The Suprarational Ultimate of
Life
IN
ALL the higher powers of his life man may be said to be seeking, blindly
enough, for God. To get at the Divine and Eternal in himself and the world and
to harmonise them, to put his being and his life in tune with the Infinite
reveals itself in these parts of his nature as his concealed aim and his
destiny. He sets out to arrive at his highest and largest and most perfect self,
and the moment he at all touches upon it, this self in him appears to be one
with some great Soul and Self of Truth and Good and Beauty in the world to which
we give the name of God. To get at this as a spiritual presence is the aim of
religion, to grow into harmony with its eternal nature of light, love, strength
and purity is the aim of ethics, to enjoy and mould ourselves into the harmony
of its eternal beauty and delight is the aim and consummation of our aesthetic
need and nature,
to know
and to be according to its eternal principles of truth is
the
end of science and philosophy and of all our insistent drive towards knowledge
But
all this seems to be something above our normal and usual being; it is something
into which we strive to grow, but it does not seem to be the normal stuff, the
natural being or atmosphere of the individual and the society in their ordinary
consciousness and their daily life. That life is practical and not idealistic;
it is concerned not with good, beauty, spiritual experience, the higher truth,
but with interests, physical needs, desires, vital necessities. This is real to
it, all the rest is a little shadowy; this belongs to its ordinary labour, all
the rest to its leisure; this to the stuff of which it is made, all the rest to
its parts of ornament and
dispensable improvement. To all that rest society gives
a
place, but its heart is not there. It accepts
ethics as a bond and an influence, but it does not live for ethical good; its
real gods are vital need and utility and the desires of the body. If it governs
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its life partly by ethical laws because otherwise vital need, desire,
utility in seeking their own satisfaction through many egoistic individuals
would clash among themselves and destroy their own aims, it does not feel called
upon to make its life entirely ethical. It concerns itself still less with
beauty; even if it admits things beautiful as an embellishment and an amusement,
a satisfaction and pastime of the eye and ear and mind, nothing moves it
imperatively to make its life a thing of beauty. It allows religion a fixed
place and portion, on holy days, in the church or temple, at the end of life
when age and the approach of death call the
attention forcibly away
from this life to
other life, at fixed times
in the week or the day when it thinks it right for a
moment to pause in the affairs of the world and remember God; but to make the
whole of life a religion, a remembering of God and a seeking after him, is a
thing that is not really done even in societies which like the Indian erect
spirituality as their aim and principle. It admits philosophy in a still more
remote fashion; and if nowadays it eagerly seeks after science, that is because
science helps prodigiously the satisfaction of its vital desires, needs and
interests: but it does not turn to seek after an entirely scientific life any
more than after an entirely ethical life. A more complete effort in any one of
these directions it leaves to the individual, to the few, and to individuals of
a special type, the saint, the ethical man, the artist, the thinker, the man of
religion; it gives them a place, does some homage to them, assigns some room to
the things they represent, but for itself it is content to follow mainly after
its own inherent principle of vital satisfaction, vital necessity and utility,
vital efficiency.
The reason is that here we get to
another power of our being which is different from the ethical, aesthetic,
rational and religious, - one which, even if we recognise it as lower in the
scale, still insists on its own reality and has not only the right to exist but
the right to satisfy itself and be fulfilled. It is indeed the primary power, it
is the base of our existence upon earth, it is that which the others take as
their starting-point and their foundation. This is the life-power in us, the
vitalistic, the dynamic nature. Its whole principle and aim 'is to be, to assert
its existence, to increase, to expand, to possess and to enjoy: its native terms
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are growth of being, pleasure and power. Life itself here is Being at
labour in Matter to express itself in terms of conscious force; human life is
the human being at labour to impress himself on the material world with the
greatest possible force and intensity and extension. His primary insistent aim
must be to live and make for himself a place in the world, for himself and his
species, secondly, having made it to possess, produce and enjoy with an
ever-widening scope, and finally to spread himself over all the earth-life and
dominate it; this is and must be his first practical business. That is
what the Darwinians have tried to express by their notion of the struggle for
life. But the struggle is not merely to last and live, but to increase, enjoy
and possess: its method includes and uses not only a principle and
instinct of egoism, but a concomitant principle and instinct of association.
