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CHAPTER XI
The Boundaries of the Ignorance
One who thinks there is
this world and no other...
Katha Upanishad.1
Extended within the Infinite... headless and footless, concealing
his two ends.2
Rig Veda.3
He who has the knowledge “I am Brahman” becomes all this that is;
but whoever worships another divinity than the One Self and thinks,
“Other is he and I am other”, he knows not.
Brihadaranyaka Upanishad.4
This Self is fourfold,—the Self of Waking who has the outer intelligence
and enjoys external things, is its first part; the Self of Dream who has the
inner intelligence and enjoys things subtle, is its second part; the Self of
Sleep, unified, a massed intelligence, blissful and enjoying bliss, is the third
part... the lord of all, the omniscient, the inner Control. That which is
unseen,
indefinable, self-evident in its one selfhood, is the fourth part: this is the
Self,
this is that which has to be known.
Mandukya Upanishad.5
A conscious being, no larger than a man's thumb, stands in the centre of our
self;
he is master of the past and the present... he is today and he is tomorrow.
Katha Upanishad.6
IT is now possible to review in its larger lines this Ignorance, or this separative knowledge labouring towards identical
knowledge, which constitutes our human mentality and, in an obscurer form, all consciousness that has evolved below our
level. We see that in us it consists of a succession of waves of being and force, pressing from outside and rising from within,
which become stuff of consciousness and formulate in a mental cognition and mentalised sensation of self and things in
Time and Space. Time presents itself to us as a flow of dynamic movement, Space as an objective field of contents for the
experience of this imperfect and developing awareness. By immediate
1 I. 2. 6.
2 Head and feet, the superconscient and the inconscient.
3 IV. I. 7, 11.
4 I. 4. 10. 5
Verses 2-7. 6 II. 1. 12,
13.
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awareness the mental being mobile in Time lives
perpetually in the present; by memory he saves a certain part of his
experience of self and things from streaming away from him entirely
into the past; by thought and will and action, by mind
energy, life energy, body energy he utilises it for what he becomes in
the present and is yet to become hereafter; the force
of being in him that has made him what he is works to prolong, develop
and amplify his becoming in the future. All this
insecurely held material of self-expression and experience of things,
this partial knowledge accumulated in the succession of
Time, is co-ordinated for him by perception, memory, intelligence and
will to be utilised for an ever-new or ever-repeated
becoming and for the mental, vital, physical action which helps him to
grow into what he is to be and to express what he
already is. The present totality of all this experience of
consciousness and output of energy is co-ordinated for relation to his
being, gathered into consistency around an ego-sense which formulates
the habit of response of self-experience to the
contacts of Nature in a persistent limited field of conscious being. It
is this ego-sense that gives a first basis of coherence to
what otherwise might be a string or mass of floating impressions: all
that is so sensed is referred to a corresponding artificial
centre of mental consciousness in the understanding, the ego-idea. This
ego-sense in the life stuff and this ego-idea in the
mind maintain a constructed symbol of self, the separative ego, which
does duty for the hidden real self, the spirit or true
being. The surface mental individuality is, in consequence, always
ego-centric; even its altruism is an enlargement of its ego:
the ego is the lynch-pin invented to hold together the motion of our
wheel of nature. The necessity of centralisation around
the ego continues until there is no longer need of any such device or
contrivance because there has emerged the true self,
the spiritual being, which is at once wheel and motion and that which
holds all together, the centre and the circumference.
But the moment we study ourselves, we find that the self-experience
which we thus co-ordinate and consciously utilise
for life, is a small part even of our waking individual consciousness.
We fasten only upon a very limited number of the
mental sensations and perceptions of self and things which come up into
our
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surface consciousness in our continual present: of
these again memory saves up only a scanty part from the oblivious gulf
of
the past; of the storings of memory our intelligence utilises only a
small portion for co-ordinated knowledge, our will utilises a
smaller percentage for action. A narrow selection, a large rejection or
reservation, a miserly-spendthrift system of waste of
material and unemployment of resources and a scanty and disorderly
modicum of useful spending and utilisable balance
seems to be the method of Nature in our conscious becoming even as it
is in the field of the material universe. But this is
only in appearance, for it would be a wholly untrue account to say that
all that is not thus saved up and utilised is destroyed,
becomes null and has passed away ineffectually and in vain. A great
part of it has been quietly used by Nature herself to
form us and actuates that sufficiently large mass of our growth and
becoming and action for which our conscious memory,
will and intelligence are not responsible. A still greater part is used
by her as a store from which she draws and which she
utilises, while we ourselves have utterly forgotten the origin and
provenance of this material which we find ourselves
employing with a deceptive sense of creation; for we imagine we are
creating this new material of our work, when we are
only combining results out of that which we have forgotten but Nature
in us has remembered. If we admit rebirth as part of
her system, we shall realise that all experience has its use; for all
experience counts in this prolonged building and nothing is
rejected except what has exhausted its utility and would be a burden on
the future. A judgment from what appears now in
our conscious surface is fallacious: for when we study and understand,
we perceive that only a little of her action and
growth in us is conscious; the bulk of it is carried on subconsciously
as in the rest of her material life. We are not only what
we know of ourselves but an immense more which we do not know; our
momentary personality is only a bubble on the
ocean of our existence.
