We speak of the evolution of Life in Matter, the evolution of Mind in Matter;
but evolution is a word which merely states the phenomenon without explaining
it. For there seems to be no reason why Life should evolve out of material elements
or Mind out of living form, unless we accept the Vedantic solution that Life
is already involved in Matter and Mind in Life because in essence Matter is
a form of veiled Life, Life a form of veiled Consciousness. And then there seems
to be little objection to a further step in the series and the admission that
mental consciousness may itself be only a form and a veil of higher states which
are beyond Mind. In that case, the unconquerable impulse of man towards God,
Light, Bliss, Freedom, Immortality presents itself in its right place in the
chain as simply the imperative impulse by which Nature is seeking to evolve
beyond Mind, and appears to be as natural, true and just as the impulse towards
Life which she has planted in certain forms of Matter or the impulse towards
Mind which she has planted in certain forms of Life. As there, so here, the
impulse exists more of less obscurely in her different vessels with an ever-ascending
series in the power of its will-to-be; as there, so here, it is gradually evolving
and bound fully to evolve the necessary organs and faculties. As the impulse
towards Mind ranges from the more sensitive reactions of Life in the metal and
the plant up to its full organisation in man, so in man himself there is the
same ascending series, the preparation, if nothing more, of a higher and divine
life. The animal is a living laboratory in which Nature has, it is said, worked
out man. Man himself may well be a thinking and living laboratory in whom and
with whose conscious co-operation she wills to work out the superman, the God.
Or shall we not say, rather, to manifest God? For if evolution is the progressive
manifestation by Nature of that which slept or worked in her, involved, it is
also the overt realisation of that which she secretly is. We cannot, then, bid
her pause at a given stage of her evolution, nor have we the right to condemn
with the religionist as perverse and presumptuous or with the rationalist as
a disease or hallucination any intention she may evince or effort she may make
to go beyond. If it be true that Spirit is involved in Matter and apparent Nature
is secret God, then the manifestation of the divine in himself and the realisation
of God within and without are the highest and most legitimate aim possible to
man upon earth.
Thus the eternal paradox and eternal truth of a divine life in an animal body, an immortal aspiration or reality inhabiting a mortal tenement, a single and universal consciousness representing itself in limited minds and divided egos, a transcendent, indefinable, timeless and spaceless Being who alone renders time and space and cosmos possible, and in all these the higher truth realisable by the lower term, justify themselves to the deliberate reason as well as to the persistent instinct or intuition of mankind. Attempts are sometimes made to have done finally with questionings which have so often been declared insoluble by logical thought and to persuade men to limit their mental activities to the practical and immediate problems of their material existence in the universe; but such evasions are never permanent in their effect. Mankind returns from them with a more vehement impulse of inquiry or a more violent hunger for an immediate solution. By that hunger mysticism profits and new religions arise to replace the old that have been destroyed or stripped of significance by a scepticism which itself could not satisfy because, although its business was inquiry, it was unwilling sufficiently to inquire. The attempt to deny or stifle a truth because it is yet obscure in its outward workings and too often represented by obscurantist superstition or a crude faith, is itself a kind of obscurantism. The will to escape from a cosmic necessity because it is arduous, difficult to justify by immediate tangible results, slow in regulating its operations, must turn out eventually to have been no acceptance of the truth of Nature but a revolt against the secret, mightier will of the great Mother. It is better and more rational to accept what she will not allow us as a race to reject and lift it from the sphere of blind instinct, obscure intuition and random aspiration into the light of reason and an instructed and consciously self-guiding will. And if there is any higher light of illumined intuition or self-revealing truth which is now in man either obstructed and inoperative or works with intermittent glancings as if from behind a veil or with occasional displays as of the northern lights in our material skies, then there also we need not fear to aspire. For it is likely that such is the next higher state of consciousness of which Mind is only a form and veil, and through the splendours of that light may lie the path of our progressive self-enlargement into whatever highest state is humanity's ultimate resting-place.
