|
CHAPTER
III
The Eternal and the Individual
He and I.
Isha Upanishad.1
It is an eternal portion of Me that has become the living being
in a world of living beings.... The eye of knowledge sees
the Lord
abiding in the body and enjoying and going forth from it.
Gita 2
Two birds beautiful of wing, friends and comrades, cling to a
common tree, and one eats the sweet fruit, the other regards him
and eats not.... Where winged souls cry the discoveries of know-
ledge over their portion of immortality, there the Lord of all,
the Guardian of the World took possession of me, he the Wise,
me the ignorant.
Rig Veda.3
There
is then a fundamental truth of existence, an Omnipresent Reality,
omnipresent above the cosmic manifestation and in
it and immanent in each individual. There is also a dynamic power of
this Omnipresence, a creative or self-manifesting
action of its infinite Consciousness-Force. There is as a phase or
movement of the self-manifestation a descent into an
apparent material inconscience, an awakening of the individual out of
the Inconscience and an evolution of his being into the
spiritual and supramental consciousness and power of the Reality, into
his own universal and transcendent Self and source
of existence. It is on this foundation that we have to base our
conception of a truth in our terrestrial being and the possibility
of a divine Life in material Nature. There our chief need is to
discover the origin and nature of the Ignorance which we see
emerging out of the inconscience of matter or disclosing itself within
a body of matter and the nature of the Knowledge that
has to replace it, to understand too the process of Nature's
self-unfolding and the soul's recovery. For in fact the Knowledge
is there concealed in the Ignorance itself; it has rather to be
unveiled than acquired: it reveals itself rather than is learned, by
1 Verse 16
2 XV. 7, 10. 3 164.
20, 21.
Page 365
an inward and upward self-unfolding. But first it will be convenient to meet and get out of the way one difficulty that
inevitably arises, the difficulty of admitting that, even given the immanence of the Divine in us, even given our individual
consciousness as a vehicle of progressive evolutionary manifestation, the individual is in any sense eternal or that there can
be any persistence of individuality after liberation has been attained by unity and self-knowledge.
This is a difficulty of the logical reason and must be met by a larger
and more catholic enlightening reason. Or if it is a
difficulty of spiritual experience, it can only be met by a wider
resolving experience. It can indeed be met also by a
dialectical battle, a logomachy of the logical mind; but that by itself
is an artificial method, often a futile combat in the clouds
and always inconclusive. Logical reasoning is useful and indispensable
in its own field in order to give the mind a certain
clearness, precision and subtlety in dealing with its own ideas and
word-symbols, so that our perception of the truths which
we arrive at by observation and experience or which physically,
psychologically or spiritually we have seen, may be as little
as possible obscured by the confusions of our average human
intelligence, its proneness to take appearance for fact, its
haste to be misled by partial truth, its exaggerated conclusions, its
intellectual and emotional partialities, its incompetent
bunglings in that linking of truth to truth by which alone we can
arrive at a complete knowledge. We must have a clear,
pure, subtle and flexible mind in order that we may fall as little as
possible into that ordinary mental habit of our kind which
turns truth itself into a purveyor of errors. That clarification, the
habit of clear logical reasoning culminating in the method of
metaphysical dialectics, does help to accomplish and its part in the
preparation of knowledge is therefore very great. But by
itself it cannot arrive either at the knowledge of the world or the
knowledge of God, much less reconcile the lower and the
higher realisation. It is much more efficiently a guardian against
error than a discoverer of truth,—although by deduction
from knowledge already acquired it may happen upon new truths and
indicate them for experience or for the higher and
larger truth-seeing faculties to confirm.
Page 366
In the more subtle field of synthetical or unifying
knowledge the logical habit of mind may even become a stumbling-block
by the very faculty which gives it its peculiar use; for it is so
accustomed to making distinctions and dwelling upon
distinctions and working by distinctions that it is always a little at
sea when distinctions have to be overriden and overpassed.
Our object, then, in considering the difficulties of the normal mind
when face to face with the experience of cosmic and
transcendental unity by the individual, must be solely to make more
clear to ourselves, first, the origin of the difficulties and
the escape from them and by that, what is more important, the real
nature of the unity at which we arrive and of the
culmination of the individual when he becomes one with all creatures
and dwells in the oneness of the Eternal.
The first difficulty for the reason is that it has always been
accustomed to identify the individual self with the ego and to
think of it as existing only by the limitations and exclusions of the
ego. If that were so, then by the transcendence of the ego
the individual would abolish his own existence; our end would be to
disappear and dissolve into some universality of matter,
life, mind or spirit or else some indeterminate from which our egoistic
determinations of individuality have started. But what
is this strongly separative self-experience that we call ego? It is
nothing fundamentally real in itself but only a practical
constitution of our consciousness devised to centralise the activities
of Nature in us. We perceive a formation of mental,
physical, vital experience which distinguishes itself from the rest of
being, and that is what we think of as ourselves in
nature — this individualisation of being in becoming. We then proceed
to conceive of ourselves as something which has thus
individualised itself and only exists so long as it is individualised,
— a temporary or at least a temporal becoming; or else we
conceive of ourselves as someone who supports or causes the
individualisation, an immortal being perhaps but limited by its
individuality. This perception and this conception constitute our
ego-sense. Normally, we go no farther in our knowledge of
our individual existence.