A superficial observation of our waking consciousness shows us that of
a great part of our individual being and
becoming we are quite ignorant; it is to us the Inconscient, just as
much as the life of the plant, the metal, the earth, the
elements. But if we
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carry our knowledge farther, pushing psychological experiment and observation beyond their normal bounds, we find how
vast is the sphere of this supposed Inconscient or this subconscient in our total existence, — the subconscient, so seeming and
so called by us because it is a concealed consciousness, — and what a small and fragmentary portion of our being is covered
by our waking self-awareness. We arrive at the knowledge that our waking mind and ego are only a superimposition upon a
submerged, a subliminal self, — for so that self appears to us, — or, more accurately, an inner being, with a much vaster
capacity of experience; our mind and ego are like the crown and dome of a temple jutting out from the waves while the
great body of the building is submerged under the surface of the waters.
This concealed self and consciousness is our real or whole being, of
which the outer is a part and a phenomenon, a
selective formation for a surface use. We perceive only a small number
of the contacts of things which impinge upon us; the
inner being perceives all that enters or touches us and our
environment. We perceive only a part of the workings of our life
and being; the inner being perceives so much that we might almost
suppose that nothing escapes its view. We remember
only a small selection from our perceptions, and of these even we keep
a great part in a store-room where we cannot
always lay our hand upon what we need; the inner being retains
everything that it has ever received and has it always ready
to hand. We can form into co-ordinated understanding and knowledge only
so much of our perceptions and memories as our
trained intelligence and mental capacity can grasp in their sense and
appreciate in their relations: the intelligence of the inner
being needs no training, but preserves the accurate form and relations
of all its perceptions and memories and, — though this
is a proposition which may be considered doubtful or difficult to
concede in its fullness, — can grasp immediately, when it does not
possess already, their significance. And its perceptions are not
confined, as are ordinarily those of the waking mind, to the scanty
gleanings of the physical senses, but extend far beyond and use, as
telepathic phenomena of many kinds bear witness, a subtle sense the
limits of which are too wide to be easily fixed. The relations between
the surface will or
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impulsion and the subliminal urge, mistakenly described as unconscious or subconscious, have not been properly studied
except in regard to unusual and unorganised manifestations and to certain morbidly abnormal phenomena of the diseased
human mind; but if we pursue our observation far enough, we shall find that the cognition and will or impulsive force of the
inner being really stand behind the whole conscious becoming; the latter represents only that part of its secret endeavour
and achievement which rises successfully to the surface of our life. To know our inner being is the first step towards a real
self-knowledge.
If we undertake this self-discovery and enlarge our knowledge of the
subliminal self, so conceiving it as to include in it
our lower subconscient and upper superconscient ends, we shall discover
that it is really this which provides the whole
material of our apparent being and that our perceptions, our memories,
our effectuations of will and intelligence are only a
selection from its perceptions, memories, activities and relations of
will and intelligence; our very ego is only a minor and
superficial formulation of its self-consciousness and self-experience.
It is, as it were, the urgent sea out of which the waves
of our conscious becoming arise. But what are its limits? how far does
it extend? what is its fundamental nature? Ordinarily,
we speak of a subconscious existence and include in this term all that
is not on the waking surface. But the whole or the
greater part of the inner or subliminal self can hardly be
characterised by that epithet; for when we say subconscious, we
think readily of an obscure unconsciousness or half-consciousness or
else a submerged consciousness below and in a way
inferior to and less than our organised waking awareness or, at least,
less in possession of itself. But we find, when we go
within, that somewhere in our subliminal part, — though not
co-extensive with it since it has also obscure and ignorant
regions, — there is a consciousness much wider, more luminous, more in
possession of itself and things than that which
wakes upon our surface and is the percipient of our daily hours; that
is our inner being, and it is this which we must regard
as our subliminal self and set apart the subconscient as an inferior, a
lowest occult province of our nature. In the same way
there is a superconscient part of our total existence in which
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there is what we discover to be our highest self, and this too we can set apart as a higher occult province of our nature.
