CHAPTER
XXV
The Triple
Transformation
A conscious
being is the centre of the self, who rules past and
future; he is like a fire
without smoke.... That, one must disengage
with patience from one's own body.
Katha Upanishad.1
An intuition in
the heart sees that truth.
Rig Veda.
2
I abide in the
spiritual being and from there destroy the darkness
born of ignorance with the
shining lamp of knowledge.
Gita. 3
These rays are
directed downwards, their foundation is above:
may they be set deep within
us.... O Varuna, here awake, make
wide thy reign; may
we abide in the law of thy workings and be
blameless before the Mother
Infinite.
Rig Veda. 4
The Swan that
settles in the purity... born of the Truth,—itself
the Truth, the Vast.
Katha Upanishad.
5
If it is the sole intention of Nature in the
evolution of the spiritual man to awaken him to the supreme Reality and release
him from herself, or from the Ignorance in which she as the Power of the Eternal
has masked herself, by a departure into a higher status of being elsewhere, if
this step in the evolution is a close and an exit, then in the essence her work
has been already accomplished and there is nothing more to be done. The ways
have been built, the capacity to follow them has been developed, the goal or
last height of the creation is manifest; all that is left is for each soul to
reach individually the right
stage and turn of its development, enter into the spiritual ways and
pass by its own chosen path out of this inferior existence. But we have
supposed that there is a farther intention,—not only a revelation of the
Spirit, but a radical and integral transformation of Nature. There is a will in
her to effectuate a true manifestation of the embodied life of the Spirit, to
complete what she has begun
1 II. 1. 12, 13; II. 3. 17. 2 I. 24. 12. 3 X. 11. 4 I. 24. 7, 11, 15. 5 II. 2. 2.
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by a passage from the Ignorance to the
Knowledge, to throw off her mask and to reveal herself as the luminous
Consciousness-Force carrying in her the eternal Existence and its universal
Delight of being. It then becomes obvious that there is something not yet
accomplished, there becomes clear to view the much that has still to be done, bhūri aspasta kartvam; there is a height still to be reached, a wideness
still to be covered by the eye of vision, the wing of the will, the
self-affirmation of the Spirit in the material universe. What the evolutionary
Power has done is to make a few individuals aware of their souls, conscious of
their selves, aware of the eternal being that they are, to put them into
communion with the Divinity or the Reality which is concealed by her
appearances: a certain change of nature prepares, accompanies or follows upon
this illumination, but it is not the complete and radical change which
establishes a secure and settled new principle, a new creation, a permanent new
order of being in the field of terrestrial Nature. The spiritual man has
evolved, but not the supramental being who shall
thenceforward be the leader of that Nature.
This is because the
principle of spirituality has yet to affirm itself in its own complete right
and sovereignty; it has been up till now a power for the mental being to escape
from itself or to refine and raise itself to a spiritual poise, it has availed
for the release of the Spirit from mind and for the enlargement of the being in
a spiritualised mind and heart, but not,—or rather
not yet sufficiently,—for the self-affirmation of the Spirit in its own dynamic
and sovereign mastery free from the mind's limitations and from the mental
instrumentation. The development of another instrumentation has begun, but has
yet to become total and effective; it has besides to cease to be a purely
individual self-creation in an original Ignorance, something supernormal to
earth-life that must always be acquired as an individual achievement by a
difficult endeavour. It must become the normal nature
of a new type of being; as Mind is established here on a basis of Ignorance
seeking for Knowledge and growing into Knowledge, so Supermind
must be established here on a basis of Knowledge growing into its own greater
Light. But this cannot be so long as the spiritual-mental being has not risen
fully to Supermind and
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brought down its powers into terrestrial
existence. For the gulf between Mind and Supermind
has to be bridged, the closed passages
opened and roads of ascent and descent created where there is now a void and a
silence. This can be done only by the triple transformation to which we have
already made a passing reference: there must first be the psychic change, the
conversion of our whole present nature into a soul-instrumentation; on that or
along with that there must be the spiritual change, the descent of a higher
Light, Knowledge, Power, Force, Bliss, Purity into the whole being, even into
the lowest recesses of the life and body, even into the darkness of our subconscience; last, there must supervene the supramental transmutation,—there must take place as the
crowning movement the ascent into the Supermind and
the transforming descent of the supramental
Consciousness into our entire being and nature.
At the beginning the
soul in Nature, the psychic entity, whose unfolding is the first step towards a
spiritual change, is an entirely veiled part of us, although it is that
by which we exist and persist as individual beings in Nature. The other parts
of our natural composition are not only mutable but perishable; but the psychic
entity in us persists and is fundamentally the same always: it contains all
essential possibilities of our manifestation but is not constituted by them; it
is not limited by what it manifests, not contained by the incomplete forms of
the manifestation, not tarnished by the imperfections and impurities, the defects
and depravations of the surface being. It is an ever-pure flame of the divinity
in things and nothing that comes to it, nothing that enters into our experience
can pollute its purity or extinguish the flame. This spiritual stuff is
immaculate and luminous and, because it is perfectly luminous, it is
immediately, intimately, directly aware of truth of being and truth of nature;
it is deeply conscious of truth and good and beauty because truth and good and
beauty are akin to its own native character, forms of something that is
inherent in its own substance. It is aware also of all that contradicts these
things, of all that deviates from its own native character, of falsehood and
evil and the ugly and the unseemly; but it does not become these things nor is it
touched or changed by these opposites of itself which so powerfully affect
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its outer instrumentation of mind, life and
body. For the soul, the permanent being in us, puts forth and uses mind, life
and body as its instruments, undergoes the envelopment of their conditions, but
it is other and greater than its members.
If the psychic entity
had been from the beginning unveiled and known to its ministers, not a secluded
King in a screened chamber, the human evolution would have been a rapid soul-outflowering, not the difficult, chequered
and disfigured development it now is; but the veil is thick and we know not the
secret Light within us, the light in the hidden crypt of the heart's innermost
sanctuary. Intimations rise to our surface from the psyche, but our mind does
not detect their source; it takes them for its own activities because, before
even they come to the surface, they are clothed in mental substance: thus
ignorant of their authority, it follows or does not follow them according to its
bent or turn at the moment. If the mind obeys the urge of the vital ego, then
there is little chance of the psyche at all controlling the nature or
manifesting in us something of its secret spiritual stuff and native movement;
or, if the mind is over-confident to act in its own smaller light, attached to
its own judgment, will and action of knowledge, then also the soul will remain
veiled and quiescent and wait for the mind's farther evolution. For the psychic
part within is there to support the natural evolution, and the first natural
evolution must be the development of body, life and mind, successively, and
these must act each in its own kind or together in their ill-assorted
partnership in order to grow and have experience and evolve. The soul gathers
the essence of all our mental, vital and bodily experience and assimilates it
for the farther evolution of our existence in Nature; but this action is occult
and not obtruded on the surface. In the early material and vital stages of the
evolution of being there is indeed no consciousness of soul; there are psychic
activities, but the instrumentation, the form of these activities are vital and
physical,—or mental when the mind is active. For even the mind, so long as it
is primitive or is developed but still too external, does not recognise their deeper character. It is easy to regard
ourselves as physical beings or beings of life or mental beings using life and
body and to ignore the existence of the soul altogether: for the
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only definite idea that we have of the soul is
of something that survives the death of our bodies; but what this is we do not
know because even if we are conscious sometimes of its presence, we are not
normally conscious of its distinct reality nor do we feel clearly its direct
action in our nature.