But in the end we have to see that our individualisation is only a
superficial formation, a practical selection and limited
Page 367
conscious synthesis for the temporary utility of life in a particular body, or else it is a constantly changing and developing
synthesis pursued through successive lives in successive bodies. Behind it there is a consciousness, a Purusha, who is not
determined or limited by his individualisation or by this synthesis but on the contrary determines, supports and yet exceeds it.
That which he selects from in order to construct this synthesis, is his total experience of the world-being. Therefore our
individualisation exists by virtue of the world-being, but also by virtue of a consciousness which uses the world-being for
experience of its possibilities of individuality. These two powers, Person and his world-material, are both necessary for our
present experience of individuality. If the Purusha with his individualising syntheses of consciousness were to disappear, to
merge, to annul himself in any way, our constructed individuality would cease because the Reality that supported it would no
longer be in presence; if, on the other hand, the world-being were to dissolve, merge, disappear, then also our
individualisation would cease, for the material of experience by which it effectuates itself would be wanting. We have then
to recognise these two terms of our existence, a world-being and an individualising consciousness which is the cause of all
our self-experience and world-experience.
But we see farther that in the end this Purusha, this cause and self of
our individuality, comes to embrace the whole
world and all other beings in a sort of conscious extension of itself
and to perceive itself as one with the world-being. In its
conscious extension of itself it exceeds the primary experience and
abolishes the barriers of its active self-limitation and
individualisation; by its perception of its own infinite universality
it goes beyond all consciousness of separative individuality
or limited soul-being. By that very fact the individual ceases to be
the self-limiting ego; in other words, our false
consciousness of existing only by self-limitation, by rigid distinction
of ourselves from the rest of being and becoming is
transcended; our identification of ourselves with our personal and
temporal individualisation in a particular mind and body is
abolished. But is all truth of individuality and individualisation
abolished? does the Purusha
Page 368
cease to exist or does he become the world-Purusha
and live intimately in innumerable minds and bodies? We do not find it
to be so. He still individualises and it is still he who exists and
embraces this wider consciousness while he individualises: but
the mind no longer thinks of a limited temporary individualisation as
all ourselves but only as a wave of becoming thrown up
from the sea of its being or else as a form or centre of universality.
The soul still makes the world-becoming the material for
individual experience, but instead of regarding it as something outside
and larger than itself on which it has to draw, by
which it is affected, with which it has to make accommodations, it is
aware of it subjectively as within itself; it embraces
both its world-material and its individualised experience of spatial
and temporal activities in a free and enlarged
consciousness. In this new consciousness the spiritual individual
perceives its true self to be one in being with the
Transcendence and seated and dwelling within it, and no longer takes
its constructed individuality as anything more than a
formation for world-experience.
Our unity with the world-being is the consciousness of a Self which at
one and the same time cosmicises in the world
and individualises through the individual Purusha, and both in that
world-being and in this individual being and in all individual
beings it is aware of the same Self manifesting and experiencing its
various manifestations. That then is a Self which must
be one in its being, — otherwise we could not have this experience of
unity, — and yet must be capable in its very unity of
cosmic differentiation and multiple individuality. The unity is its
being,—yes, but the cosmic differentiation and the multiple
individuality are the power of its being which it is constantly
displaying and which it is its delight and the nature of its
consciousness to display. If then we arrive at unity with that, if we
even become entirely and in every way that being, why
should the power of its being be excised and why at all should we
desire or labour to excise it? We should then only diminish
the scope of our unity with it by an exclusive concentration accepting
the divine being but not accepting our part in the
power and consciousness and infinite delight of the Divine. It would in
fact be the individual seeking peace and rest of union
in a motionless identity, but
Page 369
rejecting delight and various joy of union in the nature and act and power of the divine Existence. That is possible, but there
is no necessity to uphold it as the ultimate aim of our being or as our ultimate perfection.
Or the one possible reason would be that in the power, the act of
consciousness there is not real union and that only in
the status of consciousness is there perfect undifferentiated unity.
Now in what we may call the waking union of the
individual with the Divine, as opposed to a falling asleep or a
concentration of the individual consciousness in an absorbed
identity, there is certainly and must be a differentiation of
experience. For in this active unity the individual Purusha enlarges
its active experience also as well as its static consciousness into a
way of union with this Self of his being and of the
world-being, and yet individualisation remains and therefore
differentiation. The Purusha is aware of all other individuals as
selves of himself; he may by a dynamic union become aware of their
mental and practical action as occurring in his
universal consciousness, just as he is aware of his own mental and
practical action; he may help to determine their action by
subjective union with them: but still there is a practical difference.
The action of the Divine in himself is that with which he is
particularly and directly concerned; the action of the Divine in his
other selves is that with which he is universally concerned,
not directly, but through and by his union with them and with the
Divine. The individual therefore exists though he exceeds
the little separative ego; the universal exists and is embraced by him
but it does not absorb and abolish all individual
differentiation, even though by his universalising himself the
limitation which we call the ego is overcome.
