|
CHAPTER
XVII
The Progress to Knowledge — God, Man and Nature
Thou art That, O Swetaketu.
Chhandogya Upanishad.¹
The living being is none else than the Brahman, the whole world
is the Brahman.
Vivekachudamani.²
My supreme Nature has become the living being and this
world
is upheld by it... all beings have this for their source of birth.
Gita.³
.
Thou art man and woman, boy and girl; old and worn thou
walkest bent over a staff; thou art the blue bird and the green
and the
scarlet-eyed...
Swetaswatara Upanishad.4
4IV. 3, 4
This whole world is filled with beings who are His
members.
Swetaswatara Upanishad.5
AN INVOLUTION of the Divine Existence, the spiritual Reality, in the apparent inconscience of Matter is the starting-point of the
evolution. But that Reality is in its nature an eternal Existence, Consciousness, Delight of Existence: the evolution must then
be an emergence of this Existence, Consciousness, Delight of Existence, not at first in its essence or totality but in
evolutionary forms that express or disguise it. Out of the Inconscient, Existence appears in a first evolutionary form as
substance of Matter created by an inconscient Energy. Consciousness, involved and non-apparent in Matter, first emerges
in the disguise of vital vibrations, animate but subconscient; then, in imperfect formulations of a conscient life, it strives
towards self-finding through successive forms of that material substance, forms more and more adapted to its own
completer expression. Consciousness in life, throwing off the primal insensibility of a material inanimation and nescience,
labours to find itself more and more entirely in the Ignorance
¹
VI. 8. 7. ²
Verse 479. ³ VII. 5, 6
5 IV. 10.
Page-683
which is its first inevitable formulation; but it
achieves at first only a primary mental perception and a vital
awareness of self
and things, a life-perception which in its first forms depends on an
internal sensation responsive to the contacts of other life
and of Matter. Consciousness labours to manifest as best it can through
the inadequacy of sensation its own inherent delight
of being; but it can only formulate a partial pain and pleasure. In man
the energising Consciousness appears as Mind more
clearly aware of itself and things; this is still a partial and
limited, not an integral power of itself, but a first conceptive
potentiality and promise of integral emergence is visible. That
integral emergence is the goal of evolving Nature.
Man is there to affirm himself in the universe, that is his first
business, but also to evolve and finally to exceed himself:
he has to enlarge his partial being into a complete being, his partial
consciousness into an integral consciousness; he has to
achieve mastery of his environment but also world-union and
world-harmony; he has to realise his individuality but also to
enlarge it into a cosmic self and a universal and spiritual delight of
existence. A transformation, a chastening and correction
of all that is obscure, erroneous and ignorant in his mentality, an
ultimate arrival at a free and wide harmony and
luminousness of knowledge and will and feeling and action and
character, is the evident intention of his nature; it is the ideal
which the creative Energy has imposed on his intelligence, a need
implanted by her in his mental and vital substance. But
this can only be accomplished by his growing into a larger being and a
larger consciousness: self-enlargement,
self-fulfilment, self-evolution from what he partially and temporarily
is in his actual and apparent nature to what he
completely is in his secret self and spirit and therefore can become
even in his manifest existence, is the object of his
creation. This hope is the justification of his life upon earth amidst
the phenomena of the cosmos. The outer apparent man,
an ephemeral being subject to the constraints of his material
embodiment and imprisoned in a limited mentality, has to
become the inner real Man, master of himself and his environment and
universal in his being. In a more vivid and less
metaphysical language, the natural man has to evolve himself
Page 684
into the divine Man; the sons of Death have to know themselves as the children of Immortality. It is on this account that the
human birth can be described as the turning-point in the evolution, the critical stage in earth-nature.
It follows at once that the knowledge we have to arrive at is not truth
of the intellect; it is not right belief, right opinions,
right information about oneself and things,—that is only the surface
mind's idea of knowledge. To arrive at some mental
conception about God and ourselves and the world is an object good for
the intellect but not large enough for the Spirit; it
will not make us the conscious sons of Infinity. Ancient Indian thought
meant by knowledge a consciousness which
possesses the highest Truth in a direct perception and in
self-experience; to become, to be the Highest that we know is the
sign that we really have the knowledge. For the same reason, to shape
our practical life, our actions as far as may be in
consonance with our intellectual notions of truth and right or with a
successful pragmatic knowledge,—an ethical or a vital fulfilment,—is
not and cannot be the ultimate aim of our life; our aim must be to grow
into our true being, our being of Spirit,
the being of the supreme and universal Existence, Consciousness,
Delight, Sachchidananda.