As
the evolution proceeds, Nature begins slowly and tentatively to manifest our
occult parts; she leads us to look more and more within ourselves or sets out
to initiate more clearly recognisable intimations and
formations of them on the surface. The soul in us, the psychic principle, has
already begun to take secret form; it puts forward and develops a
soul-personality, a distinct psychic being to represent it. This psychic being
remains still behind the veil in our subliminal part, like the true mental, the
true vital or the true or subtle physical being within us: but, like them, it
acts on the surface life by the influences and intimations it throws up upon
that surface; these form part of the surface aggregate which is the
conglomerate effect of the inner influences and upsurgings,
the visible formation and superstructure which we ordinarily experience and
think of as ourselves. On this ignorant surface we become dimly aware of
something that can be called a soul as distinct from mind, life or body; we
feel it not only as our mental idea or vague instinct of ourselves, but as a
sensible influence in our life and character and action. A certain sensitive
feeling for all that is true and good and beautiful, fine and pure and noble, a
response to it, a demand for it, a pressure on mind and life to accept and
formulate it in our thought, feelings, conduct, character is the most usually recognised, the most general and characteristic, though not
the sole sign of this influence of the psyche. Of the man who has not this
element in him or does not respond at all to this urge, we say that he has no
soul. For it is this influence that we can most easily recognise
as a finer or even a diviner part in us and the most powerful for the slow
turning towards some aim at perfection in our nature.
But this psychic
influence or action does not come up to the surface quite pure or does not
remain distinct in its purity; if it did, we would be able to distinguish
clearly the soul element in us and follow consciously and fully its dictates.
An occult mental and vital and subtle-physical action intervenes, mixes
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with it, tries to use it and turn it to its own
profit, dwarfs its divinity, distorts or diminishes its self-expression, even
causes it to deviate and stumble or stains it with the impurity, smallness and
error of mind and life and body. After it reaches the surface, thus alloyed and
diminished, it is taken hold of by the surface nature in an obscure reception
and ignorant formation, and there is or can be by this cause a still further
deviation and mixture. A twist is given, a wrong direction is imparted, a wrong
application, a wrong formation, an erroneous result of what is in itself pure
stuff and action of our spiritual being; a formation of consciousness is
accordingly made which is a mixture of the psychic influence and its
intimations jumbled with mental ideas and opinions, vital desires and urges,
habitual physical tendencies. There coalesce too with the obscured
soul-influence the ignorant though well-intentioned efforts of these external
parts towards a higher direction; a mental ideation of a very mixed character,
often obscure even in its idealism, sometimes even disastrously mistaken, a fervour and passion of the emotional being throwing up its
spray and foam of feelings, sentiments, sentimentalisms, a dynamic enthusiasm
of the life-parts, eager responses of the physical, the thrills and excitements
of nerve and body,—all these influences coalesce in a composite formation which
is frequently taken as the soul and its mixed and confused action for the
soul-stir, for a psychic development and action or a realised
inner influence. The psychic entity is itself free from stain or mixture, but
what comes up from it is not protected by that immunity; therefore this
confusion becomes possible.
Moreover, the psychic
being, the soul-personality in us, does not emerge full-grown and luminous; it
evolves, passes through a slow development and formation; its figure of being
may be at first indistinct and may afterwards remain for a long time weak and
undeveloped, not impure but imperfect: for it rests its formation, its dynamic
self-building on the power of soul that has been actually and more or less
successfully, against the resistance of the Ignorance and Inconscience,
put forth in the evolution upon the surface. Its appearance is the sign of a
soul-emergence in Nature, and if that emergence is as yet small and defective,
the psychic personality also will be
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stunted or feeble. It is too, by the obscurity
of our consciousness, separated from its inner reality, in imperfect
communication with its own source in the depths of the being; for the road is
as yet ill-built, easily obstructed, the wires often cut or crowded with
communications of another kind and proceeding from another origin: its power to
impress what it receives upon the outer instruments is also imperfect; in its
penury it has for most things to rely on these instruments and it forms its
push to expression and action on their data and not solely on the unerring
perceptions of the psychic entity. In these conditions it cannot prevent the
true psychic light from being diminished or distorted in the mind into a mere
idea or opinion, the psychic feeling in the heart into a fallible emotion or
mere sentiment, the psychic will to action in the life-parts into a blind vital
enthusiasm or a fervid excitement: it even accepts these mistranslations for
want of something better and tries to fulfil itself
through them. For it is part of the work of the soul to influence mind and
heart and vital being and turn their ideas, feelings, enthusiasms, dynamisms in
the direction of what is divine and luminous; but this has to be done at first
imperfectly, slowly and with a mixture. As the psychic personality grows
stronger, it begins to increase its communion with the psychic entity behind it
and improve its communications with the surface: it can transmit its
intimations to the mind and heart and life with a greater purity and force; for
it is more able to exercise a strong control and react against false mixtures;
now more and more it makes itself distinctly felt as a power in the nature. But
even so this evolution would be slow and long if left solely to the difficult automatic
action of the evolutionary Energy; it is only when man awakes to the knowledge
of the soul and feels a need to bring it to the front and make it the master of
his life and action that a quicker conscious method of evolution intervenes and
a psychic transformation becomes possible.
