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Chapter
VII
The Knowledge and the Ignorance
Let the Knower distinguish the Knowledge and the Ignorance.
Rig Veda.1
Two are there, hidden in the secrecy of the Infinite, the Knowledge
and the Ignorance; but perishable is the Ignorance,
immortal is the
Knowledge; another than they is He who rules over both the
Knowledge and the Ignorance.
Swetaswatara Upanishad.2
Two Unborn, the Knower and one who knows not, the Lord and
one who has not mastery: one Unborn and in her are
the object
of enjoyment and the enjoyer.
Swetaswatara Upanishad.3
Two are joined together, powers of Truth, powers of Maya,—they
have built the Child and given him birth and they
nourish his growth.
Rig Veda.4
IN our scrutiny of the seven principles of existence it was found that they are one in their essential and fundamental reality:
for if even the matter of the most material universe is nothing but a status of being of Spirit made an object of sense,
envisaged by the Spirit's own consciousness as the stuff of its forms, much more must the life-force that constitutes itself
into form of Matter, and the mind-consciousness that throws itself out as Life, and the Supermind that develops Mind as one
of its powers, be nothing but Spirit itself modified in apparent substance and in dynamism of action, not modified in real
essence. All are powers of one Power of being and not other than that All-Existence, All-Consciousness, All-Will,
All-Delight which is the true truth behind every appearance. And they are not only one in their reality, but also inseparable in
the sevenfold variety of their action. They are the seven colours of the light
of the divine consciousness, the seven rays of the Infinite, and by them the
Spirit has filled in on the canvas of his self-existence conceptually extended,
woven of the objective warp
1IV. 2. 11.
2V. 1. 3I. 9.
4X. 5. 3.
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of Space and the subjective woof of Time, the myriad
wonders of his self-creation great, simple, symmetrical in its primal
laws and vast framings, infinitely curious and intricate in its variety
of forms and actions and the complexities of relation and
mutual effect of all upon each and each upon all. These are the seven
Words of the ancient sages; by them have been
created and in the light of their meaning are worked out and have to be
interpreted the developed and developing harmonies
of the world we know and the worlds behind of which we have only an
indirect knowledge. The Light, the Sound is one;
their action is sevenfold.
But here there is a world based upon an original Inconscience; here
consciousness has formulated itself in the figure of
an ignorance labouring towards knowledge. We have seen that there is no
essential reason either in the nature of Being
itself or in the original character and fundamental relations of its
seven principles for this intrusion of Ignorance, of discord
into the harmony, of darkness into the light, of division and
limitation into the self-conscious infinity of the divine creation. For
we can conceive, and since we can, the Divine can still more conceive,
— and since there is the conception, there must
somewhere be the execution, the creation actual or intended, — a
universal harmony into which these contrary elements do
not enter. The Vedic seers were conscious of such a divine
self-manifestation and looked on it as the greater world beyond
this lesser, a freer and wider plane of consciousness and being, the
truth-creation of the Creator which they described as the
seat or own home of the Truth, as the vast Truth, or the Truth, the
Right, the Vast,1or again as a Truth hidden by a Truth where the Sun of Knowledge finishes his journey and unyokes his horses, where the
thousand rays of consciousness stand together so that there is That One, the supreme form of the Divine Being. But this
world in which we live seemed to them to be a mingled weft in which truth is disfigured by an abundant falsehood,
anrtasya
bhureh,2 here the one light has to be born by its own vast force out of an initial darkness or
1sadanam \,rtasya, sve dame \,rtasya, \,rtasya b\,rhate, \,rtam satyam b\,rhat.
2 Rig Veda, VII. 60. 5.
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sea of Inconscience;1 immortality and godhead have to be built up out of an existence which is under the yoke of death, ignorance, weakness,
suffering and limitation. This self-building they figured as the creation by man in himself of that other world or high ordered
harmony of infinite being which already exists perfect and eternal in the Divine Infinite. The lower is for us the first
condition of the higher; the darkness is the dense body of the light, the Inconscient guards in itself all the concealed
Superconscient, the powers of the division and falsehood hold from us but also for us and to be conquered from them the
riches and substance of the unity and the truth in their cave of subconscience. This was in their view, expressed in the
highly figured enigmatic language of the early mystics, the sense and justification of man's actual existence and his
conscious or unconscious Godward effort, his conception so paradoxical at first sight in a world which seems its very
opposite, his aspiration so impossible to a superficial view in a creature so ephemeral, weak, ignorant, limited, towards a
plenitude of immortality, knowledge, power, bliss, a divine and imperishable existence.