Now we may get rid of this differentiation by plunging into the
absorption of an exclusive unity, but to what end? For
perfect union? But we do not forfeit that by accepting the
differentiation any more than the Divine forfeits His oneness by
accepting it. We have the perfect union in His being and can absorb
ourselves in it at any time, but we have also this other
differentiated unity and can emerge into it and act freely in it at any
time without losing oneness: for we have merged the
ego and are absolved from the exclusive stresses of our mentality.
Page 370
Then for peace and rest? But we have the peace and rest by virtue of our unity with Him, even as the Divine possesses for
ever His eternal calm in the midst of His eternal action. Then for the mere joy of getting rid of all differentiation? But that
differentiation has its divine purpose: it is a means of greater unity, not as in the egoistic life a means of divisions; for we
enjoy by it our unity with our other selves and with God in all, which we exclude by our rejection of his multiple being. In
either experience it is the Divine in the individual possessing and enjoying in one case the Divine in His pure unity or in the
other the Divine in that and in the unity of the cosmos; it is not the absolute Divine recovering after having lost His unity.
Certainly, we may prefer the absorption in a pure exclusive unity or a departure into a supracosmic transcendence, but there
is in the spiritual truth of the Divine Existence no compelling reason why we should not participate in this large possession
and bliss of His universal being which is the fulfilment of our individuality.
But we see farther that it is not solely and ultimately the cosmic
being into which our individual being enters but
something in which both are unified. As our individualisation in the
world is a becoming of that Self, so is the world too a
becoming of that Self. The world-being includes always the individual
being; therefore these two becomings, the cosmic and
the individual, are always related to each other and in their practical
relation mutually dependent. But we find that the
individual being also comes in the end to include the world in its
consciousness, and since this is not by an abolition of the
spiritual individual, but by his coming to his full, large and perfect
self-consciousness, we must suppose that the individual
always included the cosmos, and it is only the surface consciousness
which by ignorance failed to possess that inclusion
because of its self-limitation in ego. But when we speak of the mutual
inclusion of the cosmic and the individual, the world in
me, I in the world, all in me, I in all,—for that is the liberated
self-experience,—we are evidently travelling beyond the
language of the normal reason. That is because the words we have to use
were minted by mind and given their values by an
intellect bound to the conceptions of physical Space and circumstance
Page 371
and using for the language of a higher psychological experience figures drawn from the physical life and the experience of
the senses. But the plane of consciousness to which the liberated human being arises is not dependent upon the physical
world, and the cosmos which we thus include and are included in is not the physical cosmos, but the harmonically manifest
being of God in certain great rhythms of His conscious-force and self-delight. Therefore this mutual inclusion is spiritual and
psychological; it is a translation of the two forms of the Many, all and individual, into a unifying spiritual experience, — a
translation of the eternal unity of the One and the Many; for the One is the eternal unity of the Many differentiating and
undifferentiating itself in the cosmos. This means that cosmos and individual are manifestations of a transcendent Self who
is indivisible being although he seems to be divided or distributed; but he is not really divided or distributed but indivisibly
present everywhere. Therefore all is in each and each is in all and all is in God and God in all; and when the liberated soul
comes into union with this Transcendent, it has this self-experience of itself and cosmos which is translated psychologically
into a mutual inclusion and a persistent existence of both in a divine union which is at once a oneness and a fusion and an
embrace.
The normal experience of the reason therefore is not applicable to
these higher truths. In the first place the ego is the
individual only in the ignorance; there is a true individual who is not
the ego and still has an eternal relation with all other
individuals which is not egoistic or self-separative, but of which the
essential character is practical mutuality founded in
essential unity. This mutuality founded in unity is the whole secret of
the divine existence in its perfect manifestation; it must
be the basis of anything to which we can give the name of a divine
life. But, secondly, we see that the whole difficulty and
confusion into which the normal reason falls is that we are speaking of
a higher and illimitable self-experience founded on
divine infinites and yet are applying to it a language formed by this
lower and limited experience which founds itself on finite
appearances and the separative definitions by which we try to
distinguish and classify the phenomena of the material
universe. Thus we have to use the word
Page 372
individual and speak of the ego and the true individual, just as we speak sometimes of the apparent and the real Man.
Evidently, all these words, man, apparent, real, individual, true, have to be taken in a very relative sense and with a full
awareness of their imperfection and inability to express the things that we mean. By individual we mean normally something
that separates itself from everything else and stands apart, though in reality there is no such thing anywhere in existence; it
is a figment of our mental conceptions useful and necessary to express a partial and practical truth. But the difficulty is that
the mind gets dominated by its words and forgets that the partial and practical truth becomes true truth only by its relation to
others which seem to the reason to contradict it, and that taken by itself it contains a constant element of falsity. Thus when
we speak of an individual we mean ordinarily an individualisation of mental, vital, physical being separate from all other
beings, incapable of unity with them by its very individuality. If we go beyond these three terms of mind, life and body, and
speak of the soul or individual self, we still think of an individualised being separate from all others, incapable of unity and
inclusive mutuality, capable at most of a spiritual contact and soul-sympathy. It is therefore necessary to insist that by the
true individual we mean nothing of the kind, but a conscious power of being of the Eternal, always existing by unity, always
capable of mutuality. It is that being which by self-knowledge enjoys liberation and immortality.
