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CHAPTER
XXIV
Matter
He arrived at
the knowledge that Matter is Brahman.
Taittiriya Upanishad.¹
WE HAVE
now the rational assurance that Life is neither an inexplicable dream
nor an impossible evil that has yet become a
dolorous fact, but a mighty pulsation of the divine All-Existence. We
see something of its foundation and its principle, we
look upward to its high potentiality and ultimate divine out-flowering.
But there is one principle below all the others which we
have not yet sufficiently considered, the principle of Matter upon
which Life stands as upon a pedestal or out of which it
evolves like the form of a many-branching tree out of its encasing
seed. The mind, life and body of man depend upon this
physical principle, and if the out-flowering of Life is the result of
Consciousness emerging into Mind, expanding, elevating
itself in search of its own truth in the largeness of the supramental
existence, yet it seems also to be conditioned by this case
of body and by this foundation of Matter. The importance of the body is
obvious; it is because he has developed or been
given a body and brain capable of receiving and serving a progressive
mental illumination that man has risen above the
animal. Equally, it can only be by developing a body or at least a
functioning of the physical instrument capable of receiving
and serving a still higher illumination that he will rise above himself
and realise, not merely in thought and in his internal being
but in life, a perfectly divine manhood. Otherwise either the promise
of Life is cancelled, its meaning annulled and earthly
being can only realise Sachchidananda by abolishing itself, by shedding
from it mind, life and body and returning to the pure
Infinite, or else man is not the divine instrument, there is a destined
limit to the consciously progressive power which
distinguishes him from all other terrestrial existences and as he has
replaced them in the front of things, so another must
¹
III. 2.
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eventually replace him and assume his heritage.
It seems indeed that the body is from the beginning the soul's great
difficulty, its continual stumbling-block and rock of
offence. Therefore the eager seeker of spiritual fulfilment has hurled
his ban against the body and his world-disgust selects
this world-principle above all other things as an especial object of
loathing. The body is the obscure burden that he cannot
bear; its obstinate material grossness is the obsession that drives him
for deliverance to the life of the ascetic. To get rid of it
he has even gone so far as to deny its existence and the reality of the
material universe. Most of the religions have put their
curse upon Matter and have made the refusal or the resigned temporary
endurance of the physical life the test of religious
truth and of spirituality. The older creeds, more patient, more
broodingly profound, not touched with the torture and the
feverish impatience of the soul under the burden of the Iron Age, did
not make this formidable division; they acknowledged
Earth the Mother and Heaven the Father and accorded to them an equal
love and reverence; but their ancient mysteries are
obscure and unfathomable to our gaze who, whether our view of things be
materialistic or spiritual, are alike content to cut
the Gordian knot of the problem of existence with one decisive blow and
to accept an escape into an eternal bliss or an end
in an eternal annihilation or an eternal quietude.
The quarrel does not really commence with our awakening to our
spiritual possibilities; it begins from the appearance of
life itself and its struggle to establish its activities and its
permanent aggregations of living form against the force of inertia,
against the force of inconscience, against the force of atomic
disaggregation which are in the material principle the knot of
the great Denial. Life is at constant war with Matter and the battle
seems always to end in the apparent defeat of Life and
in that collapse downward to the material principle which we call
death. The discord deepens with the appearance of Mind;
for Mind has its own quarrel with both Life and Matter: it is at
constant war with their limitations, in constant subjection to
and revolt against the grossness and inertia of the one and the
passions and sufferings of the other; and the battle seems to
turn eventually, though
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not very surely, towards a partial and costly
victory for the Mind in which it conquers, represses or even slays the
vital
cravings, impairs the physical force and disturbs the balance of the
body in the interests of a greater mental activity and a
higher moral being. It is in this struggle that the impatience of Life,
the disgust of the body and the recoil from both towards
a pure mental and moral existence take their rise. When man awakens to
an existence beyond Mind, he carries yet farther
this principle of discord. Mind, Body and Life are condemned as the
trinity of the world, the flesh and the devil. Mind too is
banned as the source of all our malady; war is declared between the
spirit and its instruments and the victory of the spiritual
Inhabitant is sought for in an evasion from its narrow residence, a
rejection of mind, life and body and a withdrawal into its
own infinitudes. The world is a discord and we shall best solve its
perplexities by carrying the principle of discord itself to its
extreme possibility, a cutting away and a final severance.