For, as a matter of fact, while the very keyword of the ideal creation
is a plenary self-consciousness and
self-possession in the infinite Soul and a perfect oneness, the keyword
of the creation of which we have present experience
is the very opposite; it is an original inconscience developing in life
into a limited and divided self-consciousness, an original
inert subjection to the drive of a blind self-existent Force developing
in life into a struggle of the self-conscious being to
possess himself and all things and to establish in the kingdom of this
unseeing mechanic Force the reign of an enlightened
Will and Knowledge. And because the blind mechanic Force, — we know now
really that it is no such thing, — confronts us
everywhere, initial, omnipresent, the fundamental law, the great total
energy, and because the only enlightened will we
know, our own, appears as a subsequent phenomenon, a result, a partial,
subordinate, circumscribed, sporadic energy, the
struggle seems to us at the best a very precarious and doubtful
venture. The Inconscient to our perceptions is the beginning
and the end; the self-conscious soul
1 apraketam salilam.
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seems hardly more than a temporary accident, a fragile blossom upon this great, dark and monstrous Ashwattha-tree of the
universe. Or if we suppose the soul to be eternal, it appears at least as a foreigner, an alien and not over well-treated guest
in the reign of this vast Inconscience. If not an accident in the Inconscient Darkness, it is perhaps a mistake, a stumble
downwards of the superconscient Light.
If this view of things had a complete validity, then only the absolute
idealist, sent perhaps out of some higher existence,
unable to forget his mission, stung into indomitable enthusiasm by a
divine oestrus or sustained in a calm and infinite fortitude
by the light and force and voice of the unseen Godhead, could persist
under such circumstances in holding up before himself,
much more before an incredulous or doubting world, the hope of a full
success for the human endeavour. Actually, for the
most part, men either reject it from the beginning or turn away from it
eventually, after some early enthusiasm, as a proved
impossibility. The consistent materialist seeks a partial and
short-lived power, knowledge, happiness, so much only as the
dominant inconscient order of Nature will allow to the struggling
self-consciousness of man if he accepts his limitations,
obeys her laws and makes as good a use of them by his enlightened will
as their inexorable mechanism will tolerate. The
religionist seeks his reign of enlightened will, love or divine being,
his kingdom of God, in that other world where they are
unalloyed and eternal. The philosophic mystic rejects all as a mental
illusion and aspires to self-extinction in some Nirvana or
else an immersion in the featureless Absolute; if the soul or mind of
the illusion-driven individual has dreamed of a divine
realisation in this ephemeral world of the Ignorance, it must in the
end recognise its mistake and renounce its vain
endeavour. But still, since there are these two sides of existence, the
ignorance of Nature and the light of the Spirit, and
since there is behind them the One Reality, the reconciliation or at
any rate the bridging of the gulf forecast in the mystic
parables of the Veda ought to be possible. It is a keen sense of this
possibility which has taken different shapes and
persisted through the centuries, — the perfectibility of man, the
perfectibility of society, the Alwar's vision of the descent of
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Vishnu and the Gods upon earth, the reign of the saints, sadhunam
rajyam,
the city of God, the millennium, the new heaven
and earth of the Apocalypse. But these intuitions have lacked a basis
of assured knowledge and the mind of man has
remained swinging between a bright future hope and a grey present
certitude. But the grey certitude is not so certain as it
looks and a divine life evolving or preparing in earth-Nature need not
be a chimera. All acceptations of our defeat or our
limitation start from the implied or explicit recognition, first, of an
essential dualism and, then, of an irreconcilable opposition
between the dual principles, between the Conscient and the Inconscient,
between Heaven and Earth, between God and the
World, between the limitless One and the limited Many, between the
Knowledge and the Ignorance. We have arrived by the
train of our reasoning at the conclusion that this need be no more than
an error of the sense-mind and the logical intellect
founded upon a partial experience. We have seen that there can be and
is a perfectly rational basis for the hope of our
victory; for the lower term of being in which we now live contains in
itself the principle and intention of that which exceeds
it and it is by its own self-exceeding and transformation into that
that it can find and develop into a complete form its own
real essence.
