exaggeration of the ego. Power in itself may
be dreaded as a temptation by the aspirant to perfection, because power can
abase as well as elevate; nothing is more liable to misuse. But when new
capacities come as an inevitable result of the growth into a greater consciousness
and a greater life and that growth is part of the very aim of the
139
spiritual
being within us, this bar does not operate; for a growth of the being into
supernature and its life in supernature cannot take place or cannot be complete
without bringing with it a greater power of consciousness and a greater power
of life and the spontaneous development of an instrumentation of knowledge and
force normal to that supernature. There is nothing in this future evolution of
the being which could be regarded as irrational or incredible; there is nothing
in it abnormal or miraculous: it would be the necessary course of the evolution
of consciousness and its forces in the passage from the mental to the gnostic
or supramental formulation of our existence. This action of the forces of
supernature would be a natural, normal and spontaneously simple working of the
new higher or greater consciousness into which the being enters in the course
of his self-evolution; the gnostic being accepting the gnostic life would develop
and use the powers of this greater consciousness, even as man develops and uses
the powers of his mental nature.
LD.II,
28
The life of gnostic beings
might fitly be characterized as
a superhuman or divine life.
But it must not be confused
with past and present ideas
of supermanhood.
A
gnostic Supernature transcends all the values of our normal ignorant Nature;
our standards and values are created by ignorance and therefore cannot
determine the life of Supernature. At the same time our present nature is a
derivation from Supernature and is not a pure ignorance but a half-knowledge;
it is therefore reasonable to suppose that whatever spiritual truth there is in
or behind its standards and values will reappear in the higher life, not as
standards, but as elements transformed, uplifted out of the ignorance and
raised into the true harmony of a more luminous existence. As the universalized
spiritual individual sheds the limited personality, the ego, as he rises beyond
mind to a completer knowledge in Supernature, the conflicting ideals of the
mind must fall away from him, but what is true behind them will remain in the
life of Supernature. The gnostic consciousness is a consciousness in which all
contradictions are cancelled or fused into each other in a higher light of
seeing and being, in a unified self-knowledge and world-knowledge. The gnostic
being will not accept the
140
mind’s
ideals and standards; he will not be moved to live for himself, for his ego, or
for humanity or for others or for the community or for the State; for he will
be aware of something greater than these half-truths, of the Divine Reality,
and it is for that he will live, for its will in himself and in all, in a
spirit of large universality, in the light of the will of the Transcendence.
For the same reason there can be no conflict between self-affirmation and
altruism in the gnostic life, for the self of the gnostic being is one with the
self of all,—no conflict between the ideal of individualism and the collective
ideal, for both are terms of a greater Reality and only in so far as either
expresses the Reality or their fulfilment serves the will of the Reality, can
they have a value for his spirit. But at the same time what is true in the
mental ideals and dimly figured in them will be fulfilled in his existence; for
while his consciousness exceeds the human values so that he cannot substitute
mankind or the community or the State or others or himself for God, the
affirmation of the Divine in himself and a sense of the Divine in others and
the sense of oneness with humanity, with all other beings, with all the world
because of the Divine in them and a lead towards a greater and better
affirmation of the growing Reality in them will be part of his life action. But
what he shall do will be decided by the Truth of the Knowledge and Will in him,
a total an infinite Truth that is not bound by any single mental law or
standard but acts with freedom in the whole reality, with respect for each
truth in its place and with a clear knowledge of the forces at work and the
intention in the manifesting Divine Nisus at each step of cosmic evolution and
in each event and circumstance.
The
one rule of the gnostic life would be the self-expression of the Spirit, the
will of the Divine Being; that will, that self-expression could manifest
through extreme simplicity or through extreme complexity and opulence or in
their natural balance,—for beauty and plenitude, a hidden sweetness and
laughter in things, a sunshine and gladness of life are also powers and expressions
of the Spirit. In all directions the Spirit within determining the law of the
nature would determine the frame of the life and its detail and circumstance.
In all there would be the same plastic principle; a rigid standardization,
however necessary for the mind’s arrangement of things, could
141
not
be the law of the spiritual life. A great diversity and liberty of
self-expression based on an underlying unity might well become manifest; but
everywhere there would be harmony and truth of order.