All our existence depends
on that Existence, it is that which is evolving in us; we are a being
of that Existence, a state
of consciousness of that Consciousness, an energy of that conscious
Energy, a will-to-delight of being, delight of
consciousness, delight of energy born of that Delight: this is the root
principle of our existence. But our surface formulation
of these things is not that, it is a mistranslation into the terms of
the Ignorance. Our I is not that spiritual being which can
look on the Divine Existence and say, “That am I”; our mentality is not
that spiritual consciousness; our will is not that force
of consciousness; our pain and pleasure, even our highest joys and
ecstasies are not that delight of being. On the surface we
are still an ego figuring self, an ignorance turning into knowledge, a
will labouring towards true force, a desire seeking for
the delight of existence. To become ourselves by exceeding
ourselves,—so we may turn the inspired phrases of a half-blind
seer who knew not the self of
Page-685
which he spoke,—is the difficult and dangerous
necessity, the cross surmounted by an invisible crown which is imposed
on
us, the riddle of the true nature of his being proposed to man by the
dark Sphinx of the Inconscience below and from within
and above by the luminous veiled Sphinx of the infinite Consciousness
and eternal Wisdom confronting him as an inscrutable
divine Maya. To exceed ego and be our true self, to be aware of our
real being, to possess it, to possess a real delight of
being, is therefore the ultimate meaning of our life here; it is the
concealed sense of our individual and terrestrial existence.
Intellectual knowledge and
practical action are devices of Nature by which we are able to express
so much of our
being, consciousness, energy, power of enjoyment as we have been able
to actualise in our apparent nature and by which
we attempt to know more, express and actualise more, grow always more
into the much that we have yet to actualise. But
our intellect and mental knowledge and will of action are not our only
means, not all the instruments of our consciousness
and energy: our nature, the name which we give to the Force of being in
us in its actual and potential play and power, is
complex in its ordering of consciousness, complex in its
instrumentation of force. Every discovered or discoverable term and
circumstance of that complexity which we can get into working order, we
need to actualise in the highest and finest values
possible to us and to use in its widest and richest powers for the one
object. That object is to become, to be conscious, to
increase continually in our realised being and awareness of self and
things, in our actualised force and joy of being, and to
express that becoming dynamically in such an action on the world and
ourselves that we and it shall grow more and always
yet more towards the highest possible reach, largest possible breadth
of universality and infinity. All man's age-long effort,
his action, society, art, ethics, science, religion, all the manifold
activities by which he expresses and increases his mental,
vital, physical, spiritual existence, are episodes in the vast drama of
this endeavour of Nature and have behind their limited
apparent aims no other true sense or foundation. For the individual to
arrive at the divine universality and supreme infinity,
live in it, possess it, to be, know, feel and express that
Page-686
alone in all his being, consciousness, energy, delight of being is what the ancient seers of the Veda meant by the
Knowledge; that was the Immortality which they set before man as his divine culmination.
But by the nature of his mentality, by his inlook into himself and his
outlook on the world, by his original limitation in both
through sense and body to the relative, the obvious and the apparent,
man is obliged to move step by step and at first
obscurely and ignorantly in this immense evolutionary movement. It is
not possible for him to envisage being at first in the
completeness of its unity: it presents itself to him through diversity,
and his search for knowledge is preoccupied with three
principal categories which sum up for him all its diversity;
himself,—man or individual soul,—God, and Nature. The first is
that of which alone he is directly aware in his normal ignorant being;
he sees himself, the individual, separate apparently in
its existence, yet always inseparable from the rest of being, striving
to be sufficient, yet always insufficient to itself, since
never has it been known to come into existence or to exist or to
culminate in its existence apart from the rest, without their
aid and independently of universal being and universal nature.
Secondly, there is that which he knows only indirectly by his
mind and bodily senses and its effects upon them, yet must strive
always to know more and more completely: for he sees
also this rest of being with which he is so closely identified and yet
from which he is so separate,—the cosmos, world,
Nature, other individual existences whom he perceives as always like
himself and yet always unlike; for they are the same
in nature even to the plant and the animal and yet different in nature.
Each seems to go its own way, to be a separate being,
and yet each is impelled by the same movement and follows in its own
grade the same vast curve of evolution as himself.
Finally, he sees or rather divines something else which he does not
know at all except quite indirectly; for he knows it only
through himself and that at which his being aims, through the world and
that at which it seems to point and which it is either
striving obscurely to reach and express by its imperfect figures or, at
least, founds them without knowing it on their secret
relation to that invisible Reality and occult Infinite.