But
there is one point in the reasoning which till now we have left
somewhat obscure, and it is precisely in this matter of
the co-existence of the Knowledge and the Ignorance. Admittedly, we
start here from conditions which are the opposite of
the ideal divine Truth and all the circumstances of that opposition are
founded upon the being's ignorance of himself and of
the Self of all, outcome of an original cosmic Ignorance whose result
is self-limitation and the founding of life on division in
being, division in consciousness, division in will and force, division
in the light, division and limitation in knowledge, power,
love with, as consequence, the positive opposite phenomena of egoism,
obscuration, incapacity, misuse of knowledge and
will, disharmony, weakness and suffering. We have found that this
Ignorance, although shared by Matter and Life, has its
roots in the nature of Mind whose very office it is to measure off,
limit, particularise and thereby divide. But Mind also is a universal
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principle, is One, is Brahman, and therefore it has a tendency to a unifying and universalising knowledge as well as to that
which marks off and particularises. The particularising faculty of Mind only becomes Ignorance when it separates itself
from the higher principles of which it is a power and acts not only with its characteristic tendency, but also with a tendency
to exclude the rest of knowledge, to particularise first and foremost and always and to leave unity as a vague concept to be
approached only afterwards, when particularisation is complete, and through the sum of particulars. This exclusiveness is
the very soul of Ignorance.
We must then seize hold on this strange power of Consciousness
which is the root of our ills, examine the principle of
its operation and detect not only its essential nature and origin, but
its power and process of operation and its last end and
means of removal. How is it that the Ignorance exists? How has any
principle or power in the infinite self-awareness been
able to put self-knowledge behind it and exclude all but its own
characteristic limited action? Certain thinkers1
have declared that the problem is insoluble, it is an original
mystery and is intrinsically incapable of explanation; only the fact
and the process can be stated: or else the question of the nature of
the supreme original Existence or Non-existence is put
aside as either unanswerable or unnecessary to answer. One can say that
Maya with its fundamental principle of ignorance
or illusion simply is, and this power of Brahman has the double force
of Knowledge and Ignorance inherently potential in it;
all we have to do is to recognise the fact and find a means of escape
out of the Ignorance, — through the Knowledge, but
into what is beyond both Knowledge and Ignorance, — by renunciation of
life, by recognition of the universal impermanency
of things and the vanity of cosmic existence.
But our mind cannot remain satisfied, — the mind of
1 Buddha refused to consider the metaphysical problem:
the process by which our unreal individuality is constructed and a world of
suffering maintained in existenceand the method of escape from it is all that is
of importance. Karma is a fact; the construction of objects, of an individuality
not truly existent is the cause of suffering: to get rid of Karma, individuality
and suffering must be our objective ; by that elimination we shall pass into
whatever may be free from these things, permanent, real; the way of liberation
alone matters.
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Buddhism itself did not remain satisfied, — with this evasion at the very root of the whole matter. In the first place, these
philosophies, while thus putting aside the root question, do actually make far-reaching assertions that assume, not only a
certain operation and symptoms, but a certain fundamental nature of the Ignorance from which their prescription of
remedies proceeds; and it is obvious that without such a radical diagnosis no prescription of remedies can be anything but an
empiric dealing. But if we are to evade the root-question, we have no means of judging whether the assertions advanced are
correct or the remedies prescribed the right ones, or whether there are not others which without being so violent,
destructively radical or of the nature of a surgical mutilation or extinction of the patient may yet bring a more integral and
natural cure. Secondly, it is always the business of man the thinker to know. He may not be able by mental means to know
the essentiality of the Ignorance or of anything in the universe in the sense of defining it, because the mind can only know
things in that sense by their signs, characters, forms, properties, functionings, relations to other things, not in their occult
self-being and essence. But we can pursue farther and farther, clarify more and more accurately our observation of the
phenomenal character and operation of the Ignorance until we get the right revealing word, the right indicating sense of the
thing and so come to know it, not by intellect but by vision and experience of the truth, by realising the truth in our own
being. The whole process of man's highest intellectual knowledge is through this mental manipulation and discrimination to
the point where the veil is broken and he can see; at the end spiritual knowledge comes in to help us to become what we
see, to enter into the Light in which there is no Ignorance.
It is true that the first origin of the Ignorance is beyond us as
mental beings because our intelligence lives and moves
within the Ignorance itself and does not reach up to the point or
ascend on to the plane where that separation took place of
which the individual mind is the result. But this is true of the first
origin and fundamental truth of all things, and on this
principle we should have to rest satisfied with a general agnosticism.
