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CHAPTER
XVIII
Mind and Supermind
He discovered
that Mind was the Brahman.
Taittiriya Upanishad.¹
Indivisible,
but as if divided in beings.
Gita.²
THE
conception which we have so far been striving to form is that of the
essence only of the supramental life which the
divine soul possesses securely in the being of Sachchidananda, but
which the human soul has to manifest in this body of
Sachchidananda formed here into the mould of a mental and physical
living. But so far as we have been able yet to envisage
this supramental existence, it does not seem to have any connection or
correspondence with life as we know it, life active
between the two terms of our normal existence, the two firmaments of
mind and body. It seems rather to be a state of
being, a state of consciousness, a state of active relation and mutual
enjoyment such as disembodied souls might possess and
experience in a world without physical forms, a world in which
differentiation of souls had been accomplished but not
differentiation of bodies, a world of active and joyous infinities, not
of form-imprisoned spirits. Therefore it might reasonably
be doubted whether such a divine living would be possible with this
limitation of bodily form and this limitation of
form-imprisoned mind and form-trammelled force which is what we now
know as existence.
In fact, we have striven to arrive
at some conception of that supreme infinite being, conscious-force and
self-delight of which our world is a creation and our mentality a perverse
figure; we have tried to give ourselves an idea of what this divine Maya may be,
this Truth-Consciousness, this Real-Idea by which the conscious force of the
transcendent and universal Existence conceives, forms and governs the universe,
the order, the cosmos of its manifested delight of being. But we have not
studied the connections of these four great and divine terms with the three
others with
¹III. 4.
² XIII. 17.
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which our human experience is alone familiar,—mind, life and body. We have not scrutinised this other and apparently
undivine Maya which is the root of all our striving and suffering or seen how precisely it develops out of the divine reality or
the divine Maya. And till we have done this, till we have woven the missing cords of connection, our world is still
unexplained to us and the doubt of a possible unification between that higher existence and this lower life has still a basis.
We know that our world has come forth from Sachchidananda and subsists in His being; we conceive that He dwells in it as
the Enjoyer and Knower, Lord and Self; we have seen that our dual terms of sensation, mind, force, being can only be
representations of His delight, His conscious force, His divine existence. But it would seem that they are actually so much
the opposite of what He really and supernally is that we cannot while dwelling in the cause of these opposites, cannot while
contained in the lower triple term of existence attain to the divine living. We must either exalt this lower being into that
higher status or exchange body for that pure existence, life for that pure condition of conscious-force, sensation and
mentality for that pure delight and knowledge which live in the truth of the spiritual reality. And must not this mean that we
abandon all earthly or limited mental existence for something which is its opposite,—either for some pure state of the Spirit
or else for some world of the Truth of things, if such exists, or other worlds, if such exist, of divine Bliss, divine Energy,
divine Being? In that case the perfection of humanity is elsewhere than in humanity itself; the summit of its earthly evolution
can only be a fine apex of dissolving mentality whence it takes the great leap either into formless being or into worlds
beyond the reach of embodied Mind.
But in reality all that we
call undivine can only be an action of the four divine principles
themselves, such action of them
as was necessary to create this universe of forms. Those forms have
been created not outside but in the divine existence,
conscious-force and bliss, not outside but in and as a part of the
working of the divine Real-Idea. There is therefore no
reason to suppose that there cannot be any real play of the higher
divine consciousness in a world of forms or that forms
and their
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immediate supports, mental consciousness, energy of vital force and formal substance, must necessarily distort that which
they represent. It is possible, even probable that mind, body and life are to be found in their pure forms in the divine Truth
itself, are there in fact as subordinate activities of its consciousness and part of the complete instrumentation by which the
supreme Force always works. Mind, life and body must then be capable of divinity; their form and working in that short
period out of possibly only one cycle of the terrestrial evolution which Science reveals to us, need not represent all the
potential workings of these three principles in the living body. They work as they do because they are by some means
separated in consciousness from the divine Truth from which they proceed. Were this separation once abrogated by the
expanding energy of the Divine in humanity, their present functioning might well be converted, would indeed naturally be
converted by a supreme evolution and progression into that purer working which they have in the Truth-Consciousness.
