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CHAPTER IV
Reality Omnipresent
If one knows Him as Brahman the Non-Being, he becomes merely the non-existent. If one knows that Brahman Is,
then is he known as the real in existence.
Taittiriya
Upanishad.¹
Since, then, we admit both the claim of the pure Spirit to
manifest in us its absolute freedom and the claim of universal Matter to be the
mould and condition of our manifestation, we have to find a truth that can
entirely reconcile these antagonists and can give to both their due portion in
Life and their due justification in Thought, amercing neither of its rights,
denying in neither the sovereign truth from which even its errors, even the
exclusiveness of its exaggerations draw so constant a strength. For wherever
there is an extreme statement that makes such a powerful appeal to the human
mind, we may be sure that we are standing in the presence of no mere error,
superstition or hallucination, but of some sovereign fact disguised which
demands our fealty and will avenge itself if denied or excluded. Herein lies the
difficulty of a satisfying solution and the source of that lack of finality
which pursues all mere compromises between Spirit and Matter. A compromise is a
bargain, a transaction of interests between two conflicting powers; it is not a
true reconciliation. True reconciliation proceeds always by a mutual
comprehension leading to some sort of intimate oneness. It is therefore through
the utmost possible unification of Spirit and Matter that we shall best arrive
at their reconciling truth and so at some strongest foundation for a reconciling
practice in the inner life of the individual and his outer existence.
We have found already in the cosmic
consciousness a meeting-place where Matter becomes real to Spirit, Spirit
becomes real to Matter. For in the cosmic consciousness Mind and Life are
intermediaries and no longer, as they seem in the ordinary egoistic mentality,
agents of separation, fomenters of an artificial quarrel
¹
II. 6.
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between the positive and negative principles of the same unknowable Reality. Attaining to the cosmic consciousness Mind,
illuminated by a knowledge that perceives at once the truth of Unity and the truth of Multiplicity and seizes on the formulae
of their interaction, finds its own discords at once explained and reconciled by the divine Harmony; satisfied, it consents to
become the agent of that supreme union between God and Life towards which we tend. Matter reveals itself to the realising
thought and to the subtilised senses as the figure and body of Spirit,—Spirit in its self-formative extension. Spirit reveals
itself through the same consenting agents as the soul, the truth, the essence of Matter. Both admit and confess each other
as divine, real and essentially one. Mind and Life are disclosed in that illumination as at once figures and instruments of the
supreme Conscious Being by which It extends and houses Itself in material form and in that form unveils Itself to Its
multiple centres of consciousness. Mind attains its self-fulfilment when it becomes a pure mirror of the Truth of Being
which expresses itself in the symbols of the universe; Life, when it consciously lends its energies to the perfect
self-figuration of the Divine in ever-new forms and activities of the universal existence.
In the light of this conception we can perceive the possibility of a divine life for man in the world which will at once
justify Science by disclosing a living sense and intelligible aim for the cosmic and the terrestrial evolution and realise
by the transfiguration of the human soul into the divine the great ideal dream
of all high religions.
But what then of that silent Self,
inactive, pure, self-existent, self-enjoying, which presented itself to us as
the abiding justification of the ascetic? Here also harmony and not
irreconcilable opposition must be the illuminative truth. The silent and the
active Brahman are not different, opposite and irreconcilable entities, the one
denying, the other affirming a cosmic illusion; they are one Brahman in two
aspects, positive and negative, and each is necessary to the other. It is out of
this Silence that the Word which creates the worlds for ever proceeds; for the
Word expresses that which is self-hidden in the Silence. It is an eternal
passivity which makes possible the perfect freedom and omni-
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potence of an eternal divine activity in innumerable cosmic systems. For the becomings of that activity derive their
energies and their illimitable potency of variation and harmony from the impartial support of the immutable Being, its consent
to this infinite fecundity of its own dynamic Nature.
Man, too, becomes perfect only when he has found within himself that absolute calm and passivity of the Brahman and
supports by it with the same divine tolerance and the same divine bliss a free and inexhaustible activity. Those who have
thus possessed the Calm within can perceive always welling out from its silence the perennial supply of the energies that
work in the universe. It is not, therefore, the truth of the Silence to say that it is in its nature a rejection of the cosmic
activity. The apparent incompatibility of the two states is an error of the limited Mind which, accustomed to trenchant
oppositions of affirmation and denial and passing suddenly from one pole to the other, is unable to conceive of a
comprehensive consciousness vast and strong enough to include both in a simultaneous embrace. The Silence does not
reject the world; it sustains it. Or rather it supports with an equal impartiality the activity and the withdrawal from the
activity and approves also the reconciliation by which the soul remains free and still even while it lends itself to all action.
But, still, there is the absolute
withdrawal, there is the Non-Being. Out of the Non-Being, says the ancient
Scripture, Being appeared.¹Then
into the Non-Being it must surely sink again. If the infinite
indiscriminate Existence permits all possibilities of
discrimination and multiple realisation, does not the Non-Being at
least, as primal state and sole constant reality, negate and
reject all possibility of a real universe? The Nihil of certain
Buddhist schools would then be the true ascetic solution; the Self,
like the ego, would be only an ideative formation by an illusory
phenomenal consciousness.