Man has to work in the Ignorance, to learn under its
conditions, to know it
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up to its farthest point so that he may arrive at its borders where it meets the Truth, touch its final lid of luminous
obscuration and develop the faculties which enable him to overstep that powerful but really unsubstantial barrier.
We have then to scrutinise more closely than we have yet done the
character and operation of this principle or this
power of Ignorance and arrive at a clearer conception of its nature and
origin. And first we must fix firmly in our minds
what we mean by the word itself. The distinction between the Knowledge
and the Ignorance begins with the hymns of the
Rig Veda. Here knowledge appears to signify a consciousness of the
Truth, the Right, satyam rtam, and of all that is of the
order of the Truth and Right; ignorance is an unconsciousness, acitti, of the Truth and Right, an opposition to its workings
and a creation of false or adverse workings. Ignorance is the absence of the divine eye of perception which gives us the
sight of the supramental Truth; it is the non-perceiving principle in our consciousness as opposed to the truth-perceiving
conscious vision and knowledge.1
In its actual operation this non-perceiving is not an entire inconscience, the inconscient sea from which this world has
arisen, 2
but either a limited or a false knowledge, a knowledge based on the division of undivided being, founded upon the
fragmentary, the little, opposed to the opulent, vast and luminous completeness of things; it is a cognition which by the
opportunity of its limitations is turned into falsehood and supported in that aspect by the Sons of Darkness and Division,
enemies of the divine endeavour in man, the assailants, robbers, coverers of his light of knowledge. It was therefore
regarded as an undivine Maya, 3
that which creates false mental forms and appearances,—and hence the later significance of this word which seems to
have meant originally a formative power of knowledge, the true magic of the supreme Mage, the divine Magician, but was
also used for the adverse formative power of a lower knowledge, the deceit, illusion and deluding magic of the Rakshasa.
The divine Maya is the knowledge of the Truth of things, its essence, law, operation, which the gods possess and on which
they found their own eternal action and creation 4 and their building
of their powers
1 acitti and citti
2 apraketam salilam. 3 adevi
maya. 4 devanam adabdha vratani.
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in the human being. This idea of the Vedic mystics can in a more metaphysical thought and language be translated into the
conception that the Ignorance is in its origin a dividing mental knowledge which does not grasp the unity, essence, self-law
of things in their one origin and in their universality, but works rather upon divided particulars, separate phenomena, partial
relations, as if they were the truth we had to seize or as if they could really be understood at all without going back behind
the division to the unity, behind the dispersion to the universality. The Knowledge is that which tends towards unification
and, attaining to the supramental faculty, seizes the oneness, the essence, the self-law of existence and views and deals with
the multiplicity of things out of that light and plenitude, in some sort as does the Divine Himself from the highest height
whence He embraces the world. It must be noted, however, that the Ignorance in this conception of it is still a kind of
knowledge, but, because it is limited, it is open at any point to the intrusion of falsehood and error; it turns into a wrong
conception of things which stands in opposition to the true Knowledge.
In the Vedantic thought of the Upanishad we find the original Vedic
terms replaced by the familiar antinomy of Vidya
and Avidya, and with the change of terms there has come a certain
development of significance: for since the nature of the
Knowledge is to find the Truth and the fundamental Truth is the One, —
the Veda speaks repeatedly of it as “That Truth”
and “That One”, — Vidya, Knowledge in its highest spiritual sense, came
to mean purely and trenchantly the knowledge of
the One, Avidya, Ignorance, purely and trenchantly the knowledge of the
divided Many divorced, as in our world it is
divorced, from the unifying consciousness of the One Reality. The
complex associations, the rich contents, the luminous
penumbra of varied and corollary ideas and significant figures which
belonged to the conception of the Vedic words, were
largely lost in a language more precise and metaphysical, less
psychological and flexible. Still the later exaggerated idea of
absolute separation from the true truth of Self and Spirit, of an
original illusion, of a consciousness that can be equated with
dream or with hallucination, did not at first enter into the Vedantic
conception of the Ignorance. If in the
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Upanishads it is declared that the man who lives and moves within the Ignorance, wanders about stumbling like a blind man
led by the blind and returns ever to the net of Death which is spread wide for him, it is also affirmed elsewhere in the
Upanishads that he who follows after the Knowledge only, enters as if into a blinder darkness than he who follows after the
Ignorance and that the man who knows Brahman as both the Ignorance and the Knowledge, as both the One and the Many,
as both the Becoming and the Non-Becoming, crosses by the Ignorance, by the experience of the Multiplicity, beyond death
and by the Knowledge takes possession of Immortality. For the Self-existent has really become these many existences; the
Upanishad can say to the Divine Being, in all solemnity and with no thought to mislead, “Thou art this old man walking with
his staff, yonder boy and girl, this blue-winged bird, that red of eye”, not “Thou seemest to be these things” to the
self-deluding mind of the Ignorance. The status of becoming is inferior to the status of Being, but still it is the Being that
becomes all that is in the universe.