Page-687
This third and unknown,
this tertium quid, he names God; and by the word he means somewhat or
someone who is the
Supreme, the Divine, the Cause, the All, one of these things or all of
them at once, the perfection or the totality of all that
here is partial or imperfect, the absolute of all these myriad
relativities, the Unknown by learning of whom the real secret of
the known can become to him more and more intelligible. Man has tried
to deny all these categories,—he has tried to deny
his own real existence, he has tried to deny the real existence of the
cosmos, he has tried to deny the real existence of God.
But behind all these denials we see the same constant necessity of his
attempt at knowledge; for he feels the need of
arriving at a unity of these three terms, even if it can only be done
by suppressing two of them or merging them in the other
that is left. To do that he affirms only himself as cause and all the
rest as mere creations of his mind, or he affirms only
Nature and all the rest as nothing but phenomena of Nature-Energy, or
he affirms only God, the Absolute, and all the rest as
no more than illusions which That thrusts upon itself or on us by an
inexplicable Maya. None of these denials can wholly
satisfy, none solves the entire problem or can be indisputable and
definitive,—least of all the one to which his
sense-governed intellect is most prone, but in which it can never
persist for long; the denial of God is a denial of his true
quest and his own supreme Ultimate. The ages of naturalistic atheism
have always been short-lived because they can never
satisfy the secret knowledge in man: that cannot be the final Veda
because it does not correspond with the Veda within
which all mental knowledge is labouring to bring out; from the moment
that this lack of correspondence is felt, a solution,
however skilful it may be and however logically complete, has been
judged by the eternal Witness in man and is doomed; it
cannot be the last word of Knowledge.
Man as he is is not
sufficient to himself, nor separate, nor is he the Eternal and the All;
therefore by himself he cannot
be the explanation of the cosmos of which his mind, life and body are
so evidently an infinitesimal detail. The visible cosmos
too, he finds, is not sufficient to itself, nor does it explain itself
even by its unseen material forces; for there is too much that
he finds
Page-688
both in the world and in himself which is beyond them and of which they seem only to be a face, an epidermis or even a
mask. Neither his intellect, nor his intuitions, nor his feeling can do without a One or a Oneness to whom or to which these
world-forces and himself may stand in some relation which supports them and gives them their significance. He feels that
there must be an Infinite which holds these finites, is in, behind and about all this visible cosmos, bases the harmony and
interrelation and essential oneness of multitudinous things. His thought needs an Absolute on which these innumerable and
finite relativities depend for their existence, an ultimate Truth of things, a creating Power or Force or a Being who originates
and upholds all these innumerable beings in the universe. Let him call it what he will, he must arrive at a Supreme, a Divine,
a Cause, an Infinite and Eternal, a Permanent, a Perfection to which all tends and aspires, or an All to which everything
perpetually and invisibly amounts and without which they could not be.
Yet even this Absolute he
cannot really affirm by itself and to the exclusion of the two other
categories; for then he has
only made a violent leap away from the problem he is here to solve, and
he himself and the cosmos remain an inexplicable
mystification or a purposeless mystery. A certain part of his intellect
and his longing for rest may be placated by such a
solution, just as his physical intelligence is easily satisfied by a
denial of the Beyond and a deification of material Nature; but
his heart, his will, the strongest and intensest parts of his being
remain without a meaning, void of purpose or justification, or
become merely a random foolishness agitating itself like a vain and
restless shadow against the eternal repose of the pure
Existence or amidst the eternal inconscience of the universe. As for
the cosmos, it remains there in the singular character of
a carefully constructed lie of the Infinite, a monstrously aggressive
and yet really non-existent anomaly, a painful and
miserable paradox with false shows of wonder and beauty and delight. Or
else it is a huge play of blind organised Energy
without significance and his own being a temporary minute anomaly
incomprehensibly occurring in that senseless vastness.
That way no satisfying fulfilment lies for the consciousness, the
energy that has manifested itself in the world
Page-689
and in man: the mind needs to find something that links all together, something by which Nature is fulfilled in man and man in
Nature and both find themselves in God, because the Divine is ultimately self-revealed in both man and Nature.
An acceptance, a perception
of the unity of these three categories is essential to the Knowledge;
it is towards their
unity as well as their integrality that the growing self-consciousness
of the individual opens out and at which it must arrive if
it is to be satisfied of itself and complete. For without the
realisation of unity the Knowledge of none of the three can be
entire; their unity is for each the condition of its own integrality.