This slow development
can be aided by the mind's clear perception and insistence on something within
that survives the death of the body and an effort to know its nature. But at
first this knowledge is impeded by the fact that there are many elements in us,
many formations which present themselves as soul-
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elements and can be mistaken for the psyche. In
the early Greek and some other traditions about the after-life, the
descriptions given show very clearly that what was then mistaken for the soul
was a subconscious formation, a subphysical
impression-mould or shadow-form of the being or else a wraith or ghost of the
personality. This ghost, which is mistakenly called the spirit, is sometimes a
vital formation reproducing the man's characteristics, his surface
life-mannerisms, sometimes a subtle-physical prolongation of the surface form
of the mind-shell: at best it is a sheath of the life-personality which still
remains in the front for some time after the departure from the body. Apart
from these confusions born of an after-death contact with discarded phantasms
or remnants of the sheaths of the personality, the difficulty is due to our
ignorance of the subliminal parts of our nature and the form and powers of the
conscious being or Purusha which preside over their
action; owing to this inexperience we can easily mistake something of the inner
mind or vital self for the psychic. For as Being is one yet multiple, so also
the same law prevails in ourselves and our members; the Spirit, the Purusha is one but it adapts itself to the formations of
Nature. Over each grade of our being a power of the Spirit presides; we have
within us and discover when we go deep enough inwards a mind-self, a life-self,
a physical self; there is a being of mind, a mental Purusha,
expressing something of itself on our surface in the thoughts, perceptions,
activities of our mind-nature, a being of life which expresses something of
itself in the impulses, feelings, sensations, desires, external life-activities
of our vital nature, a physical being, a being of the body which expresses
something of itself in the instincts, habits, formulated activities of our
physical nature. These beings or part selves of the self in us are powers of
the Spirit and therefore not limited by their temporary expression, for what is
thus formulated is only a fragment of its possibilities; but the expression
creates a temporary mental, vital or physical personality which grows and
develops even as the psychic being or soul-personality grows and develops
within us. Each has its own distinct nature, its influence, its action on the
whole of us; but on our surface all these influences and all this action, as
they come up, mingle and create an
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aggregate surface being which is a composite, an
amalgam of them all, an outer persistent and yet shifting and mobile formation
for the purposes of this life and its limited experience.
But this aggregate is,
because of its composition, a heterogeneous compound, not a single harmonious
and homogeneous whole. This is the reason why there is a constant confusion and
even a conflict in our members which our mental reason and will are moved to
control and harmonise and have often much difficulty
in creating out of their confusion or conflict some kind of order and guidance;
even so, ordinarily, we drift too much or are driven by the stream of our
nature and act from whatever in it comes uppermost at the time and seizes the
instruments of thought and action,—even our seemingly deliberate choice is more
of an automatism than we imagine; our co-ordination of our multifarious
elements and of our consequent thoughts, feelings, impulses, actions by the
reason and will is incomplete and a half-measure. In animal being Nature acts
by her own mental and vital intuitions; she works out an order by the
compulsion of habit and instinct which the animal implicitly obeys, so that the
shiftings of its consciousness do not matter. But man
cannot altogether act in the same way without forfeiting his prerogative of
manhood; he cannot leave his being to be a chaos of instincts and impulses
regulated by the automatism of Nature: mind has become conscious in him and is
therefore self-compelled to make some attempt, however elementary in many, to
see and control and in the end more and more perfectly harmonise
the manifold components, the different and conflicting tendencies that seem to
make up his surface being. He does succeed in setting up a sort of regulated
chaos or ordered confusion in him, or at least succeeds in thinking that he is
directing himself by his mind and will, even though in fact that direction is
only partial; for not only a disparate consortium of habitual motive-forces but
also newly emergent vital and physical tendencies and impulses, not always
calculable or controllable, and many incoherent and inharmonious mental
elements use his reason and will, enter into and determine his self-building,
his nature-development, his life action. Man is in his self a unique Person,
but he is also in his manifestation of self a multiperson;
he will
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never
succeed in being master of himself until the Person imposes itself on his multipersonality and governs it: but this can only be
imperfectly done by the surface mental will and reason; it can be perfectly
done only if he goes within and finds whatever central being is by its
predominant influence at the head of all his expression and action. In inmost
truth it is his soul that is this central being, but in outer fact it is often
one or other of the part beings in him that rules, and this representative of
the soul, this deputy self he can mistake for the inmost soul-principle.
This rule of different
selves in us is at the root of the stages of the development of human personality
which we have already had occasion to differentiate, and we can reconsider them
now from the point of view of the government of the nature by the inner
principle. In some human beings it is the physical Purusha,
the being of body, who dominates the mind, will and action; there is then
created the physical man mainly occupied with his corporeal life and habitual
needs, impulses, life-habits, mind-habits, body-habits, looking very little or
not at all beyond that, subordinating and restricting all his other tendencies
and possibilities to that narrow formation. But even in the physical man there
are other elements and he cannot live altogether as the human animal concerned
with birth and death and procreation and the satisfaction of common impulses
and desires and the maintenance of the life and the body: this is his normal
type of personality, but it is crossed, however feebly, with influences by
which he can proceed, if they are developed, to a higher human evolution. If
the inner subtle-physical Purusha insists, he can
arrive at the idea of a finer, more beautiful and perfect physical life and
hope or attempt to realise it in his own or in the
collective or group existence. In others it is the vital self, the being of
life, who dominates and rules the mind, the will, the action; then is created
the vital man, concerned with self-affirmation, self-aggrandisement,
life-enlargement, satisfaction of ambition and passion and impulse and desire,
the claims of his ego, domination, power, excitement, battle and struggle,
inner and outer adventure: all else is incidental or subordinated to this
movement and building and expression of the vital ego. But still in the vital
man too there are or can
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be other elements of a growing mental or
spiritual character, even if these happen to be less developed than his
life-personality and life-power. The nature of the vital man is more active,
stronger and more mobile, more turbulent and chaotic, often to the point of
being quite unregulated, than that of the physical man who holds on to the soil
and has a certain material poise and balance, but it is more kinetic and
creative: for the element of the vital being is not earth but air; it has more
movement, less status. A vigorous vital mind and will can grasp and govern the
kinetic vital energies, but it is more by a forceful compulsion and constraint
than by a harmonisation of the being. If, however, a
strong vital personality, mind and will can get the reasoning intelligence to
give it a firm support and be its minister, then a certain kind of forceful
formation can be made, more or less balanced but always powerful, successful
and effective, which can impose itself on the nature and environment and arrive
at a strong self-affirmation in life and action. This is the second step of harmonised formulation possible in the ascent of the
nature.
At a higher stage of the
evolution of personality the being of mind may rule; there is then cr eated the mental man who lives
predominantly in the mind as the others live in the vital or the physical
nature. The mental man tends to subordinate to his mental self-expression,
mental aims, mental interests or to a mental idea or ideal the rest of his
being: because of the difficulty of this subordination and its potent effect when
achieved, it is at once more difficult for him and easier to arrive at a
harmony of his nature. It is easier because the mental will once in control can
convince by the power of the reasoning intelligence and at the same time
dominate, compress or suppress the life and the body and their demands, arrange
and harmonise them, force them to be its instruments,
even reduce them to a minimum so that they shall not disturb the mental life or
pull it down from its ideative or idealising
movement. It is more difficult because life and body are the first powers and,
if they are in the least strong, can impose themselves with an almost
irresistible insistence on the mental ruler. Man is a mental being and the mind
is the leader of his life and body;
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but this
is a leader who is much led by his followers and has sometimes no other will
than what they impose on him. Mind in spite of its power is often impotent
before the inconscient and subconscient
which obscure its clarity and carry it away on the tide of instinct or impulse;
in spite of its clarity it is fooled by vital and emotional suggestions into
giving sanction to ignorance and error, to wrong thought and to wrong action,
or it is obliged to look on while the nature follows what it knows to be wrong,
dangerous or evil. Even when it is strong and clear and dominant, Mind, though
it imposes a certain, a considerable mentalised
harmony, cannot integrate the whole being and nature. These harmonisations
by an inferior control are, besides, inconclusive, because it is one part of
the nature which dominates and fulfils itself while the others are coerced and
denied their fullness. They can be steps on the way, but not final; therefore
in most men there is no such sole dominance and effected partial harmony, but
only a predominance and for the rest an unstable equilibrium of a personality
half formed, half in formation, sometimes a disequilibrium or unbalance due to
the lack of a central government or the disturbance of a formerly achieved
partial poise. All must be transitional until a first, though not a final, true
harmonisation is achieved by finding our real centre.