But the development of the separative distinction could not stop here;
it had to go to its logical extreme. Since the
knowledge of the One is Knowledge and the knowledge of the Many is
Ignorance, there can be, in a rigidly analytic and
dialectical view, nothing but pure opposition between the things
denoted by the two terms; there is no essential unity
between them, no reconciliation possible. Therefore Vidya alone is
Knowledge, Avidya is pure Ignorance; and, if pure
Ignorance takes a positive form, it is because it is not merely a
not-knowing of Truth, but a creation of illusions and
delusions, of seemingly real unrealities, of temporarily valid
falsehoods. Obviously then, the object matter of Avidya can
have no true and abiding existence; the Many are an illusion, the world
has no real being. Undoubtedly it has a sort of
existence while it lasts, as a dream has or the long-continued
hallucination of a delirious or a demented brain, but no more.
The One has not become and can never become Many; the Self has not and
cannot become all these existences; Brahman
has not manifested and cannot manifest a real world in itself: it is
only the Mind or some principle of which Mind is a result
that thrusts names and forms upon the featureless unity which is alone
real
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and, being essentially featureless, cannot manifest
real feature and variation; or else, if it manifests these things, then
that is
a temporal and temporary reality which vanishes and is convicted of
unreality by the illumination of true knowledge.
Our view of the ultimate Reality and of the true nature of Maya has
compelled us to depart from these later fine
excesses of the dialectical intellect and return to the original
Vedantic conception. While giving every tribute to the
magnificent fearlessness of these extreme conclusions, to the
uncompromising logical force and acuity of these speculations,
inexpugnable so long as the premisses are granted, admitting the truth
of two of the main contentions, the sole Reality of the
Brahman and the fact that our normal conceptions about ourselves and
world-existence are stamped with ignorance, are
imperfect, are misleading, we are obliged to withdraw from the hold so
powerfully laid by this conception of Maya on the
intelligence. But the obsession of this long-established view of things
cannot be removed altogether so long as we do not
fathom the true nature of the Ignorance and the true and total nature
of the Knowledge. For if these two are independent,
equal and original powers of the Consciousness, then the possibility of
a cosmic Illusion pursues us. If Ignorance is the very
character of cosmic existence, then our experience of the universe, if
not the universe itself, becomes illusory. Or, if
Ignorance is not the very grain of our natural being, but still an
original and eternal power of Consciousness, then, while
there can be a truth of cosmos, it may be impossible for a being in the
universe, while he is in it, to know its truth: he can
only arrive at real knowledge by passing beyond mind and thought,
beyond this world-formation, and viewing all things from
above in some supracosmic or super-cosmic consciousness like those who
have become of one nature with the Eternal and
dwell in Him, unborn in the creation and unafflicted by the cataclysmic
destruction of the worlds below them.1
But the solution of this problem cannot be satisfactorily pursued and reached on the basis of an examination of words and
ideas or a dialectical discussion; it must be the result of a total observation and penetration of the relevant facts of
consciousness, — both
1 Gita.
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those of the surface and those below or above our surface level or behind our frontal surface, — and a successful fathoming
of their significance.
For the dialectical intellect is not a sufficient judge of essential or
spiritual truths; moreover, very often, by its propensity
to deal with words and abstract ideas as if they were binding
realities, it wears them as chains and does not look freely
beyond them to the essential and total facts of our existence.
Intellectual statement is an account to our intelligence and a
justification by reasoning of a seeing of things which pre-exists in
our turn of mind or temperament or in some tendency of
our nature and secretly predetermines the very reasoning that claims to
lead to it. That reasoning itself can be conclusive
only if the perception of things on which it rests is both a true and a
whole seeing. Here what we have to see truly and
integrally is the nature and validity of our consciousness, the origin
and scope of our mentality; for then alone can we know
the truth of our being and nature and of world-being and world-nature.