But we have to carry still farther the conflict between the normal and
the higher reason. When we speak of the true
individual as a conscious power of being of the Eternal, we are still
using intellectual terms, — we cannot help it, unless we
plunge into a language of pure symbols and mystic values of speech, —
but, what is worse, we are, in the attempt to get
away from the idea of the ego, using a too abstract language. Let us
say, then, a conscious being who is for our valuations
of existence a being of the Eternal in his power of individualising
self-experience; for it must be a concrete being, — and not
an abstract power, — who enjoys immortality. And then we get to this
that not only am I in the world and the world in me,
but God is in me and I am in God; by which yet it is not meant that God
depends for
Page 373
His existence on man, but that He manifests Himself in that which He manifests within Himself; the individual exists in the
Transcendent, but all the Transcendent is there concealed in the individual. Further I am one with God in my being and yet I
can have relations with Him in my experience. I, the liberated individual, can enjoy the Divine in His transcendence, unified
with Him, and enjoy at the same time the Divine in other individuals and in His cosmic being. Evidently we have arrived at
certain primary relations of the Absolute and they can only be intelligible to the mind if we see that the Transcendent, the
individual, the cosmic being are the eternal powers of consciousness, — we fall again, this time without remedy, into a wholly
abstract language, — of an absolute existence, a unity yet more than a unity, which so expresses itself to its own
consciousness in us, but which we cannot adequately speak of in human language and must not hope to describe either by
negative or positive terms to our reason, but can only hope to indicate it to the utmost power of our language.
But the normal mind, which has no experience of these things that are
so powerfully real to the liberated consciousness,
may well revolt against what may seem to it nothing more than a mass of
intellectual contradictions. It may say, “I know
very well what the Absolute is; it is that in which there are no
relations. The Absolute and the relative are irreconcilable
opposites; in the relative there is nowhere anything absolute, in the
Absolute there can be nothing relative. Anything which
contradicts these first data of my thought, is intellectually false and
practically impossible. These other statements also
contradict my law of contradictions which is that two opposing and
conflicting affirmations cannot both be true. It is
impossible that there should be oneness with God and yet a relation
with Him such as this of the enjoyment of the Divine. In
oneness there is no one to enjoy except the One and nothing to be
enjoyed except the One. God, the individual and the
cosmos must be three different actualities, otherwise there could be no
relations between them. Either they are eternally
different or they are different in present time, although they may have
originally been one undifferentiated existence and
may eventually re-become one undifferentiated
Page 374
existence.
Unity was perhaps and will be perhaps, but it is not now and cannot be
so long as cosmos and the individual
endure. The cosmic being can only know and possess the transcendent
unity by ceasing to be cosmic; the individual can
only know and possess the cosmic or the transcendent unity by ceasing
from all individuality and individualisation. Or if unity
is the one eternal fact, then cosmos and individual are non-existent;
they are illusions imposed on itself by the Eternal. That
may well involve a contradiction or an unreconciled paradox; but I am
willing to admit a contradiction in the Eternal which I
am not compelled to think out, rather than a contradiction here of my
primary conceptions which I am compelled to think out
logically and to practical ends. I am on this supposition able either
to take the world as practically real and think and act in it
or to reject it as an unreality and cease to think and act; I am not
compelled to reconcile contradictions, not called on to be
conscious of and conscious in something beyond myself and world and yet
deal from that basis, as God does, with a world
of contradictions. The attempt to be as God while I am still an
individual or to be three things at a time seems to me to
involve a logical confusion and a practical impossibility.” Such might
well be the attitude of the normal reason, and it is clear,
lucid, positive in its distinctions; it involves no extraordinary
gymnastics of the reason trying to exceed itself and losing itself
in shadows and half-lights or any kind of mysticism, or at least there
is only one original and comparatively simple mysticism
free from all other difficult complexities. Therefore it is the
reasoning which is the most satisfactory to the simply rational
mind. Yet is there here a triple error, the error of making an
unbridgeable gulf between the Absolute and the relative, the
error of making too simple and rigid and extending too far the law of
contradictions and the error of conceiving in terms of
Time the genesis of things which have their origin and first habitat in
the Eternal.
We
mean by the Absolute something greater than ourselves, greater than the
cosmos which we live in, the supreme
reality of that transcendent Being which we call God, something without
which all that we see or are conscious of as
existing, could not have been, could not for a moment remain in
existence. Indian
Page 375
thought calls it Brahman, European thought the Absolute because it is a self-existent which is absolved of all bondage to
relativities. For all relatives can only exist by something which is the truth of them all and the source and continent of their
powers and properties and yet exceeds them all; it is something of which not only each relativity itself, but also any sum we
can make of all relatives that we know, can only be, — in all that we know of them,—a partial, inferior or practical
expression. We see by reason that such an Absolute must exist; we become by spiritual experience aware of its existence:
but even when we are most aware of it, we cannot describe it because our language and thought can deal only with the
relative. The Absolute is for us the Ineffable.
