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CHAPTER XIII
Exclusive Concentration of
Consciousness -
Force and the Ignorance
From the
kindled fire of Energy of Consciousness, Truth was
born and the Law of Truth; from that the Night, from the
Night
the flowing ocean of being.
Rig Veda.1
SINCE Brahman is in the essentiality of its universal being a unity and a multiplicity aware of each other and in each other
and since in its reality it is something beyond the One and the Many, containing both, aware of both, Ignorance can only
come about as a subordinate phenomenon by some concentration of consciousness absorbed in a part knowledge or a part
action of the being and excluding the rest from its awareness. There may be either a concentration of the One in itself to the
exclusion of the Many or of the Many in their own action to the exclusion of the all-awareness of the One, or of the
individual being in himself to the exclusion both of the One and the rest of the Many who are then to him separated units not
included in his direct awareness. Or again there may be or there may intervene at a certain point some general rule of
exclusive concentration, operative in all these three directions, a concentration of separative active consciousness in a
separative movement; but this takes place not in the true self, but in the force of active being, in Prakriti.
This hypothesis we adopt in
preference to the others, because none of the others taken by itself will hold
or will square with all the facts of existence. Integral Brahman cannot be in
its integrality the source of the Ignorance, because its integrality is in its
very nature all-consciousness. The One cannot in its integral conscious being
exclude the Many from itself, because the Many would not then at all exist; at
most it can stand back somewhere in its consciousness from the cosmic play so as
to enable
1 X. 190. 1.
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a similar movement in the individual being. The Many
in the integrality or in each self of the Many cannot be really
ignorant
of the One or of others, because by the Many we mean the same divine
Self in all, individualised indeed, but still one in
conscious being with all in a single universality and one too with the
original and transcendent Being. Ignorance is therefore
not the natural character of the consciousness of the soul, even of the
individual soul; it is the outcome of some
particularising action in the executive Conscious-Force when it is
absorbed in its works and forgetful of self and of the total
reality of the nature. This action cannot be that of the whole being or
of the whole force of being, — for the character of that
completeness is whole consciousness and not partial consciousness, — it
must be a superficial or partial movement absorbed
in a superficial or partial action of the consciousness and the energy,
concentrated in its formation, oblivious of all else that is
not included in the formation or not there overtly operative. Ignorance
is Nature's purposeful oblivion of the Self and the All,
leaving them aside, putting them behind herself in order to do solely
what she has to do in some outer play of existence.
In the infinity of being and its infinite awareness concentration of
consciousness, Tapas, is always present as an
inherent power of Consciousness-Force: it is a self-held or
self-gathered dwelling of the eternal Awareness in itself and on
itself or on its object; but the object is always in some way itself,
its own being or a manifestation and movement of its
being. The concentration may be essential; it may be even a sole
indwelling or an entire absorption in the essence of its own
being, a luminous or else a self-oblivious self-immersion. Or it may be
an integral or else a total-multiple or a part-multiple
concentration. Or it may be a single separative regard on one field of
its being or movement, a single-pointed concentration
in one centre or an absorption in one objective form of its
self-existence. The first, the essential, is at one end the
superconscient Silence and at the other end the Inconscience; the
second, the integral, is the total consciousness of
Sachchidananda, the supramental concentration; the third, the multiple,
is the method of the totalising or global overmental
awareness; the fourth, the separative, is the characteristic nature
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of the Ignorance. The supreme integrality of the Absolute holds all these states or powers of its consciousness together as a
single indivisible being looking at all itself in manifestation with a simultaneous self-vision.