Human life is moved by two equally powerful impulses, one of individualistic
self-assertion, the other of collective self-assertion; it works by strife, but
also by mutual assistance and united effort; it uses two diverse convergent
forms of action, two motives which seem to be contradictory but are in fact
always coexistent, competitive endeavour and co-operative endeavour. It is from
this character of the dynamism of life that the whole structure of human society
has come into being, and it is upon the sustained and vigorous action of this
dynamism that the continuance, energy and growth of all human societies depends.
If this life-force in them fails and these motive-powers lose in vigour, then
all begins to languish, stagnate and finally move towards disintegration.
The modern
European idea of society is founded upon the primary and predominant part played
by this vital dynamism in the formation and maintenance of society; for the
European, ever since the Teutonic mind and temperament took possession of
western Europe, has been fundamentally the practical, dynamic and kinetic man,
vitalistic in the very marrow of his thought and being. All else has been the
fine flower of his life and culture, this has been its root and stalk, and ill
modern times this truth of his temperament, always there, has come aggressively
to the surface and triumphed over the traditions of Christian piety and
Latinistic culture. This triumphant emergence and
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lead of the vital man and his motives has been the whole significance of
the great economic and political civilisation of the nineteenth century. Life in
society consists, for the practical human instincts, in three activities, the
domestic and social life of man,
-
social in the sense of his customary relations with
others in the community both as an individual and as a member of one family
among many,
-
his economic
activities as a producer, wealth-getter and consumer and his political status
and action. Society is the organisation of these three things and,
fundamentally, it is for the practical human being nothing more. Learning and
science, culture, ethics, aesthetics, religion are assigned their place as aids
to life, for its guidance and betterment, for its embellishment, for the
consolation of its labours, difficulties and sorrows, but they are no part of
its very substance, do not figure among its essential objects. Life itself is
the only object of living.
The ancients held a
different, indeed a diametrically opposite view. Although they recognised the
immense importance of the primary activities, in Asia the social most, in Europe
the political, - as every society must which at all means to live and flourish,
- yet these were not to them primary in the higher sense of the word; they were
man's first business, but not his chief business. The ancients regarded this
life as an occasion for the development of the rational, the ethical, the
aesthetic, the spiritual being. Greece and Rome laid stress on the three first
alone. Asia went farther, made these also subordinate and looked upon them as
stepping-stones to a spiritual consummation. Greece and Rome were proudest of
their art, poetry and philosophy and cherished these things as much as or even
more than their political liberty or greatness. Asia too exalted these three
powers and valued inordinately her social organisation, but valued much more
highly, exalted with a much greater intensity of worship her saints, her
religious founders and thinkers, her spiritual heroes. The modern world has been
proudest of its economic organisation, its political liberty, order and
progress, the mechanism, comfort and ease of its social and domestic life, its
science, but science most in its application to practical life, most for its
instruments and conveniences, its railways, tele-
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graphs, steamships and its other thousand and one discoveries, countless
inventions and engines which help man to master the physical world. That marks
the whole difference in the attitude.
On this a great deal hangs; for if the practical and vitalistic
view of life and society is the right one, if society merely or principally
exists for the maintenance, comfort, vital happiness and political and economic
efficiency of the species, then our idea that life is a seeking for God and for
the highest self and that society too must one day make that its principle,
cannot stand. Modem society, at any rate in its self-conscious aim, is far
enough from any such endeavour; whatever may be the splendour of its
achievement, it acknowledges only two gods, life and practical reason organised
under the name of science. Therefore on this great primary thing, this
life-power and its manifestations, we must look with special care to see what it
is in its reality as well as what it is in its appearance. Its appearance is
familiar enough; for of that is made the very stuff and present form of our
everyday life. Its main ideals are the physical good and vitalistic well being
of the individual and the community, the entire satisfaction of the desire for
bodily health, long life, comfort, luxury, wealth, amusement, recreation, a
constant and tireless expenditure of the mind and the dynamic life-force in
remunerative work and production and, as the higher flame-spires of this
restless and devouring energy, creations and conquests of various kinds, wars,
invasions, colonisation, discovery, commercial victory, travel, adventure, the
full possession and utilisation of the earth. All this life still takes as its
cadre the old existing forms, the family, the society, the nation; and it has
two impulses, individualistic and collective.
