As
we reach in our thought the line at which the evolution of Mind into Overmind
passes over into an evolution of Overmind into Supermind, we are faced with a
ifficulty which amounts almost to an impossibility. For we are moved to seek for
some precise idea, some clear mental description of the supramental or gnostic
existence of which evolutionary Nature in the Ignorance is in travail; but by
crossing this extreme line of sublimated Mind the consciousness passes out of
the sphere,
exceeds the characteristic action and escapes from the grasp, of mental
perception and knowledge. It is evident indeed that supramental nature must be a
perfect
integration and consummation of spiritual nature and experience: it would
also contain in itself, by the very character of the evolutionary principle,
though
1 I. 46.
11. 2
V. 12. 2. 3 I. 93. 4. 4 V. 80. 4.
5 V. 15. 2. 6 IX. 110. 4; 108. 8.
Page 964
it would not be limited to that change, a total spiritualisation of mundane
nature; our world-experience would be taken up in this step of our evolution
and, by a
transformation of its parts of divinity, a creative rejection of its
imperfections and disguises, reach some divine truth and plenitude. But these
are general formulas and give us no precise idea of the change. Our normal
perception or imagination or formulation of things spiritual and things mundane
is mental, but in the Gnostic change the evolution crosses a line beyond which
there is a supreme and radical reversal of consciousness and the standards and
forms of mental cognition are no longer sufficient: it is difficult for mental
thought to understand or describe supramental nature.
Mental nature and mental thought are based on a consciousness of the finite;
supramental nature is in its very grain a consciousness and power of the
Infinite. Supramental nature sees everything from the standpoint of oneness and
regards all things, even the greatest multiplicity and diversity, even what are
to the mind the strongest contradictions, in the light of that oneness; its
will, ideas, feelings, sense are made of the stuff of oneness, its actions
proceed upon that basis. Mental nature, on the contrary, thinks, sees, wills,
feels, senses with division as a starting-point and has only a constructed
understanding of unity; even when it experiences oneness, it has to act from the
oneness on a basis of limitation and difference. But the supramental, the divine
life is a life of essential, spontaneous and inherent unity. It is impossible
for the mind to forecast in detail what the supramental change must be in its
parts of life-action and outward behaviour or lay down for it what forms it
shall create for the individual or the collective existence. For the mind acts
by intellectual rule or device or by reasoned choice of will or by mental
impulse or in obedience to life-impulse; but supramental nature does not act by
mental idea or rule or in subjection to any inferior impulse: each of its steps
is dictated by an innate spiritual vision, a comprehensive and exact penetration
into the truth of all and the truth of each thing; it acts always according to
inherent reality, not by the mental idea, not according to an imposed law of
conduct or a constructive thought or perceptive contrivance. Its movement is
calm, self-possessed, spontaneous,
Page 965
plastic; it arises naturally and inevitably out of a harmonic identity of the
truth which is felt in the very substance of the conscious being, a spiritual
substance which is universal and therefore intimately one with all that is
included in its cognition of existence. A mental description of supramental
nature could only express itself either in phrases which are too abstract or in
mental figures which might turn it into something quite different from its
reality. It would not seem to be possible, therefore, for the mind to anticipate
or indicate what a supramental being shall be or how he shall act; for here
mental ideas and formulations cannot decide anything or arrive at any precise
definition or determination, because they are not near enough to the law and
self-vision of supramental nature. At the same time certain deductions can be
made from the very fact of this difference of nature which might be valid at
least for a general description of the passage from Overmind to Supermind or
might vaguely construct for us an idea of the first status of the evolutionary
supramental existence.
This passage is the stage at which the supermind gnosis can take over the lead
of the evolution from the Overmind and build the first foundations of its own
characteristic manifestation and unveiled activities; it must be marked
therefore by a decisive but long-prepared transition from an evolution in the
Ignorance to an always progressive evolution in the Knowledge. It will not be a
sudden revelation and effectuation of the absolute Supermind and the supramental
being as they are in their own plane, the swift apocalypse of a truth-conscious
existence ever self-fulfilled and complete in self-knowledge; it will be the
phenomenon of the supramental being descending into a world of evolutionary
becoming and forming itself there, unfolding the powers of the gnosis within the
terrestrial nature. This is indeed the principle of all terrestrial being; for
the process of earth-existence is the play of an infinite Reality concealing
itself first in a succession of obscurely limited, opaque and incomplete
half-figures which by their imperfection and character of disguise distort the
truth of which they are in labour, but afterwards arriving more and more at
half-luminous figures of itself which can become, once there is the supramental
descent, a true
Page 966
progressive revelation. The descent from original Supermind, the assumption of
evolutionary Supermind is a step which the supramental gnosis can very well
undertake and accomplish without changing its own essential character. It can
assume the formula of a truth-conscious existence founded in an inherent
self-knowledge but at the same time taking up into itself mental nature and
nature of life and material body. For the Supermind as the Truth-Consciousness
of the Infinite has in its dynamic principle the infinite power of a free
self-determination. It can hold all knowledge in itself and yet put forward in
formulation only what is needed at each stage of an evolution; it formulates
whatever is in accordance with the Divine Will in manifestation and the truth of
the thing to be manifested. It is by this power that it is able to hold back its
knowledge, hide its own character and law of action and manifest Overmind and
under Overmind a world of ignorance in which the being wills on its surface not
to know and even puts itself under the control of a pervading Nescience. But in
this new stage the veil thus put on will be lifted; the evolution at every step
will move in the power of the Truth-Consciousness and its progressive
determinations will be made by a conscious Knowledge and not in the forms of an
Ignorance or Inconscience.
As there has been established on earth a mental Consciousness and Power which
shapes a race of mental beings and takes up into itself all of earthly nature
that is ready for the change, so now there will be established on earth a
Gnostic Consciousness and Power which will shape a race of gnostic spiritual
beings and take up into itself all of earth-nature that is ready for this new
transformation. It will also receive into itself from above, progressively, from
its own domain of perfect
light and power and beauty all that is ready to descend from that domain into
terrestrial being. For the evolution proceeded in the past by the upsurging, at
each critical stage, of a concealed Power from its involution in the
Inconscience, but also by a descent from above, from its own plane, of that
Power already self-realised in its own higher natural province. In all these
previous stages there has been a division between surface self and consciousness
and subliminal self and consciousness; the
Page 967
surface was formed mainly under the push of the upsurging force from below, by
the Inconscient developing a slowly emergent formulation of a concealed force of
the Spirit, the subliminal partly in this way but mainly by a simultaneous
influx of the largeness of the same force from above: a mental or a vital being
descended into the subliminal parts and formed from its secret station there a
mental or a vital personality on the surface. But before the supramental change
can begin, the veil between the subliminal and the surface parts must have been
already broken down; the influx, the descent will be in the entire consciousness
as a whole, it will not take place partly behind a veil: the process will be no
longer a concealed, obscure and ambiguous procedure but an open out-flowering
consciously felt and followed by the whole being in its transmutation. In other
respects the process will be identical,—a supramental inflow from above, the
descent of a gnostic being into the nature, and an emergence of the concealed
supramental force from below; the influx and the unveiling between them will
remove what is left of the nature of the Ignorance. The rule of the Inconscient
will disappear: for the Inconscience will be changed by the outburst of the
greater secret Consciousness within it, the hidden Light, into what it always
was in reality, a sea of the secret Superconscience. A first formation of a
gnostic consciousness and nature will be the consequence.
The creation of a supramental being, nature, life on earth, will not be the sole
result of this evolution; it will also carry with it the consummation of the
steps that have led up to it: for it will confirm in possession of terrestrial
birth the Overmind, the Intuition and the other gradations of the spiritual
nature-force and establish a race of gnostic beings and a hierarchy, a shining
ladder of ascending degrees and successive constituent formations of the gnostic
light and power in earth-nature. For the description of gnosis applies to all
consciousness that is based upon Truth of being and not upon the Ignorance or
Nescience. All life and living beings ready to rise beyond the mental ignorance,
but not ready yet for the supramental height, would find in a sort of echelon or
a scale with overlapping degrees their assured basis, their intermediate steps
of self-formation,
Page 968
their expression of realised capacity of spiritual existence on the way to the
supreme Reality. But also the presence of the liberated and now sovereign
supramental light and force at the head of evolutionary Nature might be expected
to have its consequences in the whole evolution. An incidence, a decisive stress
would affect the life of the lower evolutionary stages; something of the light,
something of the force would penetrate downwards and awaken into a greater
action the hidden Truth-Power everywhere in Nature. A dominant principle of
harmony would impose itself on the life of the Ignorance; the discord, the blind
seeking, the clash of struggle, the abnormal vicissitudes of exaggeration and
depression and unsteady balance of the unseeing forces at work in their mixture
and conflict, would feel the influence and yield place to a more orderly pace
and harmonic steps of the development of being, a more revealing arrangement of
progressing life and consciousness, a better life-order. A freer play of
intuition and sympathy and understanding would enter into human life, a clearer
sense of the truth of self and things and a more enlightened dealing with the
opportunities and difficulties of existence. Instead of a constant intermixed
and confused struggle between the growth of Consciousness and the power of the
Inconscience, between the forces of light and the forces of darkness, the
evolution would become a graded progression from lesser light to greater light;
in each stage of it the conscious beings belonging to that stage would respond
to the inner Consciousness-Force and expand their own law of cosmic Nature
towards the possibility of a higher degree of that Nature. This is at least a
strong possibility and might be envisaged as the natural consequence of the
direct action of Supermind on the evolution. This intervention would not annul
the evolutionary principle, for Supermind has the power of withholding or
keeping in reserve its force of knowledge as well as the power of bringing it
into full or partial action; but it would harmonise, steady, facilitate,
tranquillise and to a great extent hedonise the difficult and afflicted process
of the evolutionary emergence.
There is something in the nature of Supermind itself that would make this great
result inevitable. It is in its foundation
Page 969
a unitarian and integralising and harmonic consciousness, and in its descent and
evolutionary working out of the diversity of the Infinite it would not lose its
unitarian trend, its push towards integralisation or its harmonic influence. The
Overmind follows out diversities and divergent possibilities on their own lines
of divergence: it can allow contradictions and discords, but it makes them
elements of a cosmic whole so that they are forced, however unwittingly and in
spite of themselves, to contribute their shares to its wholeness. Or we may say
that it accepts and even encourages contradictions, but obliges them to support
each other's existence so that there may be divergent roads of being and
consciousness and experience that lead away from the One and from each other but
still maintain themselves on the Oneness and can lead back again each on its own
path to the Oneness. That is the secret sense even of our own world of Ignorance
which works from the Inconscience but with the underlying cosmicity of the
overmind principle. But the individual being in such a creation does not possess
this secret principle in knowledge and does not base upon it his action. An
overmind being here would perceive this secret; but he might still work on his
own lines of Nature and law of action, Swabhava, Swadharma, according to the
inspiration, the dynamic control or the inner governance of the Spirit or the
Divine within him and leave the rest to their own line in the whole: an overmind
creation of knowledge in the Ignorance might therefore be something separate
from the surrounding world of Ignorance and guarded from it by the luminous
encircling and separating wall of its own principle. The supramental gnostic
being, on the contrary, would not only found all his living on an intimate sense
and effective realisation of harmonic unity in his own inner and outer life or
group-life, but would create a harmonic unity also with the still surviving
mental world, even if that world remained altogether a world of Ignorance. For
the gnostic consciousness in him would perceive and bring out the evolving truth
and principle of harmony hidden in the formations of the Ignorance; it would be
natural to his sense of integrality and it would be within his power to link
them in a true order with his own Gnostic
Page 970
principle and the evolved truth and harmony of his own greater life-creation.