It is, again, by knowing each in its completeness that all
three meet in our consciousness and become one; it is in a total
knowledge that all knowing becomes one and indivisible.
Otherwise it is only by division and rejection of two of them from the
third that we could get at any kind of oneness. Man
therefore has to enlarge his knowledge of himself, his knowledge of the
world and his knowledge of God until in their totality
he becomes aware of their mutual indwelling and oneness. For so long as
he knows them only in part, there will be an
incompleteness resulting in division, and so long as he has not
realised them in a reconciling unity, he will not have found
their total truth or the fundamental significances of existence.
This is not to say that the Supreme is not self-existent and self-sufficient; God exists in Himself and not by virtue of the
cosmos or of man, while man and cosmos exist by virtue of God and not in themselves except in so far as their being is one
with the being of God. But still they are a manifestation of the power of God and even in His eternal existence their spiritual
reality must in some way be present or implied, since otherwise there would be no possibility of their manifestation or,
manifested, they would have no significance. What appears here as man is an individual being of the Divine; the Divine
extended in multiplicity is the Self of all individual existences.¹
Moreover, it is through the knowledge of self and the world that man arrives at the knowledge of God and he cannot attain
to it otherwise. It is not by rejecting God's manifestation, but by rejecting his own ignorance of it and
¹eko vaśī sarvabhūtāntarātmā—Katha
Upanishad, II. 2. 12.
Page-690
the results of his ignorance, that he can best lift
up and offer the whole of his being and consciousness and energy and
joy of
being into the Divine Existence. He may do this through himself, one
manifestation, or he may do it through the universe,
another manifestation. Arriving through himself alone, it is possible
for him to plunge into an individual immergence or
absorption in the Indefinable and to lose the universe. Arriving
through the universe alone, he can sink his individuality either
in the impersonality of universal being or in a dynamic self of
universal Conscious-Force; he merges into the universal self or
he becomes an impersonal channel of the cosmic Energy. Arriving through
the equal integrality of both and seizing through
them and beyond them on all the aspects of the Divine, he exceeds both
and fulfils them in that exceeding: he possesses the
Divine in his being, even as he is enveloped, penetrated, pervaded,
possessed by the Divine Being, Consciousness, Light,
Power, Delight, Knowledge; he possesses God in himself and God in the
universe. The All-Knowledge justifies to him its
creation of himself and justifies by him perfected its creation of the
world it has made. All this becomes entirely real and
effective by an ascension into a supramental and supreme supernature
and the descent of its powers into the manifestation; but even while
that consummation is still difficult and distant, the true knowledge
can be made subjectively real by a spiritual reflection or reception in
mind-life-body Nature.
But this spiritual truth and true
aim of his being is not allowed to appear till late in his journey: for the
early preparatory business of man in the evolutionary steps of Nature is to
affirm, to make distinct and rich, to possess firmly, powerfully and completely
his own individuality. As a consequence, he has in the beginning principally to
occupy himself with his own ego. In this egoistic phase of his evolution the
world and others are less important to him than himself, are indeed only
important as aids and occasions for his self-affirmation. God too at this stage
is less important to him than he is to himself, and therefore in earlier
formations, on the lower levels of religious development, God or the gods are
treated as if they existed for man, as supreme instruments for the satisfaction
of his desires, his helpers
Page-691
in his task of getting the world in which he lives
to satisfy his needs and wants and ambitions. This primary egoistic
development with all its sins and violences and crudities is by no
means to be regarded, in its proper place, as an evil or an
error of Nature; it is necessary for man's first work, the finding of
his own individuality and its perfect disengagement from
the lower subconscient in which the individual is overpowered by the
mass-consciousness of the world and entirely subject
to the mechanical workings of Nature. Man the individual has to affirm,
to distinguish his personality against Nature, to be
powerfully himself, to evolve all his human capacities of force and
knowledge and enjoyment so that he may turn them upon
her and upon the world with more and more mastery and force; his
self-discriminating egoism is given him as a means for
this primary purpose. Until he has thus developed his individuality,
his personality, his separate capacity, he cannot be fit for
the greater work before him or successfully turn his faculties to
higher, larger and more divine ends. He has to affirm
himself in the Ignorance before he can perfect himself in the
Knowledge.
For the initiation of the
evolutionary emergence from the Inconscient works out by two forces, a
secret cosmic
consciousness and an individual consciousness manifest on the surface.