Our principle in such an inquiry must be to see and
know; the dialectical intellect is to be used only so far as it helps
to clarify our arrangement and justify our expression of the
vision and the knowledge, but it cannot be allowed to govern our
conceptions and exclude truth that does not fall within the
rigid frame of its logic. Illusion, knowledge and ignorance are terms
or results of our consciousness, and it is only by looking
deeply into our consciousness that we can discover and determine the
character and relations of the Knowledge and the
Ignorance or of the Illusion, if it exists, and the Reality. Being is
no doubt the fundamental object of inquiry, things in
themselves and things in their nature; but it is only through
consciousness that we can approach Being. Or if it be maintained
that we can only reach Being, enter into the Real, because it is
superconscient, through extinction or transcendence of
consciousness or through its self-transcendence and
self-transformation, it is still through consciousness that we must
arrive
at the knowledge of this necessity and the process or power of
execution of this extinction or this self-transcendence, this
transformation: then, through consciousness, to know of the
Superconscient Truth becomes the supreme need
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and to discover the power and process of consciousness by which it can pass into superconscience, the supreme discovery.
But in ourselves consciousness seems to be identical with Mind; in any
case Mind is so dominant a factor of our being
that to examine its fundamental movements is the first necessity. In
fact, however, Mind is not the whole of us; there is also
in us a life and a body, a subconscience and an inconscience; there is
a spiritual entity whose origin and secret truth carry us
into an occult inward consciousness and a superconscience. If Mind were
all or if the nature of the original Consciousness
in things were of the nature of Mind, Illusion or Ignorance might
conceivably be regarded as the source of our natural
existence: for limitation of knowledge and obscuration of knowledge by
Mind-nature create error and illusion, illusions
created by Mind-action are among the first facts of our consciousness.
It might therefore be conceivably held that Mind is
the matrix of an Ignorance which makes us create or represent to
ourselves a false world, a world that is nothing more than
a subjective construction of the consciousness. Or else Mind might be
the matrix in which some original Illusion or
Ignorance, Maya or Avidya, cast the seed of a false impermanent
universe; Mind would still be the mother, — a “barren
mother” since the child would be unreal, — and Maya or Avidya could be
looked at as a sort of grandmother of the universe;
for Mind itself would be a production or reproduction of Maya. But it
is difficult to discern the physiognomy of this obscure
and enigmatic ancestress; for we have then to impose a cosmic
imagination or an illusion-consciousness on the eternal
Reality; Brahman the Reality must itself either be or have or support a
constructing Mind or some constructive
consciousness greater than Mind but of an analogous nature, must be by
its activity or its sanction the creator and even
perhaps in some sort by participation a victim, like Mind, of its own
illusion and error. It would not be less perplexing if Mind
were simply a medium or mirror in which there falls the reflection of
an original illusion or a false image or shadow of the
Reality. For the origin of this medium of reflection would be
inexplicable and the origin also of the false image cast upon it
would be inexplicable. An indeterminable Brahman
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could only be reflected as something indeterminable,
not as a manifold universe. Or if it be the inequality of the
reflecting
medium, its nature as of rippling and restless water that creates
broken images of the Reality, still it would be broken and
distorted reflections of the Truth that would appear there, not a
pullulation of false names and images of things that had no
source or basis of existence in the Reality. There must be some
manifold truth of the one Reality which is reflected,
however falsely or imperfectly, in the manifold images of the mind's
universe. It could then very well be that the world might
be a reality and only the mind's construction of it or picture of it
erroneous or imperfect. But this would imply that there is a
Knowledge, other than our mental thought and perception which is only
an attempt at knowing, a true cognition which is
aware of the Reality and aware also in it of the truth of a real
universe.
