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CHAPTER VII
The Ego and the Dualities
The
soul seated on the same tree of Nature is absorbed and deluded and has sorrow
because it is not the Lord, but when it sees and is in union with that other
self and greatness of it which is the Lord, then sorrow passes away from it.
Swetaswatara Upanishad.¹
If all is in truth Sachchidananda, death, suffering, evil, limitation can
only be the creations, positive in practical effect, negative in essence, of a
distorting consciousness which has fallen from the total and unifying knowledge
of itself into some error of division and partial experience. This is the fall
of man typified in the poetic parable of the Hebrew Genesis. That fall is his
deviation from the full and pure acceptance of God and himself, or rather of God
in himself, into a dividing consciousness which brings with it all the train of
the dualities, life and death, good and evil, joy and pain, completeness and
want, the fruit of a divided being. This is the fruit which Adam and Eve,
Purusha and Prakriti, the soul tempted by Nature, have eaten. The redemption
comes by the recovery of the universal in the individual and of the spiritual
term in the physical consciousness. Then alone the soul in Nature can be allowed
to partake of the fruit of the tree of life and be as the Divine and live for
ever. For then only can the purpose of its descent into material consciousness
be accomplished, when the knowledge of good and evil, joy and suffering, life
and death has been accomplished through the recovery by the human soul of a
higher knowledge which reconciles and identifies these opposites in the
universal and transforms their divisions into the image of the divine Unity.
To Sachchidananda extended in all things in widest commonalty and impartial
universality, death, suffering, evil and limitation can only be at the most
reverse terms, shadow-forms of their luminous opposites. As these things are
felt by us, they are
1 IV. 7
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notes of a discord. They formulate separation where there should be a unity,
miscomprehension where there should be an understanding, an attempt to arrive at
independent harmonies where there should be a self-adaptation to the orchestral
whole. All totality, even if it be only in one scheme of the universal
vibrations, even if it be only a totality of the physical consciousness without
possession of all that is in movement beyond and behind, must be to that extent
a reversion to harmony and a reconciliation of jarring opposites. On the other
hand, to Sachchidananda transcendent of the forms of the universe the dual terms
themselves, even so understood, can no longer be justly applicable.
Transcendence transfigures; it does not reconcile, but rather transmutes
opposites into something surpassing them that effaces their oppositions.
At first, however, we must strive to relate the individual again to the harmony
of the totality. There it is necessary for us,—otherwise there is no issue from
the problem,—to realise that the terms in which our present consciousness
renders the values of the universe, though practically justified for the
purposes of human experience and progress, are not the sole terms in which it is
possible to render them and may not be the complete, the right, the ultimate
formulas. Just as there may be sense-organs or formations of sense-capacity
which see the physical world differently and it may well be better, because more
completely, than our sense-organs and sense-capacity, so there may be other
mental and supramental envisagings of the universe which surpass our own. States
of consciousness there are in which Death is only a change in immortal Life,
pain a violent backwash of the waters of universal delight, limitation a turning
of the Infinite upon itself, evil a circling of the good around its own
perfection; and this not in abstract conception only, but in actual vision and
in constant and substantial experience. To arrive at such states of
consciousness may, for the individual, be one of the most important and
indispensable steps of his progress towards self-perfection.
Certainly, the practical values given us by our senses and by the
dualistic sense-mind must hold good in their field and be accepted as
the standard for ordinary life-experience until a
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larger harmony is ready into which they can enter and transform themselves
without losing hold of the realities which they represent. To enlarge the
sense-faculties without the knowledge that would give the old sense-values their
right interpretation from the new standpoint might lead to serious disorders and
incapacities, might unfit for practical life and for the orderly and disciplined
use of the reason. Equally, an enlargement of our mental consciousness out of
the experience of the egoistic dualities into an unregulated unity with some
form of total consciousness might easily bring about a confusion and incapacity
for the active life of humanity in the established order of the world's
relativities. This, no doubt, is the root of the injunction imposed in the Gita
on the man who has the knowledge not to disturb the life-basis and thought-basis
of the ignorant; for, impelled by his example but unable to comprehend the
principle of his action, they would lose their own system of values without
arriving at a higher foundation.