So far there need be no real difficulty nor confusion. But we readily
go on, led by the mind's habit of oppositions, of
thinking by distinctions and pairs of contraries, to speak of it as not
only not bound by the limitations of the relative, but as if
it were bound by its freedom from limitations, inexorably empty of all
power for relations and in its nature incapable of them,
something hostile in its whole being to relativity and its eternal
contrary. By this false step of our logic we get into an
impasse. Our own existence and the existence of the universe become not
only a mystery, but logically inconceivable. For
we get by that to an Absolute which is incapable of relativity and
exclusive of all relatives and yet the cause or at least the
support of relativity and the container, truth and substance of all
relatives. We have then only one logical-illogical way of
escape out of the impasse; we have to suppose the imposition of the
world as a self-effective illusion or an unreal temporal
reality, on the eternity of the formless relationless Absolute. This
imposition is made by our misleading individual
consciousness which falsely sees Brahman in the figure of the cosmos, —
as a man mistakes a rope for a serpent; but since
either our individual consciousness is itself a relative supported by
the Brahman and only existent by it, not a real reality, or
since in its reality it is itself the Brahman, it is the Brahman after
all which imposes on itself in us this delusion and mistakes
in some figure of its own consciousness an existent rope for a
non-existent snake, imposes on its own indeterminable pure
Page 376
Reality the semblance of a universe, or if it does
not impose it on its own consciousness, it is on a consciousness
derived
from it and dependent on it, a projection of itself into Maya. By this
explanation nothing is explained; the original
contradiction stands where it was, unreconciled, and we have only
stated it over again in other terms. It looks as if, by
attempting to arrive at an explanation by means of intellectual
reasoning, we have only befogged ourselves by the delusion
of our own uncompromising logic: we have imposed on the Absolute the
imposition which our too presumptuous reasoning
has practised on our own intelligence; we have transformed our mental
difficulty in understanding the world-manifestation
into an original impossibility for the Absolute to manifest itself in
world at all. But the Absolute, obviously, finds no difficulty
in world-manifestation and no difficulty either in a simultaneous
transcendence of world-manifestation; the difficulty exists
only for our mental limitations which prevent us from grasping the
supramental rationality of the co-existence of the infinite
and the finite or seizing the nodus of the unconditioned with the
conditioned. For our intellectual rationality these are
opposites; for the absolute reason they are interrelated and not
essentially conflicting expressions of one and the same
reality. The consciousness of infinite Existence is other than our
mind-consciousness and sense-consciousness, greater and
more capacious, for it includes them as minor terms of its workings,
and the logic of infinite Existence is other than our
intellectual logic. It reconciles in its great primal facts of being
what to our mental view, concerned as it is with words and
ideas derived from secondary facts, are irreconcilable contraries.
Our mistake is that in trying to define the indefinable we think we
have succeeded when we have described by an
all-exclusive negation this Absolute which we are yet compelled to
conceive of as a supreme positive and the cause of all
positives. It is not surprising that so many acute thinkers, with their
eye on the facts of being and not on verbal distinctions,
should be driven to infer that the Absolute is a fiction of the
intelligence, an idea born of words and verbal dialectics, a zero,
non-existent, and to conclude that an eternal Becoming is the only
truth of our
Page 377
existence. The ancient sages spoke indeed of Brahman
negatively, — they said of it, neti neti, it is not this, it is not
that, — but
they took care also to speak of it positively; they said of it too, it
is this, it is that, it is all: for they saw that to limit it either by
positive or negative definitions was to fall away from its truth.
Brahman, they said, is Matter, is Life, is Mind, is Supermind,
is cosmic Delight, is Sachchidananda; yet it cannot really be defined
by any of these things, not even by our largest
conception of Sachchidananda. In the world as we see it, for our mental
consciousness however high we carry it, we find
that to every positive there is a negative. But the negative is not a
zero, — indeed whatever appears to us a zero is packed
with force, teeming with power of existence, full of actual or
potential contents. Neither does the existence of the negative
make its corresponding positive non-existent or an unreality; it only
makes the positive an incomplete statement of the truth
of things and even, we may say, of the positive's own truth. For the
positive and the negative exist not only side by side, but
in relation to each other and by each other; they complete and would to
the all-view, which a limited mind cannot reach,
explain one another. Each by itself is not really known; we only begin
to know it in its deeper truth when we can read into it
the suggestions of its apparent opposite. It is through such a
profounder catholic intuition and not by exclusive logical
oppositions that our intelligence ought to approach the Absolute.