Concentration in this sense of self-held dwelling in itself or on
itself as object may be said then to belong to the very
nature of conscious being. For, although there is an infinite extension
of consciousness and a diffusion of consciousness, it is
a self-held self-contained extension or a self-held self-contained
diffusion. Although there may seem to be a dispersion of its
energies, that is in reality a form of distribution, and is only
possible in a superficial field because it is supported by an
underlying self-held concentration. An exclusive concentration on or in
a single subject or object or domain of being or
movement is not a denial or departure from the Spirit's awareness, it
is one form of the self-gathering of the power of Tapas. But when the
concentration is exclusive, it brings about a holding back behind it of
the rest of self-knowledge. It may
be aware of the rest all the time, yet act as if it were not aware of
it; that would not be a state or act of Ignorance: but if the
consciousness erects by the concentration a wall of exclusion limiting
itself to a single field, domain or habitation in the
movement so that it is aware only of that or aware of all the rest as
outside itself, then we have a principle of self-limiting
knowledge which can result in a separative knowledge and culminate in a
positive and effective ignorance.
We can get some glimpse of what this
means, to what it amounts in action, when we look at the nature of exclusive
concentration in mental man, in our own consciousness. First of all, we must
note that what we mean ordinarily by the man is not his inner self, but only a
sum of apparent continuous movement of consciousness and energy in past, present
and future to which we give this name. It is this that in appearance does all
the works of the man, thinks all his thoughts, feels all his emotions. This
energy is a movement of Consciousness-Force concentrated on a temporal stream of
inward and outward workings. But we know that behind this stream of energy there
is a whole sea of consciousness which is aware of the stream, but of which the
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stream is unaware; for this sum of surface energy is
a selection, an outcome from all the rest that is invisible. That sea
is the
subliminal self, the superconscient, the subconscient, the
intraconscient and circumconscient being, and holding it all together
the soul, the psychic entity. The stream is the natural, the
superficial man. In this superficial man Tapas, the being's dynamic
force of consciousness, is concentrated on the surface in a certain
mass of superficial workings; all the rest of itself it has
put behind and may be vaguely aware of it there in the unformulated
back of its conscious existence, but is not aware of it in
this superficial absorbed movement in front. It is not precisely, at
any rate in that back or in the depths, ignorant of itself in
any essential sense of the word, but for the purposes of its
superficial movement and within that movement only it is
oblivious of its real, its greater self, by absorption, by exclusive
concentration on what it is superficially doing. Yet it is really
the hidden sea and not the superficial stream which is doing all the
action: it is the sea that is the source of this movement,
not the conscious wave it throws up, whatever the consciousness of the
wave, absorbed in its movement, living in that,
seeing nothing else but that, may think about the matter. And that sea,
the real self, the integral conscious being, the integral
force of being, is not ignorant; even the wave is not essentially
ignorant, — for it contains within itself all the consciousness it
has forgotten and but for that it could not act or endure at all, — but
it is self-oblivious, absorbed in its own movement, too
absorbed to note anything else than the movement while that continues
to preoccupy it. A limited practical self-oblivion, not
an essential and binding self-ignorance, is the nature of this
exclusive concentration which is yet the root of that which
works as the Ignorance.
So too we see that man, though a really indivisible stream of Tapas,
of conscious energy in Time, capable of acting in the present only by the sum of
his past force of working, creating already his future by his past and his
present action, yet lives absorbed in the present moment, lives from moment to
moment, and is therefore in this superficial action of consciousness, ignorant
of his future and ignorant of his past except for that small
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part of it which at any moment he may recall to him
by memory. He does not, however, live in the past; what he recalls is
not the past itself, but only the ghost of it, a conceptual shadow of a
reality which is now to him dead, non-existent, no longer
in being. But all this is an action of the superficial ignorance. The
true consciousness within is not unaware of its past; it
holds it there, not necessarily in memory but in being, still active,
living, ready with its fruits, and sends it up from time to time
in memory or more concretely in result of past action or past causes to
the superficial conscious being,—that is indeed the
true rationale of what is called Karma. It is or can be aware too of
the future, for there is somewhere in the inner being a
field of cognition open to future knowledge, a prospective as well as a
retrospective Time-sense, Time-vision,
Time-perception; something in it lives indivisibly in the three times
and contains all their apparent divisions, holds the future
ready for manifestation within it. Here, then, in this habit of living
in the present, we have a second absorption, a second
exclusive concentration which complicates and farther limits the being,
but simplifies the apparent course of the action by
relating it not to the whole infinite course of Time, but to a definite
succession of moments.