—The Life Divine —The Human Aspiration, pg. 4-5
In Europe and in India, respectively, the negation of the materialist and
the refusal of the ascetic have sought to assert themselves as the sole truth
and to dominate the conception of Life. In India, if the result has been a
great heaping up of the treasures of the Spirit, — or of some of them, — it
has also been a great bankruptcy of Life; in Europe, the fullness of riches
and the triumphant mastery of this world's powers and possessions have progressed
towards an equal bankruptcy in the things of the Spirit. Nor has the intellect,
which sought the solution of all problems in the one term of Matter, found
satisfaction in the answer that it has received.
Therefore the time grows ripe and the tendency of the world moves towards a
new and comprehensive affirmation in thought and in inner and outer experience
and to its corollary, a new and rich self-fulfilment in an integral human existence
for the individual and for the race.
From the difference in the relations of Spirit and Matter to the Unknowable which they both represent, there arises also a difference of effectiveness in the material and the spiritual negations. The denial of the materialist although more insistent and immediately successful, more facile in its appeal to the generality of mankind, is yet less enduring, less effective finally than the absorbing and perilous refusal of the ascetic. For it carries within itself its own cure. Its most powerful element is the Agnosticism which, admitting the Unknowable behind all manifestation, extends the limits of the unknowable until it comprehends all that is merely unknown. Its premise is that the physical senses are our sole means of Knowledge and that Reason, therefore, even in its most extended and vigorous flights, cannot escape beyond their domain; it must deal always and solely with the facts which they provide of suggest; and the suggestions themselves must always be kept tied to their origins we cannot go beyond, we cannot use them as a bridge leading us into a domain where more powerful and less limited faculties come into play and another kind of inquiry has to be instituted.
A premise so arbitrary pronounces on itself its own sentence of insufficiency. It can only be maintained by ignoring or explaining away all that vast field of evidence and experience which contradicts it, denying or disparaging noble and useful faculties, active consciously or obscurely or at worst latent in all human beings, and refusing to investigate supraphysical phenomena except as manifested in relation to matter and its movements and conceived as a subordinate activity of material forces. As soon as we begin to investigate the operations of mind and of supermind, in themselves and without the prejudgment that is determined from the beginning to see in them only a subordinate term of Matter, we come into contact with a mass of phenomena which escape entirely from the rigid hold, the limiting dogmatism of the materialist formula. And the moment we recognise, as our enlarging experience compels us to recognise, that there are in the universe knowable realities beyond the range of the senses and in man powers and faculties which determine rather than are determined by the material organs through which they hold themselves in touch with the world of the senses, —that outer shell of our true and complete existence,— the premise of materialistic Agnosticism disappears. We are ready for a large statement and an ever-developing inquiry.
But, first, it is well that we should recognise the enormous, the indispensable
utility of the very brief period of rationalistic Materialism through which
humanity has been passing. For that vast field of evidence and experience which
now begins to reopen its gates to us, can only be safely entered when the intellect
has been severely trained to a clear austerity; seized on by unripe minds,
it lends itself to the most perilous distortions and misleading imaginations
and actually in the past encrusted a real nucleus of truth with such an accretion
of perverting superstitions and irrationalising dogmas that all advance in
true knowledge was rendered impossible. It became necessary for a time to make
a clean sweep at once of the truth and its disguise in order that the road
might be clear for a new departure and a surer advance. The rationalistic tendency
of Materialism has done mankind this great service.
—
The Life Divine —The Two Negations: The Materialist Denial,
pg. 9-11
Matter expresses itself eventually as a formulation of some unknown force. Life,
too, that yet unfathomed mystery, begins to reveal itself as an obscure energy
of sensibility imprisoned in its material formulation; and when the dividing
ignorance is cured which gives us the sense of a gulf between Life and Matter,
it is difficult to suppose that Mind, Life and Matter will be found to be anything
else that one Energy triply formulated, the triple world of the Vedic seers.
Nor will the conception then be able to endure of a brute material Force as
the mother of the Mind. The Energy that creates the world can be nothing else
than a Will, and Will is only consciousness applying itself to a work and a
result.