The
primary impulse of life is individualistic and makes family, social and national
life a means for the greater satisfaction of the vital individual. In the family
the individual seeks for the satisfaction of his vital instinct of possession,
as well as for the joy of companionship, and for the fulfilment of his other
vital instinct of self-reproduction. His gains are the possession of wife,
servants, house, wealth, estates, the reproduction of much of him- self in the
body and mind of his progeny and the prolongation of his activities, gains and
possessions in the life of his children;
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incidentally he enjoys the vital and physical pleasures and the more
mental pleasures of emotion and affection to which the domestic life gives
scope. In society he finds a less intimate but a larger expansion of himself and
his instincts. A wider field of companionship, interchange, associated effort
and production, errant or gregarious pleasure, satisfied emotion, stirred
sensation and regular amusement are the advantages which attach him to social
existence. In the nation and its constituent parts he finds a means for the play
of a remoter but still larger sense of power and expansion. If he has the force,
he finds there fame, pre- eminence, leadership, or at a lower pitch the sense of
an effective action on a small or a large scale, in a reduced or a magnified
field of public action; if he cannot have this, still he can feel a share of
some kind, a true portion or fictitious image of participation, in the pride,
power and splendour of a great collective activity and vital expansion. In all
this there is primarily at work the individualist principle of the vital
instinct in which the competitive side of that movement of our nature associates
with the co- operative but predominates over it. Carried to an excess this
predominance creates the ideal of the arrivist, to whom family, society and
nation are not so much a sympathetic field as a ladder to be climbed, a prey to
be devoured, a thing to be conquered and dominated. In extreme cases the
individualist turn isolates itself from the companion motive, reverts to a
primitive antisocial feeling and creates the nomad, the adventurer, the ranger
of wilds, or the pure solitary,
-
solitary not from any intellectual or spiritual
impulse, but because society, once an instrument, has become a prison and a
burden, an oppressive cramping of his expansion, a denial of breathing-space and
elbow-room. But these cases grow rarer, now that the ubiquitous tentacles of
modern society take hold everywhere; soon there will be no place of refuge left
for either the nomad or the solitary, not even perhaps Saharan deserts or the
secure remoteness of the Himalayas. Even, it may be, the refuge of an inner
seclusion may be taken from us by a collectivist society intent to make its
pragmatic, economic, dynamic most of every individual "cell" of the organism.
For
this growing collectivist or co-operative tendency embodies the second instinct
of the vital or practical being in man.
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It shows itself first in the family ideal by which the individual
subordinates himself and finds his vital satisfaction and practical account, not
in his own predominant individuality, but in the life of a larger vital ego.
