|
CHAPTER VIII
Memory, Self-Consciousness and
the Ignorance
Some speak of the self-nature of things, others say
that it is Time.
Swetaswatara Upanishad.1
Two are the forms of Brahman, Time and the Timeless.
Maitrayani Upanishad.2
Night was born and from Night the flowing ocean of being and on
the ocean Time was born to whom is subjected
every seeing creature.
Rig Veda.3
Memory is greater: without memory men could think and know nothing....
As far as goes the movement of Memory,
there he ranges at will.
Chhandogya Upanishad.4
This is he who is that which sees, touches, hears, smells, tastes,
thinks,
understands, acts in us, a conscious being, a self
of knowledge.
Prasna Upanishad.5
IN any survey of the dual character of our consciousness we have first to look at the Ignorance, — for Ignorance trying to
turn into Knowledge is our normal status. To begin with, it is necessary to consider some of the essential movements of this
partial awareness of self and things which works in us as a mediator between the complete self-knowledge and
all-knowledge and the complete Inconscience, and, from that starting-point, find its relation to the greater Consciousness
below our surface. There is a line of thought in which great stress is laid upon the action of memory: it has even been said
that Memory is the man,—it is memory that constitutes our personality and holds cemented the foundation of our
psychological being; for it links together our experiences and relates them to one and the same individual entity. This is an
idea which takes its stand on our existence in the succession of Time and accepts process as the key to essential Truth,
even when it does
VI. 1.
VI. 15. X. 190. 1, 2.
VII. 13. 1, 2.
IV. 9.
Page 501
not regard the whole of existence as process or as
cause and effect in the development of some kind of self-regulating
Energy, as Karma. But process is merely a utility; it is a habitual
adoption of certain effective relations which might in the
infinite possibility of things have been arranged otherwise, for the
production of effects which might equally have been quite
different. The real truth of things lies not in their process, but
behind it, in whatever determines, effects or governs the
process; not in effectuation so much as in the Will or Power that
effects, and not so much in Will or Power as in the
Consciousness of which Will is the dynamic form and in the Being of
which Power is the dynamic value. But memory is
only a process of consciousness, a utility; it cannot be the substance
of being or the whole of our personality: it is simply one
of the workings of consciousness as radiation is one of the workings of
Light. It is Self that is the man: or, if we regard only
our normal surface existence, Mind is the man, — for man is the mental
being. Memory is only one of the many powers and
processes of the Mind, which is at present the chief action of
Consciousness-Force in our dealings with self, world and
Nature.
Nevertheless, it is as well to begin
with this phenomenon of memory when we consider the nature of the Ignorance in
which we dwell; for it may give the key to certain important aspects of our
conscious existence. We see that there are two applications which the mind makes
of its faculty or process of memory, memory of self, memory of experience.
First, radically, it applies memory to the fact of our conscious-being and
relates that to Time. It says, “I am now, I was in the past, I shall therefore
be in the future, it is the same I in all the three ever unstable divisions of
Time.” Thus it tries to render to itself in the terms of Time an account of that
which it feels to be the fact, but cannot know or prove to be true, the eternity
of the conscious being. By memory Mind can only know of itself in the past, by
direct self-awareness only in the moment of the present, and it is only by
extension of and inference from this self-awareness and from the memory which
tells us that for some time awareness has been continuously existent that mind
can conceive of itself in the future. The extent of the past and
Page 502
the future it cannot fix; it can only carry back the
past to the limit of its memory and infer from the evidence of others
and
the facts of life it observes around it that the conscious being
already was in times which it can no longer remember. It
knows that it existed in an infant unreasoning state of the mind to
which memory has lost its link; whether it existed before
physical birth, the mortal mind owing to the gap of memory cannot
determine. Of the future it knows nothing at all; of its
existing in the next moment it can only have a moral certainty which
some happening of that moment can prove to be an
error because what it saw was no more than a dominant probability; much
less can it know whether or no physical
dissolution is the end of the conscious being. Yet it has this sense of
a persistent continuity which easily extends itself into a
conviction of eternity.