—The Life Divine —The Two Negations: The Materialist Denial, pg. 14
If we push the materialist conclusion far enough, we arrive at an insignificance
and unreality in the life of the individual and the race which leaves us, logically,
the option between a feverish effort of the individual to snatch what he may
from a transient existence, to "live his life" as it is said, or a
dispassionate and objectless service of the race and the individual, knowing
well that the latter is a transient fiction of the nervous mentality and the
former only a little more long-lived collective form of the same regular nervous
spasm of Matter. We work or enjoy under the impulsion of a material energy which
deceives us with the brief delusion of life or with the nobler delusion of an
ethical aim and a mental consummation. Materialism like spiritual Monism arrives
at a Maya that is and yet is not, —is, for it is present and compelling,
is not, for it is phenomenal and transitory in its works.
—The Life Divine —The Two Negations: The Refusal of the Ascetic, pg. 20
For at the gates of the Transcendent stands that mere and perfect Spirit described
in the Upanishads, luminous, pure, sustaining the world but inactive in it,
without sinews of energy, without flaw of duality, without scar of division,
unique, identical, free from all appearance of relation and of multiplicity,
— the pure Self of the Adwaitins1, the inactive Brahman, the transcendent Silence.
And the mind when it passes suddenly, without intermediate transitions, receives
a sense of the unreality of the world and the sole reality of the Silence which
is one of the most powerful and convincing experiences of which the human mind
is capable. Here, in the perception of this pure Self or of the Non-Being behind
it, we have the starting-point for a second negation, — parallel at the
other pole to the materialistic, but more complete, more final, more perilous
in its effects on the individuals or collectivities that hear its potent call
to the wilderness, — the refusal of the ascetic.
It is this revolt of Spirit against Matter that for two thousand years, since Buddhism disturbed the balance of the old Aryan world, has dominated increasingly the Indian mind. Not that the sense of the cosmic illusion is the whole of Indian thought; there are other philosophical statements, other religious aspirations. Nor has some attempt at an adjustment between the two terms been wanting even from the most extreme philosophies. But all have lived in the shadow of the great Refusal and the final end of life for all is the garb of the ascetic. The general conception of existence has been permeated with the Buddhistic theory of the chain of Karma and with the consequent antinomy of bondage and liberation, bondage by birth, liberation by cessation from birth. Therefore all voices are joined in one great consensus that not in this world of the dualities can there be our kingdom of heaven, but beyond, whether in the joys of the eternal Vrindavan1 or the high beatitude of Brahmaloka2, beyond all manifestations in some ineffable Nirvana3 or where all separate experience is lost in the featureless unity of the indefinable Existence. And through many centuries a great army of shining witnesses, saints and teachers, names sacred to Indian memory and dominant in Indian imagination, have borne always the same witness and swelled always the same lofty and distant appeal, — renunciation the sole path of knowledge, acceptation of physical life the act of the ignorant, cessation from birth the right use of human birth, the call of the Spirit, the recoil from Matter.
1 Goloka, the Vaishnava heaven of eternal Beauty and Bliss.
2 The highest state of pure existence, consciousness and beatitude attainable
by the soul without complete extinction in the Indefinable.
3 Extinction, not necessarily of all being, but of being as we know it; extinction
of ego, desire and egoistic action and mentality.
For an age out of sympathy with the ascetic spirit — and throughout all
the rest of the world the hour of the Anchorite may seem to have passed or to
be passing — it is easy to attribute this great trend to the failing of
vital energy in an ancient race tired out by its burden, its once vast share
in the common advance, exhausted by its many-sided contribution to the sum of
human effort and human knowledge. But we have seen that it corresponds to a
truth of existence, a state of conscious realisation which stands at the very
summit of our possibility. In practice also the ascetic spirit is an indispensable
element in human perfection and even its separate affirmation cannot be avoided
so long as the race has not at the other end liberated its intellect and its
vital habits from subjection to an always insistent animalism.