A
life of gnostic beings carrying the evolution to a higher supramental status
might fitly be characterized as a divine life; for it would be a life in the
Divine, a life of the beginnings of a spiritual divine light and power and joy
manifested in material Nature. That might be described, since it surpasses the
mental human level, as a life of spiritual and supramental supermanhood. But
this must not be confused with past and present ideas of supermanhood; for
supermanhood in the mental idea consists of an overtopping of the normal human
level, not in kind but in degree of the same kind, by an enlarged personality,
a magnified and exaggerated ego, an increased power of mind, an increased power
of vital force, a refined or dense and massive exaggeration of the forces of
the human Ignorance; it carries also, commonly implied in it, the idea of a
forceful domination over humanity by a superman. That would mean a supermanhood
of the Nietzschean type; it might be at its worst the reign of the ‘blonde
beast’ or the dark beast or of any and every beast, a return to barbaric
strength and ruthlessness and force: but this would be no evolution, it would
be a reversion to an old strenuous barbarism.
But
earth has had enough of this kind in her past and its repetition can only
prolong the old lines; she can get no true profit for her future, no power of
self-exceeding, from the Titan, the Asura28: even a great or
supernormal power in it could only carry her on larger circles of her old
orbit. But what has to emerge is something much more difficult and much more
simple; it is a self-realized being, a building of the spiritual self, an
intensity and urge of the soul and the deliverance and sovereignty of its light
and power and beauty,—not an egoistic supermanhood seizing on a mental and
vital domination over humanity, but the sovereignty of the Spirit over its own
instruments, its possession of itself and its possession of life in the power
of the spirit, a new consciousness in which humanity itself shall find its own
self-exceeding and self-fulfilment by the revelation of the divinity that is
striving for birth within it.
142
This
is the sole true supermanhood and the one real possibility of a step forward in
evolutionary Nature.
LD.II,
28
It would be a misconception
to think that a life in the full
light of Knowledge would
lose its charm and become an
insipid monotony. The
gnostic manifestation of life would
be more full and fruitful
and its interest more vivid than
the creative interest
offered to us by the world of Ignorance.
This
new status would indeed be a reversal of the present law of human consciousness
and life, for it would reverse the whole principle of the life of the
Ignorance. It is for the taste of the Ignorance, its surprise and adventure,
one might say, that the soul has descended into the Inconscience and assumed
the disguise of Matter, for the adventure and the joy of creation and
discovery, an adventure of the spirit, an adventure of the mind and life and
the hazardous surprises of their working in Matter, for the discovery and
conquest of the new and the unknown; all this constitutes the enterprise of
life and all this, it might seem, would cease with the cessation of the
Ignorance. Man’s life is made up of the light and the darkness, the gains and losses,
the difficulties and dangers, the pleasures and pains of the Ignorance, a play
of colours moving on a soil of the general neutrality of Matter which has as
its basis the nescience and insensibility of the Inconscient. To the normal
life-being an existence without the reactions of success and frustration, vital
joy and grief, peril and passion, pleasure and pain, the vicissitudes and
uncertainties of fate and struggle and battle and endeavour, a joy of novelty
and surprise and creation projecting itself into the unknown, might seem to be
void of variety and therefore void of vital savour. Any life surpassing these
things tends to appear to it as something featureless and empty or cast in the
figure of an immutable sameness; the human mind’s picture of heaven is the
incessant repetition of an eternal monotone. But this is a misconception; for
an entry into the gnostic consciousness would be an entry into the Infinite. It
would be a self-creation bringing out the Infinite infinitely into form of
being, and the interest of the Infinite is much greater and multitudinous as
well as more imperishably delightful than the interest of the finite. The
evolution in the Knowledge would be a more beautiful and glorious manifesta-
143
tion
with more vistas ever unfolding themselves and more intensive in all ways than
any evolution could be in the Ignorance. The delight of the Spirit is ever new,
the forms of beauty it takes innumerable, its godhead ever young and the taste
of delight, rasa,29 of the Infinite eternal and
inexhaustible. The gnostic manifestation of life would be more full and
fruitful and its interest more vivid than the creative interest of the
Ignorance; it would be a greater and happier constant miracle.