In that case not only would
it be possible to manifest and maintain the divine consciousness in the
human mind and body
but, even, that divine consciousness might in the end, increasing its
conquests, remould mind, life and body themselves into a
more perfect image of its eternal Truth and realise not only in soul
but in substance its kingdom of heaven upon earth. The
first of these victories, the internal, has certainly been achieved in
a greater or less degree by some, perhaps by many, upon
earth; the other, the external, even if never more or less realised in
past aeons as a first type for future cycles and still held
in the subconscious memory of the earth-nature, may yet be intended as
a coming victorious achievement of God in
humanity. This earthly life need not be necessarily and for ever a
wheel of half-joyous half-anguished effort; attainment may
also be intended and the glory and joy of God made manifest upon earth.
What Mind, Life and Body
are in their supreme sources and what therefore they must be in the
integral completeness
of the divine manifestation when informed by the Truth and not cut off
from it by the separation and the ignorance in which
presently we live,—this then is the problem that we have next to
consider.
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For there they must have already their perfection towards which we here are growing,—we who are only the first shackled
movement of the Mind which is evolving in Matter, we who are not yet liberated from the conditions and effects of that
involution of spirit in form, that plunge of Light into its own shadow by which the darkened material consciousness of
physical Nature was created. The type of all perfection towards which we grow, the terms of our highest evolution must
already be held in the divine Real-Idea; they must be there formed and conscious for us to grow towards and into them: for
that pre-existence in the divine knowledge is what our human mentality names and seeks as the Ideal. The Ideal is an
eternal Reality which we have not yet realised in the conditions of our own being, not a non-existent which the Eternal and
Divine has not yet grasped and only we imperfect beings have glimpsed and mean to create.
Mind, first, the chained
and hampered sovereign of our human living. Mind in its essence is a
consciousness which
measures, limits, cuts out forms of things from the indivisible whole
and contains them as if each were a separate integer.
Even with what exists only as obvious parts and fractions, Mind
establishes this fiction of its ordinary commerce that they
are things with which it can deal separately and not merely as aspects
of a whole. For, even when it knows that they are not
things in themselves, it is obliged to deal with them as if they were
things in themselves; otherwise it could not subject them
to its own characteristic activity. It is this essential characteristic
of Mind which conditions the workings of all its operative
powers, whether conception, perception, sensation or the dealings of
creative thought. It conceives, perceives, senses things
as if rigidly cut out from a background or a mass and employs them as
fixed units of the material given to it for creation or
possession. All its action and enjoyment deal thus with wholes that
form part of a greater whole, and these subordinate
wholes again are broken up into parts which are also treated as wholes
for the particular purposes they serve. Mind may
divide, multiply, add, subtract, but it cannot get beyond the limits of
this mathematics. If it goes beyond and tries to conceive
a real whole, it loses itself in a foreign element; it falls from its
own firm ground into the ocean of the
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intangible, into the abysms of the infinite where it
can neither perceive, conceive, sense nor deal with its subject for
creation
and enjoyment. For if Mind appears sometimes to conceive, to perceive,
to sense or to enjoy with possession the infinite, it is
only in seeming and always in a figure of the infinite. What it does
thus vaguely possess is simply a formless Vast and not
the real spaceless infinite. The moment it tries to deal with that, to
possess it, at once the inalienable tendency to delimitation
comes in and the Mind finds itself again handling images, forms and
words. Mind cannot possess the infinite, it can only
suffer it or be possessed by it; it can only lie blissfully helpless
under the luminous shadow of the Real cast down on it from
planes of existence beyond its reach. The possession of the infinite
cannot come except by an ascent to those supramental
planes, nor the knowledge of it except by an inert submission of Mind
to the descending messages of the Truth-Conscious
Reality.