Such a disorder and incapacity may be accepted personally and are accepted by
many great souls as a temporary passage or as the price to be paid for the entry
into a wider existence. But the right goal of human progress must be always an
effective and synthetic reinterpretation by which the law of that wider
existence may be represented in a new order of truths and in a more just and
puissant working of the faculties on the life-material of the universe. For the
senses the sun goes round the earth; that was for them the centre of existence
and the motions of life are arranged on the basis of a misconception. The truth
is the very opposite, but its discovery would have been of little use if there
were not a science that makes the new conception the centre of a reasoned and
ordered knowledge putting their right values on the perceptions of the senses.
So also for the mental consciousness God moves round the personal ego and all
His works and ways are brought to the judgment of our egoistic sensations,
emotions and conceptions and are there given values and interpretations which,
though a perversion and inversion of the truth of things, are yet useful and
practically sufficient in a certain development of human life and progress. They
are a rough practical systematisation of our experience of things valid so long
as we dwell in a
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certain order of ideas and activities. But they do not represent the last and
highest state of human life and knowledge. “Truth is the path and not the
falsehood.” The truth is not that God moves round the ego as the centre of
existence and can be judged by the ego and its view of the dualities, but that
the Divine is itself the centre and that the experience of the individual only
finds its own true truth when it is known in the terms of the universal and the
transcendent. Nevertheless, to substitute this conception for the egoistic
without an adequate base of knowledge may lead to the substitution of new but
still false and arbitrary ideas for the old and bring about a violent instead of
a settled disorder of right values. Such a disorder often marks the inception of
new philosophies and religions and initiates useful revolutions. But the true
goal is only reached when we can group round the right central conception a
reasoned and effective knowledge in which the egoistic life shall rediscover all
its values transformed and corrected. Then we shall possess that new order of
truths which will make it possible for us to substitute a more divine life for
the existence which we now lead and to effectualise a more divine and puissant
use of our faculties on the life-material of the universe.
That new life and power of the human integer must necessarily repose on a
realisation of the great verities which translate into our mode of conceiving
things the nature of the divine existence. It must proceed through a
renunciation by the ego of its false standpoint and false certainties, through
its entry into a right relation and harmony with the totalities of which it
forms a part and with the transcendences from which it is a descent, and through
its perfect self-opening to a truth and a law that exceed its own conventions,—a
truth that shall be its fulfilment and a law that shall be its deliverance. Its
goal must be the abolition of those values which are the creations of the
egoistic view of things; its crown must be the transcendence of limitation,
ignorance, death, suffering and evil.
The transcendence, the abolition are not possible here on earth and in our human
life if the terms of that life are necessarily bound to our present egoistic
valuations. If life is in its nature individual phenomenon and not
representation of a universal
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existence and the breathing of a mighty Life-Spirit, if the dualities which are
the response of the individual to its contacts are not merely a response but the
very essence and condition of all living, if limitation is the inalienable
nature of the substance of which our mind and body are formed, disintegration of
death the first and last condition of all life, its end and its beginning,
pleasure and pain the inseparable dual stuff of all sensation, joy and grief the
necessary light and shade of all emotion, truth and error the two poles between
which all knowledge must eternally move, then transcendence is only attainable
by the abandonment of human life in a Nirvana beyond all existence or by
attainment to another world, a heaven quite otherwise constituted than this
material universe.