The secret cosmic consciousness remains secret
and subliminal to the surface individual; it organises itself on the
surface by the creation of separate objects and beings. But
while it organises the separate object and the body and mind of the
individual being, it creates also collective powers of
consciousness which are large subjective formations of cosmic Nature;
but it does not provide for them an organised mind
and body, it bases them on the group of individuals, develops for them
a group-mind, a changing yet continuous group-body.
It follows that only as the individuals become more and more conscious
can the group-being also become more and more
conscious; the growth of the individual is the indispensable means for
the inner growth as distinguished from the outer force
and expansion of the collective being. This indeed is the dual
importance of the individual that it is through him that the
cosmic spirit organises its collective units and makes them
self-expressive and progressive and
Page-692
through him that it raises Nature from the
Inconscience to the Superconscience and exalts it to meet the
Transcendent. In
the mass the collective consciousness is near to the Inconscient; it
has a subconscious, an obscure and mute movement
which needs the individual to express it, to bring it to light, to
organise it and make it effective. The mass-consciousness by
itself moves by a vague, half-formed or unformed subliminal and
commonly subconscient impulse rising to the surface; it is
prone to a blind or half-seeing unanimity which suppresses the
individual in the common movement: if it thinks, it is by the
motto, the slogan, the watchword, the common crude or formed idea, the
traditional, the accepted customary notion; it acts,
when not by instinct or on impulse, then by the rule of the pack, the
herd-mentality, the type-law. This mass-consciousness,
life, action can be extraordinarily effective if it can find an
individual or a few powerful individuals to embody, express, lead,
organise it; its sudden crowd-movements can also be irresistible for
the moment like the motion of an avalanche or the rush
of a tempest. The suppression or entire subordination of the individual
in the mass-consciousness can give a great practical
efficiency to a nation or a community if the subliminal collective
being can build a binding tradition or find a group, a class, a
head to embody its spirit and direction; the strength of powerful
military states, of communities with a tense and austere
culture rigidly imposed on its individuals, the success of the great
world-conquerors, had behind it this secret of Nature. But
this is an efficiency of the outer life, and that life is not the
highest or last term of our being. There is a mind in us, there is a
soul and spirit, and our life has no true value if it has not in it a
growing consciousness, a developing mind, and if life and
mind are not an expression, an instrument, a means of liberation and
fulfilment for the soul, the indwelling Spirit.
But the progress of the
mind, the growth of the soul, even of the mind and soul of the
collectivity, depends on the
individual, on his sufficient freedom and independence, on his separate
power to express and bring into being what is still
unexpressed in the mass, still undeveloped from the subconscience or
not yet brought out from within or brought down from the Super-
Page-693
conscience. The collectivity is a mass, a field of formation; the individual is the diviner of truth, the form-maker, the
creator. In the crowd the individual loses his inner direction and becomes a cell of the mass-body moved by the collective
will or idea or the mass-impulse. He has to stand apart, affirm his separate reality in the whole, his own mind emerging from
the common mentality, his own life distinguishing itself in the common life-uniformity, even as his body has developed
something unique and recognisable in the common physicality. He has, even, in the end to retire into himself in order to find
himself, and it is only when he has found himself that he can become spiritually one with all; if he tries to achieve that
oneness in the mind, in the vital, in the physical and has not yet a sufficiently strong individuality, he may be overpowered by
the mass-consciousness and lose his soul-fulfilment, his mind-fulfilment, his life-fulfilment, become only a cell of the
mass-body. The collective being may then become strong and dominant, but it is likely to lose its plasticity, its evolutionary
movement: the great evolutionary periods of humanity have taken place in communities where the individual became active,
mentally, vitally or spiritually alive. For this reason Nature invented the ego that the individual might disengage himself from
the inconscience or subconscience of the mass and become an independent living mind, life-power, soul, spirit, co-ordinating
himself with the world around him but not drowned in it and separately inexistent and ineffective. For the individual is indeed
part of the cosmic being, but he is also something more, he is a soul that has descended from the Transcendence. This he
cannot manifest at once, because he is too near to the cosmic Inconscience, not near enough to the original
Superconscience; he has to find himself as the mental and vital ego before he
can find himself as the soul or spirit.