This essential faculty and
the essential limitation that accompanies it are the truth of Mind and
fix its real nature and
action, svabhāva and svadharma;
here is the mark of the divine fiat assigning it its office in the
complete instrumentation of
the supreme Maya,—the office determined by that which it is in its very
birth from the eternal self-conception of the
Self-existent. That office is to translate always infinity into the
terms of the finite, to measure off, limit, depiece. Actually it
does this in our consciousness to the exclusion of all true sense of
the infinite; therefore Mind is the nodus of the great
Ignorance, because it is that which originally divides and distributes,
and it has even been mistaken for the cause of the
universe and for the whole of the divine Maya. But the divine Maya
comprehends Vidya as well as Avidya, the Knowledge
as well as the Ignorance. For it is obvious that since the finite is
only an appearance of the infinite, a result of its action, a
play of its conception and cannot exist except by it, in it, with it as
a background, itself form of that stuff and action of that
force, there must be an original consciousness which contains and views
both at the same time and is intimately conscious
of all the relations of the one with the other. In that consciousness
there is no ignorance, because the infinite is known and
the finite is not separated from it as an independent reality;
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but still there is a subordinate process of delimitation,—otherwise no world could exist,—a process by which the ever
dividing and reuniting consciousness of Mind, the ever divergent and convergent action of Life and the infinitely divided and
self-aggregating substance of Matter come, all by one principle and original act, into phenomenal being. This subordinate
process of the eternal Seer and Thinker, perfectly luminous, perfectly aware of Himself and all, knowing well what He does,
conscious of the infinite in the finite which He is creating, may be called the divine Mind. And it is obvious that it must be a
subordinate and not really a separate working of the Real-Idea, of the Supermind, and must operate through what we have
described as the apprehending movement of the Truth-Consciousness.
That apprehending
consciousness, the Prajnana, places, as we have seen, the working of
the indivisible All, active and
formative, as a process and object of creative knowledge before the
consciousness of the same All, originative and
cognisant as the possessor and witness of its own working,—somewhat as
a poet views the creations of his own
consciousness placed before him in it as if they were things other than
the creator and his creative force, yet all the time
they are really no more than the play of self-formation of his own
being in itself and are indivisible there from their creator.
Thus Prajnana makes the fundamental division which leads to all the
rest, the division of the Purusha, the conscious soul
who knows and sees and by his vision creates and ordains, and the
Prakriti, the Force-Soul or Nature-Soul which is his
knowledge and his vision, his creation and his all-ordaining power.
Both are one Being, one existence, and the forms seen
and created are multiple forms of that Being which are placed by Him as
Knowledge before Himself as Knower, by
Himself as Force before Himself as Creator. The last action of this
apprehending consciousness takes place when the
Purusha pervading the conscious extension of his being, present at
every point of himself as well as in his totality, inhabiting
every form, regards the whole as if separately, from each of the
standpoints he has taken; he views and governs the
relations of each soul-form of himself with other soul-forms from the
standpoint of will and knowledge appropriate to each
particular form.
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Thus the elements of division have come into being. First, the infinity
of the One has translated itself into an extension in
conceptual Time and Space; secondly, the omnipresence of the One in
that self-conscious extension translates itself into a
multiplicity of the conscious soul, the many Purushas of the Sankhya;
thirdly, the multiplicity of soul-forms has translated
itself into a divided habitation of the extended unity. This divided
habitation is inevitable the moment these multiple Purushas
do not each inhabit a separate world of its own, do not each possess a
separate Prakriti building a separate universe, but
rather all enjoy the same Prakriti,—as they must do, being only
soul-forms of the One presiding over the multiple creations
of His power,—yet have relations with each other in the one world of
being created by the one Prakriti. The Purusha in
each form actively identifies himself with each; he delimits himself in
that and sets off his other forms against it in his
consciousness as containing his other selves which are identical with
him in being but different in relation, different in the
various extent, various range of movement and various view of the one
substance, force, consciousness, delight which each
is actually deploying at any given moment of Time or in any given field
of Space. Granted that in the divine Existence,
perfectly aware of itself, this is not a binding limitation, not an
identification to which the soul becomes enslaved and which it
cannot exceed as we are enslaved to our self-identification with the
body and unable to exceed the limitation of our
conscious ego, unable to escape from a particular movement of our
consciousness in Time determining our particular field in
Space; granted all this, still there is a free identification from
moment to moment which only the inalienable self-knowledge
of the divine soul prevents from fixing itself in an apparently rigid
chain of separation and Time succession such as that in
which our consciousness seems to be fixed and chained.