For if we found that the highest Reality and an ignorant Mind alone
exist, we might have no choice but to admit the
Ignorance as an original power of the Brahman and to accept as the
source of all things Avidya or Maya. Maya would be
an eternal power of the self-aware Brahman to delude itself or rather
to delude something that seems to be itself, something
created by Maya; Mind would be the ignorant consciousness of a soul
that exists only as a part of Maya. Maya would be
the Brahman's power to foist name and form upon itself, Mind its power
to receive them and take them for realities. Or
Maya would be Brahman's power to create illusions knowing them to be
illusions, Mind its power to receive illusions
forgetting that they are illusions. But if Brahman is essentially and
always one in self-awareness, this trick would not be
possible. If Brahman can divide itself in that fashion, at once knowing
and not knowing or one part knowing and the other
not knowing, or even if it can put something of itself into Maya, then
Brahman must be capable of a double, — or a
manifold, — action of consciousness, one a consciousness of Reality,
the other a consciousness of illusion, or one an ignorant
consciousness and the other a superconscience. This duality or
manifoldness seems at first sight logically impossible, yet it
must be on this hypothesis the crucial fact of existence, a spiritual
mystery, a suprarational paradox. But once
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we admit the origin of things as a suprarational mystery, we can equally or preferably accept this other crucial fact of the
One becoming or being always many and the Many being or becoming the One; this too is at first view dialectically
impossible, a suprarational paradox, yet it presents itself to us as an eternal fact and law of existence. But if that is
accepted, there is then no longer any need for the intervention of an illusive Maya. Or, equally, we can accept, as we have
accepted, the conception of an Infinite and Eternal which is capable, by the infinite power of its consciousness, of
manifesting the fathomless and illimitable Truth of its being in many aspects and processes, in innumerable expressive forms
and movements; these aspects, processes, forms, movements could be regarded as real expressions, real consequences of
its infinite Reality; even the Inconscience and Ignorance could then be accepted among them as reverse aspects, as powers
of an involved consciousness and a self-limited knowledge brought forward because necessary to a certain movement in
Time, a movement of involution and evolution of the Reality. If suprarational in its basis, this total conception is not
altogether a paradox; it only demands a change, an enlargement in our conceptions of the Infinite.
But the real world cannot be known and none of these possibilities can
be put to the test if we consider Mind alone or
only Mind's power for ignorance. Mind has a power also for truth; it
opens its thought-chamber to Vidya as well as to
Avidya, and if its starting-point is Ignorance, if its passage is
through crooked ways of error, still its goal is always
Knowledge: there is in it an impulse of truth-seeking, a power, — even
though secondary and limited, — of truth-finding and
truth-creation. Even if it is only images or representations or
abstract expressions of truth that it can show us, still these are
in their own manner truth-reflections or truth-formations, and the
realities of which they are forms are present in their more
concrete truth in some deeper depth or on some higher level of power of
our consciousness. Matter and Life may be the
form of realities of which Mind touches only an incomplete figure;
Spirit may have secret and supernal realities of which
Mind is only a partial and rudimentary receiver, transcriber or
transmitter. It would then be only by
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an examination of other supramental and inframental
as well as higher and deeper mental powers of consciousness that we
can arrive at the whole reality. And in the end all depends on the
truth of the supreme Consciousness — or the Superconscience — that
belongs to the highest Reality and the relation to it of Mind,
Supermind, Infra-Mind and the
Inconscience.
All
indeed changes when we penetrate the lower and the higher depths of
consciousness and unite them in the one
omnipresent Reality. If we take the facts of our and the world's being,
we find existence to be one always, — a unity governs
even its utmost multiplicity; but the multiplicity is also on the face
of things undeniable. We have found unity pursuing us
everywhere: even, when we go below the surface, we find that there is
no binding dualism; the contradictories and
oppositions which the intellect creates exist only as aspects of the
original Truth; oneness and multiplicity are poles of the
same Reality; the dualities that trouble our consciousness are
contrasted truths of one and the same Truth of being. All
multiplicity resolves itself into a manifoldness of the one Being, the
one Consciousness of Being, the one Delight of Being.
Thus in the duality of pleasure and pain, we have seen that pain is a
contrary effect of the one delight of existence resulting
from the weakness of the recipient, his inability to assimilate the
force that meets him, his incapacity to bear the touch of
delight that would otherwise be felt in it; it is a perverse reaction
of Consciousness to Ananda, not itself a fundamental
opposite of Ananda: this is shown by the significant fact that pain can
pass into pleasure and pleasure into pain and both
resolve into the original Ananda. So too every form of weakness is
really a particular working of the one divine Will-Force
or the one Cosmic Energy; weakness in that Force means its power to
hold back, measure, relate in a particular way its
action of Force; incapacity or weakness is the Self's withholding of
its force-completeness or an insufficient reaction of
Force, not its fundamental opposite. If this is so, then also it may
be, and should be in the nature of things, that what we call
Ignorance is not really anything else than a power of the one divine
Knowledge-Will or Maya; it is the capacity of the One
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Consciousness similarly to regulate, to hold back, measure, relate in a particular way the action of its Knowledge.