This ideal played a great part in the old aristocratic views of life; it was
there in the ancient Indian idea of the kula and the kuladharma,
and in later India it was at the root of the joint-family system which made the
strong economic base of mediaeval Hinduism. It has taken its grossest Vaishya
form in the ideal of the British domestic Philistine, the idea of the human
individual born here to follow a trade or profession, to marry and procreate a
family, to earn his living, to succeed reasonably if not to amass an efficient
or ostentatious wealth, to enjoy for a space and then die, thus having done the
whole business for which he came into the body and performed all his essential
duty in life, - for this apparently was the end unto
which man with all
his divine possibilities was born! But whatever form it
may take, however this grossness may be refined or toned down, whatever ethical
or religious conceptions may be superadded, always the family is an essentially
practical, vitalistic and economic creation. It is simply a larger vital ego, a
more complex vital organism that takes up the individual and englobes him in a
more effective competitive and co-operative life unit. The family like the
individual accepts and uses society for its field and means of continuance, of. vital satisfaction
and well-being, of aggrandisement and enjoyment. But this life unit also, this
multiple ego can be induced by the co-operative instinct in life to subordinate
its egoism to the claims of the society and trained even to sacrifice itself at
need on the communal altar. For the society is only a still larger vital
competitive and co-operative ego that takes up both the individual and the
family into a more complex organism and uses them for the collective
satisfaction of its vital needs, claims, interests, aggrandisement, well-being:
enjoyment. The individual and family consent to this exploitation for the same
reason that induced the individual to take on himself the yoke of the family,
because they find their account in this wider vital life and have the instinct
in it of their own larger growth, security and satisfaction. The society, still
more than the family, is essentially economic in its aims and in its very
nature. That accounts for the predomi-
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nantly economic and materialistic character of modern ideas of Socialism;
for these ideas are the full rationalistic flowering of this instinct of
collective life. But since the society is one competitive unit among many of its
kind, and since its first relations with the others are always potentially
hostile, even at the best competitive and not co-operative, and have to be
organised in that view, a political character is necessarily added to the social
life, even predominates for a time over the economic and we have the nation or
State. If we give their due value to these fundamental characteristics and
motives of collective existence, it will seem natural enough that the
development of the collective and co- operative idea of society should have
culminated in a huge, often a monstrous overgrowth of the vitalistic, economic
and political ideal of life, society and civilisation.
What
account are the higher parts of man's being, those finer powers in him that more
openly tend to the growth of his divine nature, to make with this vital instinct
or with its gigantic modern developments? Obviously, their first impulse must be
to take hold of them and dominate and transform all this crude life into their
own image; but when they discover that here is a power apart, as persistent as
themselves, that it seeks a satisfaction per se and accepts their impress
to a certain extent, but not altogether
and,
as it were, unwillingly, partially, unsatisfactorily,
- what
then? We often find that ethics and religion especially, when they find
themselves in a constant conflict with the vital instincts, the dynamic
life-power in man, proceed to an attitude of almost complete hostility and seek
to damn them in idea and repress them in fact. To the vital instinct for wealth
and well-being they oppose the ideal of a chill and austere poverty; to the
vital instinct for pleasure the ideal not only of self-denial, but of absolute
mortification; to the vital instinct for health and ease the ascetic's contempt,
disgust and neglect of the body; to the vital instinct for incessant action and
creation the ideal of calm and inaction, passivity, contemplation; to the vital
instinct for power, expansion, domination, rule, conquest the ideal of humility,
self-abasement, submission, meek harmlessness, docility in suffering; to the
vital instinct of sex on which depends the continuance of the species, the ideal
of an unreproductive chastity and celibacy; to the
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social and family instinct the anti-social ideal of the ascetic, the
monk, the solitary, the world-shunning saint. Commencing with discipline and
subordination they proceed to complete mortification, which means when
translated the putting to death of the vital instincts, and declare that life
itself is an illusion to be shed from the soul or a kingdom of the flesh, the
world and the devil, - accepting thus the claim of the unenlightened and
undisciplined life itself that it is not, was never meant to be, can never
become the kingdom of God, a high manifestation of the Spirit.
Up to a certain
point this recoil has its uses and may easily even, by tapasyli, by the
law of energy increasing through compression, develop for a time a new vigour in
the life of the society, as happened in India in the early Buddhist centuries.