Still, to find his egoistic
individuality is not to know himself; the true spiritual individual is not the
mind-ego, the life-ego, the body-ego: predominantly, this first movement is a
work of will, of power, of egoistic self-effectuation and only secondarily of
knowledge. Therefore a time must come when man has to look below the obscure
surface of his egoistic being and attempt to know himself; he must set out to
find the real man: without
Page-694
that he would be stopping short at Nature's primary education and never go on to her deeper and larger teachings; however
great his practical knowledge and efficiency, he would be only a little higher than the animals. First, he has to turn his eyes
upon his own psychology and distinguish its natural elements,—ego, mind and its instruments, life, body,—until he discovers
that his whole existence stands in need of an explanation other than the working of the natural elements and of a goal for its
activities other than an egoistic self-affirmation and satisfaction. He may seek it in Nature and mankind and thus start on his
way to the discovery of his unity with the rest of his world: he may seek it in supernature, in God, and thus start on his way
to the discovery of his unity with the Divine. Practically, he attempts both paths and, continually wavering, continually seeks
to fix himself in the successive solutions that may be best in accordance with the various partial discoveries he has made on
his double line of search and finding.
But through it all what he
is in this stage still insistently seeking to discover, to know, to
fulfil is himself; his knowledge
of Nature, his knowledge of God are only helps towards self-knowledge,
towards the perfection of his being, towards the
attainment of the supreme object of his individual self-existence.
Directed towards Nature and the cosmos, it may take upon
itself the figure of self-knowledge, self-mastery,—in the mental and
vital sense,—and mastery of the world in which we find
ourselves: directed towards God, it may take also this figure but in a
higher spiritual sense of world and self, or it may
assume that other, so familiar and decisive to the religious mind, the
seeking for an individual salvation whether in heavens
beyond or by a separate immergence in a supreme Self or a supreme
Non-self,—beatitude or Nirvana. Throughout,
however, it is the individual who is seeking individual self-knowledge
and the aim of his separate existence, with all the rest,
even altruism and the love and service of mankind, self-effacement or
self-annihilation, thrown in,—with whatever subtle
disguises,—as helps and means towards that one great preoccupation of
his realised individuality. This may seem to be only
an expanded egoism, and the separative ego would then be the truth of
man's
Page-695
being persistent in him to the end or till at last
he is liberated from it by his self-extinction in the featureless
eternity of the
Infinite. But there is a deeper secret behind which justifies his
individuality and its demand, the secret of the spiritual and
eternal individual, the Purusha.
It is because of the spiritual Person, the Divinity in the individual,
that perfection or liberation,—salvation, as it is called
in the West,—has to be individual and not collective; for whatever
perfection of the collectivity is to be sought after, can
come only by the perfection of the individuals who constitute it.
It is because the individual is That, that to find himself is his
great necessity. In his complete surrender and self-giving to the Supreme it is he who finds his perfect self-finding in a
perfect self-offering. In the abolition of the mental, vital, physical ego, even of the spiritual ego, it is the formless and
limitless Individual that has the peace and joy of his escape into his own infinity. In the experience that he is nothing and no
one, or everything and everyone, or the One which is beyond all things and absolute, it is the Brahman in the individual that
effectuates this stupendous merger or this marvellous joining, Yoga, of its eternal unit of being with its vast
all-comprehending or supreme all-transcending unity of eternal existence. To get beyond the ego is imperative, but one
cannot get beyond the self,—except by finding it supremely, universally. For the self is not the ego; it is one with the All and
the One and in finding it it is the All and the One that we discover in our self: the contradiction, the separation disappears,
but the self, the spiritual reality remains, united with the One and the All by that delivering disappearance.
The higher self-knowledge
begins therefore as soon as man has got beyond his preoccupation with
the relation of
Nature and God to his superficial being, his most apparent self. One
step is to know that this life is not all, to get at the
conception of his own temporal eternity, to realise, to become
concretely aware of that subjective persistence which is
called the immortality of the soul. When he knows that there are states
beyond the material and lives behind and before him,
at any rate a pre-existence and a subsequent existence, he is on the
way to get rid
Page-696
of his temporal ignorance by enlarging himself
beyond the immediate moments of Time into the possession of his own
eternity. Another step forward is to learn that his surface waking
state is only a small part of his being, to begin to fathom
the abyss of the Inconscient and depths of the subconscient and
subliminal and scale the heights of the superconscient; so
he commences the removal of his psychological self-ignorance. A third
step is to find out that there is something in him
other than his instrumental mind, life and body, not only an immortal
ever-developing individual soul that supports his nature
but an eternal immutable self and spirit, and to learn what are the
categories of his spiritual being, until he discovers that all
in him is an expression of the spirit and distinguishes the link
between his lower and his higher existence; thus he sets out to
remove his constitutional self-ignorance. Discovering self and spirit
he discovers God; he finds out that there is a Self
beyond the temporal: he comes to the vision of that Self in the cosmic
consciousness as the divine Reality behind Nature and
this world of beings; his mind opens to the thought or the sense of the
Absolute of whom self and the individual and the
cosmos are so many faces; the cosmic, the egoistic, the original
ignorance begin to lose the rigidness of their hold upon him.