Thus the depiecing is already there; the relation of form with form as if they were separate beings, of will-of-being with
will-of-being as if they were separate forces, of knowledge-of-being with knowledge-of-being as if they were separate
consciousnesses has already been founded. It is as yet only “as if”; for the divine soul is not deluded, it is aware of all as
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phenomenon of being and keeps hold of its existence in the reality of being; it does not forfeit its unity: it uses mind as a
subordinate action of the infinite knowledge, a definition of things subordinate to its awareness of infinity, a delimitation
dependent on its awareness of essential totality—not that apparent and pluralistic totality of sum and collective aggregation
which is only another phenomenon of Mind. Thus there is no real limitation; the soul uses its defining power for the play of
well-distinguished forms and forces and is not used by that power.
A new factor, a new action
of conscious force is therefore needed to create the operation of a
helplessly limited as
opposed to a freely limiting mind,—that is to say, of mind subject to
its own play and deceived by it as opposed to mind
master of its own play and viewing it in its truth, the creature mind
as opposed to the divine. That new factor is Avidya, the
self-ignoring faculty which separates the action of mind from the
action of the Supermind that originated and still governs it
from behind the veil. Thus separated, Mind perceives only the
particular and not the universal, or conceives only the
particular in an unpossessed universal and no longer both particular
and universal as phenomena of the Infinite. Thus we
have the limited mind which views every phenomenon as a
thing-in-itself, separate part of a whole which again exists
separately in a greater whole and so on, enlarging always its
aggregates without getting back to the sense of a true infinity
.
Mind, being an action of the Infinite, depieces as well as aggregates ad infinitum. It cuts up being into wholes, into ever
smaller wholes, into atoms and those atoms into primal atoms, until it would, if it could, dissolve the primal atom into
nothingness. But it cannot, because behind this dividing action is the saving knowledge of the supramental which knows
every whole, every atom to be only a concentration of all-force, of all-consciousness, of all-being into phenomenal forms of
itself. The dissolution of the aggregate into an infinite nothingness at which Mind seems to arrive, is to the Supermind only
the return of the self-concentrating conscious-being out of its phenomenon into its infinite existence. Whichever way its
consciousness proceeds, by the way of infinite division or by the way of
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infinite enlargement, it arrives only at
itself, at its own infinite unity and eternal being. And when the
action of the mind is
consciously subordinate to this knowledge of the Supermind, the truth
of the process is known to it also and not at all
ignored; there is no real division but only an infinitely multiple
concentration into forms of being and into arrangements of the
relation of those forms of being to each other in which division is a
subordinate appearance of the whole process necessary
to their spatial and temporal play. For divide as you will, get down to
the most infinitesimal atom or form the most monstrous
possible aggregate of worlds and systems, you cannot get by either
process to a thing-in-itself; all are forms of a Force
which alone is real in itself while the rest are real only as
self-imagings or manifesting self-forms of the eternal
Force-Consciousness.
Whence then does the
limiting Avidya, the fall of mind from Supermind and the consequent
idea of real division
originally proceed? exactly from what perversion of the supramental
functioning? It proceeds from the individualised soul
viewing everything from its own standpoint and excluding all others; it
proceeds, that is to say, by an exclusive concentration
of consciousness, an exclusive self-identification of the soul with a
particular temporal and spatial action which is only a part
of its own play of being; it starts from the soul's ignoring the fact
that all others are also itself, all other action its own action
and all other states of being and consciousness equally its own as well
as the action of the one particular moment in Time
and one particular standing-point in Space and the one particular form
it presently occupies. It concentrates on the moment,
the field, the form, the movement so as to lose the rest; it has then
to recover the rest by linking together the succession of
moments, the succession of points of Space, the succession of forms in
Time and Space, the succession of movements in
Time and Space. It has thus lost the truth of the indivisibility of
Time, the indivisibility of Force and Substance. It has lost
sight even of the obvious fact that all minds are one Mind taking many
standpoints, all lives one Life developing many
currents of activity, all body and form one substance of Force and
Consciousness concentrating into many apparent
stabilities of force and
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consciousness; but in truth all these stabilities
are really only a constant whorl of movement repeating a form while it
modifies it; they are nothing more. For the Mind tries to clamp
everything into rigidly fixed forms and apparently unchanging
or unmoving external factors, because otherwise it cannot act; it then
thinks it has got what it wants: in reality all is a flux of
change and renewal and there is no fixed form-in-itself and no
unchanging external factor. Only the eternal Real-Idea is
firm and maintains a certain ordered constancy of figures and relations
in the flux of things, a constancy which the Mind
vainly attempts to imitate by attributing fixity to that which is
always inconstant. These truths Mind has to rediscover; it
knows them all the time, but only in the hidden back of its
consciousness, in the secret light of its self-being; and that light is
to it a darkness because it has created the ignorance, because it has
lapsed from the dividing into the divided mentality,
because it has become involved in its own workings and in its own
creations.