But again we find that we are being misled by words, deceived by the
trenchant oppositions of our limited mentality
with its fond reliance on verbal distinctions as if they perfectly
represented ultimate truths and its rendering of our supramental
¹ In the beginning all this was the Non-Being. It was thence that Being was born.
—Taittiriya
Upanishad. II. 7.
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experiences in the sense of those intolerant
distinctions. Non-Being is only a word. When we examine the fact it
represents,
we can no longer be sure that absolute non-existence has any better
chance than the infinite Self of being more than an ideative formation
of the mind. We really mean by this Nothing something beyond the last
term to which we can reduce our
purest conception and our most abstract or subtle experience of actual
being as we know or conceive it while in this
universe. This Nothing then is merely a something beyond positive
conception. We erect a fiction of nothingness in order to
overpass, by the method of total exclusion, all that we can know and
consciously are. Actually when we examine closely the
Nihil of certain philosophies, we begin to perceive that it is a zero
which is All or an indefinable Infinite which appears to the
mind a blank, because mind grasps only finite constructions, but is in
fact the only true Existence.¹
And when we say that out of Non-Being Being appeared, we perceive that
we are speaking in terms of Time about
that which is beyond Time. For what was that portentous date in the
history of eternal Nothing on which Being was born out
of it or when will come that other date equally formidable on which an
unreal all will relapse into the perpetual void? Sat and Asat, if they
have both to be affirmed, must be conceived as if they obtained
simultaneously. They permit each other even though they refuse to
mingle. Both, since we must speak in terms of Time, are eternal. And
who shall persuade eternal Being that it does not really exist and only
eternal Non-Being is? In such a negation of all experience how shall we
find the solution that explains all experience?
Pure Being is the affirmation
by the Unknowable of Itself as the free base of all cosmic existence. We give
the name of Non-Being to a contrary affirmation of Its freedom from all cosmic
existence,—freedom, that is to say, from all positive terms of actual existence
which consciousness in the universe can
¹
Another Upanishad rejects the birth of being out of Non-Being as an impossibility; Being, it says, can only be
born from Being. But if we take Non-Being in the sense, not of an inexistent Nihil but of an x which exceeds
our idea or experience of existence,—a sense applicable to the Absolute Brahman of the Adwaita as well as
the Void or Zero of the Buddhists,—the impossibility disappears, for That may very well be the source of
being, whether by a conceptual or formative Maya or a manifestation or creation out of itself.
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formulate to itself, even from the most abstract, even from the most transcendent. It does not deny them as a real
expression of Itself, but It denies Its limitation by all expression or any expression whatsoever. The Non-Being permits the
Being, even as the Silence permits the Activity. By this simultaneous negation and affirmation, not mutually destructive, but
complementary to each other like all contraries, the simultaneous awareness of conscious Self-being as a reality and the
Unknowable beyond as the same Reality becomes realisable to the awakened human soul. Thus was it possible for the
Buddha to attain the state of Nirvana and yet act puissantly in the world, impersonal in his inner consciousness, in his action
the most powerful personality that we know of as having lived and produced results upon earth.
When we ponder on these
things, we begin to perceive how feeble in their self-assertive
violence and how confusing in
their misleading distinctness are the words that we use. We begin also
to perceive that the limitations we impose on the
Brahman arise from a narrowness of experience in the individual mind
which concentrates itself on one aspect of the
Unknowable and proceeds forthwith to deny or disparage all the rest. We
tend always to translate too rigidly what we can
conceive or know of the Absolute into the terms of our own particular
relativity. We affirm the One and Identical by
passionately discriminating and asserting the egoism of our own
opinions and partial experiences against the opinions and
partial experiences of others. It is wiser to wait, to learn, to grow,
and, since we are obliged for the sake of our
self-perfection to speak of these things which no human speech can
express, to search for the widest, the most flexible, the
most catholic affirmation possible and found on it the largest and most
comprehensive harmony.
We recognise, then, that it
is possible for the consciousness in the individual to enter into a
state in which relative
existence appears to be dissolved and even Self seems to be an
inadequate conception. It is possible to pass into a Silence
beyond the Silence. But this is not the whole of our ultimate
experience, nor the single and all-excluding truth. For we find
that this Nirvana, this self-extinction, while it gives an absolute
peace and freedom to the soul within is yet consistent in
practice with a desireless but
effect-
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ive action without. This possibility of an entire motionless impersonality and void Calm within doing outwardly the
works of the eternal verities, Love, Truth and Righteousness, was perhaps the real gist of the Buddha's teaching,—this
superiority to ego and to the chain of personal workings and to the identification with mutable form and idea, not the petty
ideal of an escape from the trouble and suffering of the physical birth. In any case, as the perfect man would combine in
himself the silence and the activity, so also would the completely conscious soul reach back to the absolute freedom of the
Non-Being without therefore losing its hold on Existence and the universe. It would thus reproduce in itself perpetually the
eternal miracle of the divine Existence, in the universe, yet always beyond it and even, as it were, beyond itself. The
opposite experience could only be a concentration of mentality in the individual upon Non-existence with the result of an
oblivion and personal withdrawal from a cosmic activity still and always proceeding in the consciousness of the Eternal
Being.