That might be impossible without a considerable change in the life of the world,
but such a change would be a natural consequence of the appearance of a new
Power in Nature and its universal influence. In the emergence of the gnostic
being would be the hope of a more harmonious evolutionary order in terrestrial
Nature.
A supramental or gnostic race of beings would not be a race made according to a
single type, moulded in a single fixed pattern; for the law of the Supermind is
unity fulfilled in diversity, and therefore there would be an infinite diversity
in the manifestation of the gnostic consciousness although that consciousness
would still be one in its basis, in its constitution, in its all-revealing and
all-uniting order. It is evident that the triple status of the Supermind would
reproduce itself as a principle in this new manifestation: there would be below
it and yet belonging to it the degrees of the overmind and intuitive gnosis with
the souls that had realised these degrees of the ascending consciousness; there
would be also at the summit, as the evolution in Knowledge proceeded, individual
beings who would ascend beyond a supermind formulation and reach from the
highest height of Supermind to the summits of unitarian self-realisation in the
body which must be the last and supreme state of the epiphany of the Creation.
But in the supramental race itself, in the variation of its degrees, the
individuals would not be cast according to a single type of individuality; each
would be different from the other, a unique formation of the Being, although one
with all the rest in foundation of self and sense of oneness and in the
principle of his being. It is only this general principle of the supramental
existence of which we can attempt to form an idea however diminished by the
limitations of mental thought and mental language. A more living picture of the
gnostic being Supermind only could make; for the mind some abstract outlines of
it are alone possible. The gnosis is the effective principle of the Spirit, a
highest dynamis of the spiritual existence.
The gnostic individual would be the consummation of the spiritual man; his whole
way of being, thinking, living, acting would be governed by the
Page 971
power of a vast universal spirituality. All the trinities of the Spirit would be
real to his self-awareness and realised in his inner life. All his existence
would be fused into oneness with the transcendent and universal Self and Spirit;
all his action would originate from and obey the supreme Self and Spirit's
divine governance of Nature. All life would have to him the sense of the
Conscious Being, the Purusha within, finding its self-expression in Nature; his
life and all its thoughts, feelings, acts would be filled for him with that
significance and built upon that foundation of its reality. He would feel the
presence of the Divine in every centre of his consciousness, in every vibration
of his life-force, in every cell of his body. In all the workings of his force
of Nature he would be aware of the workings of the supreme World-Mother, the
Supernature; he would see his natural being as the becoming and manifestation of
the power of the World-Mother. In this consciousness he would live and act in an
entire transcendent freedom, a complete joy of the Spirit, an entire identity
with the cosmic Self and a spontaneous sympathy with all in the universe. All
beings would be to him his own selves, all ways and powers of consciousness
would be felt as the ways and powers of his own universality. But in that
inclusive universality there would be no bondage to inferior forces, no
deflection from his own highest truth: for this truth would envelop all truth of
things and keep each in its own place, in a relation of diversified harmony,—it
would not admit any confusion, clash, infringing of boundaries, any distortion
of the different harmonies that constitute the total harmony. His own life and
the world-life would be to him like a perfect work of art; it would be as if the
creation of a cosmic and spontaneous genius infallible in its working out of a
multitudinous order. The gnostic individual would be in the world and of the
world, but would also exceed it in his consciousness and live in his Self of
transcendence above it; he would be universal but free in the universe,
individual but not limited by a separative individuality. The true Person is not
an isolated entity, his individuality is universal; for he individualises the
universe: it is at the same time divinely emergent in a spiritual air of
transcendental infinity, like a
Page 972
high cloud-surpassing summit; for he individualises the divine Transcendence.
The three powers which present themselves to our life as the three keys to its
mystery are the individual, the cosmic entity and the Reality present in both
and beyond them. These three mysteries of existence would find in the life of
the supramental being a united fulfilment of their harmony. He will be the
perfected and complete individual, fulfilled in the satisfaction of his growth
and self-expression; for all his elements would be carried to a highest degree
and integrated in some kind of comprehensive largeness. What we are striving
towards is completeness and harmony; an imperfection and incapacity or a discord
of our nature is that from which inwardly we most suffer. But this is because of
our incompleteness of being, our imperfect self-knowledge, our imperfect
possession of our self and our nature. A complete self-knowledge in all things
and at all moments is the gift of the supramental gnosis and with it a complete
self-mastery, not merely in the sense of control of Nature but in the sense of a
power of perfect self-expression in Nature. Whatever knowledge of self there
would be, would be perfectly embodied in the will of the self, the will
perfectly embodied in the action of the self; the result would be the self's
complete dynamic self-formulation in its own nature. In the lower grades of
gnostic being, there would be a limitation of self-expression according to the
variety of the nature, a limited perfection in order to formulate some side,
element or combined harmony of elements of some Divine Totality, a restricted
selection of powers from the cosmic figure of the infinitely manifold One. But
in the supramental being this need of limitation for perfection would disappear;
the diversity would not be secured by limitation but by a diversity in the power
and hue of the Supernature: the same whole of being and the same whole of nature
would express themselves in an infinitely diverse fashion; for each being would
be a new totality, harmony, self-equation of the One Being. What would be
expressed in front or held behind at any moment would depend not on capacity or
incapacity, but on the dynamic self-choice of the Spirit, its delight of
self-expression, on the truth of the
Page 973
Divine's will and joy of itself in the individual and, subordinately, on the
truth of the thing that had to be done through the individual in the harmony of
the totality. For the complete individual is the cosmic individual, since only
when we have taken the universe into ourselves,—and transcended it,—can our
individuality be complete.
The supramental being in his cosmic consciousness seeing and feeling all as
himself would act in that sense; he would act in a universal awareness and a
harmony of his individual self with the total self, of his individual will with
the total will, of his individual action with the total action. For what we most
suffer from in our outer life and its reactions upon our inner life is the
imperfection of our relations with the world, our ignorance of others, our
disharmony with the whole of things, our inability to equate our demand on the
world with the world's demand on us. There is a conflict,—a conflict from which
there seems to be no ultimate issue except an escape from both world and
self,—between our self-affirmation and a world on which we have to impose that
affirmation, a world which seems to be too large for us and to pass
indifferently over our soul, mind, life, body in the sweep of its course to its
goal. The relation of our course and goal to the world's is unapparent to us,
and to harmonise ourselves with it we have either to enforce ourselves upon it
and make it subservient to us or suppress ourselves and become subservient to it
or else to compass a difficult balance between these two necessities of the
relation between the individual personal destiny and the cosmic whole and its
hidden purpose. But for the supramental being living in a cosmic consciousness
the difficulty would not exist, since he has no ego; his cosmic individuality
would know the cosmic forces and their movement and their significance as part
of himself, and the Truth-Consciousness in him would see the right relation at
each step and find the dynamic right expression of that relation.
For in fact both individual and universe are simultaneous and interrelated
expressions of the same transcendent Being; even though in the Ignorance and
under its law there is maladjustment and conflict, yet there must be a right
relation, an
Page 974
equation to which all arrives but which is missed by our blindness of ego, our
attempt to affirm the ego and not the Self one in all. The supramental
consciousness has that truth of relation in itself as its natural right and
privilege, since it is the Supermind that determines the cosmic relations and
the relations of the individual with the universe, determines them freely and
sovereignly as a power of the Transcendence. In the mental being even the
pressure of the cosmic consciousness overpowering the ego and an awareness of
the transcendent Reality might not of themselves bring about a dynamic solution;
for there might still be an incompatibility between its liberated spiritual
mentality and the obscure life of the cosmic Ignorance which the mind would not
have the power to solve or overcome. But in the supramental being, not only
statically conscious but fully dynamic and acting in the creative light and
power of the Transcendence, the supramental light, the truth light,
rtam jyotih, would have that power. For there would be a unity with the
cosmic self, but not a bondage to the Ignorance of cosmic Nature in its lower
formulation; there would on the contrary be a power to act in the light of the
Truth on that Ignorance. A large universality of self-expression, a large
harmonic universality of world-being would be the very sign of the supramental
Person in his gnostic nature.
The existence of the supramental being would be the play of a manifoldly and
multiply manifesting truth-power of one-existence and one-consciousness for the
delight of one-existence. Delight of the manifestation of the Spirit in its
truth of being would be the sense of the gnostic life. All its movements would
be a formulation of the truth of the Spirit, but also of the joy of the
Spirit,—an affirmation of spiritual existence, an affirmation of spiritual
consciousness, an affirmation of spiritual delight of being. But this would not
be what self-affirmation tends to be in us in spite of the underlying unity,
something egocentric, separative, opposed or indifferent or insufficiently alive
to the self-affirmation of others or their demand on existence. One in self with
all, the supramental being will seek the delight of self-manifestation of the
Spirit in himself but equally the delight of the Divine in all: he will have the
cosmic joy and will be a
Page 975
power for bringing the bliss of the Spirit, the joy of being to others; for
their joy will be part of his own joy of existence. To be occupied with the good
of all beings, to make the joy and grief of others one's own has been described
as a sign of the liberated and fulfilled spiritual man. The supramental being
will have no need, for that, of an altruistic self-effacement, since this
occupation will be intimate to his self-fulfilment, the fulfilment of the One in
all, and there will be no contradiction or strife between his own good and the
good of others: nor will he have any need to acquire a universal sympathy by
subjecting himself to the joys and griefs of creatures in the Ignorance; his
cosmic sympathy will be part of his inborn truth of being and not dependent on a
personal participation in the lesser joy and suffering; it will transcend what
it embraces and in that transcendence will be its power. His feeling of
universality, his action of universality will be always a spontaneous state and
natural movement, an automatic expression of the Truth, an act of the joy of the
Spirit's self-existence. There could be in it no place for limited self or
desire or for the satisfaction or frustration of the limited self or the
satisfaction or frustration of desire, no place for the relative and dependent
happiness and grief that visit and afflict our limited nature; for these are
things that belong to the ego and the Ignorance, not to the freedom and truth of
the Spirit.
The gnostic being has the will of action but also the knowledge of what is to be
willed and the power to effectuate its knowledge; it will not be led from
ignorance to do what is not to be done. Moreover, its action is not the seeking
for a fruit or result; its joy is in being and doing, in pure state of Spirit,
in pure act of Spirit, in the pure bliss of the Spirit. As its static
consciousness will contain all in itself and must be, therefore, for ever
self-fulfilled, so its dynamis of consciousness will find in each step and in
each act a spiritual freedom and a self-fulfilment. All will be seen in its
relation to the whole, so that each step will be luminous and joyous and
satisfying in itself because each is in unison with a luminous totality. This
consciousness, this living in the spiritual totality and acting from it, a
satisfied totality in essence of being and a satisfied totality in the dynamic
movement of being, the sense of the relations of that totality
Page 976
accompanying each step, is indeed the very mark of a supramental consciousness
and distinguishes it from the disintegrated, ignorantly successive steps of our
consciousness in the Ignorance. The gnostic existence and delight of existence
is a universal and total being and delight, and there will be the presence of
that totality and universality in each separate movement: in each there will be,
not a partial experience of self or a fractional bit of its joy, but the sense
of the whole movement of an integral being and the presence of its entire and
integral bliss of being, Ananda. The gnostic being's knowledge self-realised in
action will be, not an ideative knowledge, but the Real-Idea of the Supermind,
the instrumentation of an essential light of Consciousness; it will be the
self-light of all the reality of being and becoming pouring itself out
continually and filling every particular act and activity with the pure and
whole delight of its self-existence. For an infinite consciousness with its
knowledge by identity there is in each differentiation the joy and experience of
the Identical, in each finite is felt the Infinite.