But beyond a certain point it tends, not really to kill, for that is impossible,
but to discourage along with the vital instincts the indispensable life-energy
of which they are the play and renders them in the end inert, feeble, narrow,
unelastic, incapable of energetic reaction to force and circumstance. That was
the final result in India of the age-long pressure of Buddhism and its
supplanter and successor, Illusionism. No society wholly or too persistently and
pervadingly dominated by this denial of the life dynamism can flourish and put
forth its possibilities of growth and perfection. For from dynamic it becomes
static and from the static position it proceeds to stag- nation and
degeneration. Even the higher being of man, which finds its account in a
vigorous life dynamism, both as a fund of force to be transmuted into its own
loftier energies and as a potent channel of. connection with the outer life,
suffers in the end by this failure and contradiction. The ancient Indian ideal
recognised this truth and divided life into four essential and in- dispensable
divisions, artha, klima, dharma, moksa, vital interests, satisfaction of
desires of all kinds, ethics and religion, and liberation or spirituality, and
it insisted on the practice and development of all. Still it tended not only to
put the last forward as the goal of all the rest, which it is, but to put it at
the end of life and its habitat in another world of our being, rather than here
in life, as the supreme status and formative power on the physical plane. But
this rules out the idea of the kingdom of God on earth, the perfectibility of
society and of man in society, the evolution of a
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new and diviner race, and without one or ot4er of these no universal
ideal can be complete. It provides a temporary and occasional, but not an
inherent justification for life; it holds out no illumining fulfilment either
for its individual or its collective impulse.
.Let us then look
at this vital instinct and life dynamism in its own being and not merely as an
occasion for ethical or religious development and see whether it is really
rebellious in its very nature to the Divine. We can see at once that what we
have described is the first stage of the vital being, the infrarational, the
instinctive; this is the crude character of its first native development and
persists even when it is trained by the growing application to it of the
enlightening reason. Evidently it is in this natural form a thing of the earth,
gross, earthy, full even of hideous uglinesses and brute blunders and jarring
discords; but so also is the infrarational stage in ethics, in aesthetics, in
religion. It is true too that it presents a much more enormous difficulty than
these others, more fundamentally and obstinately resists elevation, because it
is the very province of the infrararational, a. first formulation of
consciousness out of the Inconscient, nearest to it in the scale of being. But
still it has too, properly looked at, its rich elements of power, beauty,
nobility, good, sacrifice, worship, divinity; here too are high-reaching gods,
masked but still resplendent. Until recently, and even now, reason in the garb
no longer of philosophy, but of science, has increasingly proposed to take up
all this physical and vital life and perfect it by the sole power of
rationalism, by a knowledge of the laws of Nature, of sociology and physiology
and biology and health, by collectivism, by State education, by a new
psychological education and a number of other kindred means. All this is well in
its own way and in its limits, but it is not enough and can never come to a
truly satisfying success. The ancient attempt of reason in the form of a high
idealistic, rational, aesthetic, ethical and religious culture achieved only an
imperfect discipline of the vital man and his instincts, sometimes only a
polishing, a gloss, a clothing. and mannerising of the original uncouth savage.
The modern attempt of reason in the form of a broad and thorough rational,
utilitarian, and efficient instruction
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and organisation of man and his life is not succeeding any better for all
its insistent but always illusory promise of more perfect results in the future.
These endeavours cannot indeed be truly successful if our theory of life is
right and if this great mass of vital energism contains in itself the imprisoned
suprarational, if it has, as it then must have, the instinctive reaching out for
some thing divine, absolute and infinite which is concealed in its blind
strivings. Here too reason must be overpassed or surpass itself and become a passage to the
Divine.
The first mark
of the suprarational, when it intervenes to take up any portion of our being, is
the growth of absolute ideals; and since life is Being and Force and the divine
state of being is unity and the Divine in force is God as Power taking
possession, the absolute vital ideals must be of that nature. Nowhere are they
wanting. If we take the domestic and social life of man, we find hints of them
there in several forms; but we need only note, however imperfect and dim the
present shapes, the strivings of love at its own self-finding, its reachings
towards its absolute
-
the absolute love of man and
woman, the absolute maternal or paternal, filial or fraternal love, the love of
friends, the love of comrades, love of country, love of humanity. These ideals
of which the poets have sung so persistently, are not a mere glamour and
illusion, however the egoisms and discords of our instinctive, infrarational way
of living may seem to contradict them. Always crossed by imperfection or
opposite vital movements, they are still divine possibilities and can be made a
first means of our growth into a spiritual unity of being with being. Certain
religious disciplines have understood this truth, have taken up these relations
boldly and applied them to our soul's communion with God; and by a converse
process they can, lifted out of their present social and physical formulas,
become for us, not the poor earthly things they are now, but deep and beautiful
and wonderful movements of God in man fulfilling himself in life. All the
economic development of life itself takes on at its end the appearance of an
attempt to get rid of the animal squalor and bareness which is what obligatory
poverty really means, and to give to man the divine ease and leisure of the
gods. It is pursued in a wrong way, no doubt, and with many ugly circumstances,
but
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still the ideal is darkly there. Politics itself, that apparent game of
strife and deceit and charlatanism, can be a large field of absolute idealisms.