It is not very easy for the customary mind of man, always attached to its past
and present associations, to conceive of an existence still human, yet radically
changed in what are now our fixed circumstances. We are in respect to our
possible higher evolution much in the position of the original Ape of the
Darwinian theory. It would have been impossible for that Ape leading his
instinctive arboreal life in primeval forests to conceive that there would be
one day an animal on the earth who would use a new faculty called reason upon
the materials of his inner and outer existence, who would dominate by that power
his instincts and habits, change the circumstances of his physical life, build
for himself houses of stone, manipulate Nature's forces, sail the seas, ride the
air, develop codes of conduct, evolve conscious methods for his mental and
spiritual development. And if such a conception had been possible for the
Ape-mind, it would still have been difficult for him to imagine that by any
progress of Nature or long effort of Will and tendency he himself could develop
into that animal. Man, because he has acquired reason and still more because he
has indulged his power of imagination and intuition, is able to conceive an
existence higher than his own and even to envisage his personal elevation beyond
his present state into that existence. His idea of the supreme state is an
absolute of all that is positive to his own concepts and desirable to his own
instinctive aspiration,—Knowledge without its negative shadow of error, Bliss
without its negation in experience of suffer-
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ing, Power without its constant denial by incapacity, purity and plenitude of
being without the opposing sense of defect and limitation. It is so that he
conceives his gods; it is so that he constructs his heavens. But it is not so
that his reason conceives of a possible earth and a possible humanity. His dream
of God and Heaven is really a dream of his own perfection; but he finds the same
difficulty in accepting its practical realisation here for his ultimate aim as
would the ancestral Ape if called upon to believe in himself as the future Man.
His imagination, his religious aspirations may hold that end before him; but
when his reason asserts itself, rejecting imagination and transcendent
intuition, he puts it by as a brilliant superstition contrary to the hard facts
of the material universe. It becomes then only his inspiring vision of the
impossible. All that is possible is a conditioned, limited and precarious
knowledge, happiness, power and good.
Yet in the principle of reason itself there is the assertion of a Transcendence.
For reason is in its whole aim and essence the pursuit of Knowledge, the
pursuit, that is to say, of Truth by the elimination of error. Its view, its aim
is not that of a passage from a greater to a lesser error, but it supposes a
positive, pre-existent Truth towards which through the dualities of right
knowledge and wrong knowledge we can progressively move. If our reason has not
the same instinctive certitude with regard to the other aspirations of humanity,
it is because it lacks the same essential illumination inherent in its own
positive activity. We can just conceive of a positive or absolute realisation of
happiness, because the heart to which that instinct for happiness belongs has
its own form of certitude, is capable of faith, and because our minds can
envisage the elimination of unsatisfied want which is the apparent cause of
suffering. But how shall we conceive of the elimination of pain from nervous
sensation or of death from the life of the body? Yet the rejection of pain is a
sovereign instinct of the sensations, the rejection of death a dominant claim
inherent in the essence of our vitality. But these things present themselves to
our reason as instinctive aspirations, not as realisable potentialities.
Yet the same law should hold throughout. The error of the practical reason is an
excessive subjection to the apparent fact
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which it can immediately feel as real and an insufficient courage in carrying
profounder facts of potentiality to their logical conclusion. What is, is the
realisation of an anterior potentiality; present potentiality is a clue to
future realisation. And here potentiality exists; for the mastery of phenomena
depends upon a knowledge of their causes and processes and if we know the causes
of error, sorrow, pain, death, we may labour with some hope towards their
elimination. For knowledge is power and mastery.
In fact, we do pursue as an ideal, so far as we may, the elimination of all
these negative or adverse phenomena. We seek constantly to minimise the causes
of error, pain and suffering. Science, as its knowledge increases, dreams of
regulating birth and of indefinitely prolonging life, if not of effecting the
entire conquest of death. But because we envisage only external or secondary
causes, we can only think of removing them to a distance and not of eliminating
the actual roots of that against which we struggle. And we are thus limited
because we strive towards secondary perceptions and not towards root-knowledge,
because we know processes of things, but not their essence. We thus arrive at a
more powerful manipulation of circumstances, but not at essential control. But
if we could grasp the essential nature and the essential cause of error,
suffering and death, we might hope to arrive at a mastery over them which should
be not relative but entire. We might hope even to eliminate them altogether and
justify the dominant instinct of our nature by the conquest of that absolute
good, bliss, knowledge and immortality which our intuitions perceive as the true
and ultimate condition of the human being.