An evolution of gnostic consciousness brings with it a transformation of our
world-consciousness and world-action: for it takes up into the new power of
awareness not only the inner existence but our outer being and our world-being;
there is a remaking of both, an integration of them in the sense and power of
the spiritual existence. There must come upon us in the change at once a
reversal and rejection of our present way of existence and a fulfilment of its
inner trend and tendency. For we stand now between these two terms, an outer
world of Life and Matter that has made us and a remaking of the world by
ourselves in the sense of the evolving Spirit. Our present way of living is at
once a subjection to Life-Force and Matter and a struggle with Life and Matter.
In its first appearance an outer existence creates by our reactions to it an
inner or mental existence; if we shape ourselves at all, it is in most men less
by the conscious pressure of a free soul or intelligence from within than by a
response to our environment and the world-Nature acting upon us: but what we
move towards in the development of our conscious being is an inner existence
creating by its knowledge and power its own outer form of living and self-
Page 977
expressive environment of living. In the gnostic nature this movement will have
consummated itself; the nature of living will be an accomplished inner existence
whose light and power will take perfect body in the outer life. The gnostic
being will take up the world of Life and Matter, but he will turn and adapt it
to his own truth and purpose of existence; he will mould life itself into his
own spiritual image, and this he will be able to do because he has the secret of
a spiritual creation and is in communion and oneness with the Creator within
him. This will be first effective in the shaping of his own inner and outer
individual existence, but the same power and principle will operate in any
common gnostic life; the relations of gnostic being with gnostic being will be
the expression of their one gnostic self and supernature shaping into a
significant power and form of itself the whole common existence.
In all spiritual living the inner life is the thing of first importance; the
spiritual man lives always within, and in a world of the Ignorance that refuses
to change he has to be in a certain sense separate from it and to guard his
inner life against the intrusion and influence of the darker forces of the
Ignorance: he is out of the world even when he is within it; if he acts upon it,
it is from the fortress of his inner spiritual being where in the inmost
sanctuary he is one with the Supreme Existence or the soul and God are alone
together. The gnostic life will be an inner life in which the antinomy of the
inner and the outer, the self and the world will have been cured and exceeded.
The gnostic being will have indeed an inmost existence in which he is alone with
God, one with the Eternal, self-plunged into the depths of the Infinite, in
communion with its heights and its luminous abysses of secrecy; nothing will be
able to disturb or to invade these depths or bring him down from the summits,
neither the world's contents nor his action nor all that is around him. This is
the transcendence-aspect of the spiritual life and it is necessary for the
freedom of the Spirit; for otherwise the identity in Nature with the world would
be a binding limitation and not a free identity. But at the same time God-love
and the delight of God will be the heart's expression of that inner communion
and oneness, and that delight and love will expand
Page 978
itself to embrace all existence. The peace of God within will be extended in the
gnostic experience of the universe into a universal calm of equality not merely
passive but dynamic, a calm of freedom in oneness dominating all that meets it,
tranquillising all that enters into it, imposing its law of peace on the
supramental being's relations with the world in which he is living. Into all his
acts the inner oneness, the inner communion will attend him and enter into his
relations with others, who will not be to him others but selves of himself in
the one existence, his own universal existence. It is this poise and freedom in
the Spirit that will enable him to take all life into himself while still
remaining the spiritual self and to embrace even the world of the Ignorance
without himself entering into the Ignorance.
For his experience of cosmic existence will be, by its form of nature and by an
individualised centration, that of one living in the universe but, at the same
time, by self-diffusion and extension in oneness, that of one who carries the
universe and all its beings within him. This extended state of being will not
only be an extension in oneness of self or an extension in conceptive idea and
vision, but an extension of oneness in heart, in sense, in a concrete physical
consciousness. He will have the cosmic consciousness, sense, feeling, by which
all objective life will become part of his subjective existence and by which he
will realise, perceive, feel, see, hear the Divine in all forms; all forms and
movements will be realised, sensed, seen, heard, felt as if taking place within
his own vast self of being. The world will be connected not only with his outer
but with his inner life. He will not meet the world only in its external form by
an external contact; he will be inwardly in contact with the inner self of
things and beings: he will meet consciously their inner as well as their outer
reactions; he will be aware of that within them of which they themselves will
not be aware, act upon all with an inner comprehension, encounter all with a
perfect sympathy and sense of oneness but also an independence which is not
overmastered by any contact. His action on the world will be largely an inner
action by the power of the Spirit, by the spiritual-supramental idea-force
formulating itself in the world, by the secret unspoken word, by the power of
the heart, by the dynamic life-force, by the
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enveloping and penetrating power of the self one with all things; the outer
expressed and visible action will be only a fringe, a last projection of this
vaster single total of activity.
At the same time the universal inner life of the individual will not be confined
to an inner pervasive and inclusive contact with the physical world alone: it
will extend beyond it through the full realisation of the subliminal inner
being's natural connection with other planes of being; a knowledge of their
powers and influences will have become a normal element of the inner experience,
and the happenings of this world will be seen not solely in their external
aspect but also in the light of all that is secret behind the physical and
terrestrial creation and movement. A gnostic being will possess not only a
truth-conscious control of the realised Spirit's power over its physical world,
but also the full power of the mental and vital planes and the use of their
greater forces for the perfection of the physical existence. This greater
knowledge and wider hold of all existence will enormously increase the power of
instrumentation of the gnostic being on his surroundings and on the world of
physical Nature.
In the Self-Existence of which Supermind is the dynamic Truth-Consciousness,
there can be no aim of being except to be, no aim of consciousness except to be
conscious of being, no aim of delight of being other than its delight; all is a
self-existent and self-sufficient Eternity. Manifestation, becoming, has in its
original supramental movement the same character; it sustains in a self-existent
and self-sufficient rhythm an activity of being which sees itself as a manifold
becoming, an activity of consciousness which takes the form of a manifold
self-knowledge, an activity of force of conscious existence which exists for the
glory and beauty of its own manifold power of being, an activity of delight
which assumes innumerable forms of delight. The existence and consciousness of
the supramental being here in Matter will have fundamentally the same nature,
but with subordinate characters which mark the difference between Supermind in
its own plane and Supermind working in its manifested power in the
earth-existence. For here there will be an evolving being, an evolving
consciousness, an evolving delight of existence. The gnostic being will appear
as the sign of an evolution from the
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consciousness of the Ignorance into the consciousness of Sachchidananda. In the
Ignorance one is there primarily to grow, to know and to do, or, more exactly to
grow into something, to arrive by knowledge at something, to get something done.
Imperfect, we have no satisfaction of our being, we must perforce strive with
labour and difficulty to grow into something we are not; ignorant and burdened
with a consciousness of our ignorance, we have to arrive at something by which
we can feel that we know; bounded with incapacity, we
have to hunt after strength and power; afflicted with a consciousness of
suffering, we have to try to get something done by which we catch at some
pleasure or lay hold on some satisfying reality of life. To maintain existence
is, indeed, our first occupation and necessity, but it is only a starting-point:
for the mere maintenance of an imperfect existence chequered with suffering
cannot be sufficient as an aim of our being; the instinctive will of existence,
the pleasure of existence, which is all that the Ignorance can make out of the
secret underlying Power and Ananda, has to be supplemented by the need to do and
become. But what to do and what to become is not clearly known to us; we get
what knowledge we can, what power, strength, purity, peace we can, what delight
we can, become what we can. But our aims and our effort towards their
achievement and the little we can hold as our gains turn into meshes by which we
are bound; it is these things that become for us the object of life: to know our
souls and to be our selves, which must be the foundation of our true way of
being, is a secret that escapes us in our preoccupation with an external
learning, an external construction of knowledge, the achievement of an external
action, an external delight and pleasure. The spiritual man is one who has
discovered his soul: he has found his self and lives in that, is conscious of
it, has the joy of it; he needs nothing external for his completeness of
existence. The gnostic being starting from this new basis takes up our ignorant
becoming and turns it into a luminous becoming of knowledge and a realised power
of being. All therefore that is our attempt to be in the Ignorance, he will
fulfil in the Knowledge. All knowledge he will turn into a manifestation of the
self-knowledge of being, all power and action into a power and action of the
self-force of
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being, all delight into a universal delight of self-existence. Attachment and
bondage will fall away, because at each step and in each thing there will be the
full satisfaction of self-existence, the light of the consciousness fulfilling
itself, the ecstasy of delight of existence finding itself. Each stage of the
evolution in the knowledge will be an unfolding of this power and will of being
and this joy to be, a free becoming supported by the sense of the Infinite, the
bliss of the Brahman, the luminous sanction of the Transcendence.
The supramental transformation, the supramental evolution must carry with it a
lifting of mind, life and body out of themselves into a greater way of being in
which yet their own ways and powers would be, not suppressed or abolished, but
perfected and fulfilled by the self-exceeding. For in the Ignorance all paths
are the paths of the Spirit seeking for itself blindly or with a growing light;
the gnostic being and life would be the Spirit's self-discovery and its seeing
and reaching of the aims of all these paths but in the greater way of its own
revealed and conscious truth of being. Mind seeks for light, for knowledge,—for
knowledge of the one truth basing all, an essential truth of self and things,
but also of all truth of diversity of that oneness, all its detail,
circumstance, manifold way of action, form, law of movement and happening,
various manifestation and creation; for thinking mind the joy of existence is
discovery and the penetration of the mystery of creation that comes with
knowledge. This the gnostic change will fulfil in an ample measure; but it will
give it a new character. It will act not by the discovery of the unknown, but by
the bringing out of the known; all will be the finding “of the self by the self
in the self”. For the self of the gnostic being will not be the mental ego but
the Spirit that is one in all; he will see the world as a universe of the
Spirit. The finding of the one truth underlying all things will be the Identical
discovering identity and identical truth everywhere and discovering too the
power and workings and relations of that identity. The revelation of the detail,
the circumstance, the abundant ways and forms of the manifestation will be the
unveiling of the endless opulence of the truths of that identity, its forms and
powers of self, its curious manifoldness and multiplicity of form bringing
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out infinitely its oneness. This knowledge will proceed by identification with
all, by entering into all, by a contact bringing with it a leap of
self-discovery and a flame of recognition, a greater and surer intuition of
truth than the mind can reach; there will be an intuition too of the means of
embodying and utilising the truth seen, an operative intuition of its dynamic
processes, a direct intimate awareness guiding the life and the physical senses
in every step of their action and service to the Spirit when they have to be
called in as instruments for the effectuation of process in Life and Matter.