If
there is an evolution in material Nature and if it is an evolution of being
with consciousness and life as its two key-terms and powers, this fullness of
being, fullness of consciousness, fullness of life must be the goal of
development towards which we are tending and which will manifest at an early or
later stage of our destiny. The self, the spirit, the reality that is
disclosing itself out of the first inconscience of life and matter, would
evolve its complete truth of being and consciousness in that life and matter.
It would return to itself–or, if its end as an individual is to return into its
Absolute, it could make that return also,–not through a frustration of life but
through a spiritual completeness of itself in life. Our evolution in the
Ignorance with its chequered joy and pain of self-discovery and
world-discovery, its half-fulfilments, its constant finding and missing, is
only our first state. It must lead inevitably towards an evolution in the
Knowledge, a self-finding and self-unfolding of the Spirit, a self-revelation
of the Divinity in things in that true power of itself in Nature which is to us
still a Supernature.
LD.II,
28
144
NOTES
1.
The principle and support of all existence is the Self or Spirit (Atman or Brahman in Sanskrit). From the point of view of the manifested
existence, it has three aspects:
a)
transcendent: the Supreme Self (Paramatman), Existence in
esse, above the individual and the
cosmos, identical with the essential Divine Being, the Supracosmic Reality, the
spaceless and timeless Absolute (Parabrahman);
b)
cosmic: the Universal Self, the Spirit manifested in infinite
self-extension, the indwelling Spirit equal in all beings;
c)
individual (Jivatman): the true Individual Self, the central being of each living entity, the essential
individual consciousness, immutable and free, not affected by desire, ego and
ignorance.
The
Self is one and indivisible notwithstanding its three aspects.
2.
To the highest spiritual perception, the One reveals a triple nature: Existence-Consciousness-Bliss,
Sat-Chit-Ananda (Sachchidananda).
In
the Supreme the three are not three but one—Existence (Sat) is Consciousness (Chit),
Consciousness is Bliss (Ananda). In
the superior planes of manifestation, they become triune although inseparable;
one can be made more prominent and base or lead the others. In the lower planes
they become separable in appearance, though not in their secret reality, and
one can exist phenomenally without the others, so that we can speak of an
inconscient or a painful existence.
Chit, Consciousness, is not an
inert and passive principle; it contains inherently the potential spiritual
Energy, Tapas, which in the
manifestation becomes the dynamic and creative Power or Force, Shakti. Chit-Tapas becomes Chit-Shakti,
the universal Consciousness-Force, the conscious creative Force.
3.
The present cosmic manifestation is the result of a double movement: involution and evolution. Involution is a process of self-limitation, of
densification, by which the universal Consciousness-Force veils itself by
stages until it assumes the appearance of a dense cosmic Inconscience. In this
way a series of universal principles, worlds or planes of consciousness have
been created, each characterized by certain powers of consciousness.
145
The
three superior planes of this universe are called the planes of Sachchidananda. They form universal and fundamental
states of the spiritual Reality in which the unity of the Divine Existence, the
power of the Divine Consciousness, the bliss of the Divine Delight of existence
are put in front. They are far above the reach of normal human consciousness
and experience.
Then
comes an intermediate plane, called the
Supramental plane, or the plane of Supermind. It can be characterized as a
self-effectuating Truth-Consciousness.
The
series of descending planes ends with
— the mental plane or plane of Mind,
— the vital plane or plane of Life,
— the physical or material plane, or plane
of Matter.
In
the physical plane the involution reaches its last stage in a total
Inconscience which becomes the starting point of a gradual evolution. This
Inconscience is a stark and utter negation of the Spirit—an indeterminable
original chaos, as it were.
In
each plane all the powers of consciousness belonging to the planes above it are
involved, so that all the powers of the original and universal
Consciousness-Force are really involved or hidden even in the Inconscient.