We seek indeed a larger and completer affirmation. We perceive that in the Indian ascetic ideal the great Vedantic formula, "One without a second", has not been read sufficiently in the light of that other formula equally imperative, "All this is the Brahman". The passionate aspiration of man upward to the Divine has not been sufficiently related to the descending movement of the Divine leaning downward to embrace eternally Its manifestation. Its meaning in Matter has not been so well understood as Its truth in the Spirit. The Reality which the Sannyasin seeks has been grasped in its full height, but not, as by the ancient Vedantins, in its full extent and comprehensiveness. But in our completer affirmation we must not minimise the part of the pure spiritual impulse. As we have seen how greatly Materialism has served the ends of the Divine, so we must acknowledge the still greater service rendered by Asceticism to Life. We shall preserve the truths of material Science and its real utilities in the final harmony, even if many or even if all of its existing forms have to be broken or left aside. An even greater scruple of right preservation must guide us in our dealing with the legacy, however actually diminished or depreciated, of the Aryan past.
—The Life Divine —The Two Negations: The Refusal of the Ascetic, pg. 22-24.
In the ordinary distribution of life's activities the individual regards himself
as a separate being included in the universe and both as dependent upon that
which transcends alike the universe and the individual. It is to this Transcendence
that we give currently the name of God, who thus becomes to our conceptions
not so much supracosmic as extracosmic. The belittling and degradation of both
the individual and the universe is a natural consequence of this division: the
cessation of both cosmos and individual by the attainment of the Transcendence
would be logically its supreme conclusion.
The integral view of the unity of Brahman avoids these consequences. Just as we need not give up the bodily life to attain to the mental and spiritual, so we can arrive at a point of view where the preservation of the individual activities is no longer inconsistent with our comprehension of the cosmic consciousness or our attainment to the transcendent and supracosmic. For the World-Transcendent embraces the universe, is one with it and does not exclude it, even as the universe embraces the individual, is one with him and does not exclude him. The individual is a centre of the whole universal consciousness; the universe is a form and definition which is occupied by the entire immanence of the Formless and Indefinable. This is always the true relation, veiled from us by our ignorance or our wrong consciousness of things. When we attain to knowledge or right consciousness, nothing essential in the eternal relation is changed, but only the inview and the outview from the individual centre is profoundly modified and consequently also the spirit and effect of its activity. The individual is still necessary to the action of the Transcendent in the universe and that action in him does not cease to be possible by his illumination. On the contrary, since the conscious manifestation of the Transcendent in the individual is the means by which the collective, the universal is also to become conscious of itself, the continuation of the illumined individual in the action of the world is an imperative need of the world-play. If his inexorable removal through the very act of illumination is the law, then the world is condemned to remain eternally the scene of unredeemed darkness, death and suffering. And such a world can only be a ruthless ordeal or a mechanical illusion.
—The Life Divine —The Destiny of the Individual, pg. 37-38
For if we examine carefully, we shall find that Intuition is our first teacher.
Intuition always stands veiled behind our mental operations. Intuition brings
to man those brilliant messages from the Unknown which are the beginning of
his higher knowledge. Reason only comes in afterwards to see what profit it
can have of the shining harvest. Intuition gives us that idea of something behind
and beyond all that we know and seem to be which pursues man always in contradiction
of his lower reason and all his normal experience and impels him to formulate
that formless perception in the more positive ideas of God, Immortality, Heaven
and the rest by which we strive to express it to the mind. For Intuition is
as strong as Nature herself from whose very soul it has sprung and cares nothing
for the contradictions of reason or the denials of experience. It knows what
is because it is, because itself it is of that and has come from that, and will
not yield it to the judgment of what merely becomes and appears. What the Intuition
tells us of, is not so much Existence as the Existent, for it proceeds from
that one point of light in us which gives it its advantage, that sometimes opened
door in our own self-awareness. Ancient Vedanta seized this message of the Intuition
and formulated it in the three great declarations of the Upanishads, "I am He",
"Thou art That, O Swetaketu", "All this is the Brahman; this Self is the Brahman".