A replacement of intellectual seeking by supramental identity and gnostic
intuition of the contents of the identity, an omnipresence of Spirit with its
light penetrating the whole process of knowledge and all its use,—so that there
is an integration between the knower, knowledge and the thing known, between the
operating consciousness, the instrumentation and the thing done, while the
single self watches over the whole integrated movement and fulfils itself
intimately in it, making it a flawless unit of self-effectuation,—will be the
character of each gnostic movement of knowledge and action of knowledge. Mind,
observing and reasoning, labours to detach itself and see objectively and truly
what it has to know; it tries to know it as not-self, independent other-reality
not affected by process of personal thinking or by any presence of self: the
gnostic consciousness will at once intimately and exactly know its object by a
comprehending and penetrating identification with it. It will overpass what it
has to know, but it will include it in itself; it will know the object as part
of itself as it might know any part or movement of its own being, without any
narrowing of itself by the identification or snaring of its thought in it so as
to be bound or limited in knowledge. There will be the intimacy, accuracy,
fullness of a direct internal knowledge, but not that misleading by personal
mind by which we constantly err, because the consciousness will be that of a
universal and not a restricted and ego-bound person. It will proceed towards all
knowledge, not setting truth against truth to see which will stand and survive,
but completing truth by truth in the light of the one Truth of which all are the
aspects. All idea and vision and perception will have this character of an inner
seeing,
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an intimate extended self-perception, a large self-integrating knowledge, an
indivisible whole working itself out by light acting upon light in a
self-executing harmony of truth-being. There will be an unfolding, not as a
delivery of light out of darkness, but as a delivery of light out of itself; for
if an evolving supramental Consciousness holds back part of its contents of
self-awareness behind in itself, it does this not as a step or by an act of
Ignorance, but as the movement of a deliberate bringing out of its timeless
knowledge into a process of Time-manifestation. A self-illumination, a
revelation of light out of light will be the method of cognition of this
evolutionary supramental Nature.
As mind seeks for light, for the discovery of knowledge and for mastery by
knowledge, so life seeks for the development of its own force and for mastery by
force: its quest is for growth, power, conquest, possession, satisfaction,
creation, joy, love, beauty; its joy of existence is in a constant
self-expression, development, diverse manifoldness of action, creation,
enjoyment, an abundant and strong intensity of itself and its power. The gnostic
evolution will lift that to its highest and fullest expression, but it will not
act for the power, satisfaction, enjoyment of the mental or vital ego, for its
narrow possession of itself and its eager ambitious grasp on others and on
things or for its greater self-affirmation and magnified embodiment; for in that
way no spiritual fullness and perfection can come. The gnostic life will exist
and act for the Divine in itself and in the world, for the Divine in all; the
increasing possession of the individual being and the world by the Divine
Presence, Light, Power, Love, Delight, Beauty will be the sense of life to the
gnostic being. In the more and more perfect satisfaction of that growing
manifestation will be the individual's satisfaction: his power will be the
instrumentation of the power of Supernature for bringing in and extending that
greater life and nature; whatever conquest and adventure will be there, will be
for that only and not for the reign of any individual or collective ego. Love
will be for him the contact, meeting, union of self with self, of spirit with
spirit, a unification of being, a power and joy and intimacy and closeness of
soul to soul, of the One to the One, a joy of identity and the consequences of a
diverse identity. It is this joy of an intimate
Page 984
self-revealing diversity of the One, the multitudinous union of the One and a
happy interaction in the identity, that will be for him the full revealed sense
of life. Creation aesthetic or dynamic, mental creation, life-creation, material
creation will have for him the same sense. It will be the creation of
significant forms of the Eternal Force, Light, Beauty, Reality,—the beauty and
truth of its forms and bodies, the beauty and truth of its powers and qualities,
the beauty and truth of its spirit, its formless beauty of self and essence.
As a consequence of the total change and reversal of consciousness establishing
a new relation of Spirit with Mind and Life and Matter, and a new significance
and perfection in the relation, there will be a reversal, a perfecting new
significance also of the relations between the spirit and the body it inhabits.
In our present way of living the soul expresses itself, as best it can or as
badly as it must, through the mind and the vitality, or, more often, allows the
mind and the vitality to act with its support: the body is the instrument of
this action. But the body, even in obeying, limits and determines the mind's and
the life's self-expression by the limited possibilities and acquired character
of its own physical instrumentation; it has besides a law of its own action, a
movement and will or force or urge of movement of its own subconscious or
half-emerged conscious power of being which they can only partially,—and even in
that part more by an indirect than by a direct or, if direct, then more by a
subconscious than a willed and conscious action,—influence or alter. But in the
gnostic way of being and living the will of the Spirit must directly control and
determine the movements and law of the body. For the law of the body arises from
the subconscient or inconscient: but in the gnostic being the subconscient will
have become conscious and subject to the supramental control, penetrated with
its light and action; the basis of inconscience with its obscurity and
ambiguity, its obstruction or tardy responses will have been transformed into a
lower or supporting superconscience by the supramental emergence. Already even
in the realised higher-mind being and in the intuitive and overmind being the
body will have become sufficiently conscious to respond to the influence of the
Idea and the Will-Force so that
Page 985
the action of mind on the physical parts, which is rudimentary, chaotic and
mostly involuntary in us, will have developed a considerable potency: but in the
supramental being it is the consciousness with the Real-Idea in it which will
govern everything. This Real-Idea is a truth-perception which is self-effective;
for it is the idea and will of the Spirit in direct action and originates a
movement of the substance of being which must inevitably effectuate itself in
state and act of being. It is this dynamic irresistible spiritual realism of the
Truth-Consciousness in the highest degree of itself that will have here grown
conscient and consciously competent in the evolved gnostic being: it will not
act as now, veiled in an apparent inconscience and self-limited by law of
mechanism, but as the sovereign Reality in self-effectuating action. It is this
that will rule the existence with an entire knowledge and power and include in
its rule the functioning and action of the body. The body will be turned by the
power of the spiritual consciousness into a true and fit and perfectly
responsive instrument of the Spirit.
This new relation of the Spirit and the body assumes,—and makes possible,—a free
acceptance of the whole of material Nature in place of a rejection; the drawing
back from her, the refusal of all identification or acceptance, which is the
first normal necessity of the spiritual consciousness for its liberation, is no
longer imperative. To cease to be identified with the body, to separate oneself
from the body-consciousness, is a recognised and necessary step whether towards
spiritual liberation or towards spiritual perfection and mastery over Nature.
But, this redemption once effected, the descent of the spiritual light and force
can invade and take up the body also and there can be a new liberated and
sovereign acceptance of material Nature. That is possible, indeed, only if there
is a changed communion of the Spirit with Matter, a control, a reversal of the
present balance of interaction which allows physical Nature to veil the Spirit
and affirm her own dominance. In the light of a larger knowledge Matter also can
be seen to be the Brahman, a self-energy put forth by the Brahman, a form and
substance of Brahman; aware of the secret consciousness within material
substance, secure in this larger knowledge, the gnostic light and
Page 986
power can unite itself with Matter, so seen, and accept it as an instrument of a
spiritual manifestation. A certain reverence, even, for Matter and a sacramental
attitude in all dealings with it is possible. As in the Gita the act of the
taking of food is spoken of as a material sacrament, a sacrifice, an offering of
Brahman to Brahman by Brahman, so also the Gnostic consciousness and sense can
view all the operations of Spirit with Matter. The Spirit has made itself Matter
in order to place itself there as an instrument for the well-being and joy,
yogaksema, of created beings, for a self-offering of universal physical
utility and service. The gnostic being, using Matter but using it without
material or vital attachment or desire, will feel that he is using the Spirit in
this form of itself with its consent and sanction for its own purpose. There
will be in him a certain respect for physical things, an awareness of the occult
consciousness in them, of its dumb will of utility and service, a worship of the
Divine, the Brahman in what he uses, a care for a perfect and faultless use of
his divine material, for a true rhythm, ordered harmony, beauty in the life of
Matter, in the utilisation of Matter.
As a result of this new relation between the Spirit and the body, the gnostic
evolution will effectuate the spiritualisation, perfection and fulfilment of the
physical being; it will do for the body as for the mind and life. Apart from the
obscurity, frailties and limitations, which this change will overcome, the
body-consciousness is a patient servant and can be in its large reserve of
possibilities a potent instrument of the individual life, and it asks for little
on its own account: what it craves for is duration, health, strength, physical
perfection, bodily happiness, liberation from suffering, ease. These demands are
not in themselves unacceptable, mean or illegitimate, for they render into the
terms of Matter the perfection of form and substance, the power and delight
which should be the natural outflowing, the expressive manifestation of the
Spirit. When the gnostic Force can act in the body, these things can be
established; for their opposites come from a pressure of external forces on the
physical mind, on the nervous and material life, on the body-organism, from an
ignorance that does not know how to meet
Page 987
these forces or is not able to meet them rightly or with power, and from some
obscurity, pervading the stuff of the physical consciousness and distorting its
responses, that reacts to them in a wrong way. A supramental self-acting
self-effectuating awareness and knowledge, replacing this ignorance, will
liberate and restore the obscured and spoiled intuitive instincts in the body
and enlighten and supplement them with a greater conscious action. This change
would institute and maintain a right physical perception of things, a right
relation and right reaction to objects and energies, a right rhythm of mind,
nerve and organism. It would bring into the body a higher spiritual power and a
greater life-force unified with the universal life-force and able to draw on it,
a luminous harmony with material Nature and the vast and calm touch of the
eternal repose which can give to it its diviner strength and ease. Above
all,—for this is the most needed and fundamental change,—it will flood the whole
being with a supreme energy of Consciousness-Force which would meet, assimilate
or harmonise with itself all the forces of existence that surround and press
upon the body.
It is the incompleteness and weakness of the Consciousness-Force manifested in
the mental, vital and physical being, its inability to receive or refuse at
will, or, receiving, to assimilate or harmonise the contacts of the universal
Energy cast upon it, that is the cause of pain and suffering. In the material
realm Nature starts with an entire insensibility, and it is a notable fact that
either a comparative insensibility or a deficient sensibility or, more often, a
greater endurance and hardness to suffering is found in the beginnings of life,
in the animal, in primitive or less developed man; as the human being grows in
evolution, he grows in sensibility and suffers more keenly in mind and life and
body. For the growth in consciousness is not sufficiently supported by a growth
in force: the body becomes more subtle, more finely capable, but less solidly
efficient in its external energy: man has to call in his will, his mental power
to dynamise, correct and control his nervous being, force it
to the strenuous tasks he demands from his instruments, steel it against
suffering and disaster. In the spiritual ascent this power of the consciousness
and its will over the instruments, the control of
Page 988
spirit and inner mind over the outer mentality and the nervous being and the
body, increases immensely; a tranquil and wide equality of the spirit to all
shocks and contacts comes in and becomes the habitual poise, and this can pass
from the mind to the vital parts and establish there too an immense and enduring
largeness of strength and peace; even in the body this state may form itself and
meet inwardly the shocks of grief and pain and all kinds of suffering. Even, a
power of willed physical insensibility can intervene or a power of mental
separation from all shock and injury can be acquired which shows that the
ordinary reactions and the debile submission of the bodily self to the normal
habits of response of material Nature are not obligatory or unalterable. Still
more significant is the power that comes on the level of spiritual Mind or
Overmind to change the vibrations of pain into vibrations of Ananda: even if
this were to go only up to a certain point, it indicates the possibility of an
entire reversal of the ordinary rule of the reacting consciousness; it can be
associated too with a power of self-protection that turns away the shocks that
are more difficult to transmute or to endure. The gnostic evolution at a certain
stage must bring about a completeness of this reversal and of this power of
self-protection which will fulfil the claim of the body for immunity and
serenity of its being and for deliverance from suffering and build in it a power
for the total delight of existence. A spiritual Ananda can flow into the body
and inundate cell and tissue; a luminous materialisation of this higher Ananda
could of itself bring about a total transformation of the deficient or adverse
sensibilities of physical Nature.