These
universal planes are worlds in themselves: they have their own forces, forms
and beings. We are partly immersed in them and influenced by them (see Note 6
below), although it is only in the material plane that we have developed sense
organs which bring the forces, forms and beings of the world of matter within
our normal perception.
Evolution
is an opposite process, by which the Consciousness-Force emerges again
gradually from the apparent cosmic Inconscience and manifests its hidden
powers.
Out
of the Inconscient, Matter has been
organized by the urge of the involved Consciousness-Force and under the
pressure of the subtler forces of the physical plane. It has gradually
developed into the physical cosmos as we know it. Matter, again by the working
of the secret Consciousness-Force and that of the forces of the vital plane
above, has produced Life and living
physical beings: plants and animals. In the animal, once more by a double
action, the forces of the mental plane have successfully fashioned an
instrument permitting them to come in contact with Matter and organize it: Mind is born in the physical world and,
with it, Man, the self-conscious thinking animal. The next step of the ascent
of the embodied consciousness will be taken under the pressure of the forces
from the supramental plane: Supermind
will emerge in the
146
earthly
manifestation. Sri Aurobindo’s principal works are a comprehensive study of
this new power of consciousness, the conditions of its emergence on earth and
the resultant transformation of mankind.
‘Mind,
Life and Matter are the realized powers of the evolution and well-known to us;
Supermind and the triune aspects of Sachchidananda are the secret principles
which are not yet put in front and have still to be realized in the forms of
the manifestation and we know them only by hints and a partial and fragmentary
action still not recognizable.’ (Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, II, 15).
It
must be noted that, as Sri Aurobindo uses the terms, evolution is not exactly
the reverse of involution. Evolution is not a withdrawing, a subtilization,
plane after plane, leading to a reabsorption into the One Unmanifest. It takes
place in Matter itself: it is a gradual emergence of higher powers of
consciousness, leading to an ever greater manifestation of the divine
Consciousness-Force in the material
universe. This is the secret significance of the terrestrial evolution.
4.
Man is made up of a temporary surface personality and a deeper eternal soul
with an individual Self (Jivatman) presiding from above. The personality has
three principal parts: body, life and
mind.
The
individual soul is called the psychic
being by Sri Aurobindo. It stands, so to speak, behind mind, life and body,
which are its instruments in the manifestation, and supports them at first in a
veiled manner, then, as it grows, more and more openly.
The
psychic being is immortal while the body, the vital and the mind are dissolved
at death, or a little later. It passes from life to life, gathering the essence
of its life experiences and makes that its basis of growth in the evolution of
the individual through the ages.
The
true central being, the individual Self or Spirit (Jivatman) presides over the individual evolution, but it remains
above the cosmic manifestation: it is not born nor does it evolve. It puts
forward, as a representative of itself, the psychic being, which stands behind
the manifestation in mind, life and body, and ensures the continuity of the
individual evolution.
The
psychic being should not be confused with the vital being which governs the
activities of life and is the seat of desires, passions and emotions. The true
individual Self should also be distinguished from its distorted reflection, the
ego. The ego, the little self, which
regards itself as separate from others and from the world, is a physical, vital
and mental formation; it belongs to the transitory personality and dissolves
with it.
146
5. Mind: in the language of this Yoga the
words ‘mind’ and ‘mental’ are used to connote specifically that part of the
nature which is concerned with cognition and intelligence. It proceeds by the
elaboration of images, thoughts, ideas. It has various faculties: intelligence,
memory, will, imagination, reason.
The
vital is the life nature made up of
desires, sensations, feelings, passions, energies of action, will of desire,
reactions of the desire soul in man and all that play of possessive and other
related instincts, anger, fear, greed, lust, etc.
6.
The part of our nature of which we are normally conscious is our surface
personality, consisting of the body, the (surface) vital and the (surface)
mind. But behind this superficial consciousness there exists a far greater,
deeper and more powerful consciousness which is in constant touch with the
universal planes of Mind, Life and Matter (see Note 3 above). This hidden
consciousness, which influences and governs us without our knowledge, is
sometimes referred to as our inner being.