This ignorance is farther
deepened for man by his self-identification with the body. To us mind
seems to be determined
by the body, because it is preoccupied with that and devoted to the
physical workings which it uses for its conscious
superficial action in this gross material world. Employing constantly
that operation of the brain and nerves which it has
developed in the course of its own development in the body, it is too
absorbed in observing what this physical machinery
gives to it to get back from it to its own pure workings; those are to
it mostly subconscious. Still we can conceive a life mind
or life being which has got beyond the evolutionary necessity of this
absorption and is able to see and even experience itself
assuming body after body and not created separately in each body and
ending with it; for it is only the physical impress of
mind on matter, only the corporeal mentality that is so created, not
the whole mental being. This corporeal mentality is
merely our surface of mind, merely the front which it presents to
physical experience. Behind, even in our terrestrial being,
there is this other, subconscious or subliminal to us, which knows
itself as more than the body and is capable of a less materialised
action. To this we owe immediately most of the larger, deeper and more
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forceful dynamic action of our surface mind; this, when we become conscious of it or of its impress on us, is our first idea or
our first realisation of a soul or inner being, Purusha.¹
But this life mentality also, though it may get free from the error of
body, does not make us free from the whole error of
mind; it is still subject to the original act of ignorance by which the
individualised soul regards everything from its own
standpoint and can see the truth of things only as they present
themselves to it from outside or else as they rise up to its
view from its separate temporal and spatial consciousness, forms and
results of past and present experience. It is not
conscious of its other selves except by the outward indications they
give of their existence, indications of communicated
thought, speech, action, result of actions, or subtler indications—not
felt directly by the physical being—of vital impact and
relation. Equally is it ignorant of itself; for it knows of its self
only through a movement in Time and a succession of lives in
which it has used its variously embodied energies. As our physical
instrumental mind has the illusion of the body, so this
subconscious dynamic mind has the illusion of life. In that it is
absorbed and concentrated, by that it is limited, with that it
identifies its being. Here we do not yet get back to the meeting-place
of mind and Supermind and the point at which they
originally separated.
But there is still another
clearer reflective mentality behind the dynamic and vital which is
capable of escaping from this
absorption in life and views itself as assuming life and body in order
to image out in active relations of energy that which it
perceives in will and thought. It is the source of the pure thinker in
us; it is that which knows mentality in itself and sees the
world not in terms of life and body but of mind; it is that²
which, when we get back to it, we sometimes mistake for the pure spirit as we mistake the dynamic mind for the soul. This
higher mind is able to perceive and deal with other souls as other forms of its pure self; it is capable of sensing them by pure
mental impact and communication and no longer only by vital and nervous impact and physical indications; it conceives too a
mental figure of unity,
¹
Perceived as the life being or vital being, prānamaya purusa.
²
The mental being, manomaya purusa.
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and in its activity and its will it can create and
possess more directly—not only indirectly as in the ordinary physical
life—and in other minds and lives as well as its own. But still even
this pure mentality does not escape from the original
error of mind. For it is still its separate mental self which it makes
the judge, witness and centre of the universe and through
it alone strives to arrive at its own higher self and reality; all
others are “others” grouped to it around itself: when it wills to
be free, it has to draw back from life and mind in order to disappear
into the real unity. For there is still the veil created by Avidya
between the mental and supramental action; an image of the Truth gets
through, not the Truth itself.