The positives of the Absolute are its various statements of itself to
our consciousness; its negatives bring in the rest of
its absolute positivity by which its limitation to these first
statements is denied. We have, to begin with, its large primary
relations such as the infinite and the finite, the conditioned and
unconditioned, the qualitied and unqualitied; in each pair the
negative conceals the whole power of the corresponding positive which
is contained in it and emerges from it: there is no
real opposition. We have, in a less subtle order of truths, the
transcendent and the cosmic, the universal and the individual;
here we have seen that each member of these pairs is contained in its
apparent opposite. The universal particularises itself
in the individual; the individual contains in himself all the
generalities of the universal. The
Page 378
universal consciousness finds all itself by the
variations of numberless individuals, not by suppressing variations;
the
individual consciousness fulfils all itself when it is universalised
into sympathy and identity with the cosmic, not by limiting
itself in the ego. So too the cosmic contains in all itself and in each
thing in it the complete immanence of the transcendent; it
maintains itself as the world-being by the consciousness of its own
transcendent reality, it finds itself in each individual being
by the realisation of the divine and transcendent in that being and in
all existences. The transcendent contains, manifests,
constitutes the cosmos and by manifesting it manifests or discovers, as
we may say in the old poetic sense of that word, its
own infinite harmonic varieties. But even in the lower orders of the
relative we find this play of negative and positive, and
through the divine reconciliation of its terms, not by excising them or
carrying their opposition to the bitter end, we have to
arrive at the Absolute. For there in the Absolute all this relativity,
all this varying rhythmic self-statement of the Absolute,
finds, not its complete denial, but its reason for existence and its
justification, not its conviction as a lie, but the source and
principle of its truth. Cosmos and individual go back to something in
the Absolute which is the true truth of individuality, the
true truth of cosmic being and not their denial and conviction of their
falsity. The Absolute is not a sceptical logician denying
the truth of all his own statements and self-expressions, but an
existence so utterly and so infinitely positive that no finite
positive can be formulated which can exhaust it or bind it down to its
definitions.
It is evident that if such is the truth of the Absolute, we cannot bind
it either by our law of contradictions. That law is
necessary to us in order that we may posit partial and practical
truths, think out things clearly, decisively and usefully,
classify, act, deal with them effectively for particular purposes in
our divisions of Space, distinctions of form and property,
moments of Time. It represents a formal and strongly dynamic truth of
existence in its practical workings which is strongest
in the most outward term of things, the material, but becomes less and
less rigidly binding as we go upward in the scale,
mount on the more subtle rungs of the ladder of being. It is especially
necessary for us in
Page 379
dealing
with material phenomena and forces; we have to suppose them to be one
thing at a time, to have one power at a
time and to be limited by their ostensible and practically effective
capacities and properties; otherwise we cannot deal with
them. But even there, as human thought is beginning to realise, the
distinctions made by the intellect and the classifications
and practical experiments of Science, while perfectly valid in their
own field and for their own purpose, do not represent the
whole or the real truth of things, whether of things in the whole or of
the thing by itself which we have classified and set
artificially apart, isolated for separate analysis. By that isolation
we are indeed able to deal with it very practically, very
effectively, and we think at first that the effectiveness of our action
proves the entire and sufficient truth of our isolating and
analysing knowledge. Afterwards we find that by getting beyond it we
can arrive at a greater truth and a greater effectivity.
The isolation is certainly necessary for first knowledge. A
diamond is a diamond and a pearl a pearl, each thing of its
own class, existing by its distinction from all others, each
distinguished by its own form and properties. But each has also
properties and elements which are common to both and others which are
common to material things in general. And in
reality each does not exist only by its distinctions, but much more
essentially by that which is common to both; and we get
back to the very basis and enduring truth of all material things only
when we find that all are the same thing, one energy, one
substance or, if you like, one universal motion which throws up, brings
out, combines, realises these different forms, these
various properties, these fixed and harmonised potentialities of its
own being. If we stop short at the knowledge of
distinctions, we can deal only with diamond and pearl as they are, fix
their values, uses, varieties, make the best ordinary use
and profit of them; but if we can get to the knowledge and control of
their elements and the common properties of the class
to which they belong, we may arrive at the power of making either a
diamond or pearl at our pleasure: go farther still and
master that which all material things are in their essence and we may
arrive even at the power of transmutation which
would give the greatest possible control
Page 380
of material Nature. Thus the knowledge of distinctions arrives at its greatest truth and effective use when we arrive at the
deeper knowledge of that which reconciles distinctions in the unity behind all variations. That deeper knowledge does not
deprive the other and more superficial of effectivity nor convict it of vanity. We cannot conclude from our ultimate material
discovery that there is no original substance or Matter, only energy manifesting substance or manifesting as
substance,—that diamond and pearl are non-existent, unreal, only true to the illusion of our senses of perception and action,
that the one substance, energy or motion is the sole eternal truth and that therefore the best or only rational use of our
science would be to dissolve diamond and pearl and everything else that we can dissolve into this one eternal and original
reality and get done with their forms and properties for ever. There is an essentiality of things, a commonalty of things, an
individuality of things; the commonalty and individuality are true and eternal powers of the essentiality: that transcends them
both, but the three together and not one by itself are the eternal terms of existence.