Sri Aurobindo differentiates in it three regions or parts. One part is subconscient, lower than our waking
consciousness; another part is on a level with our waking consciousness but subliminal, behind the threshold of consciousness;
and yet another is superconscient, a
higher consciousness above the normal consciousness.
The
subconscient is a concealed and
unexpressed, inarticulate consciousness which works below all our conscious
physical activities. It retains the impressions of all our past experiences;
not as perceptions, reactions, memories, thoughts, but as a fluid substance of
these, as impressions at the same time obscure and obstinate. These impressions
can surge up in dream forms as mechanical repetitions, or as ‘complexes’ which
explode in actions and happenings.
The
subliminal contains, behind the
surface mind, an inner mind, larger and more effective; behind the surface
vital, an inner vital, larger and more powerful; a subtler physical
consciousness behind the surface physical being, more open and plastic and
free. And above, the subliminal opens itself to the regions of superconscience,
just as it opens below to the subconscient regions.
The
superconscient contains first certain
regions of the mind of which ordinary man is not normally conscious, sources of
the higher intuitions and inspirations, then the Supermind and finally that
which is above and beyond it (the planes of Sachchidananda).
7. Psychic: which pertains to the true
soul, the ‘psyche’ or psychic being.
147
8.
The Spirit is the Atman, Brahman, the essential Divine. When the One manifests
the Many, that are always inherent in it, it assumes two aspects: Purusha and Prakriti, the Conscious Being or Soul, and Nature.
The
Purusha is the true being, or at
least represents the true being, on whatever plane he manifests. But in
ordinary man, he is covered by the ego and by the ignorant play of the
Prakriti, and remains veiled as a ‘witness’ which upholds and observes the play
of the Ignorance. When he emerges, he is perceived at first as a calm,
immovable consciousness, detached from the play of Nature. Thereafter he
gradually asserts himself as the sovereign Master of Prakriti. Even when he is
covered up, he is always present. The emergence of Purusha is the beginning of
liberation.
What
is commonly meant by Prakriti is
Nature; it appears to be a play of unconscious and mechanical forces. But
behind it is the ever present living Consciousness and Force of the Divine: the
divine Shakti. Truly speaking Nature is only the outer or executive aspect of
the Shakti or Conscious Force that forms and moves the worlds.
It
can be said also that Nature is only
the lower Prakriti, the Prakriti of mind, life and matter. There exists also a
Higher Prakriti (Paraprakriti), the Supernature
or divine Nature of the Sachchidananda, which has the power of manifesting the
Supermind and remains always conscious of the Divine and free from Ignorance
and its consequences.
9.
Sri Aurobindo calls Supermind or Gnosis the higher dynamism of spiritual
existence. The Supermind is the full Truth-Consciousness in which there can be
no place for the principle of division and ignorance. Its fundamental character
is knowledge by identity, in which the knower is one with that which is known.
It knows the Self, the divine Sachchidananda and also the whole truth of
manifestation.
The
Supermind possesses an inherent dynamic power of self-determination and
self-realization which sees all and unites all.
10.
Dharma: this word, translated variously
as ‘law’, ‘moral law’, ‘duty’, ‘religion’, is used at once in a wide and
flexible sense. In its deepest meaning it is ‘the law of the action according
to the essential nature of each being’. Sri Aurobindo explains this meaning in
the last quotation of Chapter IV.
11.
Pralaya: is the periodical
dissolution of the universe at the end of a cycle of cosmic creation and
activity.
148
12.
Tapasya: practice of a discipline,
and generally of austerities for a determined end; spiritual effort,
concentration of the energies in a spiritual discipline or process.
13.
Rishi: ‘one who sees (the Truth)’, a
seer, a sage.
Yoga:
union with the Divine; the discipline by which one seeks deliberately and
consciously to realize this union, or more generally, to attain to a higher
consciousness.
Yogi:
one who practices yoga; one who has attained the goal of yoga.
14.
The Bhagavad-Gita (The Celestial
Song): an episode in the ancient epic Mahabharata in which, on the battle-field
of Kurukshetra, the Divine, in the form of Sri Krishna, gives his teachings to
Arjuna. It is the most famous of the Indian Scriptures and universally revered.