In his attempt to cast his existence into the mould of this enlarging
self-knowledge his whole view and motive of life, thought
and action are progressively modified and transformed; his practical
ignorance of himself, his nature and his object of
existence diminishes: he has set his step on the path which leads out
of the falsehood and suffering of a limited and partial
into the perfect possession and enjoyment of a true and complete
existence.
In the course of this
progress he discovers step by step the unity of the three categories
with which he started. For,
first, he finds that in his manifest being he is one with cosmos and
Nature; mind, life and body, the soul in the succession of
Time, the conscient, subconscient and superconscient,—these in their
various relations and the result of their relations are
cosmos and are Nature. But he finds too that in all which stands behind
them or on which they are based, he is one with
God; for the Absolute, the Spirit, the Self spaceless and timeless, the
Self
Page-697
manifest in the cosmos and Lord of Nature,—all this
is what we mean by God, and in all this his own being goes back to
God and derives from it; he is the Absolute, the Self, the Spirit
self-projected in a multiplicity of itself into cosmos and veiled
in Nature. In both of these realisations he finds his unity with all
other souls and beings,—relatively in Nature, since he is
one with them in mind, vitality, matter, soul, every cosmic principle
and result, however various in energy and act of energy,
disposition of principle and disposition of result, but absolutely in
God, because the one Absolute, the one Self, the one Spirit
is ever the Self of all and the origin, possessor and enjoyer of their
multitudinous diversities. The unity of God and Nature
cannot fail to manifest itself to him: for he finds in the end that it
is the Absolute who is all these relativities; he sees that it is
the Spirit of whom every other principle is a manifestation; he
discovers that it is the Self who has become all these
becomings; he feels that it is the Shakti or Power of being and
consciousness of the Lord of all beings which is Nature and
is acting in the cosmos. Thus in the progress of our self-knowledge we
arrive at that by the discovery of which all is known
as one with our self and by the possession of which all is possessed
and enjoyed in our own self-existence.
Equally, by virtue of this
unity, the knowledge of the universe must lead the mind of man to the
same large revelation.
For he cannot know Nature as Matter and Force and Life without being
driven to scrutinise the relation of mental
consciousness with these principles, and once he knows the real nature
of mind, he must go inevitably beyond every surface
appearance. He must discover the will and intelligence secret in the
works of Force, operative in material and vital
phenomena; he must perceive it as one in the waking consciousness, the
subconscient and the superconscient: he must find
the soul in the body of the material universe. Pursuing Nature through
these categories in which he recognises his unity with
the rest of the cosmos, he finds a Supernature behind all that is
apparent, a supreme power of the Spirit in Time and beyond
Time, in Space and beyond Space, a conscious Power of the Self who by
her becomes all becomings, of the Absolute who
by her manifests all
rela-
Page-698
tivities. He knows her, in other words, not only as material Energy, Life-Force, Mind-Energy, the many faces of Nature,
but as the power of Knowledge-Will of the Divine Lord of being, the Consciousness-Force of the self-existent Eternal and
Infinite.
The quest of man for God,
which becomes in the end the most ardent and enthralling of all his
quests, begins with his
first vague questionings of Nature and a sense of something unseen both
in himself and her. Even if, as modern Science
insists, religion started from animism, spirit-worship, demon-worship,
and the deification of natural forces, these first forms
only embody in primitive figures a veiled intuition in the
subconscient, an obscure and ignorant feeling of hidden influences
and incalculable forces, or a vague sense of being, will, intelligence
in what seems to us inconscient, of the invisible behind
the visible, of the secretly conscious spirit in things distributing
itself in every working of energy. The obscurity and primitive
inadequacy of the first perceptions do not detract from the value or
the truth of this great quest of the human heart and
mind, since all our seekings,—including Science itself,—must start from
an obscure and ignorant perception of hidden
realities and proceed to the more and more luminous vision of the Truth
which at first comes to us masked, draped, veiled by
the mists of the Ignorance. Anthropomorphism is an imaged recognition
of the truth that man is what he is because God is
what He is and that there is one soul and body of things, humanity even
in its incompleteness the most complete
manifestation yet achieved here and divinity the perfection of what in
man is imperfect. That he sees himself everywhere
and worships that as God is also true; but here too he has laid
confusedly the groping hand of Ignorance on a truth,—that his
being and the Being are one, that this is a partial reflection of That,
and that to find his greater Self everywhere is to find
God and to come near to the Reality in things, the Reality of all
existence.