But what then is the subconscient and
where does it begin and how is it related to our surface being or to the
subliminal of which it would seem more properly to be a province? We are aware
of our body and know that we have a physical existence, even very largely
identify ourselves with it, and yet most of its operations are really
subconscious to our mental being; not only does the mind take no part in them
but, as we suppose, our most physical being has no awareness of its own hidden
operations or, by itself, of its own existence; it knows or rather feels only so
much of itself as is enlightened by mind-sense and observable by intelligence.
We are aware of a vitality working in this bodily form and structure as in the
plant or lower animal, a vital existence which is also for the most part
subconscious to us, for we only observe some of its movements and reactions. We
are partly aware of its operations, but not by any means of all or most of them,
and rather of those which are abnormal than those which are normal; its wants
impress themselves more forcibly upon us than its satisfactions, its diseases
and disorders than its health and its regular rhythm, its death is more poignant
to us than its life is vivid; we know as much of it as we can consciously
observe and use or as much as forces itself upon us by pain and pleasure and
other sensations or as a cause of nervous or physical reaction and disturbance,
but no more. Accordingly, we suppose that this vital-physical part of us also is
not conscious of its own operations or has only a suppressed consciousness or
no-consciousness like the plant or an inchoate consciousness like the incipient
animal; it becomes conscious only so far as it is enlightened by mind and
observable by intelligence.
This is an exaggeration and a confusion due to our
identification of consciousness with mentality and mental awareness. Mind
identifies itself to a certain extent with the movements proper to physical life
and body and annexes them to its mentality, so that all consciousness seems to
us to be mental. But if we draw back, if we separate the mind as witness from
these parts of us, we can discover that life and body, — even the most physical
parts of life, —have a consciousness of their own, a
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consciousness proper to an obscurer vital and to a bodily being, even such an elemental awareness as primitive animal forms
may have, but in us partly taken up by the mind and to that extent mentalised. Yet it has not, in its independent motion, the
mental awareness which we enjoy; if there is mind in it, it is mind involved and implicit in the body and in the physical life:
there is no organised self-consciousness, but only a sense of action and reaction, movement, impulse and desire, need,
necessary activities imposed by Nature, hunger, instinct, pain, insensibility and pleasure. Although thus inferior, it has this
awareness obscure, limited and automatic; but since it is less in possession of itself, void of what to us is the stamp of
mentality, we may justly call it the submental, but not so justly the subconscious part of our being. For when we stand back
from it, when we can separate our mind from its sensations, we perceive that this is a nervous and sensational and
automatically dynamic mode of consciousness, a gradation of awareness different from the mind: it has its own separate
reactions to contacts and is sensitive to them in its own power of feeling; it does not depend for that on the mind's
perception and response. The true subconscious is other than this vital or physical substratum; it is the Inconscient vibrating
on the borders of consciousness, sending up its motions to be changed into conscious stuff, swallowing into its depths
impressions of past experience as seeds of unconscious habit and returning them constantly but often chaotically to the
surface consciousness, missioning upwards much futile or perilous stuff of which
the origin is obscure to us, in dream, in mechanical repetitions of all kinds,
in untraceable impulsions and motives, in mental, vital, physical perturbations
and upheavals, in dumb automatic necessities of our obscurest parts of nature.
But the subliminal self has not at
all this subconscious character: it is in full possession of a mind, a
life-force, a clear subtle-physical sense of things. It has the same capacities
as our waking being, a subtle sense and perception, a comprehensive extended
memory and an intensive selecting intelligence, will, self-consciousness; but
even though the same in kind, they are wider, more developed, more sovereign.
And it has other
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capacities which exceed those of our mortal mind because of a power of direct awareness of the being, whether acting in
itself or turned upon its object, which arrives more swiftly at knowledge, more swiftly at effectivity of will, more deeply at
understanding and satisfaction of impulse. Our surface mind is hardly a true mentality, so involved, bound, hampered,
conditioned is it by the body and bodily life and the limitations of the nerve-system and the physical organs. But the
subliminal self has a true mentality superior to these limitations; it exceeds the physical mind and physical organs although it
is aware of them and their works and is, indeed, in a large degree their cause or creator. It is only subconscious in the sense
of not bringing all or most of itself to the surface, it works always behind the veil: it is rather a secret intraconscient and
circumconscient than a subconscient; for it envelops quite as much as it supports the outer nature. This description is no
doubt truest of the deeper parts of the subliminal; in other layers of it nearer to our surface there is a more ignorant action
and those who, penetrating within, pause in the zones of lesser coherence or in the No-man's-land between the subliminal
and the surface, may fall into much delusion and confusion: but that too, though ignorant, is not of the nature of the
subconscious; the confusion of these intermediate zones has no kinship to the Inconscience.