15.
Swami Vivekananda: (born and died in
Bengal, 1863-1902): one of the chief disciples of Sri Ramakrishna and founder
of the Ramakrishna Mission.
16.
Nirvana: dissolution of the separate
individual self (the little self, the ego); extinction of all separative
consciousness, of desire and egoistic action and mentality; it is not
necessarily the extinction of all being, but of being as we know it.
17.
Whether for the individual or the collectivity, Sri Aurobindo stresses the
fundamental difference which exists between the true Self, immutable and free, one with the supreme Self, and the ego, a
transient separative individual consciousness identified with the mind, vital
and physical, open and more or less subject to forces of all kinds belonging to
these planes.
In
the evolution, the ego has a role of protection; it is necessary as long as the
individual is not conscious of the true Self. But it becomes unnecessary when
the psychic being, which is a delegate of the true Self, openly asserts itself,
and in order that the psychic being may take possession of the nature, the ego
has to abdicate and disappear.
18.
Ishwara, the Divine as Lord and
Master of the universe, and Shakti,
the conscious creative Power, form of a fundamental duality somewhat different
from the Purusha-Prakriti duality
(Note 8, above). Purusha and Prakriti are separate powers, while Ishwara and
Shakti are contained in each other. Ishwara is Purusha who
149
contains
Prakriti and rules by the power of the Shakti within him. Shakti is Prakriti
ensouled by Purusha and acts by the will of the Ishwara, whose presence in her
movements she carries always with her.
The
Shakti of the Ishwara (Ishwari-Shakti)
is the divine Consciousness-Force or World-Mother, who contains all and
carries all within herself, and to manifest it in Time and Space is her role.
She thus appears as the mediatrix between the eternal One and the manifested Many.
These
two dualities, as also the third fundamental duality Brahman-Maya, correspond to different spiritual experiences or
realizations in Yoga (see The Synthesis
of Yoga, Part II, Chapter IV, and The
Life Divine, Vol. II, Chapter II).
19.
Bhakti: is devotion, bhakta is one who follows the path of
devotion, the devotee, the worshipper.
20.
Between the thinking mind and the Supermind there are a number of ranges,
planes or layers of consciousness in which the element or substance of mind and
consequently its movements also become more and more illumined and powerful and
wide.
The
Overmind is the highest of these
intervening ranges; it is full of lights and powers; but from the point of view
of what is above it, it is the line of the soul’s turning away from the
complete and individual Knowledge and its descent towards Ignorance. For
although it draws from the Truth, it is here that begins the separation of the
aspects of the Truth and their working out as if they were independent truths
and forces, and this is a process that ends, as one descends to ordinary mind,
life and matter, in a complete division, fragmentation, separation from the
indivisible Truth above.
It
is from the Overmind that all the different arrangements of the creative Truth
of things originate. Out of the Overmind they come down to the intuitive mind and are transmitted from
it to the illumined mind and the higher mind to be arranged there for our
intelligence. But they lose more and more of their power and certitude and
harmony in the transmission as they come down to the lower levels.
The
Overmind is the world of the great Gods, the divine Creators. One can consider
it as the line separating the higher half of the Universe of Consciousness from
the lower half. The Higher Hemisphere
consists of the planes of Sat, Chit, Ananda, Mahas (the Supermind); the Lower Hemisphere of Mind,
Life and Matter.
In
the individual yoga, as in the collective evolution, conscious-
150
ness
has to rise successively to each of the ranges extending from the thinking mind
to the Supermind. In the passages quoted in Chapter VII, Sri Aurobindo
describes the characteristic functioning of the consciousness on these levels.
21.
Mantra: ‘the word that reveals’, a
combination of words or sounds having a spiritual significance and power. The
function of a mantra is to create in the consciousness vibrations which will
prepare it for the realization of what the mantra symbolizes and is supposed to
carry within itself.
22.
Brahman: the supreme Reality, the
Absolute, the Divine (see Note 1, above).
23.
The Trinities of the Spirit: the
fundamental Trinities have been mentioned in Notes 1 and 2.