But these defeats and
victories are only apparent, this solution is not a solution but an
escape from the problem. Life is
not really defeated by Matter; it makes a compromise by using death for
the continuance of life. Mind is not really victorious
over Life and Matter, but has only achieved an imperfect development of
some of its potentialities at the cost of others
which are bound up with the unrealised or rejected possibilities of its
better use of life and body. The individual soul has not
conquered the lower triplicity, but only rejected their claim upon it
and fled from the work which spirit had undertaken when
it first cast itself into form of universe. The problem continues
because the labour of the Divine in the universe continues,
but without any satisfying solution of the problem or any victorious
accomplishment of the labour. Therefore, since our own
standpoint is that Sachchidananda is the beginning and the middle and
the end and that struggle and discord cannot be
eternal and fundamental principles in His being but by their very
existence imply labour towards a perfect solution and a
complete victory, we must seek that solution in a real victory of Life
over Matter through the free and perfect use of body
by Life, in a real victory of Mind over Life and Matter through a free
and perfect use of life-force
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and form by Mind and in a real victory of Spirit over the triplicity through a free and perfect occupation of mind, life and
body by conscious spirit; in the view we have worked out this last conquest can alone make the others really possible. To
the end, then, that we may see how these conquests can be at all or wholly possible, we must find out the reality of Matter
just as, seeking the fundamental knowledge, we have found out the reality of Mind and Soul and Life.
In a certain sense Matter is unreal and non-existent; that is to say, our present knowledge, idea and experience of
Matter is not its truth, but merely a phenomenon of particular relation between our senses and the all-existence in which we
move. When Science discovers that Matter resolves itself into forms of Energy, it has hold of a universal and fundamental
truth; and when philosophy discovers that Matter only exists as substantial appearance to the consciousness and that the one
reality is Spirit or pure conscious Being, it has hold of a greater and completer, a still more fundamental truth. But still the
question remains why Energy should take the form of Matter and not of mere force-currents or why that which is really
Spirit should admit the phenomenon of Matter and not rest in states, velleities
and joys of the spirit. This, it is said, is the work of Mind or else, since
evidently Thought does not directly create or even perceive the material form of
things, it is the work of Sense; the sense-mind creates the forms which it seems
to perceive and the thought-mind works upon the forms which the sense-mind
presents to it. But, evidently, the individual embodied mind is not the creator
of the phenomenon of Matter; earth-existence cannot be the result of the human
mind which is itself the result of earth-existence. If we say that the world
exists only in our own minds, we express a non-fact and a confusion; for the
material world existed before man was upon the earth and it will go on existing
if man disappears from the earth or even if our individual mind abolishes itself
in the Infinite. We must conclude then that there is a universal Mind,¹
subconscious to us in the form of the
¹ Mind, as we know it, creates only in a relative and
instrumental sense; it has an unlimited power of combination, but its creative
motives and forms come to it from above: all created forms have their base in
the Infinite above Mind, Life and Matter and are here
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universe or superconscious in its spirit, which has created that form for its habitation. And since the creator must have
preceded and must exceed its creation, this really implies a superconscient Mind which by the instrumentality of a universal
sense creates in itself the relation of form with form and constitutes the rhythm of the material universe. But this also is no
complete solution; it tells us that Matter is a creation of Consciousness, but it does not explain how Consciousness came to
create Matter as the basis of its cosmic workings.
We shall understand better if we go back at once to the original principle of things. Existence is in its activity a
Conscious-Force which presents the workings of its force to its consciousness as forms of its own being. Since Force is
only the action of one sole-existing Conscious-Being, its results can be nothing else but forms of that Conscious-Being;
Substance or Matter, then, is only a form of Spirit. The appearance which this form of Spirit assumes to our senses is due to
that dividing action of Mind from which we have been able to deduce consistently the whole phenomenon of the universe.