We might say then that there are three elements in the totality of our
being: there is the submental and the subconscient
which appears to us as if it were inconscient, comprising the material
basis and a good part of our life and body; there is the
subliminal, which comprises the inner being, taken in its entirety of
inner mind, inner life, inner physical with the soul or
psychic entity supporting them; there is this waking consciousness
which the subliminal and the subconscient throw up on the surface, a
wave of their secret surge. But even this is not an adequate account of
what we are; for there is not only something deep within behind our
normal self-awareness, but something also high above it: that too is
ourselves, other than our surface mental personality, but not outside
our true self; that too is a country of our spirit. For the subliminal
proper is no more than the inner being on the level of the
Knowledge-Ignorance
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luminous, powerful and extended indeed beyond the
poor conception of our waking mind, but still not the supreme or the
whole sense of our being, not its ultimate mystery. We become aware, in
a certain experience, of a range of being superconscient to all these
three, aware too of something, a supreme highest Reality sustaining and
exceeding them all,
which humanity speaks of vaguely as Spirit, God, the Oversoul: from
these superconscient ranges we have visitations and in
our highest being we tend towards them and to that supreme Spirit.
There is then in our total range of existence a
superconscience as well as a subconscience and inconscience,
overarching and perhaps enveloping our subliminal and our
waking selves, but unknown to us, seemingly unattainable and
incommunicable.
But with the extension of our knowledge we discover what this Spirit or
Oversoul is: it is ultimately our own highest
deepest vastest Self, it is apparent on its summits or by reflection in
ourselves as Sachchidananda creating us and the world
by the power of His divine Knowledge-Will, spiritual, supramental,
truth-conscious, infinite. That is the real Being, Lord and
Creator, who, as the Cosmic Self veiled in Mind and Life and Matter,
has descended into that which we call the Inconscient
and constitutes and directs its subconscient existence by His
supramental will and knowledge, has ascended out of the
Inconscient and dwells in the inner being constituting and directing
its subliminal existence by the same will and knowledge,
has cast up out of the subliminal our surface existence and dwells
secretly in it overseeing with the same supreme light and
mastery its stumbling and groping movements. If the subliminal and
subconscient may be compared to a sea which throws
up the waves of our surface mental existence, the superconscience may
be compared to an ether which constitutes,
contains, overroofs, inhabits and determines the movements of the sea
and its waves. It is there in this higher ether that we
are inherently and intrinsically conscious of our self and spirit, not
as here below by a reflection in silent mind or by
acquisition of the knowledge of a hidden Being within us; it is through
it, through that ether of superconscience, that we can
pass to a supreme status, knowledge, experience. Of this superconscient
existence through
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which we can arrive at the highest status of our real, our supreme Self, we are normally even more ignorant than of the rest
of our being; yet is it into the knowledge of it that our being emerging out of the involution in Inconscience is struggling to
evolve. This limitation to our surface existence, this unconsciousness of our highest as of our inmost self, is our first, our
capital ignorance.