The
Transcendent, the Universal, the Individual are three powers overarching,
underlying and penetrating the whole manifestation; this is the first of the
Trinities. In the unfolding of consciousness also, these are the three
fundamental terms and none of them can be neglected if we would have the
experience of the whole Truth of existence.’ (The Synthesis of Yoga, Part I, Chapter XI).
‘A
trinity of transcendent existence, self-awareness and self-delight (Sachchidananda) is, indeed, the
metaphysical description of the supreme Atman, the self-formulation, to our
awakened knowledge, of the Unknowable whether conceived as a pure Impersonality
or as a cosmic Personality manifesting the universe.’ (The Synthesis of Yoga, Introduction II).
24.
Idea: term belonging to the Platonic
vocabulary, where it designates the essential form or type of things, a kind of
eternal and immutable model. The Idea to Plato is the true reality; all the
rest is an appearance or a derivative.
The Real-Idea is a perception of truth
which contains in itself the force of its own realization.
Sri
Aurobindo distinguishes the Idea, which belongs to the higher regions of the
mind (see Note 20), from the Real-Idea, which belongs to the Supermind. The
Idea and the Will-Force are separated, whereas the Real-Idea possesses in
itself the spiritual dynamism inherent in the higher Reality, the Supernature.
But, Sri Aurobindo uses sometimes the word Idea, meaning thereby Real-Idea.
25.
Vedanta: originally the word Vedanta
meant ‘the end or culmination of the Vedas’ and refers to the Upanishads. Sub-
151
sequently,
one of the six classical schools of the Hindu philosophy, which based itself on
the Upanishads, also came to be known as Vedanta or Later Vedanta.
26.
Swadharma: the law of action proper
to an individual (see Note 10, above).
Swabhava: the distinctive nature of
each being.
27.
The inner centres are the seven
lotuses or psychological centres (chakra)
of the subtle body. They become active in the course of yoga and connect the
waking consciousness to the subtler, deeper or higher states of consciousness.
28.
Asuras: hostile beings or forces
belonging to the vital mind plane. The traditional legends of India speak of
them as Sons of Darkness, and later, as giants, titans or demons.
29.
Rasa: the sap, the juice, the inner
savour of things; essential delight, principle of aesthetic or spiritual
enjoyment.
152
BIBLIOGRAPHY
N.B.
The origin of each quotation is indicated by the letters
LD
The Life Divine
SY The Synthesis of Yoga
HC
The Human Cycle
followed
by the number of the volume and/or chapter.
__________
The Life Divine
The
Life Divine originally appeared as a series in the philosophic monthly the Arya, published at Pondicherry, between
August 1914 and January 1919.
The work was afterwards published in
book form under the same title:
1st
Indian edition—Arya Publishing House, Calcutta, 2 volumes (3 parts), 1939
(vol. I—1 part, VIII + 441 pp.) and 1940 (vol. II—2 parts, X, X + 1186 pp.).
In this edition the order of the
chapters was somewhat modified and their text revised and enlarged in places,
often considerably. This is particularly the case in the last six chapters of
the work, which are much quoted in the present book: two of them were rewritten
and four completely new.
2nd
Indian edition—Arya Publishing House, Calcutta, 2 volumes (2 parts), 1943
(vol. I—VIII + 349 pp.) and 1944 (vol. II—X + 945 pp.).
3rd
Indian edition—(Sri Aurobindo International University Centre Collection,
vol. III), in one volume (VIII + 1272 pp.), Sri Aurobindo Ashram, Pondicherry,
1955.
4th
Indian edition—same as above, 1960.
American
edition—The Sri Aurobindo Library, New York, N.Y., 1949, in one volume with
an index (X + 1040 pp.).
French
translations—A translation of the first seven chapters was published in
1947 by the Sri Aurobindo Ashram, Pondicherry.
The last six chapters of the work
have appeared both in English
153
and
French (translated by the Mother), with the sub-title ‘The Spiritual
Evolution’, in the Bulletin of Physical
Education (bilingual Quarterly), Sri Aurobindo Ashram, Pondicherry, from
1956, No. 2 to 1957, No. 4.