For the true central being is the soul, but this being stands back and in most
human natures is only the secret witness or, one might say, a constitutional
ruler who allows his ministers to rule for him, delegates to them his empire,
silently assents to their decisions and only now and then puts in a word which
they can at any moment override and act otherwise. But this is so long as the
soul-personality put forward by the psychic entity is not yet sufficiently
developed; when this is strong enough for the inner entity to impose itself
through it, then the soul can come forward and control the nature. It is by the
coming forward of this true monarch and his taking up of the reins of
government that there can take place a real harmonisation
of our being and our life.
A first condition of the
soul's complete emergence is a direct contact in the surface being with the
spiritual Reality. Because it comes from
that, the psychic element in us turns
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always towards whatever in phenomenal Nature
seems to belong to a higher Reality and can be accepted as its sign and
character. At first, it seeks this Reality through the good, the true, the
beautiful, through all that is pure and fine and high and noble: but although
this touch through outer signs and characters can modify and prepare the
nature, it cannot entirely or most inwardly and profoundly change it. For such
an inmost change the direct contact with the Reality itself is indispensable
since nothing else can so deeply touch the foundations of our being and stir it
or cast the nature by its stir into a ferment of transmutation. Mental
representations, emotional and dynamic figures have their use and value; Truth,
Good and Beauty are in themselves primary and potent figures of the Reality,
and even in their forms as seen by the mind, as felt by the heart, as realised in the life can be lines of an ascent: but it is
in a spiritual substance and being of them and of itself that That which they
represent has to come into our experience.
The soul may attempt to
achieve this contact mainly through the thinking mind as intermediary and
instrument; it puts a psychic impression on the intellect and the larger mind
of insight and intuitional intelligence and turns them in that direction. At
its highest the thinking mind is drawn always towards the impersonal; in its
search it becomes conscious of a spiritual essence, an impersonal Reality which
expresses itself in all these outward signs and characters but is more than any
formation or manifesting figure. It feels something of which it becomes
intimately and invisibly aware,—a supreme Truth, a supreme Good, a supreme
Beauty, a supreme Purity, a supreme Bliss; it bears the increasing touch, less
and less impalpable and abstract, more and more spiritually real and concrete,
the touch and pressure of an Eternity and Infinity which is all this that is
and more. There is a pressure from this Impersonality that seeks to mould the
whole mind into a form of itself; at the same time the impersonal secret and
law of things becomes more and more visible. The mind develops into the mind of
the sage, at first the high mental thinker, then the spiritual sage who has
gone beyond the abstractions of thought to the beginnings of a direct
experience. As a result
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the mind becomes pure, large, tranquil,
impersonal; there is a similar tranquillising influence
on the parts of life: but otherwise the result may remain incomplete; for the
mental change leads more naturally towards an inner status and an outer
quietude, but, poised in this purifying quietism, not drawn like the vital
parts towards a discovery of new life-energies, does not press for a full
dynamic effect on the nature.
A higher endeavour through the mind does not change this balance;
for the tendency of the spiritualised mind is to go
on upwards and, since above itself the mind loses its hold on forms, it is into
a vast formless and featureless impersonality that it enters. It becomes aware
of the unchanging Self, the sheer Spirit, the pure bareness of an essential
Existence, the formless Infinite and the nameless Absolute. This culmination
can be arrived at more directly by tending immediately beyond all forms and
figures, beyond all ideas of good or evil or true or false or beautiful or
unbeautiful to That which exceeds all dualities, to the experience of a supreme
oneness, infinity, eternity or other ineffable sublimation of the mind's
ultimate and extreme percept of Self or Spirit. A spiritualised
consciousness is achieved and the life falls quiet, the body ceases to need and
to clamour, the soul itself merges into the spiritual
silence. But this transformation through the mind does not give us the integral
transformation; the psychic transmutation is replaced by a spiritual change on
the rare and high summits, but this is not the complete divine dynamisation of Nature.
A second approach made
by the soul to the direct contact is through the heart: this is its own more
close and rapid way because its occult
seat is there, just behind in the heart-centre, in close contact with the
emotional being in us; it is consequently through the emotions that it can act
best at the beginning with its native power, with its living force of concrete
experience. It is through a love and adoration of the All-Beautiful and
All-Blissful, the All-Good, the True, the spiritual Reality of love, that the
approach is made; the aesthetic and emotional parts join together to offer the
soul, the life, the whole nature to that which they worship. This approach
through adoration can get its full power and impetus only when the mind goes
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beyond impersonality to the awareness of a
supreme Personal Being: then all becomes intense, vivid, concrete; the heart's
emotion, feeling, spiritualised sense reach their
absolute; an entire self-giving becomes possible, imperative. The nascent
spiritual man makes his appearance in the emotional nature as the devotee, the bhakta; if, in addition, he becomes directly aware of his
soul and its dictates, unites his emotional with his psychic personality and
changes his life and vital parts by purity, God-ecstasy, the love of God and
men and all creatures into a thing of spiritual beauty, full of divine light
and good, he develops into the saint and reaches the highest inner experience
and most considerable change of nature proper to this way of approach to the Divine Being. But for the
purpose of an integral transformation this too is not enough; there must be a
transmutation of the thinking mind and all the vital and physical parts of
consciousness in their own character.