Therefore in his superficial consciousness man is to himself
dynamically, practically, the man of the moment, not the
man of the past who once was but is no longer in existence, nor the man
of the future who is not yet in being; it is by
memory that he links himself with the one, by anticipation with the
other: a continuous ego-sense runs through the three
times, but this is a centralising mental construction, not an essential
or an extended existence containing what was, is and will be. An
intuition of self is behind it, but that is an underlying identity,
unaffected by the changes of his personality; in his surface formation
of being he is not that but what he is at the moment. Yet all the time
this existence in the moment is not the real or the whole truth of his
being, but only a practical or pragmatic truth for the purposes of the
superficial movement of his life and within its limits. It is a truth,
not an unreality, but a truth only in its positive part; in its
negative parts it is an ignorance, and this negative ignorance limits
and often distorts even the practical truth, so that the conscious
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life of man proceeds according to an ignorance, a partial, a half-true half-false knowledge, not according to the real truth of
himself of which he is oblivious. Yet because his real self is the true determinator and governs all secretly from behind, it is
after all a knowledge behind which really determines the formed course of his existence; the superficial ignorance erects a
necessary limiting outline and supplies the factors by which the outward colour and turn needed for his present human life
and his present moment are given to his consciousness and his action. In the same way and for the same reason man
identifies himself solely with the name and form he wears in his present existence; he is ignorant of his past before birth
even as of his future after death. Yet all that he forgets is contained, present and effective, in the all-retaining integral
consciousness within him.
There is a minor pragmatic use of exclusive concentration on the
surface which may also give us an indication in spite
of its temporary character. The superficial man living from moment to
moment plays, as it were, several parts in his present
life and, while he is busy with each part, he is capable of an
exclusive concentration, an absorption in it, by which he forgets
the rest of himself, puts it behind him for the moment, is to that
extent self-oblivious. The man is for the moment the actor,
the poet, the soldier or whatever else he may have been constituted and
formed into by some peculiar and characteristic
action of his force of being, his Tapas, his past conscious energy and
by the action which develops from it. Not only is he apt to deliver
himself up to this exclusive concentration in a part of himself for the
time being, but his success in the action very largely depends on the
completeness with which he can thus put aside the rest of himself and
live only in his immediate work. Yet all the time we can see that it is
the whole man who is really doing the action and not merely this
particular part of him; what he does, the way he does it, the elements
he brings into it, the stamp he gives to his work depends on his whole
character, mind, information, genius, all that the past of him has made
him, — and not his past in this life only, but in other lives, and
again not only his past, but the past, the present and the predestined
future both of himself and the world around him are the determinants of
his work. The
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present actor, poet or soldier in him is only a
separative determination of his Tapas; it is his force of being
organised for a
particular kind of action of its energy, a separative movement of
Tapas, which is able, — and this ability is not a weakness, a
deficiency, but a great power of the consciousness, — to absorb itself
in that particular working to the temporary self-oblivion
of the rest of itself, even though that rest is present all the time at
the back of the consciousness and in the work itself and is
active or has its influence in the shaping of the work. This active
self-oblivion of the man in his work and the part he plays,
differs from the other, the deeper self-oblivion, in that the wall of
separation is less phenomenally and not at all enduringly
complete; the mind can dissolve its concentration and go back from its
work at any time to the consciousness of the larger
self of which this was a partial action. The superficial or apparent
man cannot so go back at will to the real man within him;
he can only do it to some extent abnormally or supernormally in
exceptional conditions of his mentality or, more permanently
and completely, as the fruit of a long and arduous self-training,
self-deepening, self-heightening, self-expansion. Still he can
go back; therefore the difference is phenomenal only, not essential: it
is, in essence, in both cases the same movement of
exclusive concentration, of absorption in a particular aspect of
himself, action, movement of force, though with different
circumstances and another manner of working.