An aspiration, a demand for the supreme and total delight of existence is there
secretly in the whole make of our being, but it is disguised by the separation
of our parts of nature and their differing urge and obscured by their inability
to conceive or seize anything more than a superficial pleasure. In the
body-consciousness this demand takes shape as a need of bodily happiness, in our
life-parts as a yearning for life-happiness, a keen vibrant response to joy and
rapture of many kinds and to all surprise of satisfaction; in the mind it shapes
into a ready reception of all forms of mental delight; on a higher level it
becomes apparent
Page 989
in the spiritual mind's call for peace and divine ecstasy. This trend is founded
in the truth of the being; for Ananda is the very essence of the Brahman, it is
the supreme nature of the omnipresent Reality. The Supermind itself in the
descending degrees of the manifestation emerges from the Ananda and in the
evolutionary ascent merges into the Ananda. It is not, indeed, merged in the
sense of being extinguished or abolished but is there inherent in it,
indistinguishable from the self of awareness and the self-effectuating force of
the Bliss of Being. In the involutionary descent as in the evolutionary return
Supermind is supported by the original Delight of Existence and carries that in
it in all its activities as their sustaining essence; for Consciousness, we may
say, is its parent power in the Spirit, but Ananda is the spiritual matrix from
which it manifests and the maintaining source into which it carries back the
soul in its return to the status of the Spirit. A supramental manifestation in
its ascent would have as a next sequence and culmination of self-result a
manifestation of the Bliss of the Brahman: the evolution of the being of gnosis
would be followed by an evolution of the being of bliss; an embodiment of
gnostic existence would have as its consequence an embodiment of the beatific
existence. Always in the being of gnosis, in the life of the gnosis some power
of the Ananda would be there as an inseparable and pervading significance of
supramental self-experience. In the liberation of the soul from the Ignorance
the first foundation is peace, calm, the silence and quietude of the Eternal and
Infinite; but a consummate power and greater formation of the spiritual
ascension takes up this peace of liberation into the bliss of a perfect
experience and realisation of the eternal beatitude, the bliss of the Eternal
and Infinite. This Ananda would be inherent in the gnostic consciousness as a
universal delight and would grow with the evolution of the gnostic nature.
It has been held that ecstasy is a lower and transient passage, the peace of the
Supreme is the supreme realisation, the consummate abiding experience. This may
be true on the spiritual-mind plane: there the first ecstasy felt is indeed a
spiritual rapture, but it can be and is very usually mingled with a supreme
happiness of the vital parts taken up by the Spirit; there is an exaltation,
Page 990
exultation, excitement, a highest intensity of the joy of the heart and the pure
inner soul-sensation that can be a splendid passage or an uplifting force but is
not the ultimate permanent foundation. But in the highest ascents of the
spiritual bliss there is not this vehement exaltation and excitement; there is
instead an illimitable intensity of participation in an eternal ecstasy which is
founded on the eternal Existence and therefore on a beatific tranquillity of
eternal peace. Peace and ecstasy cease to be different and become one. The
Supermind, reconciling and fusing all differences as well as all contradictions,
brings out this unity; a wide calm and a deep delight of all-existence are among
its first steps of self-realisation, but this calm and this delight rise
together, as one state, into an increasing intensity and culminate in the
eternal ecstasy, the bliss that is the Infinite. In the gnostic consciousness at
any stage there would be always in some degree this fundamental and spiritual
conscious delight of existence in the whole depth of the being; but also all the
movements of Nature would be pervaded by it, and all the actions and reactions
of the life and the body: none could escape the law of the Ananda. Even before
the gnostic change there can be a beginning of this fundamental ecstasy of being
translated into a manifold beauty and delight. In the mind, it translates into a
calm of intense delight of spiritual perception and vision and knowledge, in the
heart into a wide or deep or passionate delight of universal union and love and
sympathy and the joy of beings and the joy of things. In the will and vital
parts it is felt as the energy of delight of a divine life-power in action or a
beatitude of the senses perceiving and meeting the One everywhere, perceiving as
their normal aesthesis of things a universal beauty and a secret harmony of
creation of which our mind can catch only imperfect glimpses or a rare
supernormal sense. In the body it reveals itself as an ecstasy pouring into it
from the heights of the Spirit and the peace and bliss of a pure and
spiritualised physical existence. A universal beauty and glory of being begins
to manifest; all objects reveal hidden lines, vibrations, powers, harmonic
significances concealed from the normal mind and the physical sense. In the
universal phenomenon is revealed the eternal Ananda.
These are the first major results of the spiritual
Page 991
transformation that follow as a necessary consequence of the nature of Supermind.
But if there is to be not only a perfection of the inner existence, of the
consciousness, of an inner delight of existence, but a perfection of the life
and action, two other questions present themselves from our mental viewpoint
which have to our human thought about our life and its dynamisms a considerable,
even a premier importance. First, there is the place of personality in the
Gnostic being,—whether the status, the building of the being will be quite other
than what we experience as the form and life of the person or similar. If there
is a personality and it is in any way responsible for its actions, there
intervenes, next, the question of the place of the ethical element and its
perfection and fulfilment in the gnostic nature. Ordinarily, in the common
notion, the separative ego is our self and, if ego has to disappear in a
transcendental or universal Consciousness, personal life and action must cease;
for, the individual disappearing, there can only be an impersonal consciousness,
a cosmic self: but if the individual is altogether extinguished, no further
question of personality or responsibility or ethical perfection can arise.
According to another line of ideas the spiritual person remains, but liberated,
purified, perfected in nature in a celestial existence. But here we are still on
earth, and yet it is supposed that the ego-personality is extinguished and
replaced by a universalised spiritual individual who is a centre and power of
the transcendent Being. It might be deduced that this Gnostic or supramental
individual is a self without personality, an impersonal Purusha. There could be
many gnostic individuals but there would be no personality, all would be the
same in being and nature. This, again, would create the idea of a void or blank
of pure being from which an action and function of experiencing consciousness
would arise, but without a construction of differentiated personality such as
that which we now observe and regard as ourselves on our surface. But this would
be a mental rather than a supramental solution of the problem of a spiritual
individuality surviving ego and persisting in experience. In the supermind
consciousness personality and impersonality are not opposite principles; they
are inseparable aspects of one and the same reality. This reality is not the ego
but the being, who is impersonal and universal in his stuff of
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nature, but forms out of it an expressive personality which is his form of self
in the changes of Nature.
Impersonality is in its source something fundamental and universal; it is an
existence, a force, a consciousness that takes on various shapes of its being
and energy; each such shape of energy, quality, power or force, though still in
itself general, impersonal and universal, is taken by the individual being as
material for the building of his personality. Thus impersonality is in the
original undifferentiated truth of things the pure substance of nature of the
Being, the Person; in the dynamic truth of things it differentiates its powers
and lends them to constitute by their variations the manifestation of
personality. Love is the nature of the lover, courage the nature of the warrior;
love and courage are impersonal and universal forces or formulations of the
cosmic Force, they are the Spirit's powers of its universal being and nature.
The Person is the Being supporting what is thus impersonal, holding it in
himself as his, his nature of self; he is that which is the lover and warrior.
What we call the personality of the Person is his expression in nature-status
and nature-action,—he himself being in his self-existence, originally and
ultimately, much more than that; it is the form of himself that he puts forth as
his manifested already developed natural being or self in nature. In the formed
limited individual it is his personal expression of what is impersonal, his
personal appropriation of it, we may say, so as to have a material with which he
can build a significant figure of himself in manifestation. In his formless
unlimited self, his real being, the true Person or Purusha, he is not that, but
contains in himself boundless and universal possibilities; but he gives to them,
as the divine Individual, his own turn in the manifestation so that each among
the Many is a unique self of the one Divine. The Divine, the Eternal, expresses
himself as existence, consciousness, bliss, wisdom, knowledge, love, beauty, and
we can think of him as these impersonal and universal powers of himself, regard
them as the nature of the Divine and Eternal; we can say that God is Love, God
is Wisdom, God is Truth or Righteousness: but he is not himself an impersonal
state or abstract of states or qualities; he is the Being, at once absolute,
universal and individual. If we look at it from this basis, there is, very
clearly, no opposition,
Page 993
no incompatibility, no impossibility of a co-existence or one-existence of the
Impersonal and the Person; they are each other, live in one another, melt into
each other, and yet in a way can appear as if different ends, sides, obverse and
reverse of the same Reality. The gnostic being is of the nature of the Divine
and therefore repeats in himself this natural mystery of existence.
A supramental gnostic individual will be a spiritual Person, but not a
personality in the sense of a pattern of being marked out by a settled
combination of fixed qualities, a determined character; he cannot be that since
he is a conscious expression of the universal and the transcendent. But neither
can his being be a capricious impersonal flux throwing up at random waves of
various form, waves of personality as it pours through Time. Something like this
may be felt in men who have no strong centralising Person in their depths but
act from a sort of confused multi-personality according to whatever element in
them becomes prominent at the time; but the gnostic consciousness is a
consciousness of harmony and self-knowledge and self-mastery and would not
present such a disorder. There are, indeed, varying notions of what constitutes
personality and what constitutes character. In one view personality is regarded
as a fixed structure of recognisable qualities expressing a power of being; but
another idea distinguishes personality and character, personality as a flux of
self-expressive or sensitive and responsive being, character as a formed fixity
of Nature's structure. But flux of nature and fixity of nature are two aspects
of being neither of which, nor indeed both together, can be a definition of
personality. For in all men there is a double element, the unformed though
limited flux of being or Nature out of which personality is fashioned and the
personal formation out of that flux. The formation may become rigid and ossify
or it may remain sufficiently plastic to change constantly and develop; but it
develops out of the formative flux, by a modification or enlargement or
remoulding of the personality, not, ordinarily, by an abolition of the formation
already made and the substitution of a new form of being,—this can only occur in
an abnormal turn or a supernormal conversion. But besides this flux and this
fixity there is also a third and occult element, the Person behind of whom the
personality is a self-expression;
Page 994
the Person puts forward the personality as his role, character, persona, in the
present act of his long drama of manifested existence. But the Person is larger
than his personality, and it may happen that this inner largeness overflows into
the surface formation; the result is a self-expression of being which can no
longer be described by fixed qualities, normalities of mood, exact lineaments,
or marked out by any structural limits. But neither is it a mere
indistinguishable, quite amorphous and unseizable flux: though its acts of
nature can be characterised but not itself, still it can be distinctively felt,
followed in its action, it can be recognised, though it cannot easily be
described; for it is a power of being rather than a structure. The ordinary
restricted personality can be grasped by a description of the characters stamped
on its life and thought and action, its very definite surface building and
expression of self; even if we may miss whatever was not so expressed, that
might seem to detract little from the general adequacy of our understanding,
because the element missed is usually little more than an amorphous raw
material, part of the flux, not used to form a significant part of the
personality. But such a description would be pitifully inadequate to express the
Person when its Power of Self within manifests more amply and puts forward its
hidden daemonic force in the surface composition and the life. We feel ourselves
in presence of a light of consciousness, a potency, a sea of energy, can
distinguish and describe its free waves of action and quality, but not fix
itself; and yet there is an impression of personality, the presence of a
powerful being, a strong, high or beautiful recognisable Someone, a Person, not
a limited creature of Nature but a Self or Soul, a Purusha. The gnostic
Individual would be such an inner Person unveiled, occupying both the depths,—no
longer self-hidden,—and the surface in a unified self-awareness; he would not be
a surface personality partly expressive of a larger secret being, he would be
not the wave but the ocean: he would be the Purusha, the inner conscious
Existence self-revealed, and would have no need of a carved expressive mask or
persona.