We exist superficially by a becoming in Time; but here again out of
that becoming in Time the surface mind, which we
call ourselves, is ignorant of all the long past and the long future,
aware only of the little life which it remembers and not of
all even of that; for much of it is lost to its observation, much to
its memory. We readily believe, — for the simple and
compelling but insufficient reason that we do not remember, have not
perceived, are not informed of anything else, — that we
came into existence first by our physical birth into this life and
shall cease to exist by the death of this body and the
cessation of this brief physical activity. But while this is true of
our physical mentality and physical vitality, our corporeal
sheath, for they have been constituted at our birth and are dissolved
by death, it is not true of our real becoming in Time. For
our real self in the cosmos is the Superconscient which becomes the
subliminal self and throws up this apparent surface self
to act out the brief and limited part assigned to it between birth and
death as a present living and conscious self-formation of
the being in the stuff of a world of inconscient Nature. The true being
which we are no more dies by the cessation of one
life than the actor ceases to exist when he has finished one of his
parts or the poet when he has poured out something of
himself in one of his poems; our mortal personality is only such a role
or such a creative self-expression. Whether or no we
accept the theory of many births of the same soul or psychic being in
various human bodies upon this earth, certain it is that
our becoming in Time goes far back into the past and continues far on
into the future. For neither the superconscient nor the subliminal can
be limited by a few moments of Time: the one is eternal and Time is
only one of its modes; to the other, to the subliminal, it is an
infinite field of various experience and the very existence of the
being
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presupposes all the past for its own and equally all
the future. Yet of this past which alone explains our present being,
our
mind knows, if knowledge it can be called, only this actual physical
existence and its memories: of the future which alone
explains the constant trend of our becoming, it knows nothing. So fixed
are we in the experience of our ignorance that we
even insist that the one can be known only by its vestiges and the
other cannot be known, because the future is not yet and
the past is no longer in existence; yet are they both here in us, the
past involved and active, the future ready to evolve in the
continuity of the secret spirit. This is another limiting and
frustrating ignorance.
But even here the self-ignorance of man does not end; for not
only is he ignorant of his superconscient Self, of his
subliminal self, of his subconscient self, he is ignorant of his world
in which he presently lives, which constantly acts on and
through him and on which and by which he has to act. And the stamp of
his ignorance is this, that he regards it as something
quite separate from him, as not-self because it is other than his
individual nature-formation and his ego. So too when he
confronts his superconscient Self, he thinks of it first as something
quite other than he, an external, even extracosmic God;
when he confronts and becomes aware of his subliminal self, it seems to
him at first another greater person or another
consciousness than his own which can support and guide him. Of the
world he regards only one little foam-bubble, his life
and body, as himself. But when we get into our subliminal
consciousness, we find it extending itself to be commensurate
with its world; when we get into our superconscient Self, we find that
the world is only its manifestation and that all in it is the One, all
in it is our self. We see that there is one indivisible Matter of which
our body is a knot, one indivisible Life of which our life is an eddy,
one indivisible Mind of which our mind is a receiving and recording,
forming or translating and transmitting station, one indivisible Spirit
of which our soul and individual being are a portion or a
manifestation. It is the ego-sense which clinches the division and in
which the ignorance we superficially are finds its power to maintain
the strong though always
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permeable walls it has created to be its own prison. Ego is the most formidable of the knots which keep us tied to the
Ignorance.
As we are ignorant of our existence in Time except the small hour which
we remember, so we are ignorant of
ourselves in Space except the small span of which we are mentally and
sensationally conscious, the single body that moves
there and the mind and life which are identified with it, and we regard
the environment as a not-self we have to deal with
and use: it is this identification and this conception that form the
life of the ego. Space according to one view is only the
co-existence of things or of souls; the Sankhya affirms the plurality
of souls and their independent existence, and their
co-existence is then only possible by the unity of Nature-force, their
field of experience, Prakriti: but, even granting this, the
co-existence is there and it is in the end co-existence in one Being.
Space is the self-conceptive extension of that one Being;
it is the one spiritual Existence displaying the field of movement of
its Conscious-Force in its own self as Space. Because
that Conscious-Force concentrates in manifold bodies, lives, minds and
the soul presides over one of them, therefore our
mentality is concentrated in this and regards this as itself and all
the rest as not-self, just as it regards its one life on which it
concentrates by a similar ignorance as its whole term of existence cut
off from the past and the future. Yet we cannot
really know our own mentality without knowing the one Mind, our own
vitality without knowing the one Life, our own body
without knowing the one Matter; for not only is their nature determined
by the nature of that, but by that their activities are
at every moment being influenced and determined. But, with all this sea
of being flowing in on us, we do not participate in its
consciousness, but know of it only so much as can be brought into the
surface of our minds and co-ordinated there. The
world lives in us, thinks in us, forms itself in us; but we imagine
that it is we who live, think, become separately by ourselves
and for ourselves. As we are ignorant of our timeless, of our
superconscient, of our subliminal and subconscient selves, so are we
ignorant of our universal self. This alone saves us that ours is an
ignorance which is full of the impulse and strives irresistibly,
eternally, by the very law of its being
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towards the realisation of self-possession and self-knowledge. A many-sided Ignorance striving to become an all-embracing
Knowledge is the definition of the consciousness of man the mental being, — or, looking at it from another side, we may say
equally that it is a limited separative awareness of things striving to become
an integral consciousness and an integral Knowledge.
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