This power of exclusive concentration is not confined to absorption in
a particular character or type of working of one's
larger self, but extends to a complete self-forgetfulness in the
particular action in which we happen at the moment to be
engaged. The actor in moments of great intensity forgets that he is an
actor and becomes the part that he is playing on the
stage; not that he really thinks himself Rama or Ravana, but that he
identifies himself for the time being with the form of character and
action which the name represents and so completely as to forget the
real man who is playing it. So the poet forgets himself, the man, the
worker, in his work and is for the moment only the inspired impersonal
energy which works itself out in formation of word and rhythm; of all
else he is oblivious. The soldier forgets himself in the act and
becomes the charge and the fury and the slaying. In
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the same way the man who is overcome by intense
anger, forgets himself as it is commonly said, or as it has been still
more
aptly and forcibly put, becomes anger: and these terms express a real
truth which is not the whole truth of the man's being
at the time, but a practical fact of his conscious energy in action. He
does forget himself, forgets all the rest of himself with
its other impulses and powers of self-restraint and self-direction, so
that he acts simply as the energy of the passion which
preoccupies him, becomes that energy for the time being. This is as far
as self-forgetfulness can go in the normal active
human psychology; for it must return soon to the wider self-aware
consciousness of which this self-forgetfulness is only a
temporary movement.
But in the larger universal consciousness there must be a power of
carrying this movement to its absolute point, to the
greatest extreme possible for any relative movement to reach, and this
point is reached, not in human unconsciousness
which is not abiding and always refers back to the awakened conscious
being that man normally and characteristically is,
but in the inconscience of material Nature. This inconscience is no
more real than the ignorance of exclusive concentration
in our temporary being which limits the waking consciousness of man;
for as in us, so in the atom, the metal, the plant, in
every form of material Nature, in every energy of material Nature,
there is, we know, a secret soul, a secret will, a secret
intelligence at work, other than the mute self-oblivious form, the
Conscient, — conscient even in unconscious things, — of the
Upanishad, without whose presence and informing Conscious-Force or
Tapas no work of Nature could be done. What is
inconscient there is the Prakriti, the formal, the motional action of
the energy absorbed in the working, identified with it, to
such an extent as to be bound in a sort of trance or swoon of
concentration, unable to go back, while imprisoned in that
form, to its real self, to the integral conscious being and the
integral force of conscious being which it has put behind it, of
which in its ecstatic trance of mere working and energy it has become
oblivious. Prakriti, the executive Force, becomes
unaware of Purusha, the Conscious-Being, holds him hidden within
herself and becomes again slowly aware only with the
emergence of consciousness from this swoon of the Inconscience. Purusha
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indeed consents to assume the apparent form of
itself which Prakriti constructs for it; it seems to become the
Inconscient,
the physical being, the vital being, the mental being: but in all these
it remains still in reality itself; the light of the secret
conscious Being supports and informs the action of the inconscient or
emergingly conscious energy of Nature.
The inconscience is superficial like the ignorance of the waking
human mind or the inconscience or subconscience of
his sleeping mind, and within it is the All-conscient; it is entirely
phenomenal, but it is the complete phenomenon. So
complete is it that it is only by an impulsion of evolutionary
consciousness emerging into other forms less imprisoned by this
inconscient method of working that it can come back to itself, recover
in the animal a partial awareness, then in man at his
highest some possibility of approach to a first more complete though
still superficial initiation of a truly conscious working.