This truth which we can see, though with difficulty and under
considerable restrictions, even in the material world
where the subtler and higher powers of being have to be excluded from
our intellectual operations, becomes clearer and
more powerful when we ascend in the scale. We see the truth of our
classifications and distinctions, but also their limits. All
things, even while different, are yet one. For practical purposes
plant, animal, man are different existences; yet when we
look deeper we see that the plant is only an animal with an
insufficient evolution of self-consciousness and dynamic force;
the animal is man in the making; man himself is that animal and yet the
something more of self-consciousness and dynamic
power of consciousness that make him man; and yet again he is the
something more which is contained and repressed in his
being as the potentiality of the divine, — he is a god in the making.
In each of these, plant, animal, man, god, the Eternal is
there containing and repressing himself as it were in order to make a
certain statement of his being. Each is the whole
Eternal concealed. Man himself, who takes up all that went before him
and transmutes it into the
Page 381
term of manhood, is the individual human being and yet he is all mankind, the universal man acting in the individual as a
human personality. He is all and yet he is himself and unique. He is what he is, but he is also the past of all that he was and
the potentiality of all that he is not. We cannot understand him if we look only at his present individuality, but we cannot
understand him either if we look only at his commonalty, his general term of manhood, or go back by exclusion from both to
an essentiality of his being in which his distinguishing manhood and his particularising individuality seem to disappear. Each
thing is the Absolute, all are that One, but in these three terms always the Absolute makes its statement of its developed
self-existence. We are not, because of the essential unity, compelled to say that all God's various action and workings are
vain, worthless, unreal, phenomenal, illusory, and that the best and only rational or super-rational use we can make of our
knowledge is to get away from them, dissolve our cosmic and individual existence into the essential being and get rid of all
becoming as a futility for ever.
In our practical dealings with life we have to arrive at the same
truth. For certain practical ends we have to say that a
thing is good or bad, beautiful or ugly, just or unjust and act upon
that statement; but if we limit ourselves by it, we do not get
at real knowledge. The law of contradictions here is only valid in so
far as two different and opposite statements cannot be
true of the same thing at the same time, in the same field, in the same
respect, from the same point of view and for the
same practical purpose. A great war, destruction or violent
all-upheaving revolution, for example, may present itself to us as
an evil, a virulent and catastrophic disorder, and it is so in certain
respects, results, ways of looking at it; but from others, it
may be a great good, since it rapidly clears the field for a new good
or a more satisfying order. No man is simply good or
simply bad; every man is a mixture of contraries: even we find these
contraries often inextricably mixed up in a single
feeling, a single action. All kinds of conflicting qualities, powers,
values meet together and run into each other to make up
our action, life, nature. We can only understand entirely if we get to
some sense of the Absolute and yet look at its workings
in all the relativities which are being
Page 382
manifested, — look not only at each by itself, but
each in relation to all and to that which exceeds and reconciles them
all. In
fact we can only know by getting to the divine view and purpose in
things and not merely looking at our own, though our
own limited human view and momentary purpose have their validity in the
cadre of the All. For behind all relativities there is
this Absolute which gives them their being and their justification. No
particular act or arrangement in the world is by itself
absolute justice; but there is behind all acts and arrangements
something absolute which we call justice, which expresses
itself through their relativities and which we would realise if our
view and knowledge were comprehensive instead of being
as they are partial, superficial, limited to a few ostensible facts and
appearances. So too there is an absolute good and an
absolute beauty: but we can only get a glimpse of it if we embrace all
things impartially and get beyond their appearances to
some sense of that which, between them, all and each are by their
complex terms trying to state and work out; not an
indeterminate, — for the indeterminate, being only the original stuff
or perhaps the packed condition of determinations, would
explain by itself nothing at all, — but the Absolute. We can indeed
follow the opposite method of breaking up all things and
refusing to look at them as a whole and in relation to that which
justifies them and so create an intellectual conception of
absolute evil, absolute injustice, the absolute hideousness,
painfulness, triviality, vulgarity or vanity of all things; but that is
to
pursue to its extreme the method of the Ignorance whose view is based
upon division. We cannot rightly so deal with the
divine workings. Because the Absolute expresses itself through
relativities the secret of which we find it difficult to fathom,
because to our limited view everything appears to be a purposeless play
of oppositions and negatives or a mass of
contradictions, we cannot conclude that our first limited view is right
or that all is a vain delusion of the mind and has no
reality. Nor can we solve all by an original unreconciled contradiction
which is to explain all the rest. The human reason is
wrong in attaching a separate and definitive value to each
contradiction by itself or getting rid of one by altogether denying
the other; but it is right in refusing to accept as final
Page 383
and as the last word the coupling of contradictions which have in no way been reconciled together or else found their source
and significance in something beyond their opposition.
We cannot, either, effect a reconciliation or explanation of the
original contradictions of existence by taking refuge in
our concept of Time. Time, as we know or conceive it, is only our means
of realising things in succession, it is a condition
and cause of conditions, varies on different planes of existence,
varies even for beings on one and the same plane: that is to
say, it is not an Absolute and cannot explain the primary relations of
the Absolute. They work themselves out in detail by
Time and seem to our mental and vital being to be determined by it; but
that seeming does not carry us back to their sources
and principles. We make the distinction of conditioned and
unconditioned and we imagine that the unconditioned became
conditioned, the Infinite became finite at some date in Time, and may
cease to be finite at some other date in Time, because
it so appears to us in details, particulars or with regard to this or
that system of things. But if we look at existence as a
whole, we see that infinite and finite co-exist and exist in and by
each other. Even if our universe were to disappear and
reappear rhythmically in Time, as was the old belief, that too would be
only a large detail and would not show that at a
particular time all condition ceases in the whole range of infinite
existence and all Being becomes the unconditioned, at
another it again takes on the reality or the appearance of conditions.