We know now that Life is an action of Conscious-Force of which material forms are the result; Life involved in those
forms, appearing in them first as inconscient force, evolves and brings back into manifestation as Mind the consciousness
which is the real self of the force and which never ceased to exist in it even when unmanifest. We know also that Mind is
an inferior power of the original conscious Knowledge or Supermind, a power to which Life acts as an instrumental energy;
for, descending through Supermind, Consciousness or Chit represents itself as Mind, Force of consciousness or Tapas
represents itself as Life. Mind, by its separation from its own higher reality in Supermind, gives Life the appearance of
division and, by its farther involution in its own Life-Force, becomes subconscious in Life and thus gives the outward
appearance of an inconscient force to its material workings. Therefore, the inconscience, the inertia,
---------------------
represented, reconstructed—very
usually misconstructed—from the infinitesimal. Their foundation is
above, their branchings downwards, says the Rig
Veda. The superconscient Mind of which we speak might rather be called
an Overmind and inhabits in the
hierarchical order of the powers of the Spirit, a zone directly
dependent on the supramental consciousness.
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the atomic disaggregation of Matter must have their source in this all-dividing and self-involving action of Mind by which our
universe came into being. As Mind is only a final action of Supermind in the descent towards creation and Life an action of
Conscious-Force working in the conditions of the Ignorance created by this descent of Mind, so Matter, as we know it, is
only the final form taken by conscious-being as the result of that working. Matter is substance of the one Conscious-Being
phenomenally divided within itself by the action of a universal Mind,¹
—a division which the individual mind repeats and dwells in, but which does not abrogate or at all diminish the unity of Spirit
or the unity of Energy or the real unity of Matter.
But why this phenomenal and
pragmatic division of an indivisible Existence? It is because Mind has
to carry the
principle of multiplicity to its extreme potential which can only be
done by separativeness and division. To do that it must,
precipitating itself into Life to create forms for the Multiple, give
to the universal principle of Being the appearance of a
gross and material substance instead of a pure or subtle substance. It
must, that is to say, give it the appearance of
substance which offers itself to the contact of Mind as stable thing or
object in an abiding multiplicity of objects and not of
substance which offers itself to the contact of pure consciousness as
something of its own eternal pure existence and reality
or to subtle sense as a principle of plastic form freely expressive of
the conscious being. The contact of mind with its objects
creates what we call sense, but here it has to be an obscure
externalised sense which must be assured of the reality of what
it contacts. The descent of pure substance into material substance
follows, then, inevitably on the descent of
Sachchidananda through Supermind into mind and life. It is a necessary
result of the will to make multiplicity of being and an
awareness of things from separate centres of consciousness the first
method of this lower experience of existence. If we go
back to the spiritual basis of things, substance in its utter purity
resolves itself into pure conscious being,
¹
Mind is here used in its widest sense including the operation of an Overmind power which is nearest to the
supramental Truth-Consciousness and which is the first fountain of the creation of the Ignorance.
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self-existent, inherently self-aware by identity,
but not yet turning its consciousness upon itself as object. Supermind
preserves this self-awareness by identity as its substance of
self-knowledge and its light of self-creation, but for that
creation presents Being to itself as the subject-object one and
multiple of its own active consciousness. Being as object is
held there in a supreme knowledge which can, by comprehension, see it
both as an object of cognition within itself and
subjectively as itself, but can also and simultaneously, by
apprehension, project it as an object (or objects) of cognition within
the circumference of its consciousness, not other than itself, part of
its being, but a part (or parts) put away from
itself,—that is to say, from the centre of vision in which Being
concentrates itself as the Knower, Witness or Purusha. We have seen
that from this apprehending consciousness arises the movement of Mind,
the movement by which the individual knower regards a form of his own
universal being as if other than he; but in the divine Mind there is
immediately or rather simultaneously another movement or reverse side
of the same movement, an act of union in being which heals this
phenomenal division and prevents it from becoming even for a moment
solely real to the knower. This act of conscious union is that which is
represented otherwise in dividing Mind obtusely, ignorantly, quite
externally as contact in consciousness between divided beings and
separate objects, and with us this contact in divided consciousness is
primarily represented by the principle of sense. On this basis of
sense, on this contact of union subject to division, the action of the
thought-mind founds itself and prepares for the return to a higher
principle of union in which division is made subject to unity and
subordinate. Substance, then, as we know it, material substance, is the
form in which Mind acting through sense contacts the Conscious Being of
which it is itself a movement of knowledge.