But still, as in the case of the superficial and the real man where
there is also a similar though lesser inability, the difference
is phenomenal only. Essentially, in the universal order of things, the
inconscience of material Nature is the same exclusive
concentration, the same absorption in the work and the energy as in the
self-limitation of the waking human mind, or the
concentration of the self-forgetting mind in its working; it is only
that self-limitation carried to a farthest point of
self-forgetfulness which becomes, not a temporary action, but the law
of its action. Nescience in Nature is the complete
self-ignorance; the partial knowledge and general ignorance of man is a
partial self-ignorance marking in her evolutionary
order a return towards self-knowledge: but both are and all ignorance
is, when examined, a superficially exclusive
self-forgetful concentration of Tapas, of the conscious energy of being
in a particular line or section of its movement of which alone it is
aware or which alone it seems to be on the surface. The ignorance is
effective within the bounds of that movement and valid for its
purposes, but phenomenal, partial, superficial, not essentially real,
not integral. We have to use the word “real” necessarily in a quite
limited and not in its absolute sense; for the ignorance is real
enough, but it is not the whole truth of our being and by regarding it
by itself even its truth is misrepresented to our
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outer awareness. In that true truth of itself it is an involved Consciousness and Knowledge evolving back to itself, but it is
dynamically effective as an Inconscience and an Ignorance.
This being the root-nature of the Ignorance, a practical truth of a
phenomenally but not really dividing, of a limiting and separative
conscious energy absorbed in its works to the apparent forgetfulness of
its integral and real self, we may answer
the questions that arise of the why, the where and the how of this
movement. The reason for the Ignorance, its necessity,
becomes clear enough once we have seen that without it the object of
the manifestation of our world would be impossible,
could not be done at all, or not completely, or not in the way in which
it should be and is done. Each side of the manifold
Ignorance has its justification, which is only a part of the one
general necessity. Man, living in his timeless being, could not
have thrown himself into the stream of Time with that movement of
subjection to its flux from moment to moment which is
the nature of his present living. Living in his superconscient or
subliminal self, he could not have worked out from the knot of
his individual mentality the relations which he has to ravel and
unravel with the world about him, or would have to do it in a
radically different fashion. Living in the universal self and not in
the egoistic separative consciousness, he could not evolve
that separate action, personality, outlook from himself as the sole or
the initial centre and point of reference which is the
contribution of the ego-sense to the world-workings. He has to put on
the temporal, the psychological, the egoistic ignorance
in order to protect himself against the light of the infinite and the
largeness of the universal, so as to develop behind this
defence his temporal individuality in the cosmos. He has to live as if
in this one life and put on the ignorance of his infinite
past and his future: for otherwise, if the past were present to him, he
could not work out his present selected relations with
his environment in the way intended; his knowledge would be too great
for him, it would necessarily alter the whole spirit
and balance and form of his action. He has to live in the mind absorbed
by this bodily life and not in the Supermind; for otherwise all these
protecting walls of ignorance created by the limiting, dividing,
differentiating power of
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mind would not be built or would become too thin and transparent for his purpose.