This conviction may be either the reflection in the mind of an endless
past which it has forgotten but of which something
in it retains the formless impression, or it may be the shadow of a
self-knowledge which comes to the mind from a higher or
a deeper plane of our being where we are really aware of our eternal
self-existence. Or, conceivably, it might be a
hallucination; just as we cannot sense or realise in our foreseeing
consciousness the fact of death and can only live in the
feeling of continued existence, cessation being to us an intellectual
conception we can hold with certainty, even imagine with
vividness, but never actually realise because we live only in the
present, yet death, cessation or interruption at least of our
actual mode of being is a fact and the sense or prevision of continued
existence in the future in the physical body becomes
beyond a point we cannot now fix a hallucination, a false extension or
a misapplication of our present mental impression of
conscious being, — so conceivably it might be with this mental idea or
impression of conscious eternity. Or it might be a false
transference to ourselves of the perception of a real eternity
conscient or inconscient other than ourselves, the eternity of
the universe or of something which exceeds the universe. The mind
seizing this fact of eternity may falsely transfer it to our
own conscious being which may be nothing more than a transient
phenomenon of that only true eternal.
Page 503
These questions our surface mind by itself has no
means of solving; it can only speculate upon them endlessly and
arrive at more or less well-reasoned opinions. The belief in our
immortality is only a faith, the belief in our mortality is only a
faith. It is impossible for the materialist to prove that our
consciousness ends with the death of the body; for he may indeed
show that there is as yet no convincing proof that anything in us
consciously survives, but equally there is and there can be
in the nature of things no proof that our conscious self does not
outlast the physical dissolution. Survival of the body by the
human personality may hereafter be proved even to the satisfaction of
the sceptic; but even then what will be established
will only be a greater continuity and not the eternity of the conscious
being.
In fact, if we look at the mind's concept of this eternity, we see that
it comes only to a continuous succession of
moments of being in an eternal Time. Therefore it is Time that is
eternal and not the continuously momentary conscious
being. But, on the other hand, there is nothing in mind-evidence to
show that eternal Time really exists or that Time itself is
anything more than the conscious being's way of looking at some
uninterrupted continuity or, it may be, eternity of existence
as an indivisible flow which it conceptually measures by the
successions and simultaneities of the experiences through which
alone that existence is represented to it. If there is an eternal
Existence which is a conscious being, it must be beyond Time
which it contains, timeless as we say; it must be the Eternal of the
Vedanta who, we may then conjecture, uses Time only
as a conceptual perspective for His view of His self-manifestation. But
the timeless self-knowledge of this Eternal is beyond
mind; it is a supramental knowledge superconscient to us and only to be
acquired by the stilling or transcending of the
temporal activity of our conscious mind, by an entry into Silence or a
passage through Silence into the consciousness of
eternity.
From
all this the one great fact emerges that the very nature of our mind is
Ignorance; not an absolute nescience, but a
limited and conditioned knowledge of being, limited by a realisation of
its present, a memory of its past, an inference of its
future,
Page 504
conditioned therefore by a temporal and successive
view of itself and its experiences. If real existence is a temporal
eternity, then the mind has not the knowledge of real being: for even
its own past it loses in the vague of oblivion except for
the little that memory holds; it has no possession of its future which
is withheld from it in a great blank of ignorance; it has
only a knowledge of its present changing from moment to moment in a
helpless succession of names, forms, happenings, the
march or flux of a cosmic kinesis which is too vast for its control or
its comprehension. On the other hand, if real existence
is a time-transcending eternity, the mind is still more ignorant of it;
for it only knows the little of it that it can itself seize from
moment to moment by fragmentary experience of its surface
self-manifestation in Time and Space.
If, then, mind is all or if the apparent mind in us is the index of the
nature of our being, we can never be anything more
than an Ignorance fleeting through Time and catching at knowledge in a
most scanty and fragmentary fashion. But if there
is a power of self-knowledge beyond mind which is timeless in essence
and can look on Time, perhaps with a simultaneous
all-relating view of past, present and future, but in any case as a
circumstance of its own timeless being, then we have two
powers of consciousness, Knowledge and Ignorance, the Vedantic Vidya
and Avidya. These two must be, then, either
different and unconnected powers, separately born as well as diverse in
their action, separately self-existent in an eternal
dualism, or else, if there is a connection between them, it must be
this that consciousness as Knowledge knows its timeless
self and sees Time within itself, while consciousness as Ignorance is a
partial and superficial action of the same Knowledge
which sees rather itself in Time, veiling itself in its own conception
of temporal being, and can only by the removal of the veil
return to eternal self-knowledge.