This, then, would be the nature of the gnostic Person, an
Page 995
infinite and universal being revealing,—or, to our mental ignorance,
suggesting,—its eternal self through the significant form and expressive power
of an individual and temporal self-manifestation. But the individual
nature-manifestation, whether strong and distinct in outline or multitudinous
and protean but still harmonic, would be there as an index of the being, not as
the whole being: that would be felt behind, recognisable but indefinable,
infinite. The consciousness also of the gnostic Person would be an infinite
consciousness throwing up forms of self-expression, but aware always of its
unbound infinity and universality and conveying the power and sense of its
infinity and universality even in the finiteness of the expression,—by which,
moreover, it would not be bound in the next movement of farther self-revelation.
But this would still not be an unregulated unrecognisable flux but a process of
self-revelation making visible the inherent truth of its powers of existence
according to the harmonic law natural to all manifestation of the Infinite.
All the character of the life and action of the gnostic being would arise
self-determined out of this nature of his gnostic individuality. There could be
in it no separate problem of an ethical or any similar content, any conflict of
good and evil. There could indeed be no problem at all, for problems are the
creations of mental ignorance seeking for knowledge and they cannot exist in a
consciousness in which knowledge arises self-born and the act is self-born out
of the knowledge, out of a pre-existent truth of being conscious and self-aware.
An essential and universal spiritual truth of being manifesting itself, freely
fulfilling itself in its own nature and self-effectuating consciousness, a truth
of being one in all even in an infinite diversity of its truth and making all to
be felt as one, would also be in its very nature an essential and universal good
manifesting itself, fulfilling itself in its own nature and self-effectuating
consciousness, a truth of good one in all and for all even in an infinite
diversity of its good. The purity of the eternal Self-existence would pour
itself into all the activities, making and keeping all things pure; there could
be no ignorance leading to wrong will and falsehood of the steps, no separative
egoism
Page 996
inflicting by its ignorance and separate contrary will harm on oneself or harm
on others, self-driven to a wrong dealing with one's own soul, mind, life or
body or a wrong dealing with the soul, mind, life, body of others, which is the
practical sense of all human evil. To rise beyond virtue and sin, good and evil
is an essential part of the Vedantic idea of liberation, and there is in this
correlation a self-evident sequence. For liberation signifies an emergence into
the true spiritual nature of being where all action is the automatic
self-expression of that truth and there can be nothing else. In the imperfection
and conflict of our members there is an effort to arrive at a right standard of
conduct and to observe it; that is ethics, virtue, merit, punya,
to do otherwise is sin, demerit, pāpa. Ethical mind declares a law of love, a
law of justice, a law of truth, laws without number, difficult to observe,
difficult to reconcile. But if oneness with others, oneness with truth is
already the essence of the real ised spiritual nature, there is no need of a law
of truth or of love,—the law, the standard has to be imposed on us now because
there is in our natural being an opposite force of separateness, a possibility
of antagonism, a force of discord, ill-will, strife. All ethics is a
construction of good in a Nature which has been smitten with evil by the powers
of darkness born of the Ignorance, even as it is expressed in the ancient legend
of the Vedanta. But where all is self-determined by truth of consciousness and
truth of being, there can be no standard, no struggle to observe it, no virtue
or merit, no sin or demerit of the nature. The power of love, of truth, of right
will be there, not as a law mentally constructed but as the very substance and
constitution of the nature and, by the integration of the being, necessarily
also the very stuff and constituting nature of the action. To grow into this
nature of our true being, a nature of spiritual truth and oneness, is the
liberation attained by an evolution of the spiritual being: the gnostic
evolution gives us the complete dynamism of that return to ourselves. Once that
is done, the need of standards of virtue, dharmas, disappears; there is the law
and self-order of the liberty of the Spirit, there can be no imposed or
constructed law of conduct, dharma. All becomes
Page 997
a self-flow of spiritual self-nature, Swadharma of Swabhava.
Here we touch the kernel of the dynamic difference between life in the mental
ignorance and life in the gnostic being and nature. It is the difference between
an integral fully conscious being in full possession of its own truth of
existence and working out that truth in its own freedom, free from all
constructed laws, while yet its life is a fulfilment of all true laws of
becoming in their essence of meaning, and an ignorant self-divided existence
which seeks for its own truth and tries to construct its findings into laws and
construct its life according to a pattern so made. All true law is the right
motion and process of a reality, an energy or power of being in action
fulfilling its own inherent movement self-implied in its own truth of existence.
This law may be inconscient and its working appear to be mechanical,—that is the
character or, at least, the appearance of law in material Nature: it may be a
conscious energy, freely determined in its action by the consciousness in the
being aware of its own imperative of truth, aware of its plastic possibilities
of self-expression of that truth, aware, always in the whole and at each moment
in the detail, of the actualities it has to realise; this is the figure of the
law of the Spirit. An entire freedom of the Spirit, an entire self-existent
order self-creating, self-effectuating, self-secure in its own natural and
inevitable movement, is the character of this dynamis of the gnostic Supernature.
At the summit of being is the Absolute with its absolute freedom of infinity but
also its absolute truth of itself and power of that truth of being; these two
things repeat themselves in the life of the Spirit in Supernature. All action
there is the action of the supreme Self, the supreme Ishwara in the truth of the
Supernature. It is at once the truth of the being of the self and the truth of
the will of the Ishwara one with that truth,—a biune reality,—which expresses
itself in each individual gnostic being according to his supernature. The
freedom of the gnostic individual is the freedom of his spirit to fulfil
dynamically the truth of his being and the power of his energies in life; but
this is synonymous with an entire obedience of his nature to the truth of Self
manifested in his existence and to the will of the Divine in him and all. This
All-Will is one in
Page 998
each gnostic individual and in many gnostic individuals and in the conscious All
which holds and contains them in itself; it is conscious of itself in each
gnostic being and is there one with his own will, and at the same time he is
conscious of the same Will, the same Self and Energy variously active in all.
Such a gnostic consciousness and gnostic will aware of its oneness in many
gnostic individuals, aware of its concordant totality and the meaning and
meeting-point of its diversities, must assure a symphonic movement, a movement
of unity, harmony, mutuality in the action of the whole. It assures at the same
time in the individual a unity and symphonic concord of all the powers and
movements of his being. All energies of being seek their self-expression and at
their highest seek their absolute; this they find in the supreme Self, and they
find at the same time their supreme oneness, harmony and mutuality of united and
common self-expression in its all-seeing and all-uniting dynamic power of
self-determination and self-effectuation, the supramental gnosis. A separate
self-existent being could be at odds with other separate beings, at variance
with the universal All in which they co-exist, in a state of contradiction with
any supreme Truth that was willing its self-expression in the universe; this is
what happens to the individual in the Ignorance, because he takes his stand on
the consciousness of a separate individuality. There can be a similar conflict,
discord, disparity between the truths, the energies, qualities, powers, modes of
being that act as separate forces in the individual and in the universe. A world
full of conflict, a conflict in ourselves, a conflict of the individual with the
world around him are normal and inevitable features of the separative
consciousness of the Ignorance and our ill-harmonised existence. But this cannot
happen in the gnostic consciousness because there each finds his complete self
and all find their own truth and the harmony of their different motions in that
which exceeds them and of which they are the expression. In the gnostic life,
therefore, there is an entire accord between the free self-expression of the
being and his automatic obedience to the inherent law of the supreme and
universal Truth of things. These are to him interconnected sides of the one
Truth; it is his own supreme
Page 999
truth of being which works itself out in the whole united truth of himself and
things in one Supernature. There is also an entire accord between all the many
and different powers of the being and their action; for even those that are
contradictory in their apparent motion and seem in our mental experience of them
to enter into conflict, fit themselves and their action naturally into each
other, because each has its self-truth and its truth of relation to the others
and this is self-found and self-formed in the gnostic Supernature.
In the supramental gnostic nature there will therefore be no need of the mental
rigid way and hard style of order, a limiting standardisation, an imposition of
a fixed set of principles, the compulsion of life into one system or pattern
which is alone valid because it is envisaged by mind as the one right truth of
being and conduct. For such a standard cannot include and such a structure
cannot take up into itself the whole of life, nor can it adapt itself freely to
the pressure of the All-life or to the needs of the evolutionary Force; it has
to escape from itself or to escape from its self-constructed limits by its own
death, by disintegration or by an intense conflict and revolutionary
disturbance. Mind has thus to select its limited rule and way of life, because
it is itself bound and limited in vision and capacity; but gnostic being takes
up into itself the whole of life and existence, fulfilled, transmuted into the
harmonic self-expression of a vast Truth one and diverse, infinitely one,
infinitely
multiple. The knowledge and action of the gnostic being would have the wideness
and plasticity of an infinite freedom. This knowledge would grasp its objects as
it went in the largeness of the whole; it would be bound only by the integral
truth of the whole and the complete and inmost truth of the object, but not by
the formed idea or fixed mental symbols by which the mind is caught and held and
confined in them so as to lose the freedom of its knowledge. The entire activity
also would be unbound by an obligation of unelastic rule or by the obligation
of a past state or action or by its compelling consequence, Karma; it would have
the sequent but self-guided and self-evolving plasticity of the Infinite acting
directly upon its own finites. This movement will not create a flux or chaos,
but a
Page 1000
liberated and harmonic Truth-expression; there would be a free
self-determination of the spiritual being in a plastic entirely conscious
nature.
In the consciousness of the Infinite individuality does not break up nor
circumscribe cosmicity, cosmicity does not contradict transcendence. The gnostic
being living in the consciousness of the Infinite will create his own
self-manifestation as an individual, but he will do so as a centre of a larger
universality and yet at the same time a centre of the transcendence. A universal
individual, all his action would be in harmony with the cosmic action, but,
owing to his transcendence, it would not be limited by a temporary inferior
formulation or at the mercy of any or every cosmic force. His universality would
embrace even the Ignorance around him in its larger self, but, while intimately
aware of it, he would not be affected by it: he would follow the greater law of
his transcendent individuality and express its gnostic truth in his own way of
being and action. His life would be a free harmonic expression of the self; but,
since his highest self would be one with the being of the Ishwara, a natural
divine government of his self-expression by the Ishwara, by his highest self,
and by the Supernature, his own supreme nature, would automatically bring into
the knowledge, the life, the action a large and unbound but perfect order. The
obedience of his individual nature to the Ishwara and the Supernature would be a
natural consonance and indeed the very condition of the freedom of the self,
since it would be an obedience to his own supreme being, a response to the
Source of all his existence. The individual nature would be nothing separate, it
would be a current of the Supernature. All antinomy of the Purusha and the
Prakriti, that curious division and unbalance of the Soul and Nature which
afflicts the Ignorance, would be entirely removed; for the nature would be the
outflowing of the self-force of the Person and the Person would be the
outflowing of the supreme Nature, the supramental power of being of the Ishwara.