It is only when the veil is
rent and the divided mind overpowered, silent and passive to a
supramental action that mind
itself gets back to the Truth of things. There we find a luminous
mentality reflective, obedient and instrumental to the divine
Real-Idea. There we perceive what the world really is; we know in every
way ourselves in others and as others, others as
ourselves and all as the universal and self-multiplied One. We lose the
rigidly separate individual standpoint which is the
source of all limitation and error. Still, we perceive also that all
that the ignorance of Mind took for the truth was in fact truth
but truth deflected, mistaken and falsely conceived. We still perceive
the division, the individualising, the atomic creation, but
we know them and ourselves for what they and we really are. And so we
perceive that the Mind was really a subordinate
action and instrumentation of the Truth-Consciousness. So long as it is
not separated in self-experience from the enveloping
Master-Consciousness and does not try to set up house for itself, so
long as it serves passively as an instrumentation and
does not attempt to possess for its own benefit, Mind fulfils
luminously its function which is in the Truth to hold forms apart
from each other by a phenomenal, a purely formal delimitation of their
activity behind which the governing universality of the
being remains conscious and untouched. It has to receive the truth of
things and distribute it according to the unerring
perception of a supreme and universal Eye and Will. It has to uphold an
individualisation of active consciousness, delight,
force, substance which
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derives all its power, reality and joy from an
inalienable universality behind. It has to turn the multiplicity of the
One into an
apparent division by which relations are defined and held off against
each other so as to meet again and join. It has to
establish the delight of separation and contact in the midst of an
eternal unity and intermiscence. It has to enable the One to
behave as if He were an individual dealing with other individuals but
always in His own unity, and this is what the world
really is. The mind is the final operation of the apprehending
Truth-Consciousness which makes all this possible, and what
we call the Ignorance does not create a new thing and absolute
falsehood but only misrepresents the Truth. The Ignorance
is the Mind separated in knowledge from its source of knowledge and
giving a false rigidity and a mistaken appearance of
opposition and conflict to the harmonious play of the supreme Truth in
its universal manifestation.
The fundamental error of
the Mind is, then, this fall from self-knowledge by which the
individual soul conceives of its
individuality as a separate fact instead of as a form of Oneness and
makes itself the centre of its own universe instead of
knowing itself as one concentration of the universal. From that
original error all its particular ignorances and limitations are
contingent results. For, viewing the flux of things only as it flows
upon and through itself, it makes a limitation of being from
which proceeds a limitation of consciousness and therefore of
knowledge, a limitation of conscious force and will and
therefore of power, a limitation of self-enjoyment and therefore of
delight. It is conscious of things and knows them only as
they present themselves to its individuality and therefore it falls
into an ignorance of the rest and thereby into an erroneous
conception even of that which it seems to know: for since all being is
interdependent, the knowledge either of the whole or
of the essence is necessary for the right knowledge of the part. Hence
there is an element of error in all human knowledge.
Similarly our will, ignorant of the rest of the all-will, must fall
into error of working and a greater or less degree of incapacity
and impotence; the soul's self-delight and delight of things, ignoring
the all-bliss and by defect of will and knowledge unable
to master its world, must fall into incapacity
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of possessive delight and therefore into suffering. Self-ignorance is therefore the root of all the perversity of our existence,
and that perversity stands fortified in the self-limitation, the egoism which is the form taken by that self-ignorance.
Yet is all ignorance and all perversity only the distortion of the truth and right of things and not the play of an absolute
falsehood. It is the result of Mind viewing things in the division it makes, avidyāyām antare,
instead of viewing itself and its
divisions as instrumentation and phenomenon of the play of the truth of
Sachchidananda. If it gets back to the truth from
which it fell, it becomes again the final action of the
Truth-Consciousness in its apprehensive operation, and the relations it
helps to create in that light and power will be relations of the Truth
and not of the perversity. They will be the straight things
and not the crooked, to use the expressive distinction of the Vedic
Rishis,—Truths, that is to say, of divine being with its
self-possessive consciousness, will and delight moving harmoniously in
itself. Now we have rather the warped and zigzag
movement of mind and life, the contortions created by the struggle of
the soul once grown oblivious of its true being to find
itself again, to resolve back all error into the truth which both our
truth and our error, our right and our wrong limit or distort,
all incapacity into the strength which both our power and our weakness
are a struggle of force to grasp, all suffering into the
delight which both our joy and our pain are a convulsive effort of
sensation to realise, all death into the immortality to which both our
life and our death are a constant effort of being to return.
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