The ancient Vedanta presents us with such a solution in the conception and
experience of Brahman as the one universal and essential fact and of the nature
of Brahman as Sachchidananda.
In this view the essence of all life is the movement of a universal and
immortal existence, the essence of all sensation and emotion is the play
of a universal and self-existent delight in being, the essence of all
thought and perception is the radiation of a universal and all-pervading
truth, the essence of all activity is the progression of a universal and
self-effecting good.
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But the play and movement embodies itself in a multiplicity of forms, a
variation of tendencies, an interplay of energies. Multiplicity permits of the
interference of a determinative and temporarily deformative factor, the
individual ego; and the nature of the ego is a self-limitation of consciousness
by a willed ignorance of the rest of its play and its exclusive absorption in
one form, one combination of tendencies, one field of the movement of energies.
Ego is the factor which determines the reactions of error, sorrow, pain, evil,
death; for it gives these values to movements which would otherwise be
represented in their right relation to the one Existence, Bliss, Truth and Good.
By recovering the right relation we may eliminate the ego-determined reactions,
reducing them eventually to their true values; and this recovery can be effected
by the right participation of the individual in the consciousness of the
totality and in the consciousness of the transcendent which the totality
represents.
Into later Vedanta there crept and arrived at fixity the idea that the limited
ego is not only the cause of the dualities, but the essential condition for the
existence of the universe. By getting rid of the ignorance of the ego and its
resultant limitations we do indeed eliminate the dualities, but we eliminate
along with them our existence in the cosmic movement. Thus we return to the
essentially evil and illusory nature of human existence and the vanity of all
effort after perfection in the life of the world. A relative good linked always
to its opposite is all that here we can seek. But if we adhere to the larger and
profounder idea that the ego is only an intermediate representation of something
beyond itself, we escape from this consequence and are able to apply Vedanta to
fulfilment of life and not only to the escape from life. The essential cause and
condition of universal existence is the Lord, Ishwara or Purusha, manifesting
and occupying individual and universal forms. The limited ego is only an
intermediate phenomenon of consciousness necessary for a certain line of
development. Following this line the individual can arrive at that which is
beyond himself, that which he represents, and can yet continue to represent it,
no longer as an obscured and limited ego, but as a centre of the Divine and of
the universal consciousness embracing, utilising and transforming into
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harmony with the Divine all individual determinations.
We have then the manifestation of the divine Conscious Being in the totality of
physical Nature as the foundation of human existence in the material universe.
We have the emergence of that Conscious Being in an involved and inevitably
evolving Life, Mind and Supermind as the condition of our activities; for it is
this evolution which has enabled man to appear in Matter and it is this
evolution which will enable him progressively to manifest God in the body,—the
universal Incarnation. We have in egoistic formation the intermediate and
decisive factor which allows the One to emerge as the conscious Many out of that
indeterminate totality general, obscure and formless which we call the
subconscient,—hrdya samudra,
the ocean heart in things of the Rig Veda. We have the dualities of life and
death, joy and sorrow, pleasure and pain, truth and error, good and evil as the
first formations of egoistic consciousness, the natural and inevitable outcome
of its attempt to realise unity in an artificial construction of itself
exclusive of the total truth, good, life and delight of being in the universe.
We have the dissolution of this egoistic construction by the self-opening of the
individual to the universe and to God as the means of that supreme fulfilment to
which egoistic life is only a prelude even as animal life was only a prelude to
the human. We have the realisation of the All in the individual by the
transformation of the limited ego into a conscious centre of the divine unity
and freedom as the term at which the fulfilment arrives. And we have the
outflowing of the infinite and absolute Existence, Truth, Good and Delight of
being on the Many in the world as the divine result towards which the cycles of
our evolution move. This is the supreme birth which maternal Nature holds in
herself; of this she strives to be delivered.
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