For it would be irrational to suppose that the superconscient Knowledge
is so aloof and separate as to be incapable of
knowing Time and Space and Causality and their works; for then it would
be only another kind of Ignorance, the blindness
of the absolute being answering to the blindness of the temporal being
as positive pole and negative pole of a conscious
existence which
Page 505
is incapable of knowing all itself, but either knows
only itself and does not know its works or knows only its works and
does
not know itself,—an absurdly symmetrical equipollence in mutual
rejection. From the larger point of view, the ancient Vedantic, we must
conceive of ourselves not as a dual being, but as one conscious
existence with a double phase of
consciousness: one of them is conscient or partly conscient in our
mind, the other superconscient to mind; one, a knowledge
situated in Time, works under its conditions and for that purpose puts
its self-knowledge behind it, the other, timeless, works
out with mastery and knowledge its own self-determined conditions of
Time; one knows itself only by its growth in
Time-experience, the other knows its timeless self and consciously
manifests itself in Time-experience.
We realise now what the Upanishad meant when it spoke of Brahman as
being both the Knowledge and the Ignorance
and of the simultaneous knowledge of Brahman in both as the way to
immortality. Knowledge is the inherent power of
consciousness of the timeless, spaceless, unconditioned Self which
shows itself in its essence as a unity of being; it is this
consciousness that alone is real and complete knowledge because it is
an eternal transcendence which is not only
self-aware but holds in itself, manifests, originates, determines,
knows the temporally eternal successions of the universe.
Ignorance is the consciousness of being in the successions of Time,
divided in its knowledge by dwelling in the moment,
divided in its conception of self-being by dwelling in the divisions of
Space and the relations of circumstance, self-prisoned in
the multiple working of the unity. It is called the Ignorance because
it has put behind it the knowledge of unity and by that
very fact is unable to know truly or completely either itself or the
world, either the transcendent or the universal reality.
Living within the Ignorance, from moment to moment, from field to
field, from relation to relation, the conscious soul
stumbles on in the error of a fragmentary knowledge.1 It is not a nescience, but a view and experience of the
avidyayam antare vartamanah.... janghanyamanah pariyanti mudha,h andhenaiva
niyamanah yathandhah. “Living and moving within the Ignorance,... they go round and round stumbling and battered, men
deluded, like the blind led by one who is blind.”
—Mundaka Upanishad, I. 2. 8.
Page 506
reality which is partly true and partly false, as all knowledge must be which ignores the essence and sees only fugitive parts
of the phenomenon. On the other hand, to be shut up in a featureless consciousness of unity, ignorant of the manifest
Brahman, is described as itself also a blind darkness. In truth, neither is precisely darkness, but one is the dazzling by a
concentrated Light, the other the illusive proportions of things seen in a dispersed, hazy and broken light, half mist, half
seeing. The divine consciousness is not shut up in either, but holds the immutable One and the mutable Many in one eternal
all-relating, all-uniting self-knowledge.
Memory, in the dividing consciousness, is a crutch upon which mind
supports itself as it stumbles on driven helplessly,
without possibility of stay or pause, in the rushing speed of Time.
Memory is a poverty-stricken substitute for an integral
direct abiding consciousness of self and a direct integral or global
perception of things. Mind can only have the direct
consciousness of self in the moment of its present being; it can only
have some half-direct perception of things as they are
offered to it in the present moment of time and the immediate field of
space and seized by the senses. It makes up for its
deficiency by memory, imagination, thought, idea-symbols of various
kinds. Its senses are devices by which it lays hold on
the appearances of things in the present moment and in the immediate
space; memory, imagination, thought are devices by
which it represents to itself, still less directly, the appearances of
things beyond the present moment and the immediate
space. The one thing which is not a device is its direct
self-consciousness in the present moment. Therefore through that it
can most easily lay hold on the fact of eternal being, on the reality;
all the rest it is tempted, when it considers things
narrowly, to look on not merely as phenomenon, but as, possibly, error,
ignorance, illusion, because they no longer appear to
it directly real. So the Illusionist considers them; the only thing he
holds to be truly real is that eternal self which lies behind
the mind's direct present self-consciousness. Or else, like the
Buddhist, one comes to regard even that eternal self as an
illusion, a representation, a subjective image, a mere imagination or
false sensation and false idea of being. Mind
Page 507
becomes to its own view a fantastic magician, its works and itself at once strangely existent and non-existent, a persistent
reality and yet a fleeting error which it accounts for or does not account for, but in any case is determined to slay and get
done with both itself and its works so that it may rest, may cease in the timeless repose of the Eternal from the vain
representation of appearances.