But Mind by its very nature tends to
know and sense substance of conscious-being, not in its unity or totality but by
the principle of division. It sees it, as it were, in infinitesimal points which
it associates together in order to arrive at a totality, and into these
viewpoints and associations cosmic Mind throws itself and dwells in them. So
dwelling, creative by its inherent
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force as the agent of Real-Idea, bound by its own nature to convert all its perceptions into energy of life, as the All-Existent
converts all His self-aspectings into various energy of His creative Force of consciousness, cosmic Mind turns these, its
multiple viewpoints of universal existence, into standpoints of universal Life; it turns them in Matter into forms of atomic
being instinct with the life that forms them and governed by the mind and will that actuate the formation. At the same time,
the atomic existences which it thus forms must by the very law of their being tend to associate themselves, to aggregate;
and each of these aggregates also, instinct with the hidden life that forms and the hidden mind and will that actuate them,
bears with it a fiction of a separated individual existence. Each such individual object or existence is supported, according as
the mind in it is implicit or explicit, unmanifest or manifest, by its mechanical ego of force, in which the will-to-be is dumb
and imprisoned but none the less powerful, or by its self-aware mental ego in which the will-to-be is liberated, conscious,
separately active.
Thus not any eternal and
original law of eternal and original Matter, but the nature of the
action of cosmic Mind is the
cause of atomic existence. Matter is a creation, and for its creation
the infinitesimal, an extreme fragmentation of the
Infinite, was needed as the starting-point or basis. Ether may and does
exist as an intangible, almost spiritual support of
Matter, but as a phenomenon it does not seem, to our present knowledge
at least, to be materially detectable. Subdivide the
visible aggregate or the formal atom into essential atoms, break it up
into the most infinitesimal dust of being, we shall still,
because of the nature of the Mind and Life that formed them, arrive at
some utmost atomic existence, unstable perhaps but
always reconstituting itself in the eternal flux of force,
phenomenally, and not at a mere unatomic extension incapable of
contents. Unatomic extension of substance, extension which is not an
aggregation, coexistence otherwise than by
distribution in space are realities of pure existence, pure substance;
they are a knowledge of Supermind and a principle of its
dynamism, not a creative concept of the dividing Mind, though Mind can
become aware of them behind its workings. They
are the reality underlying
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Matter, but not the phenomenon which we call Matter. Mind, Life, Matter itself can be one with that pure existence and
conscious extension in their static reality, but not operate by that oneness in their dynamic action, self-perception and
self-formation.
Therefore we arrive at this
truth of Matter that there is a conceptive self-extension of being
which works itself out in
the universe as substance or object of consciousness and which cosmic
Mind and Life in their creative action represent
through atomic division and aggregation as the thing we call Matter.
But this Matter, like Mind and Life, is still Being or
Brahman in its self-creative action. It is a form of the force of
conscious Being, a form given by Mind and realised by Life.
It holds within it as its own reality consciousness concealed from
itself, involved and absorbed in the result of its own
self-formation and therefore self-oblivious. And, however brute and
void of sense it seems to us, it is yet, to the secret
experience of the consciousness hidden within it, delight of being
offering itself to this secret consciousness as object of
sensation in order to tempt that hidden godhead out of its secrecy.
Being manifest as substance, force of Being cast into
form, into a figured self-representation of the secret
self-consciousness, delight offering itself to its own consciousness as
an
object,—what is this but Sachchidananda? Matter is Sachchidananda
represented to His own mental experience as a formal
basis of objective knowledge, action and delight of existence.
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