What of patriotism,
-
never mind the often
ugly instincts from which it starts and which it still obstinately preserves,
-
but in its aspects
of worship, self-giving, discipline, self-sacrifice? The great political ideals
of man, monarchy, aristocracy, democracy, apart from the selfishnesses they
serve and the rational and practical justifications with which they arm
themselves, have had for their soul an ideal, some half-seen truth of the
absolute and have carried with them a worship, a loyalty, a loss of self in the
idea which have made men ready to suffer and die for them. War and strife
themselves have been schools of heroism; they have preserved the heroic in man,
they have created the ksatriyiilJ,
tyaktajivitiilJ,
of the Sanskrit epic
phrase, the men of power and courage who have abandoned their bodily life for a
cause; for without heroism man cannot grow into the Godhead. Courage, energy and
strength are among the very first principles of the divine nature in action. All
this great vital, political, economic life of man with its two powers of
competition and co- operation is stumbling blindly forward towards some
realisation of power and unity,
-
in two divine directions, therefore. For the Divine in
life is Power possessed of self-mastery, but also of mastery of His world, and
man and mankind too move towards conquest of their world, their environment. And
again in the Divine fulfilment there is and must be oneness, and the ideal of
human unity however dim and far-off is coming slowly into sight. The competitive
nation-units are feeling, at times, however feebly as yet, the call to cast
themselves into a greater unified co- operative life of the human race.
No doubt all is still moving, however touched by dim lights from above, on a
lower half rational half
infrarational level, clumsily, coarsely, in ignorance
of itself and as yet with little nobility of motive. All is being worked out
very crudely by the confused clash of life-forces and the guidance of ideas that
are half-lights of the intellect, and the means proposed are too mechanical and
the aims too material; they miss the truth that the outer life result can only
endure if it is founded on inner realities. But so life in the past has moved
always and must at first move.
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For life organises itself at first round the ego motive and the instinct
of ego-expansion is the earliest means by which men have come into contact with
each other; the struggle for possession has been the first crude means towards
union, the aggressive assertion of the smaller self the first step towards a
growth into the larger self. All has been therefore a half-ordered confusion of
the struggle for life corrected by the need and instinct of association, a
struggle of individuals, clans, tribes, parties, nations, ideas, civilisations,
cultures, ideals, religion, each affirming itself each compelled into contact,
association, struggle with the others. For while Nature imposes the ego as a
veil behind which she labours out the individual manifestation of the
spirit, she also puts a compulsion on it to grow in being until it
can at last expand or merge into the larger self in which
it
meets, harmonises with itself, comprehends in its own consciousness, becomes
one with the rest of existence. To assist in this growth Life-Nature' throws up
in itself ego-enlarging, ego-exceeding, even ego- destroying instincts and
movements which combat and correct the smaller self-affirming instincts and
movements,
-
she enforces
on her human instrument
impulses of love, sympathy, self-denial, self-effacement, self-sacrifice,
altruism, the drive towards universality in mind and heart and life, glimmerings
of an obscure unanimism that has not yet found thoroughly its own true light and
motive-power. Because of this obscurity these powers, unable to affirm their own
absolute, to take the lead or dominate, obliged to compromise with the demands
of the ego, even to become themselves a form of egoism, are impotent also to
bring harmony and transformation to life. Instead of peace they seem to bring
rather a sword; for they increase the number and tension of conflict of the
unreconciled forces, ideas, impulses of which the individual human consciousness
and the life of the collectivity are the arena. The ideal and practical reason
of man labours to find amidst all this the right law of life and action; it
strives by a rule of moderation and accommodation or selection and rejection or
by the dominance of some chosen ideas or powers to reduce things to harmony, to
do consciously what Nature through natural selection and instinct has achieved
in her animal kinds, an automatically ordered and settled form and norm of
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their existence. But the order, the structure arrived at by the reason is
always partial, precarious and temporary. It is disturbed by a pull from below
and a pull from above. For these powers that life throws up to help towards the
growth into a larger self, a wider being, are already reflections of something
that is beyond reason, seeds of the spiritual, the absolute. There is the
pressure on human life of an Infinite which will not allow it to rest too long
in any formulation,
-
not at least until it has delivered out of itself that which shall be its own
self-exceeding and self-fulfilment.