It is this supreme truth of his being, an infinitely harmonic principle, that
would create the order of his spiritual freedom, an authentic, automatic and
plastic order.
In the lower existence the order is automatic, the binding of Nature complete,
her groove firm and imperative: the cosmic
Page 1001
Consciousness-Force evolves a pattern of Nature and its habitual mould or fixed
round of action and obliges the infrarational being to live and act according to
the pattern and in the mould or round made for it. Mind in man starts with this
prearranged pattern and routine, but, as it evolves, it enlarges the design and
expands the mould and tries to replace this fixed unconscious or half-conscious
law of automatism by an order based on ideas and significances and accepted
life-motives, or it attempts an intelligent standardisation and a framework
determined by rational purpose, utility and convenience. There is nothing really
binding or permanent in man's knowledge-structures or his life-structures; but
still he cannot but create standards of thought, knowledge, personality, life,
conduct and, more or less consciously and completely, base his existence on them
or, at least, try his best to frame his life in the ideative cadre of his chosen
or accepted dharmas. In the passage to the spiritual life the supreme ideal held
up is, on the contrary, not law, but liberty in the Spirit; the Spirit breaks
through all formulas to find its self and, if it has still to be concerned with
expression, it must arrive at the liberty of a free and true instead of an
artificial expression, a true and spontaneous spiritual order. “Abandon all
dharmas, all standards and rules of being and action, and take refuge in Me
alone”, is the summit rule of the highest existence held up by the Divine Being
to the seeker. In the seeking for this freedom, in the liberation from
constructed law into law of self and spirit, in the casting away of the mental
control in order to substitute for it the control of the spiritual Reality, an
abandonment of the lower constructed truth of mind for the higher essential
truth of being, it is possible to pass through a stage in which there is an
inner freedom but a lack of outer order,—an action in the flux of nature
childlike or inert like a leaf lying passive or driven by the wind or even
incoherent or extravagant in outer semblance. It is possible also to arrive at a
temporary ordered spiritual expression of the self which is sufficient for the
stage one can reach for a time or in this life; or it may be a personal order of
self-expression valid according to the norm of what one has already realised of
the spiritual truth but afterwards changing freely by the force of spirituality
to
Page 1002
express the yet larger truth that one goes on to realise. But the supramental
gnostic being stands in a consciousness in which knowledge is self-existent and
manifests itself according to the order self-determined by the Will of the
Infinite in the Supernature. This self-determination according to a
self-existent knowledge replaces the automatism of Nature and the standards of
Mind by the spontaneity of a Truth self-aware and self-active in the very grain
of the existence.
In the gnostic being this self-determining knowledge freely obedient to
self-truth and the total truth of Being would be the very law of his existence.
In him Knowledge and Will become one and cannot be in conflict; Truth of spirit
and life become one and cannot be at variance: in the self-effectuation of his
being there can be no strife or disparity or divergence between the spirit and
the members. The two principles of freedom and order, which in mind and life are
constantly representing themselves as contraries or incompatibles, though they
have no need to be that if freedom is guarded by knowledge and order based upon
truth of being, are in the supermind consciousness native to each other and even
fundamentally one. This is so because both are inseparable aspects of the inner
spiritual truth and therefore their determinations are one; they are inherent in
each other, for they arise from an identity and therefore in action coincide in
a natural identity. The gnostic being does not in any way or degree feel his
liberty infringed by the imperative order of his thoughts or actions, because
that order is intrinsic and spontaneous; he feels both his liberty and the order
of his liberty to be one truth of his being. His liberty of knowledge is not a
freedom to follow falsehood or error, for he does not need like the mind to pass
through the possibility of error in order to know,—on the contrary, any such
deviation would be a departure from his plenitude of the gnostic self, it would
be a diminution of his self-truth and alien and injurious to his being; for his
freedom is a freedom of light, not of darkness. His liberty of action is not a
license to act upon wrong will or the impulsions of the Ignorance, for that too
would be alien to his being, a restriction and diminution of it, not a
liberation. A drive for fulfilment of falsehood or wrong will would be
Page 1003
felt by him, not as a movement towards freedom, but as a violence done to the
liberty of the Spirit, an invasion and imposition, an inroad upon his
Supernature, a tyranny of some alien Nature.
A supramental consciousness must be fundamentally a Truth-Consciousness, a
direct and inherent awareness of the truth of being and the truth of things; it
is a power of the Infinite knowing and working out its finites, a power of the
Universal knowing and working out its oneness and detail, its cosmicity and its
individualities; self-possessed of Truth, it would not have to seek for the
Truth or suffer from the liability to miss it as does the mind of the Ignorance.
The evolved gnostic being would have entered into this Truth-Consciousness of
the Infinite and Universal, and it would be that which would determine for him
and in him all his individual seeing and action. His would be a consciousness of
universal identity and a consequent or rather inherent Truth-knowledge,
Truth-sight, Truth-feeling, Truth-will, Truth-sense and Truth-dynamis of action
implicit in his identity with the One or spontaneously arising from his identity
with the All. His life would be a movement in the steps of a spiritual liberty
and largeness replacing the law of the mental idea and the law of vital and
physical need and desire and the compulsion of a surrounding life; his life and
action would be bound by nothing else than the Divine Wisdom and Will acting on
him and in him according to its Truth-Consciousness. An absence of an imposed
construction of law might be expected to lead in the life of the human
ignorance, because of the separativeness of the human ego and its smallness, the
necessity it feels to impinge on and possess and utilise other life, to a chaos
of conflict, license and egoistic disorder; but this could not exist in the life
of the gnostic being. For in the gnostic Truth-Consciousness of a supramental
being there must necessarily be a truth of relation of all the parts and
movements of the being,—whether the being of the individual or the being of any
gnostic collectivity,—a spontaneous and luminous oneness and wholeness in all
the movements of the consciousness and all the action of the life. There could
be no strife of the members; for not only the knowledge and will consciousness
but the heart consciousness and life consciousness and body consciousness, what
are
Page 1004
in us the emotional, vital or physical parts of nature, would be included in
this integrated harmony of wholeness and oneness. In our language we might say
that the supermind knowledge-will of the gnostic being would have a perfect
control of the mind, heart, life and body; but this description could apply only
to the transitional stage when the Supernature was remoulding these members into
its own nature: once that transition was concluded, there would be no need of
control, for all would be one unified consciousness and therefore would act as a
whole in a spontaneous integrality and unity.
In a gnostic being there could be no conflict between self-affirmation of the
ego and a control by super-ego; for since in his action of life the gnostic
individual would at once express himself, his truth of being, and work out the
Divine Will, since he would know the Divine as his true self and the source and
constituent of his spiritual individuality, these two springs of his conduct
would not only be simultaneous in a single action, but they would be one and the
same motor-force. This motive power would act in each circumstance according to
the truth of the circumstance, with each being according to its need, nature,
relation, in each event according to the demand of the Divine Will upon that
event: for all here is the result of a complexus and a close nexus of many
forces of one Force, and the gnostic consciousness and Truth-Will would see the
truth of these forces, of each and of all together, and put forth the necessary
impact or intervention on the complex of forces to carry out what was willed to
be done through itself, that and no more. In consequence of the Identity present
everywhere, ruling everything and harmonising all diversities, there would be no
play of a separative ego bent on its own separate self-affirmation; the will of
the self of the gnostic being would be one with the will of the Ishwara, it
would not be a separative or contrary self-will. It would have the joy of action
and result but would be free from all ego-claim, attachment to action or demand
of result; it would do what it saw had to be done and was moved to do. In mental
nature there can be an opposition or disparity between self-effort and obedience
to the Higher Will, for there the self or apparent person sees itself as
different from the supreme Being, Will or Person; but here the
Page 1005
person is being of the Being and the opposition or disparity does not arise. The
action of the person is the action of the Ishwara in the person, of the One in
the many, and there can be no reason for a separative assertion of self-will or
pride of independence.
On this fact that the Divine Knowledge and Force, the supreme Supernature, would
act through the gnostic being with his full participation, is founded the
freedom of the gnostic being; it is this unity that gives him his liberty. The
freedom from law, including the moral law, so frequently affirmed of the
spiritual being, is founded on this unity of its will with the will of the
Eternal. All the mental standards would disappear because all necessity for them
would cease; the higher authentic law of identity with the Divine Self and
identity with all beings would have replaced them. There would be no question of
selfishness or altruism, of oneself and others, since all are seen and felt as
the one self and only what the supreme Truth and Good decided would be done.
There would be in the action a pervasive feeling of a self-existent universal
love, sympathy, oneness, but the feeling would penetrate, colour and move in the
act, not solely dominate or determine it: it would not stand for itself in
opposition to the larger truth of things or dictate a personally impelled
departure from the divinely willed true movement. This opposition and departure
can happen in the Ignorance where love or any other strong principle of the
nature can be divorced from wisdom even as it can be divorced from power; but in
the supermind gnosis all powers are intimate to each other and act as one. In
the gnostic person the Truth-Knowledge would lead and determine and all the
other forces of the being concur in the action: there would be no place for
disharmony or conflict between the powers of the nature. In all action there is
an imperative of existence that seeks to be fulfilled; a truth of being not yet
manifested has to be manifested or a truth manifesting has to be evolved and
achieved and perfected in manifestation or, if already achieved, to take its
delight of being and self-effectuation. In the half-light and half-power of the
Ignorance the imperative is secret or only half-revealed and the push to
fulfilment is an imperfect, struggling, partly frustrated movement: but in the
gnostic being and life the imperatives of being would be felt within, intimately
perceived
Page 1006
and brought into action; there would be a free play of their possibilities;
there would be an actualisation in accordance with the truth of circumstance and
the intention in the Supernature. All this would be seen in the knowledge and
develop itself in act; there would be no uncertain combat or torment of forces
at work; a disharmony of the being, a contradictory working of the consciousness
could have no place: the imposition of an external standardisation of mechanised
law would be entirely superfluous where there is this inherence of truth and its
spontaneous working in act of nature. A harmonic action, a working out of the
divine motive, an execution of the imperative truth of things would be the law
and natural dynamics of the whole existence.