The first source and the primary relations lie beyond
our mental divisions of Time, in the divine timelessness or else in the
indivisible or eternal Time of which our divisions and
successions are only figures in a mental experience.
There we see that all meets and all principles, all persistent
realities of existence, — for the finite as a principle of being
is as persistent as the infinite, — stand in a primary relation to each
other in a free, not an exclusive unity of the Absolute, and
that the way they present themselves to us in a material or a mental
world is only a working out of them in secondary,
tertiary or yet lower relativities. The Absolute has not become the
contrary of itself and assumed at a certain date real or
unreal relativities
Page 384
of which it was originally incapable, nor has the
One become by a miracle the Many, nor the unconditioned deviated into
the
conditioned, nor the unqualitied sprouted out into qualities. These
oppositions are only the conveniences of our mental
consciousness, our divisions of the indivisible. The things they
represent are not fictions, they are realities, but they are not
rightly known if they are set in irreconcilable opposition to or
separation from each other; for there is no such irreconcilable
opposition or separation of them in the all-view of the Absolute. This
is the weakness not only of our scientific divisions and
metaphysical distinctions, but of our exclusive spiritual realisations
which are only exclusive because to arrive at them we
have to start from our limiting and dividing mental consciousness. We
have to make the metaphysical distinctions in order to
help our intelligence towards a truth which exceeds it, because it is
only so that it can escape from the confusions of our
first undistinguishing mental view of things; but if we bind ourselves
by them to the end, we make chains of what should only
have been first helps. We have to make use too of distinct spiritual
realisations which may at first seem contrary to each
other, because as mental beings it is difficult or impossible for us to
seize at once largely and completely what is beyond our
mentality; but we err if we intellectualise them into sole truths, — as
when we assert that the Impersonal must be the one
ultimate realisation and the rest creation of Maya or declare the
Saguna, the Divine in its qualities, to be that and thrust
away the impersonality from our spiritual experience. We have to see
that both these realisations of the great spiritual
seekers are equally valid in themselves, equally invalid against each
other; they are one and the same Reality experienced
on two sides which are both necessary for the full knowledge and
experience of each other and of that which they both are.
So is it with the One and the Many, the finite and the infinite, the
transcendent and the cosmic, the individual and the
universal; each is the other as well as itself and neither can be
entirely known without the other and without exceeding their
appearance of contrary oppositions.
We see then that there are three terms of the one existence,
transcendent, universal and individual, and that each of
these
Page 385
always contains secretly or overtly the two others.
The Transcendent possesses itself always and controls the other two as
the basis of its own temporal possibilities; that is the Divine, the
eternal all-possessing God-consciousness, omnipotent,
omniscient, omnipresent, which informs, embraces, governs all
existences. The human being is here on earth the highest
power of the third term, the individual, for he alone can work out at
its critical turning-point that movement of
self-manifestation which appears to us as the involution and evolution
of the divine consciousness between the two terms of
the Ignorance and the Knowledge. The power of the individual to possess
in his consciousness by self-knowledge his unity
with the Transcendent and the universal, with the One Being and all
beings and to live in that knowledge and transform his
life by it, is that which makes the working out of the divine
self-manifestation through the individual possible; and the arrival
of the individual, — not in one but in all, — at the divine life is the
sole conceivable object of the movement. The existence of
the individual is not an error in some self of the Absolute which that
self afterwards discovers; for it is impossible that the
absolute self-awareness or anything that is one with it should be
ignorant of its own truth and its own capacities and
betrayed by that ignorance either into a false idea of itself which it
has to correct or an impossible venture which it has to
renounce. Neither is the individual existence a subordinate
circumstance in a divine play or Lila, a play which consists in a
continual revolution through unending cycles of pleasure and suffering
without any higher hope in the Lila itself or any issue
from it except the occasional escape of a few from time to time out of
their bondage to this ignorance. We might be
compelled to hold that ruthless and disastrous view of God's workings
if man had no power of self-transcendence or no
power of transforming by self-knowledge the conditions of the play
nearer and nearer to the truth of the divine Delight. In
that power lies the justification of individual existence; the
individual and the universal unfolding in themselves the divine
light, power, joy of transcendent Sachchidananda always manifest above
them, always secret behind their surface appearances, this is the
secret intention, the ultimate significance of the divine play, the
Lila.
Page 386
But it is in themselves, in their transformation but also
their persistence and perfect relations, not in their self-annihilation that
that must be unfolded. Otherwise there would be no reason for their ever having
existed; the possibility of the Divine's unfolding in the individual is the
secret of the enigma, his presence there and this intention of self-unfolding
the key to the world of Knowledge-Ignorance.
Page 387
HOME
|