This process of life through a
first obscure and confused effort of self-finding is the inevitable result of
its beginnings; for life began from an involution of the spiritual truth of
things in what seems to be its opposite. Spiritual experience tells us that
there is a Reality which supports and pervades all things as the Cosmic Self and
Spirit, can be discovered by the individual even here in the terrestrial
embodiment as his own self and spirit, and is, at its summits and in its
essence, an infinite and eternal Being, Consciousness and Bliss of existence.
But what we seem to see as the source and beginning of the material universe is
just the contrary - it wears to us the aspect of a Void, an infinite of Non-
Existence, an indeterminate Inconscient, an insensitive blissless Zero out of
which everything has yet to come. When it begins to move, evolve, create, it
puts on the appearance of an inconscient Energy which delivers existence out of
the Void in the form of an infinitesimal fragmentation, the electron - or
perhaps some still more impalpable minute unit, a not yet discovered, hardly
discoverable infinitesimal, then the atom, the molecule, and out of this
fragmentation builds up a formed and concrete universe in the void of its
infinite. Yet we see that this unconscious Energy does at every step the works
of a vast and minute Intelligence fixing and combining every possible device to
prepare, manage and work out the paradox and miracle of Matter and the awakening
of a life .and a spirit in Matter; existence grows out of the Void,
consciousness emerges and increases out of the Inconscient an ascending urge
towards pleasure, happiness, delight, divine bliss and ecstasy is inexplicably
born
out of an insensitive Nihil. These phenomena already betray
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the truth, which we discover when we grow aware in our depths, that the
Inconscient is only a mask and within it is the Upanishad's "Conscient in
unconscious things". In the beginning, says the Veda, was the ocean of inconscience and out of it That One arose into
birth by his greatness,
- by the might of his self-
manifesting Energy.
But the Inconscient, if a mask, is an effective mask of the Spirit; it imposes
on the evolving life and soul the law of a difficult emergence. Life and
consciousness, no less than Matter, obey in their first appearance' the law of
fragmentation. Life organises itself physically round the plasm, the cell,
psycho- logically round the small separative fragmentary ego. Consciousness
itself has to concentrate its small beginnings in a poor surface formation and
hide behind the veil of this limited surface existence the depths and infinities
of its own being. It has to grow slowly in an external formulation till it is
ready to break the crust between this petty outer figure of ourselves, which we
think to be the whole, and the concealed self within us. Even the spiritual
being seems to obey this law of fragmentation and manifests as a unit in the
whole a spark of itself that evolves into an individual psyche. It is this
little ego, this fragmented consciousness, this concealed soul-spark on which is
imposed the task of meeting and striving with the forces of the universe,
entering into contact with all that seems to it not itself, increasing under the
pressure of inner and outer Nature till it can become one with all existence. It
has to grow into self-knowledge and world- knowledge, to get within itself and
discover that it is a spiritual being, to get outside of itself and discover its
larger truth as the cosmic Individual, to get beyond itself and know and live in
some supreme Being, Consciousness and Bliss of existence. For this immense task
it is equipped only with the instruments of its original Ignorance. Its limited
being is the cause of all the difficulty, discord, struggle, division that mars
life. The limitation of its consciousness, unable to dominate or assimilate the
contacts of the universal Energy, is the cause of all its suffering, pain and
sorrow. Its limited power of consciousness formulated in an ignorant will unable
to grasp or follow the right law of its life and action is the cause of all its
error, wrong-doing and evil.