A knowledge by identity using the powers of the integrated being for richness of
instrumentation would be the principle of the supramental life. In the other
grades of the gnostic being, although a truth of spiritual being and
consciousness would fulfil itself, the instrumentation would be of a different
order. A higher-mental being would act through the truth of thought, the truth
of the idea and accomplish that in the life-action: but in the supramental
gnosis thought is a derivative movement, it is a formulation of truth-vision and
not the determining or the main driving force; it would be an instrument for
expression of knowledge more than for arrival at knowledge or for action,—or it
would intervene in action only as a penetrating point of the body of
identity-will and identity-knowledge. So too in the illumined gnostic being
truth-vision and in the intuitive gnostic being a direct truth-contact and
perceptive truth-sense would be the mainspring of action. In the Overmind a
comprehensive immediate grasp of the truth of things and the principle of being
of each thing and all its dynamic consequences would originate and gather up a
great wideness of gnostic vision and thought and create a foundation of
knowledge and action; this largeness of being and seeing and doing would be the
varied result of an underlying identity-consciousness, but the identity itself
would not be in the front as the very stuff of the consciousness or the very
force of the action. But in the supramental gnosis all this luminous immediate
grasp of the truth of things, truth-sense, truth-vision, truth-thought would get
back into its source of identity-
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consciousness and subsist as a single body of its knowledge. The
identity-consciousness would lead and contain everything; it would manifest as
an awareness in the very grain of the being's substance putting forth its
inherent self-fulfilling force and determining itself dynamically in form of
consciousness and form of action. This inherent awareness is the origin and
principle of the working of supramental gnosis; it could be sufficient in itself
with no need of anything to formulate or embody it: but the play of illumined
vision, the play of a radiant thought, the play of all other movements of the
spiritual consciousness would not be absent; there would be a free
instrumentation of them for their own brilliant functioning, for a divine
richness and diversity, for a manifold delight of self-manifestation, for the
joy of the powers of the Infinite. In the intermediate stages or degrees of the
gnosis there might be the manifestation of various and separate expressions of
the aspects of the divine Being and Nature, a soul and life of love, a soul and
life of divine light and knowledge, a soul and life of divine power and
sovereign action and creation, and innumerable other forms of divine life; on
the supramental height all would be taken up into a manifold unity, a supreme
integration of being and life. A fulfilment of the being in a luminous and
blissful integration of its states and powers and their satisfied dynamic action
would be the sense of the gnostic existence.
All supramental gnosis is a twofold Truth-Consciousness, a consciousness of
inherent self-knowledge and, by identity of self and world, of intimate
world-knowledge; this knowledge is the criterion, the characteristic power of
the gnosis. But this is not a purely ideative knowledge, it is not consciousness
observing, forming ideas, trying to carry them out; it is an essential light of
consciousness, the self-light of all the realities of being and becoming, the
self-truth of being determining, formulating and effectuating itself. To be, not
to know, is the object of the manifestation; knowledge is only the
instrumentation of an operative consciousness of being. This would be the
gnostic life on earth, a manifestation or play of truth-conscious being, being
grown aware of itself in all things, no longer lost to consciousness of itself,
no longer plunged into a self-oblivion or a half-oblivion of its real existence
brought about by absorption in form and action,
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but using form and action with a delivered spiritual power for its free and
perfect self-expression, no longer seeking for its own lost or forgotten or
veiled and hidden significance or significances, no longer bound, but delivered
from inconscience and ignorance, aware of its own truths and powers, determining
freely in a movement always concurrent and in tune in every detail with its
supreme and universal Reality its manifestation, the play of its substance, the
play of its consciousness, the play of its force of existence, the play of its
delight of existence.
In the gnostic evolution there would be a great diversity in the poise, status,
harmonised operations of consciousness and force and delight of existence. There
would naturally appear in time many grades of the farther ascent of the
evolutive Supermind to its own summits; but in all there would be the common
basis and principle. In the manifestation the Spirit, the Being, while knowing
all itself, is not bound to put forth all itself in the actual front of
formation and action which is its immediate power and degree of self-expression:
it may put forth a frontal self-expression and hold all the rest of itself
behind in an unexpressed delight of self-being. That All behind and its delight
would find itself in the front, know itself in it, maintain and suffuse the
expression, the manifestation with its own presence and feeling of totality and
infinity. This frontal formation with all the rest behind it and held in power
of being within it would be an act of self-knowledge, not an act of Ignorance;
it would be a luminous self-expression of the Superconscience and not an upthrow
from the Inconscience. A great harmonised variation would thus be an element in
the beauty and completeness of the evolution of the gnostic consciousness and
existence. Even in dealing with the mind of ignorance around it, as in dealing
with the still lower degrees of the gnostic evolution, the supramental life
would use this innate power and movement of its Truth of being: it would relate
in the light of that integral Reality its own truth of being with the truth of
being that is behind the Ignorance; it would found all relations upon the common
spiritual unity, accept and harmonise the manifested difference. The gnostic
Light would ensure the right relation and action or reaction of each upon each
in every circumstance; the gnostic power or influence would
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affirm always a symphonic effectuation, secure the right relation of the more
developed and the less developed life and impose by its influence a greater
harmony on the lower existence.
This would be the nature of the being, life and action of the gnostic individual
so far as we can follow the evolution with our mental conception up to that
point where it will emerge out of Overmind and cross the border into supramental
gnosis. This nature of the gnosis would evidently determine all the relations of
the life or group-life of gnostic beings; for a gnostic collectivity would be a
collective soul-power of the Truth-Consciousness, even as the gnostic individual
would be an individual soul-power of it: it would have the same integration of
life and action in unison, the same realised and conscious unity of being, the
same spontaneity, intimate oneness-feeling, one and mutual truth-vision and
truth-sense of self and each other, the same truth-action in the relation of
each with each and all with all; this collectivity would be and act not as a
mechanical but a spiritual integer. A similar inevitability of the union of
freedom and order would be the law of the collective life; it would be a freedom
of the diverse play of the Infinite in divine souls, an order of the conscious
unity of souls which is the law of the supramental Infinite. Our mental
rendering of oneness brings into it the rule of sameness; a complete oneness
brought about by the mental reason drives towards a thoroughgoing
standardisation as its one effective means,—only minor shades of differentiation
would be allowed to operate: but the greatest richness of diversity in the
self-expression of oneness would be the law of the gnostic life. In the gnostic
consciousness difference would not lead to discord but to a spontaneous natural
adaptation, a sense of complementary plenitude, a rich many-sided execution of
the thing to be collectively known, done, worked out in life. For the difficulty
in mind and life is created by ego, by separation of integers into component
parts which figure as contraries, opposites, disparates: all in which they
separate from each other is easily felt, affirmed and stressed; that in which
they meet, whatever holds their divergences together, is largely missed or found
with difficulty; everything has to be done by an overcoming or an adjustment of
difference, by a constructed unity.
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There is, indeed, an underlying principle of oneness and Nature insists on its
emergence in a construction of unity; for she is collective and communal as well
as individual and egoistic and has her instrumentation of associativeness,
sympathies, common needs, interests, attractions, affinities as well as her more
brutal means of unification: but her secondary imposed and too prominent basis
of ego-life and ego-nature overlays the unity and afflicts all its constructions
with imperfection and insecurity. A farther difficulty is created by the absence
or rather the imperfection of intuition and direct inner contact making each a
separate being forced to learn with difficulty the other's being and nature, to
arrive at understanding and mutuality and harmony from outside instead of
inwardly through a direct sense and grasp, so that all mental and vital
interchange is hampered, rendered ego-tainted or doomed to imperfection and
incompleteness by the veil of mutual ignorance. In the collective gnostic life
the integrating truth-sense, the concording unity of gnostic nature would carry
all divergences in itself as its own opulence and turn a multitudinous thought,
action, feeling into the unity of a luminous life-whole. This would be the
evident principle, the inevitable result of the very character of the
Truth-Consciousness and its dynamic realisation of the spiritual unity of all
being. This realisation, the key to the perfection of life, difficult to arrive
at on the mental plane, difficult even when realised to dynamise or organise,
would be naturally dynamic, spontaneously self-organised in all gnostic creation
and gnostic life.
This much is easily understandable if we regard the gnostic beings as living
their own life without any contact with a life of the Ignorance. But by the very
fact of the evolution here the gnostic manifestation would be a circumstance,
though a decisive circumstance, in the whole: there would be a continuance of
the lower degrees of the consciousness and life, some maintaining the
manifestation in the Ignorance, some mediating between it and the manifestation
in the gnosis; these two forms of being and life would either exist side by side
or interpenetrate. In either case the gnostic principle might be expected, if
not at once, yet finally to dominate the whole. The higher spiritual-mental
degrees would be in touch with the supramental principle now
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overtly supporting them and holding them together and would be delivered from
the once enveloping hold of the Ignorance and Inconscience. As manifestations of
the truth of being, though in a qualified and modified degree, they would draw
all their light and energy from the supramental gnosis and would be in large
contact with its instrumental powers; they would themselves be conscious
motive-powers of the Spirit and, although not yet in the full force of their
entirely realised spiritual substance, they would not be subjected to a lesser
instrumentation fragmented, diluted, diminished, obscured by the substance of
the Nescience. All Ignorance rising or entering into the overmind, into the
intuitive, into the illumined or higher-mind being would cease to be ignorance;
it would enter into the light, realise in that light the truth which it had
covered with its darkness and undergo a liberation, transmutation, new state of
consciousness and being which would assimilate it to these higher states and
prepare it for the supramental status. At the same time the involved principle
of the gnosis, acting now as an overt, arisen and constantly dynamic force and
no longer only as a concealed power with a secret origination or a veiled
support of things or an occasional intervention as its only function, would be
able to lay something of its law of harmony on the still existing Inconscience
and Ignorance. For the secret gnostic power concealed in them would act with a
greater strength of its support and origination, a freer and more powerful
intervention; the beings of the Ignorance, influenced by the light of the gnosis
through their association with gnostic beings and through the evolved and
effective presence of the supramental Being and Power in earth-nature, would be
more conscious and responsive. In the untransformed part of humanity itself
there might well arise a new and greater order of mental human beings; for the
directly intuitive or partly intuitivised but not yet gnostic mental being, the
directly or partly illumined mental being, the mental being in direct or part
communion with the higher-thought plane would emerge: these would become more
and more numerous, more and more evolved and secure in their type, and might
even exist as a formed race of higher humanity leading upwards the less evolved
in a true fraternity born of the sense of the
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manifestation of the One Divine in all beings. In this way, the consummation of
the highest might mean also a lesser consummation in its own degree of what must
remain still below. At the higher end of the evolution the ascending ranges and
summits of Supermind would begin to rise towards some supreme manifestation of
the pure spiritual existence, consciousness and delight of being of
Sachchidananda.
A question might arise whether the gnostic reversal, the passage into a
gnostic evolution and beyond it would not mean sooner or later the cessation of
the evolution from the Inconscience, since the reason for that obscure beginning
of things here would cease. This depends on the farther question whether the
movement between the Superconscience and the Inconscience as the two poles of
existence is an abiding law of the material manifestation or only a provisional
circumstance. The latter supposition is difficult to accept because of the
tremendous force of pervasiveness and durability with which the inconscient
foundation has been laid for the whole material universe. Any complete reversal
or elimination of the first evolutionary principle would mean the simultaneous
manifestation of the secret involved consciousness in every part of this vast
universal Inconscience; a change in a particular line of Nature such as the
earth-line could not have any such all-pervading effect: the manifestation in
earth-nature has its own curve and the completion of that curve is all that we
have to consider. Here this much might be hazarded that in the final result of
the revelatory creation or reproduction of the upper hemisphere of conscious
being in the lower triplicity the evolution here, though remaining the same in
its degrees and stages, would be subjected to the law of harmony, the law of
unity in diversity and of diversity working out unity: it would be no longer an
evolution through strife; it would become a harmonious development from stage to
stage, from lesser to greater light, from type to higher type of the power and
beauty of a self-unfolding existence. It would only be otherwise if for some
reason the law of struggle and suffering still remained necessary for the
working out of that mysterious possibility in the Infinite whose principle
underlies the plunge into the Inconscience. But for the earth-nature it would
seem
Page 1013
as if this necessity might be exhausted once the supramental gnosis had emerged
from the Inconscience. A change would begin with its firm appearance; that
change would be consummated when the supramental evolution became complete and
rose into the greater fullness of a supreme manifestation of the
Existence-Consciousness-Delight, Sachchidananda.
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