Knowledge and Ignorance will then be, not two irreconcilable principles, one creative of world-existence, the other intolerant
and destructive of it, but two co-existent powers both present in the universe itself, diversely operating in the conduct of its
processes but one in their essence and able to pass by a natural transmutation into each other. But in their fundamental
relation Ignorance would not be an equal co-existent, it would be dependent on Knowledge, a limitation or a contrary action
of Knowledge.
To know, we have always to dissolve the rigid constructions of the
ignorant and self-willed intellect and look freely and
flexibly at the facts of existence. Its fundamental fact is
consciousness which is power, and we actually see that this power
has three ways of operating. First, we find that there is a
consciousness behind all, embracing all, within all, which is
eternally, universally, absolutely aware of itself whether in unity or
multiplicity or in both simultaneously or beyond both in its
sheer absolute. This is the plenitude of the supreme divine
self-knowledge; it is also the plenitude of the divine
all-knowledge. Next, at the other pole of things, we see this
consciousness dwelling upon apparent oppositions in itself, and
the most extreme antinomy of all reaches its acme in what seems to us
to be a complete nescience of itself, an effective,
dynamic, creative Inconscience, though we know that this is merely a
surface appearance and that the divine Knowledge
works with a sovereign security and sureness within the operations of
the Inconscient. Between these two oppositions and
as a mediary term we see Consciousness working with a partial, limited
self-awareness which is equally superficial, for
behind it and acting through it is the divine All-Knowledge. Here in
its intermediate status, it seems to be a standing
compromise between the two opposites, between the supreme Consciousness
and the Nescience, but may prove rather in a
larger view of our data to be an incomplete emergence of the Knowledge
to the surface. This compromise or imperfect
emergence we call the Ignorance, from our own point of view, because
ignorance is our own characteristic way of the
soul's self-withholding of complete
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self-knowledge. The origin of these three poises of the power of consciousness and their exact relation is what we have, if
possible, to discover.
If we discovered that Ignorance and Knowledge were two independent
powers of Consciousness, it might then be that
we would have to pursue their difference up to the highest point of
Consciousness where they would cease only in an
Absolute from which both of them had issued together.1
It might then be concluded that the only real knowledge is the truth of
the superconscient Absolute and that truth of
consciousness, truth of cosmos, truth of ourselves in cosmos is at best
a partial figure burdened always with a concomitant
presence, an encircling penumbra, a pursuing shadow of Ignorance. It
might even be that an absolute Knowledge
establishing truth, harmony, order and an absolute Inconscience basing
a play of fantasy, disharmony and disorder,
supporting inexorably its extreme of falsehood, wrong and suffering, a
Manichean double principle of conflicting and
intermingling light and darkness, good and evil, stand at the root of
cosmic existence. The idea of certain thinkers that there
is an absolute good but also an absolute evil, both of them an approach
to the Absolute, might assume consistence. But if we
find that Knowledge and Ignorance are light and shadow of the same
consciousness, that the beginning of Ignorance is a
limitation of Knowledge, that it is the limitation that opens the door
to a subordinate possibility of partial illusion and error,
that this possibility takes full body after a purposeful plunge of
Knowledge into a material Inconscience but that Knowledge
too emerges along with an emerging Consciousness out of the
Inconscience, then we can be sure that this fullness of
Ignorance is by its own evolution changing back into a limited
Knowledge and can feel the assurance that the limitation itself
will be removed and the full truth of things become apparent, the
cosmic Truth free itself from the cosmic Ignorance. In
fact, what is happening is that the Ignorance is seeking and
1 In the Upanishads Vidya and Avidya
are spoken of as eternal in the supreme Brahman; but this can be accepted in the
sense of the consciousness of the multiplicity and the consciousness of the
Oneness which by co-existence in the supreme self-awareness became the basis of
the Manifestation; they would there be two sides of an eternal self-knowledge.
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preparing to transform itself by a progressive illumination of its darknesses
into the Knowledge that is already concealed within it; the cosmic truth
manifested in its real essence and figure would by that transformation reveal
itself as essence and figure of the supreme omnipresent Reality. It is from this
interpretation of existence that we have started, but to verify it we must
observe the structure of our surface consciousness and its relation to what is
within it and above and below it; for so best we can distinguish the nature and
scope of the Ignorance. In that process there will appear the nature and scope
also of that of which the Ignorance is a limitation and deformation, the
Knowledge, — in its totality the spiritual being's abiding self-knowledge and
world-knowledge.
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