This larger change can
be partly attained by adding to the experiences of the heart a consecration of
the pragmatic will
which must succeed in carrying with it,—for
otherwise it cannot be effective,—the adhesion of the dynamic vital part which
supports the mental dynamis and is our first
instrument of outer action. This consecration of the will in works proceeds by
a gradual elimination of the ego-will and its motive-power of desire; the ego
subjects itself to some higher law and finally effaces itself, seems not to
exist or exists only to serve a higher Power or a higher Truth or to offer its
will and acts to the Divine Being as an instrument. The law of being and action
or the light of Truth which then guides the seeker, may be a clarity or power
or principle which he perceives on the highest height of which his mind is
capable; or it may be a truth of the divine Will which he feels present and
working within him or guiding him by a Light or a Voice or a Force or a divine
Person or Presence. In the end by this way one arrives at a consciousness in
which one feels the Force or Presence acting within and moving or governing all
the actions and the personal will is entirely surrendered or identified with
that greater Truth-Will, Truth-Power or Truth-Presence. A combination of all
these three approaches, the approach of the mind, the approach of
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the will, the approach of the heart, creates a
spiritual or psychic condition of the surface being and nature in which there
is a larger and more complex openness to the psychic light within us and to the
spiritual Self or the Ishwara, to the Reality now
felt above and enveloping and penetrating us. In the nature there is a more
powerful and many-sided change, a spiritual building and self-creation, the
appearance of a composite perfection of the saint, the selfless worker and the
man of spiritual knowledge.
But, for this change to
arrive at its widest totality and profound completeness, the consciousness has
to shift its centre and its static and dynamic position from the surface to the
inner being; it is there that we must find the foundation for our thought, life
and action. For to stand outside on our surface and to receive from the inner
being and follow its intimations is not a sufficient transformation; one must
cease to be the surface personality and become the inner Person, the Purusha. But this is difficult, first because the outer
nature opposes the movement and clings to its normal accustomed poise and externalised way of existence and, in addition, because
there is a long way from the surface to the depths in which the psychic entity
is veiled from us, and this intervening space is filled with a subliminal
nature and nature-movements which are not by any means all of them favourable to the completion of the inward movement. The
outer nature has to undergo a change of poise, a quieting, a purification and
fine mutation of its substance and energy by which the many obstacles in it
rarefy, drop away or otherwise disappear; it then becomes possible to pass
through to the depths of our being and from the depths so reached a new
consciousness can be formed, both behind the exterior self and in it, joining
the depths to the surface. There must grow up within us or there must manifest
a consciousness more and more open to the deeper and the higher being, more and
more laid bare to the cosmic Self and Power and to what comes down from the
Transcendence, turned to a higher Peace, permeable to a greater light, force
and ecstasy, a consciousness that exceeds the small personality and surpasses
the limited light and experience of the surface mind, the limited force and
aspiration of the normal
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life-consciousness, the obscure and limited
responsiveness of the body.
Even before the tranquillising purification of the outer nature has been
effected or before it is sufficient, one can still break down the wall
screening our inner being from our outer awareness by a strong force of call
and aspiration, a vehement will or violent effort or an effective discipline or
process; but this may be a premature movement and is not without its serious
dangers. In entering within one may find oneself amidst a chaos of unfamiliar
and supernormal experiences to which one has not the key or a press of
subliminal or cosmic forces, subconscient, mental,
vital, subtle-physical, which may unduly sway or chaotically drive the being,
encircle it in a cave of darkness, or keep it wandering in a wilderness of
glamour, allurement, deception, or push it into an obscure battlefield full of
secret and treacherous and misleading or open and violent oppositions; beings
and voices and influences may appear to the inner sense and vision and hearing
claiming to be the Divine Being or His messengers or Powers and Godheads of the
Light or guides of the path to realisation, while in
truth they are of a very different character. If there is too much egoism in
the nature of the seeker or a strong passion or an excessive ambition, vanity
or other dominating weakness, or an obscurity of the mind or a vacillating will
or a weakness of the life-force or an unsteadiness in it or want of balance, he
is likely to be seized on through these deficiencies and to be frustrated or to
deviate, misled from the true way of the inner life and seeking into false
paths, or to be left wandering about in an intermediate chaos of experiences
and fail to find his way out into the true realisation.
These perils were well-known to a past spiritual experience and have been met
by imposing the necessity of initiation, of discipline, of methods of
purification and testing by ordeal, of an entire submission to the directions
of the path-finder or path-leader, one who has realised
the Truth and himself possesses and is able to communicate the light, the
experience, a guide who is strong to take by the hand and carry over difficult
passages as well as to instruct and point out the way. But even so the dangers
will be there and can only be surmounted if there is or there grows up a
complete sincerity, a will
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for
purity, a readiness for obedience to the Truth, for surrender to the Highest, a
readiness to lose or to subject to a divine yoke the limiting and
self-affirming ego. These things are the sign that the true will for realisation, for conversion of the consciousness, for
transformation is there, the necessary stage of the evolution has been reached:
in that condition the defects of nature which belong to the human being cannot
be a permanent obstacle to the change from the mental to the spiritual status;
the process may never be entirely easy, but the way will have been made open
and practicable.
One effective way often
used to facilitate this entry into the inner self is the separation of the Purusha, the conscious being, from the Prakriti,
the formulated nature. If one stands back from the mind and its activities so
that they fall silent at will or go on as a surface movement of which one is
the detached and disinterested witness, it becomes possible eventually to realise oneself as the inner Self of mind, the true and
pure mental being, the Purusha; by similarly standing
back from the life-activities, it is possible to realise
oneself as the inner Self of life, the true and pure vital being, the Purusha; there is even a Self of body of which, by standing
back from the body and its demands and activities and entering into a silence
of the physical consciousness watching the action of its energy, it is possible
to become aware, a true and pure physical being, the Purusha.
So too, by standing back from all these activities of nature successively or
together, it becomes possible to realize one's inner being as the silent
impersonal self, the witness Purusha. This will lead
to a spiritual realisation and liberation, but will
not necessarily bring about a transformation; for the Purusha,
satisfied to be free and himself, may leave the nature, the Prakriti,
to exhaust its accumulated impetus by an unsupported action, a mechanical
continuance not renewed and reinforced or vivified and prolonged by his
consent, and use this rejection as a means of withdrawing from all nature. The Purusha has to become not only the witness but the knower
and source, the master of all the thought and action, and this can only be
partially done so long as one remains on the mental level or has still to use
the ordinary instrumentation of mind, life and body. A certain mastery can
indeed be achieved, but mastery is
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not transformation; the change made by it cannot
be sufficient to be integral: for that it is essential to get back, beyond
mind-being, life-being, body-being, still more deeply inward to the psychic
entity inmost and profoundest within us,—or else to open to the superconscient highest domains. For this penetration into
the luminous crypt of the soul one has to get through all the intervening vital
stuff to the psychic centre within us, however long, tedious or difficult may
be the process. The method of detachment from the insistence of all mental and
vital and physical claims and calls and impulsions, a concentration in the
heart, austerity, self-purification and rejection of the old mind-movements and
life-movements, rejection of the ego of desire, rejection of false needs and
false habits, are all useful aids to this difficult passage: but the strongest,
most central way is to found all such or other methods on a self-offering and
surrender of ourselves and of our parts of nature to the Divine Being, the Ishwara. A strict obedience to the wise and intuitive
leading of a Guide is also normal and necessary for all but a few specially
gifted seekers.