A unity behind diversity
and discord is the secret of the variety of human religions and
philosophies; for they all get at
some image or some side clue, touch some portion of the one Truth or
envisage some one of its myriad aspects. Whether
they
Page-699
see dimly the material world as the body of the
Divine, or life as a great pulsation of the breath of Divine Existence,
or all
things as thoughts of the cosmic Mind, or realise that there is a
Spirit which is greater than these things, their subtler and yet
more wonderful source and creator,—whether they find God only in the
Inconscient or as the one Conscious in inconscient
things or as an ineffable superconscious Existence to reach whom we
must leave behind our terrestrial being and annul the
mind, life and body, or, overcoming division, see that He is all these
at once and accept fearlessly the large consequences of
that vision,—whether they worship Him with universality as the cosmic
Being or limit Him and themselves, like the
Positivist, in humanity only or, on the contrary, carried away by the
vision of the timeless and spaceless Immutable, reject
Him in Nature and Cosmos,—whether they adore Him in various strange or
beautiful or magnified forms of the human ego
or for His perfect possession of the qualities to which man aspires,
his Divinity revealed to them as a supreme Power, Love,
Beauty, Truth, Righteousness, Wisdom,—whether they perceive Him as the
Lord of Nature, Father and Creator, or as
Nature herself and the universal Mother, pursue Him as the Lover and
attracter of souls or serve Him as the hidden Master
of all works, bow down before the one God or the manifold Deity, the
one divine Man or the one Divine in all men or, more
largely, discover the One whose presence enables us to become unified
in consciousness or in works or in life with all
beings, unified with all things in Time and Space, unified with Nature
and her influences and even her inanimate
forces,—the truth behind must ever be the same because all is the one
Divine Infinite whom all are seeking. Because
everything is that One, there must be this endless variety in the human
approach to its possession; it was necessary that man
should find God thus variously in order that he might come to know Him
entirely. But it is when knowledge reaches its
highest aspects that it is possible to arrive at its greatest unity.
The highest and widest seeing is the wisest; for then all
knowledge is unified in its one comprehensive meaning. All religions
are seen as approaches to a single Truth, all
philosophies as divergent viewpoints looking at different sides of a
single Reality, all
Page-700
Sciences meet together in a supreme Science. For
that which all our mind-knowledge and sense-knowledge and suprasensuous
vision is seeking, is found most integrally in the unity of God and man
and Nature and all that is in Nature.
The Brahman, the Absolute is the Spirit, the timeless Self, the Self
possessing Time, Lord of Nature, creator and
continent of the cosmos and immanent in all existences, the Soul from
whom all souls derive and to whom they are
drawn,—that is the truth of Being as man's highest God-conception sees
it. The same Absolute revealed in all relativities,
the Spirit who embodies Himself in cosmic Mind and Life and Matter and
of whom Nature is the self of energy so that all
she seems to create is the Self and Spirit variously manifested in His
own being to His own conscious force for the delight
of His various existence,—this is the truth of being to which man's
knowledge of Nature and cosmos is leading him and
which he will reach when his Nature-knowledge unites itself with his
God-knowledge. This truth of the Absolute is the
justification of the cycles of the world; it is not their denial. It is
the Self-Being that has become all these becomings; the Self
is the eternal unity of all these existences,—I am He. Cosmic energy is
not other than the conscious force of that
Self-existent: by that energy it takes through universal nature
innumerable forms of itself; through its divine nature it can,
embracing the universal but transcendent of it, arrive in them at the
individual possession of its complete existence, when its
presence and power are felt in one, in all and in the relations of one
with all;—this is the truth of being to which man's entire
knowledge of himself in God and in Nature rises and widens. A triune
knowledge, the complete knowledge of God, the
complete knowledge of himself, the complete knowledge of Nature, gives
him his high goal; it assigns a vast and full sense
to the labour and effort of humanity. The conscious unity of the three,
God, Soul and Nature, in his own consciousness is the
sure foundation of his perfection and his realisation of all harmonies:
this will be his highest and widest state, his status of a divine
consciousness and a divine life and its initiation the starting-point
for his entire evolution of his self-knowledge, world-knowledge,
God-knowledge.
Page-701
HOME
|