Translations
in Indian languages—The trilingual edition of the Bulletin of Physical Education (English, French, Hindi) has given a
Hindi translation of these six chapters between the dates stated above.
There exist two complete Bengali
translations of The Life Divine.
The Synthesis
of Yoga
The
Synthesis of Yoga originally appeared (73 chapters) in the Arya between August 1914 and January
1921. It was incomplete when this monthly ceased.
Partial
edition—Sri Aurobindo Library, Madras, 1948, (VIII + 283 pp.). Re-issue,
under the same title but greatly revised and enlarged, of the first 12 chapters
published in the Arya (Part I. The
Yoga of Divine Works).
2nd
Partial edition—Same as above, Sri Aurobindo Ashram, Pondicherry, 1953.
American
edition—The Sri Aurobindo Library, New York, N.Y., 1950. Reproduction of
the Partial Indian edition (12 chapters), but with Glossary and Index (VIII +
303 pp.).
1st
complete Indian edition—Sri Aurobindo, On
Yoga: I. The Synthesis of Yoga (Sri Aurobindo International University
Centre Collection, vol. IV), Sri Aurobindo Ashram, Pondicherry, 1955, in one
volume (VIII + 1034 pp.).
Besides a newly written Introduction
(The Conditions of the Synthesis), the work consists of four parts, of which
the first (The Yoga of Divine Works) was revised and published in 1948; a
Chapter XIII, newly written but left incomplete, has been added. The second
part (The Yoga of Integral Knowledge) was partially revised by the author. The
two other parts (The Yoga of Divine Love, The Yoga of Self-Perfection) have
been reprinted without change from the Arya.
2nd
complete Indian edition—same as above, 1957.
French
translations—A translation of the revised first six chapters from the Arya was published in 1939 by the Sri
Aurobindo Ashram, Pondicherry, and re-edited in 1953.
154
The French translation (by the
Mother) of the complete work (after the 1957 edition) is in the course of being
published together with the English text in the Bulletin of Sri Aurobindo International Centre of Education (new
name of the quarterly Bulletin of
Physical Education). Sri Aurobindo Ashram, Pondicherry, from 1958. No. 1,
onward. Chapter VII, quoted in the present book, appeared in the Bulletin 1959,
No. 3.
A Hindi translation is also in the process of publication, together
with the English original and the French translation in the trilingual edition
of the Bulletin of Sri Aurobindo
International Centre of Education, Sri Aurobindo Ashram, Pondicherry, from
1958, No. 1, onward. The Introduction and Part I have already been reprinted in
book form.
The Human
Cycle
The original work appeared in the Arya under the title, ‘The Psychology of
Social Development’, from August 1916 to July 1918.
Indian
edition—under the title The Human
Cycle, Sri Aurobindo Ashram, Pondicherry, 1949 (VIII + 334 pp.). Re-issue,
almost without change except for a few footnotes, of the chapters from the Arya.
American
edition—same title, The Sri Aurobindo Library, New York, N.Y., 1950 (VIII +
312 pp.) with Index.
French
translation (by the Mother)—Le Cycle
Humain—published with the English text, in the Bulletin of Physical Education, Sri Aurobindo Ashram, Pondicherry,
from 1954, No. 3, to 1956, No. 1 (7 Nos.).
|
Chapters quoted in the present book |
Bulletin |
|
XI, XII, XIII |
1955, No. 1 |
|
XVII |
1955, No. 3 |
German
translation (by Ursula von Mangoldt)—under the title Zyklus Der Menschlichen Entwicklung, Otto-Wilhelm-Barth-Verlag,
Muenchen-Planegg, 1955 (411 pp.).
Hindi
translation—published in the trilingual editions of the Bulletin of Physical Education, between
the dates stated above. Not yet issued in book form.
155
For a biography of Sri Aurobindo or
a more extensive bibliography, consult Sri
Aurobindo: A Biography, by Dr. K.
R. Srinivasa Iyengar, M.A., D.LITT.,
with 7 illus. 22 + 404 pp. 2nd Ed. revised and enlarged, Arya Publishing House,
Calcutta.
156