Thus, after reconciling
Spirit and Matter in the cosmic consciousness, we perceive the
reconciliation, in the
transcendental consciousness, of the final assertion of all and its
negation. We discover that all affirmations are assertions of
status or activity in the Unknowable; all the corresponding negations
are assertions of Its freedom both from and in that
status or activity. The Unknowable is Something to us supreme,
wonderful and ineffable which continually formulates Itself
to our consciousness and continually escapes from the formulation It
has made. This it does not as some malicious spirit or
freakish magician leading us from falsehood to greater falsehood and so
to a final negation of all things, but as even here the
Wise beyond our wisdom guiding us from reality to ever profounder and
vaster reality until we find the profoundest and
vastest of which we are capable. An omnipresent reality is the Brahman,
not an omnipresent cause of persistent illusions.
If we thus accept a
positive basis for our harmony—and on what other can harmony be
founded?—the various
conceptual formulations of the Unknowable, each of them representing a
truth beyond conception, must be understood as
far as possible
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in their relation to each other and in their effect upon life, not separately, not exclusively, not so affirmed as to destroy or
unduly diminish all other affirmations. The real Monism, the true Adwaita, is that which admits all things as the one
Brahman and does not seek to bisect Its existence into two incompatible entities, an eternal Truth and an eternal Falsehood,
Brahman and not-Brahman, Self and not-Self, a real Self and an unreal yet perpetual Maya. If it be true that the Self alone
exists, it must be also true that all is the Self. And if this Self, God or Brahman is no helpless state, no bounded power, no
limited personality, but the self-conscient All, there must be some good and inherent reason in it for the manifestation, to
discover which we must proceed on the hypothesis of some potency, some wisdom, some truth of being in all that is
manifested. The discord and apparent evil of the world must in their sphere be admitted, but not accepted as our
conquerors. The deepest instinct of humanity seeks always and seeks wisely wisdom as the last word of the universal
manifestation, not an eternal mockery and illusion,—a secret and finally triumphant good, not an all-creative and invincible
evil,—an ultimate victory and fulfilment, not the disappointed recoil of the soul from its great adventure.
For we cannot suppose that
the sole Entity is compelled by something outside or other than Itself,
since no such thing
exists. Nor can we suppose that It submits unwillingly to something
partial within Itself which is hostile to its whole Being,
denied by It and yet too strong for It; for this would be only to erect
in other language the same contradiction of an All and
something other than the All. Even if we say that the universe exists
merely because the Self in its absolute impartiality
tolerates all things alike, viewing with indifference all actualities
and all possibilities, yet is there something that wills the
manifestation and supports it, and this cannot be something other than
the All. Brahman is indivisible in all things and
whatever is willed in the world has been ultimately willed by the
Brahman. It is only our relative consciousness, alarmed or
baffled by the phenomena of evil, ignorance and pain in the cosmos,
that seeks to deliver the Brahman from responsibility
for Itself and its workings by erecting some opposite principle, Maya
or Mara, conscious Devil or self-
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xistent principle of evil. There is one Lord and Self and the many are only His representations and becomings.
If then the world is a dream or an illusion or a mistake, it is a dream originated and willed by the Self in its totality and
not only originated and willed, but supported and perpetually entertained. Moreover, it is a dream existing in a Reality and
the stuff of which it is made is that Reality, for Brahman must be the material of the world as well as its base and continent.
If the gold of which the vessel is made is real, how shall we suppose that the vessel itself is a mirage? We see that these
words, dream, illusion, are tricks of speech, habits of our relative consciousness; they represent a certain truth, even a great
truth, but they also misrepresent it. Just as Non-Being turns out to be other than mere nullity, so the cosmic Dream turns out
to be other than mere phantasm and hallucination of the mind. Phenomenon is not phantasm; phenomenon is the substantial
form of a Truth.
We start, then, with the
conception of an omnipresent Reality of which neither the Non-Being at
the one end nor the
universe at the other are negations that annul; they are rather
different states of the Reality, obverse and reverse
affirmations. The highest experience of this Reality in the universe
shows it to be not only a conscious Existence, but a
supreme Intelligence and Force and a self-existent Bliss; and beyond
the universe it is still some other unknowable
existence, some utter and ineffable Bliss. Therefore we are justified
in supposing that even the dualities of the universe,
when interpreted not as now by our sensational and partial conceptions,
but by our liberated intelligence and experience, will
be also resolved into those highest terms. While we still labour under
the stress of the dualities, this perception must no doubt constantly
support itself on an act of faith, but a faith which the highest
Reason, the widest and most patient reflection do not deny, but rather
affirm. This creed is given, indeed, to humanity to support it on its
journey, until it arrives at a stage of development when faith will be
turned into knowledge and perfect experience and Wisdom will be
justified of her works.
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