That purpose for which all this exclusive concentration we call the
Ignorance is necessary, is to trace the cycle of
self-oblivion and self-discovery for the joy of which the Ignorance is
assumed in Nature by the secret spirit. It is not that all
cosmic manifestation would otherwise become impossible; but it would be
a quite different manifestation from the one in
which we live; it would be confined to the higher worlds of the divine
Existence or to a typal non-evolving cosmos where
each being lived in the whole light of its own law of nature, and this
obverse manifestation, this evolving cycle, would be
impossible. What is here the goal would be then the eternal condition;
what is here a stage would be the perpetuated type of
existence. It is to find himself in the apparent opposites of his being
and his nature that Sachchidananda descends into the
material Nescience and puts on its phenomenal ignorance as a
superficial mask in which he hides himself from his own
conscious energy, leaving it self-forgetful and absorbed in its works
and forms. It is in those forms that the slowly awaking
soul has to accept the phenomenal action of an ignorance which is
really knowledge awaking progressively out of the
original nescience, and it is in the new conditions created by these
workings that it has to rediscover itself and divinely
transform by that light the life which is thus labouring to fulfil the
purpose of its descent into the Inconscience. Not to return
as speedily as may be to heavens where perfect light and joy are
eternal or to the supracosmic bliss is the object of this
cosmic cycle, nor merely to repeat a purposeless round in a long
unsatisfactory groove of ignorance seeking for knowledge
and never finding it perfectly, — in that case the ignorance would be
either an inexplicable blunder of the All-conscient or a
painful and purposeless Necessity equally inexplicable, — but to
realise the Ananda of the Self in other conditions than the
supracosmic, in cosmic being, and to find its heaven of joy and light
even in the oppositions offered by the terms of an embodied material
existence, by struggle therefore towards the joy of self-discovery,
would seem to be the true object of the birth of the soul in the human
body and of the
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labour of the human race in the series of its cycles. The Ignorance is a necessary, though quite subordinate term which the
universal Knowledge has imposed on itself that that movement might be possible, — not a blunder and a fall, but a purposeful
descent, not a curse, but a divine opportunity. To find and embody the All-Delight in an intense summary of its manifoldness,
to achieve a possibility of the infinite Existence which could not be achieved in other conditions, to create out of Matter a
temple of the Divinity would seem to be the task imposed on the spirit born into the material universe.
The ignorance, we see, is not in the secret soul, but in the apparent
Prakriti; nor does it belong to the whole of that
Prakriti, — it cannot, for Prakriti is the action of the All-conscient,
— but arises in some development from its original
integrality of light and power. Where does that development take place,
in what principle of being does it find its opportunity
and starting-point? Not, certainly, in the infinite being, the infinite
consciousness, the infinite delight which are the supreme
planes of existence and from which all else derives or descends into
this obscurer ambiguous manifestation. There it can
have no place. Not in the Supermind; for in the Supermind the infinite
light and power are always present even in the most
finite workings, and the consciousness of unity embraces the
consciousness of diversity. It is on the plane of mind that this
putting back of the real self-consciousness becomes possible. For mind
is that power of the conscious being which
differentiates and runs along the lines of differentiation with the
sense of diversity prominent and characteristic and the
sense of unity behind it only, not characteristic, not the very stuff
of its workings. If by any chance this supporting sense of
unity could be drawn back, — it is possessed by mind not in its own
separate right, but because it has the Supermind behind it,
because it reflects the light of the Supermind of which it is a
derivative and secondary power, — if a veil could fall between
mind and Supermind shutting off the light of the Truth or letting it
come through only in rays diffused, scattered, reflected but with
distortion and division, then the phenomenon of the Ignorance would
intervene. Such a veil exists, says the Upanishad, constituted by the
action of
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Mind itself: it is in Overmind a golden lid which hides the face of the supramental Truth but reflects its image; in Mind it
becomes a more opaque and smoky-luminous coverture. That action is the absorbed looking downward of Mind on the
diversity which is its characteristic movement and away from the supreme unity which that diversity expresses, until it
forgets altogether to remember and support itself by the unity. Even then the unity supports it and makes its activities
possible, but the absorbed Energy is unaware of its own origin and greater, real self. Since Mind forgets that from which it
derived, because of absorption in the workings of formative Energy, it becomes so far identified with that Energy as to lose
hold even on itself, to become totally oblivious in a trance of work which it still supports in its somnambulist action, but of
which it is no longer aware. This is the last stage of the descent of consciousness, an abysmal sleep, a fathomless trance of
consciousness which is the profound basis of the action of material Nature.