As the crust of the
outer nature cracks, as the walls of inner separation break down, the inner
light gets through, the inner fire burns in the heart, the substance of the
nature and the stuff of consciousness refine to a greater subtlety and purity,
and the deeper psychic experiences, those which are not solely of an inner
mental or inner vital character, become possible in this subtler, purer, finer
substance; the soul begins to unveil itself, the psychic personality reaches
its full stature. The soul, the psychic entity, then manifests itself as the
central being which upholds mind and life and body and supports all the other
powers and functions of the Spirit; it takes up its greater function as the
guide and ruler of the nature. A guidance, a governance begins from within
which exposes every movement to the light of Truth, repels what is false,
obscure, opposed to the divine realisation: every
region of the being, every nook and corner of it, every movement, formation,
direction, inclination of thought, will, emotion, sensation, action, reaction,
motive, disposition, propensity, desire, habit of the conscious or subconscious
physical, even the most concealed, camouflaged, mute, recondite, is lighted up
with the
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unerring psychic
light, their confusions dissipated, their tangles disentangled, their
obscurities, deceptions, self-deceptions precisely indicated and removed; all
is purified, set right, the whole nature harmonised,
modulated in the psychic key, put in spiritual order. This process may be rapid
or tardy according to the amount of obscurity and resistance still left in the
nature, but it goes on unfalteringly so long as it is not complete. As a final
result the whole conscious being is made perfectly apt for spiritual experience
of every kind, turned towards spiritual truth of thought, feeling, sense,
action, tuned to the right responses, delivered from the darkness and
stubbornness of the tamasic inertia, the turbidities
and turbulences and impurities of the rajasic passion
and restless unharmonised kinetism,
the enlightened rigidities and sattwic limitations or
poised balancements of constructed equilibrium which
are the character of the Ignorance.
This is the first
result, but the second is a free inflow of all kinds of spiritual experience,
experience of the Self, experience of the Ishwara and
the Divine Shakti, experience of cosmic
consciousness, a direct touch with cosmic forces and with the occult movements
of universal Nature, a psychic sympathy and unity and inner communication and
interchanges of all kinds with other beings and with Nature, illuminations of
the mind by knowledge, illuminations of the heart by love and devotion and
spiritual joy and ecstasy, illuminations of the sense and the body by higher experience,
illuminations of dynamic action in the truth and largeness of a purified mind
and heart and soul, the certitudes of the divine light and guidance, the joy
and power of the divine force working in the will and the conduct. These
experiences are the result of an opening outward of the inner and inmost being
and nature; for then there comes into play the soul's power of unerring
inherent consciousness, its vision, its touch on things which is superior to
any mental cognition; there is there, native to the psychic consciousness in
its pure working, an immediate sense of the world and its beings, a direct
inner contact with them and a direct contact with the Self and with the
Divine,—a direct knowledge, a direct sight of Truth and of all truths, a direct
penetrating spiritual emotion and feeling, a direct intuition of right will and
right action, a power to rule and to
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create an
order of the being not by the gropings of the
superficial self, but from within, from the inner truth of self and things and
the occult realities of Nature.
Some of these
experiences can come by an opening of the inner mental and vital being, the
inner and larger and subtler mind and heart and life within us, without any
full emergence of the soul, the psychic entity, since there too there is a
power of direct contact of consciousness: but the experience might then be of a
mixed character; for there could be an emergence not only of the subliminal
knowledge but of the subliminal ignorance. An insufficient expansion of the
being, a limitation by mental idea, by narrow and selective emotion or by the
form of the temperament so that there would be only an imperfect self-creation
and action and not the free soul-emergence, could easily occur. In the absence
of any or of a complete psychic emergence, experiences of certain kinds,
experiences of greater knowledge and force, a surpassing of the ordinary
limits, might lead to a magnified ego
and even bring about instead of an out-flowering of what is divine or spiritual
an uprush of the titanic or demoniac, or might call
in agencies and powers which, though not of this disastrous type, are of a
powerful but inferior cosmic character. But the rule and guidance of the soul
brings into all experience the tendency of light, of integration, of harmony and intimate
rightness which is native to the psychic essence. A psychic or, more widely
speaking, a psycho-spiritual transformation of this kind would be already a
vast change of our mental human nature.
But all this change and
all this experience, though psychic and spiritual in essence and character,
would still be, in its parts of life-effectuation, on the mental, vital and
physical level; its dynamic spiritual outcome 1 would be a flowering
of the soul in mind and life and body, but in act and form it would be
circumscribed within the limitations,—however enlarged, uplifted and
rarefied,—of an inferior instrumentation. It would be a reflected and modified
manifestation of things whose full reality, intensity, largeness, oneness and
diversity of truth and power and delight
1 The psychic and the spiritual opening
with their experiences and consequences can lead away from life or to a
Nirvana; but they are here being
considered solely as steps in a transformation of the nature.
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are above us, above mind and therefore above any
perfection, within mind's own formula, of the foundations or superstructure of
our present nature. A highest spiritual transformation must intervene on the
psychic or psycho-spiritual change; the psychic movement inward to the inner
being, the Self or Divinity within us, must be completed by an opening upward
to a supreme spiritual status or a higher existence. This can be done by our
opening into what is above us, by an ascent of consciousness into the ranges of
overmind and supramental
nature in which the sense of Self and Spirit is ever unveiled and permanent and
in which the self-luminous instrumentation of the Self and Spirit is not
restricted or divided as in our mind-nature, life-nature, body-nature. This
also the psychic change makes possible; for as it opens us to the cosmic
consciousness now hidden from us by many walls of limiting individuality, so
also it opens us to what is now superconscient to our
normality because it is hidden from us by the strong, hard and bright lid of
mind,—mind constricting, dividing and separative. The
lid thins, is slit, breaks asunder or opens and disappears under the pressure
of the psycho-spiritual change and the natural urge of the new spiritualised consciousness towards that of which it is an
expression here. This effectuation of an aperture and its consequences may not
at all take place if there is only a partial psychic emergence satisfied with
the experience of the Divine Reality in the normal degrees of the spiritualised mind: but if there is any awakening to the
existence of these higher supernormal levels, then an aspiration towards them
may break the lid or operate a rift in it. This may happen long before the
psycho-spiritual change is complete or even before it has well begun or
proceeded far, because the psychic personality has become aware and has an
eager concentration towards the superconscience. An
early illumination from above or a rending of the upper velamen
can come as an outcome of aspiration or some inner readiness, or it may even
come uncalled for or not called for by any conscious part of the mind,—perhaps
by a secret subliminal necessity or by an action or pressure from the higher
levels, by something which is felt as the touch of the Divine Being, the touch
of the Spirit,—and its results can be exceedingly powerful. But if it is
brought about
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by a premature pressure from below, it can be attended
with difficulties and dangers which are absent when the full psychic emergence
precedes this first admission to the superior ranges of our spiritual
evolution. The choice, however, does not always rest with our will, for the
operations of the spiritual evolution in us are very various, and according to
the line it has followed will be the turn taken at any critical phase by the
action of the Consciousness-Force in its urge towards a higher
self-manifestation and formation of our existence.