But, in truth, our sharp distinctions made between the without and the
within, the present and the past
self-consciousness are tricks of the limited unstable action of mind.
Behind the mind and using it as its own surface activity
there is a stable consciousness in which there is no binding conceptual
division between itself in the present and itself in the
past and future; and yet it knows itself in Time, in the present, past
and future, but at once, with an undivided view which
embraces all the mobile experiences of the Time-self and holds them on
the foundation of the immobile timeless self. This
consciousness we can become aware of when we draw back from the mind
and its activities or when these fall silent. But
we see first its immobile status, and if we regard only the immobility
of the self, we may say of it that it is not only timeless,
but actionless, without movement of idea, thought, imagination, memory,
will, self-sufficient, self-absorbed and therefore void
of all action of the universe. That then becomes alone real to us and
the rest a vain symbolising in non-existent forms, — or
forms corresponding to nothing truly existent, — and therefore a dream.
But this self-absorption is only an act and resultant
state of our consciousness, just as much as was the self-dispersion in
thought and memory and will. The real self is the
eternal who is obviously capable of both the mobility in Time and the
immobility basing Time, — simultaneously, otherwise
they could not both exist; nor, even, could one exist and the other
create seemings. This is the supreme Soul, Self and
Being 1 of the Gita who upholds both the immobile and the mobile being as the self and lord of all existence.
So far we arrive by considering mind and memory mainly in regard to the primary phenomenon of mental
self-consciousness
1 para purusa, paramatman, parabrahman.
Page 508
in Time. But if we consider them with regard to self-experience as well as consciousness and other-experience as well as
self-experience, we shall find that we arrive at the same result with richer contents and a still clearer light on the nature of
the Ignorance. At present, let us thus express what we have seen, — an eternal conscious being who supports the mobile
action of mind on a stable immobile self-consciousness free from the action of Time and who, while with a knowledge
superior to mind he embraces all the movement of Time, dwells by the action of mind in that movement. As the surface
mental entity moving from moment to moment, not observing his essential self but only his relation to his experiences of the
Time-movement, in that movement keeping the future from himself in what appears to be a blank of Ignorance and
non-existence but is an unrealised fullness, grasping knowledge and experience of being in the present, putting it away in the
past which again appears to be a blank of Ignorance and non-existence partly lighted, partly saved and stored up by
memory, he puts on the aspect of a thing fleeting and uncertain seizing without stability upon things fleeting and uncertain.
But in reality, we shall find, he is always the same Eternal who is for ever stable and self-possessed in His supramental
knowledge and what he seizes on is also for ever stable and eternal; for it is himself that he is mentally experiencing in the
succession of Time.
Time is the great bank of conscious existence turned into values of
experience and action: the surface mental being
draws upon the past (and the future also) and coins it continually into
the present; he accounts for and stores up the gains he
has gathered in what we call the past, not knowing how ever-present is
the past in us; he uses as much of it as he needs as
coin of knowledge and realised being and pays it out as coin of mental,
vital and physical action in the commerce of the
present which creates to his view the new wealth of the future.
Ignorance is a utilisation of the Being's self-knowledge in
such a way as to make it valuable for Time-experience and valid for
Time-activity; what we do not know is what we have
not yet taken up, coined and used in our mental experience or have
ceased to coin or use. Behind, all is known and all is
ready for use according to the
Page 509
will of the Self in its dealings with Time and Space and Causality. One might almost say that our surface being is only the
deeper eternal Self in us throwing itself out as the adventurer in Time, a gambler and speculator in infinite possibilities,
limiting itself to the succession of moments so that it may have all the surprise and delight of the adventure, keeping back its
self-knowledge and complete self-being so that it may win again what it seems to have lost, reconquering all itself through
the chequered joy and pain of an aeonic passion and seeking and endeavour.
Page 510
HOME
|