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There is no other true cause; for all apparent causes are themselves
circumstance and result of this original sin of the being. Only when it rises
and widens out of this limited separative consciousness into the oneness of the
liberated spirit, can it escape from these results of its growth out of the
Inconscience.
If we see this as the truth behind life, we can understand at once why it has
had to follow its present curve of ignorant self- formulation. But also we see
what through it all it. is obscurely seeking, trying to grasp and form, feeling
out for in its own higher impulses and deepest motives, and why these are in it-
useless, perturbing and chimerical if it
were only an animal product of inconscient Nature,- these urgings towards
self-discovery, mastery, unity, freedom from its lower self, spiritual release.
Evolving out of its first involved condition in Matter and in plant life,
effecting a first imperfect organised consciousness in the animal, it arrives in
man, the mental being, at the possibility of a new, a conscious evolution which
will bring it to its goal and at a certain stage of his development it wakes in
him the over- mastering impulse to pass on from mental to spiritual being. Life
cannot arrive at its secret ultimates by following its first infrarational
motive forces of instinct and desire: for all here is a groping and seeking
without finding, a field of brief satisfactions, stamped with the Inconscient's
seal of insufficiency and impermanence. But neither can human reason give it
what it searches after; for reason can only establish half lights and a
provisional order. Therefore with man as he is the upward urge in life cannot
rest satisfied always; its evolutionary impulse cannot stop short at this
transitional term, this half achievement. It has to aim at a higher reach of
consciousness, deliver out of life and mind something that is still latent and
inchoate.
The ultimates of life are spiritual and only in the full light of the liberated
self and spirit can it achieve them. That full light is not intellect or reason,
but a knowledge by inner unity and identity which is the native self-light of
the fully developed spiritual consciousness - and, preparing that, on the way to
it, a knowledge by intimate inner contact with the truth of things and beings
which is intuitive and born of a secret oneness. Life seeks for self-knowledge;
it is only by the light of the spirit that
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it can find it. It seeks for a luminous guidance and mastery of its own
movements; it is only when it finds within itself this inner self and spirit and
by it or in obedience to it governs its own steps that it can have the illumined
will it needs and the unerring leadership. For it is so only that the blind
certitudes of the instincts and the speculative hypotheses and theories and the
experimental and inferential certitudes of reason can be replaced by the seeing
spiritual certitudes. Life seeks the fulfilment of its instincts of love and
sympathy, its yearnings after accord and union; but these are crossed by
opposing instincts and it is only the spiritual consciousness with its realised
abiding oneness that can abolish these oppositions. Life seeks for full growth
of being, but it can attain to it only when the limited being has found in
itself its own inmost soul of existence and around it its own wider self of
cosmic consciousness which can feel the world and all being in itself and as
itself. Life seeks for power; it is only the power of the spirit and the power
of this conscious oneness that can give it mastery of itself and its world. It
seeks for pleasure, happiness, bliss; but the infrarational forms of these
things are stricken with imperfection, fragmentariness, impermanence and the
impact of their opposites. Moreover infrarational life still bears some stamp of
the Inconscient in an underlying insensitiveness, a dullness of fiber, a
weakness of vibratory response,
-
it cannot attain to true happiness or bliss and
what it
can obtain of pleasure it cannot support for long or bear or keep any extreme
intensity of these things. Only the spirit has the secret of an unmixed and
abiding happiness or ecstasy, is capable of a firm tenseness of vibrant response
to it, can attain and justify a spiritual pleasure or joy of life as one form of
the infinite and universal delight of being. Life seeks a harmonious fulfillment
of all its powers, now divided and in conflict, all its possibilities, parts,
members; it is only in the consciousness of the one Self and Spirit that that is
found, for there they arrive at their full truth and their perfect agreement in
the light of the integral self-existence.
There is then a suprarational ultimate of
Life no less than a suprarational Truth, Good and Beauty. The endeavour to reach
it is the spiritual meaning of this seeking and striving Life-Nature.
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