If the rift in the lid
of mind is made, what happens is an opening of vision to something above us or
a rising up towards it or a descent of its powers into our being. What we see
by the opening of vision is an Infinity above us, an eternal Presence or an
infinite Existence, an infinity of consciousness, an infinity of bliss,—a
boundless Self, a boundless Light, a boundless Power, a boundless Ecstasy. It
may be that for a long time all that is obtained is the occasional or frequent
or constant vision of it and a longing and aspiration, but without anything
further, because, although something in the mind, heart or other part of the
being has opened to this experience, the lower nature as a whole is too heavy
and obscure as yet for more. But there may be, instead of this first wide
awareness from below or subsequently to it, an ascension of the mind to heights
above: the nature of these heights we may not know or clearly discern, but some
consequence of the ascent is felt; there is often too an awareness of infinite
ascension and return but no record or translation of that higher state. This is
because it has been superconscient to mind and
therefore mind, when it rises into it, is unable at first to retain there its
power of conscious discernment and defining experience. But when this power
begins to awake and act, when mind becomes by degrees conscious in what was to
it superconscient, then there begins a knowledge and
experience of superior planes of existence. The experience is in accord with
that which is brought to us by the first opening of vision: the mind rises into
a higher plane of pure Self, silent, tranquil, illimitable; or it rises into
regions of Light or of Felicity, or into planes where it feels an infinite
Power or a divine Presence or experiences the contact of a divine Love or
Beauty or the
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atmosphere of a wider and greater and luminous
Knowledge. In the return the spiritual impression abides; but the mental record
is often blurred and remains as a vague or a fragmentary memory; the lower
consciousness from which the ascent took place falls back to what it was, with
only the addition of an unkept or a remembered but no
longer dynamic experience. In time the ascent comes to be made at will and the
consciousness brings back and retains some effect or some gain of its temporary
sojourn in these higher countries of the Spirit. These ascents take place for
many in trance, but are perfectly possible in a concentration of the waking
consciousness or, where that consciousness has become sufficiently psychic, at
any unconcentrated moment by an upward attraction or
affinity. But these two types of contact with the superconscient,
though they can be powerfully illuminating, ecstatic or liberating, are by
themselves insufficiently effective: for the full spiritual transformation more
is needed, a permanent ascension from the lower into the higher consciousness
and an effectual permanent descent of the higher into the lower nature.
This is the third
motion, the descent which is essential for bringing the permanent ascension, an
increasing inflow from above, an experience of reception and retention of the
descending Spirit or its powers and elements of consciousness. This experience
of descent can take place as a result of the other two movements or automatically
before either has happened, through a sudden rift in the lid or a percolation,
a downpour or an influx. A light descends and touches or envelops or penetrates
the lower being, the mind, the life or the body; or a presence or a power or a
stream of knowledge pours in waves or currents, or there is a flood of bliss or
a sudden ecstasy; the contact with the superconscient
has been established. For such experiences repeat themselves till they become
normal, familiar and well-understood, revelatory of their contents and their
significance which may have at first been involved and wrapped into secrecy by
the figure of the covering experience. For a knowledge from above begins to
descend, frequently, constantly, then uninterruptedly, and to manifest in the
mind's quietude or silence; intuitions and inspirations, revelations born of a
greater sight,
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a higher truth and wisdom, enter into the being,
a luminous intuitive discrimination works which dispels all darkness of
understanding or dazzling confusions, puts all in order; a new consciousness
begins to form, the mind of a high wide self-existent thinking knowledge or an
illumined or an intuitive or an overmental
consciousness with new forces of thought or sight and a greater power of direct
spiritual realisation which is more than thought or
sight, a greater becoming in the spiritual substance of our present being; the
heart and the sense become subtle, intense, large to embrace all existence, to
see God, to feel and hear and touch the Eternal, to make a deeper and closer
unity of self and the world in a transcendent realisation.
Other decisive experiences, other changes of consciousness determine themselves
which are corollaries and consequences of this fundamental change. No limit can
be fixed to this revolution; for it is in its nature an invasion by the
Infinite.
This, effected little by
little or in a succession of great and swift definitive experiences, is the
process s of the spiritual transformation. It achieves itself and culminates in
an upward ascent often repeated by which in the end the consciousness fixes
itself on a higher plane and from there sees and governs the mind, life and
body; it achieves itself also in an increasing descent of the powers of the
higher consciousness and knowledge which become more and more the whole normal
consciousness and knowledge. A light and power, a knowledge and force are felt
which first take possession of the mind and remould
it, afterwards of the life-part and remould that,
finally of the little physical consciousness and leave it no longer little but
wide and plastic and even infinite. For this new consciousness has itself the
nature of infinity: it brings to us the abiding spiritual sense and awareness
of the Infinite and Eternal with a great largeness of the nature and a breaking
down of its limitations; immortality becomes no longer a belief or an
experience but a normal self-awareness; the close presence of the Divine Being,
his rule of the world and of our self and natural members, his force working in
us and everywhere, the peace of the infinite, the joy of the Infinite are now
concrete and constant in the being; in all sights and forms one sees the
Eternal, the
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Reality, in all sounds one hears it, in all
touches feels it; there is nothing else but its forms and personalities and
manifestations; the joy or adoration of the heart, the embrace of all
existence, the unity of the spirit are abiding realities. The consciousness of
the mental creature is turning or has been already turned wholly into the
consciousness of the spiritual being. This is the second of the three
transformations; uniting the manifested existence with what is above it, it is
the middle step of the three, the decisive transition of the spiritually
evolving nature.