It must be remembered, however, that when we speak of a partial
movement of Consciousness-Force absorbed in its
forms and actions, in a limited field of its working, this does not
imply any real division of its integrality. The putting of the
rest of itself behind it has only the effect of making all that rest
occult to the frontal immediately active energy in the limited
field of movement, but not of shutting it out of the field; in fact the
integral Force is there though veiled by the Inconscience,
and it is that integral Force supported by the integral self-being
which through its frontal energy does all the work and
inhabits all the forms created by the movement. It is to be noted also
that in order to remove the veil of the Ignorance the
conscious Force of being in us uses a reverse action of its power of
exclusive concentration; it quiets the frontal movement
of Prakriti in the individual consciousness and concentrates
exclusively on the concealed inner being, — on the Self or on the
true inner, psychic or mental or vital being, the Purusha, — to
disclose it. But when it has done so, it need not remain in this
opposite exclusiveness; it can resume its integral consciousness or a
global consciousness which includes both being of Purusha and action of
Prakriti, the
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soul and its instruments, the Self and the dynamisms of the
Self-Power, atmasakti: it can then embrace its manifestation
with a larger consciousness free from the previous limitation, free from the results of Nature's forgetfulness of the
indwelling Spirit. Or it may quiet the whole working it has manifested, concentrate on a higher level of Self and Nature, raise
the being to it and bring down the powers of the higher level to transform the previous manifestation: all that is so
transformed is still included, but as a part of the higher dynamism and its higher values, in a new and greater self-creation.
This is what can happen when the Consciousness-Force in our being decides to raise its evolution from the mental to the
supramental level. In each case it is Tapas that is effective, but it acts in a different manner according to the thing that has
to be done, according to the predetermined process, dynamism, self-deploying of the Infinite.
But still, even if this is the mechanism of the Ignorance, it may be
asked whether it does not remain a mystery how the
All-conscient could, though in only a partial action of his conscious
energy, succeed in arriving at even this superficial
ignorance and inconscience. Even if it were so, it would be worth-while
to fix the exact action of this mystery, its nature, its
limits, so that we may not be appalled by it and misled from the real
purpose it serves and the opportunity it gives. But the
mystery is a fiction of the dividing intellect which, because it finds
or creates a logical opposition between two concepts,
thinks there is a real opposition of the two facts observed and
therefore an impossibility of co-existence and unity between
them. This Ignorance is, as we have seen, really a power of the
Knowledge to limit itself, to concentrate itself on the work
in hand, an exclusive concentration in practice which does not prevent
the full existence and working of the whole conscious
being behind, but a working in the conditions chosen and self-imposed
on the nature. All conscious self-limitation is a power
for its special purpose, not a weakness; all concentration is a force
of conscious being, not a disability. It is true that while
the Supermind is capable of an integral, comprehensive, multiple,
infinite self-concentration, this is dividing
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and limited; it is true also that it creates
perverse as well as partial and, in so far, false or only half-true
values of things: but
we have seen the object of the limitation and of this partiality of
knowledge; and the object being admitted, the power to fulfil it must
be admitted also in the absolute force of the absolute Being. This
power of self-limitation for a particular
working, instead of being incompatible with the absolute
conscious-force of that Being, is precisely one of the powers we
should expect to exist among the manifold energies of the
Infinite.
The Absolute is not really limited by putting forth in itself a cosmos
of relations; it is the natural play of its absolute
being, consciousness, force, self-delight. The Infinite is not limited
by building up in itself an infinite series of interplaying
finite phenomena; rather that is its natural self-expression. The One
is not limited by its capacity for multiplicity in which it
enjoys variously its own being; rather that is part of the true
description of an infinite as opposed to a rigid, finite and
conceptual unity. So too the Ignorance, considered as a power of
manifoldly self-absorbed and self-limiting concentration of
the conscious being, is a natural capacity of variation in his
self-conscious knowledge, one of the possible poises of relation
of the Absolute in its manifestation, of the Infinite in its series of
finite workings, of the One in its self-enjoyment in the
Many. The power by self-absorption to become unaware of the world which
yet at the same time continues in the being, is
one extreme of this capacity of consciousness; the power by absorption
in the cosmic workings to become ignorant of the
self which all the time is carrying on those workings, is the reverse
extreme. But neither really limits the integral self-aware
existence of Sachchidananda which is superior to these apparent
oppositions; even in their opposition they help to express and manifest
the Ineffable.
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