If the spirit could from
the first dwell securely on the superior heights and deal with a blank and
virgin stuff of mind and matter, a complete spiritual transformation might be
rapid, even facile: but the actual process of Nature is more difficult, the logic
of her movement more manifold, contorted, winding, comprehensive; she recognises all the data of the task she has set to herself
and is not satisfied with a summary triumph over her own complexities. Every
part of our being has to be taken in its own nature and character, with all the
moulds and writings of the past still there in it: each minutest portion and movement
must either be destroyed and replaced if it is unfit, or, if it is capable,
transmuted into the truth of the higher being. If the psychic change is
complete, this can be done by a painless process, though still the programme must be long and scrupulous and the progress
deliberate; but otherwise one has to be satisfied with a partial result or, if
one's own scrupulousness of perfection or hunger of the spirit is insatiable,
consent to a difficult, often painful and seemingly interminable action. For
ordinarily the consciousness does not rise to the summits except in the highest
moments; it remains on the mental level and receives descents from above,
sometimes a single descent of some spiritual power that stays and moulds the
being into something predominatingly spiritual, or a
succession of descents bringing into it more and more of the spiritual status
and dynamis: but unless one can live on the highest
height reached, there cannot be the complete or more integral change. If the
psychic mutation has not taken place, if there has been a premature pulling
down of the higher Forces,
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their contact may be too strong for the flawed
and impure material of Nature and its immediate fate may be that of the unbaked
jar of the Veda which could not hold the divine Soma Wine; or the descending
influence may withdraw or be spilt because the nature cannot contain or keep
it. Again, if it is Power that descends, the egoistic mind or vital may try to
seize on it for its own use and a magnified ego or a hunting after powers and
self-aggrandising masteries may be the untoward result.
The Ananda descending cannot be held if there is too
much sexual impurity creating an intoxicant or degrading mixture; the Power
recedes, if there is ambition, vanity or other aggressive form of lower self,
the Light if there is an attachment to obscurity or to any form of the
Ignorance, the Presence if the chamber of the heart has not been made pure. Or
some undivine Force may try to seize hold, not of the
Power itself, for that withdraws, but of the result of force it leaves behind
in the instrument and use it for the purposes of the Adversary. Even if none of
these more disastrous faults or errors should take place, still the numerous
mistakes of reception or the imperfections of the vessel may impede the transformation.
The Power has to come at intervals and work meanwhile behind the veil or hold
itself back through long periods of obscure assimilation or preparation of the
recalcitrant parts of Nature; the Light has to work in darkness or semi-darkness
on the regions in us that are still in the Night. At any moment the work may be
stayed, personally for this life, because the nature is able to receive or
assimilate no more,—for it has reached the present limits of its capacity,—or because
the mind may be ready but the vital, when faced with a choice between the old
life and the new, refuses, or if the vital accepts, the body may prove too
weak, unfit or flawed for the necessary change of its consciousness and its
dynamic transformation.
Moreover,
the necessity of working out the change separately in each part of the being in
its own nature and character compels the consciousness to descend into each in
turn and act there according to its state and its possibility. If the work were
done from above, from some spiritual height, there might be a sublimation or
uplifting or the creation of a new structure
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compelled by the sheer force of the influence
from above: but this change might not be accepted as native to itself by the lower
being; it would not be a total growth, an integral evolution, but a partial and
imposed formation, affecting or liberating some parts of the being, suppressing
others or leaving them as they were; a creation from outside the normal nature,
by imposition upon it, it could be durable in its entirety only as long as
there was a maintenance of the creating influence. A descent of consciousness
into the lower levels is therefore necessary, but in this way also it is
difficult to work out the full power of the higher principle; there is a
modification, dilution, diminution which keeps up an imperfection and
limitation in the results: the light of a greater knowledge comes down but gets
blurred and modified, its significance misinterpreted or its truth mixed with
mental and vital error, or the force, the power to fulfil
itself is not commensurate with its light. A light and power of the Overmind working in its own full right and in its own
sphere is one thing, the same light working in the obscurity of the physical
consciousness and under its conditions is something quite different and, owing
to dilution and mixture, far inferior in its knowledge and force and results. A
mutilated power, a partial effect or hampered movement is the consequence.
This
is indeed the reason of the slow and difficult emergence of the
Consciousness-Force in Nature: for Mind and Life have to descend into Matter
and suit themselves to its conditions; changed and diminished by the obscurity
and reluctant inertia of the substance and force in which they work, they are
not able to make a complete transformation of their material into a fit
instrument and a changed substance revelatory of their real and native power.
The Life-consciousness is unable to effectuate the greatness and felicity of
its mighty or beautiful impulses in the material existence; its impetus fails
it, its force of effectuation is inferior to the truth of its conceptions, the
form betrays the Life-intuition within it which it tries to render into terms
of Life-being. The Mind is unable to achieve its high ideas in the medium of
Life or Matter without deductions and compromises which deprive them of their
divinity; its clarities of knowledge and will are not matched by its force
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to mould this inferior substance to obey and
express it: on the contrary, its own powers get affected, its will is divided,
its knowledge confused and clouded by the turbidities of life and the
incomprehensiveness of Matter. Neither Life nor Mind succeeds in converting or
perfecting the material existence, because they cannot attain to their own full
force in these conditions; they need to call in a higher power to liberate and fulfil them. But the higher spiritual-mental powers also
undergo the same disability when they descend into Life and Matter; they can do
much more, achieve much luminous change, but the modification, the limitation,
the disparity between the consciousness that comes in and the force of
effectuation that it can mentalise and materialise, are constantly there and the result is a
diminished creation. The change made is often extraordinary, there is even
something which looks like a total conversion and reversal of the state of
consciousness and an uplifting of its movements, but it is not dynamically
absolute.
Only the Supermind can thus descend without losing its full power of
action; for its action is always intrinsic and automatic, its will and
knowledge identical and the result commensurate: its nature is a self-achieving
Truth-Consciousness and, if it limits itself or its working, it is by choice
and intention, not by compulsion; in the limits it chooses its action and the results
of its action are harmonious and inevitable. Again, Overmind
is, like Mind, a dividing principle, and its characteristic operation is to
work out in an independent formation a selected harmony; its global action
enables it indeed to create a harmony whole and perfect in itself or to unite
or fuse its harmonies together, to synthetise; but, labouring under the restrictions of Mind, Life and Matter,
it is obliged to do it by sections and their joinings.
Its tendency of totality is hampered by its selective tendency which is
accentuated by the nature of the mental and life material in which it is
working here; what it can achieve is separate limited spiritual creations each
perfect in itself, but not the integral knowledge and its manifestation. For
this reason and because of the diminishing of its native light and power it is
unable to do fully what is needed and has to call in a greater power, the supramental force, to liberate and fulfil
it. As the psychic change
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has to call in the spiritual to complete it, so
the first spiritual change has to call in the supramental
transformation to complete it. For all these steps forward are, like those
before them, transitional; the whole radical change in the evolution from a
basis of Ignorance to a basis of Knowledge can only come by the intervention of
the supramental Power and its direct action in earth-existence.
This then must be the
nature of the third and final transformation which finishes the passage of the
soul through the Ignorance and bases its consciousness, its life, its power and
form of manifestation on a complete and completely effective self-knowledge.
The Truth-Consciousness, finding evolutionary Nature ready, has to descend into
her and enable her to liberate the supramental
principle within her; so must be created the supramental
and spiritual being as the first unveiled manifestation of the truth of the
Self and Spirit in the material universe.
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