—The Life Divine —The Methods of Vedantic Knowledge, pg. 67
Materialism indeed insists that, whatever the extension of consciousness, it
is a material phenomenon inseparable from our physical organs and not their
utiliser but their result. This orthodox contention, however, is no longer able
to hold the field against the tide of increasing knowledge. Its explanations
are becoming more and more inadequate and strained. It is becoming always clearer
that not only does the capacity of our total consciousness far exceed that of
our organs, the senses, the nerves, the brain, but that even for our ordinary
thought and consciousness these organs are only their habitual instruments and
not their generators. Consciousness uses the brain which its upward strivings
have produced, brain has not produced nor does it use the consciousness. There
are even abnormal instances which go to prove that our organs are not entirely
indispensable instruments, —that the heart-beats are not absolutely essential
to life, any more than is breathing, nor the organized brain-cells to thought.
Our physical organism no more causes or explains thought and consciousness than
the construction of an engine causes or explains the motive-power of steam or
electricity. The force is anterior, not the physical instrument.
—The Life Divine —Conscious Force; pg 86.
So long as Matter was Alpha and Omega to the scientific mind, the reluctance
to admit intelligence as the mother of intelligence was an honest scruple. But
now it is no more than an outworn paradox to affirm the emergence of human consciousness,
intelligence and mastery out of an unintelligent, blindly driving unconsciousness
in which no form or substance of them previously existed. Man's consciousness
can be nothing else than a form of Nature's consciousness. It is there in other
involved forms below Mind, it emerges in Mind, it shall ascend into yet superior
forms beyond Mind. For the Force that builds the worlds is a conscious Force,
the Existence which manifests itself in them is conscious Being and a perfect
emergence of its potentialities in form is the sole object which we can rationally
conceive for its manifestation of this world of forms.
—The Life Divine —Conscious Force, pg. 89-90
In truth, the difficulty thus sharply presented arises only if we assume the
existence of an extracosmic personal God, not Himself the universe, one who
has created good and evil, pain and suffering for His creatures, but Himself
stands above and unaffected by them, watching, ruling, doing His will with a
suffering and struggling world or, if not doing His will, if allowing the world
to be driven by an-inexorable law, unhelped by Him or inefficiently helped,
then not God, not omnipotent, not all-good and all-loving. On no theory of an
extracosmic moral God, can evil and suffering be explained, —the creation
of evil and suffering,— except by an unsatisfactory subterfuge which avoids
the question at issue instead of answering it or a plain or implied Manicheanism
which practically annuls the Godhead in attempting to justify its ways or excuse
its works. But such a God is not the Vedantic Sachchidananda. Sachchidananda
of the Vedanta is one existence without a second; all that is, is He. If then
evil and suffering exist, it is He that bears the evil and suffering in the
creature in whom He has embodied Himself. The problem then changes entirely.
The question is no longer how came God to create for His creatures a suffering
and evil of which He is Himself incapable and therefore immune, but how came
the sole and infinite Existence-Consciousness-Bliss to admit into itself that
which is not bliss, that which seems to be its positive negation.
—The Life Divine —Delight of Existence: The Problem, pg. 94-95
Mind is an instrument of analysis and synthesis, but not of essential knowledge.
Its function is to cut out something vaguely from the unknown Thing in itself
and call this measurement or delimitation of it the whole, and again to analyse
the whole into its parts which it regards as separate mental objects. It is
only the parts and accidents that the Mind can see definitely and, after its
own fashion, know. Of the whole its only definite idea is an assemblage of parts
or a totality of properties and accidents. The whole not seen as a part of something
else or in its own parts, properties and accidents is to the mind no more than
a vague perception; only when it is analysed and put by itself as a separate
constituted object, a totality in a larger totality, can Mind say to itself,
"This now I know." And really it does not know. It knows only its own analysis
of the object and the idea it has formed of it by a synthesis of the separate
parts and properties that it has seen. There its characteristic power, its sure
function ceases, and if we would have a greater, a profounder and a real knowledge,
—a knowledge and not an intense but formless sentiment such as comes sometimes
to certain deep but inarticulate parts of our mentality,— Mind has to make
room for another consciousness which will fulfil Mind by transcending it or
reverse and so rectify its operations after leaping beyond it: the summit of
mental knowledge is only a vaulting-board from which that leap can be taken.
The utmost mission of Mind is to train our obscure consciousness which has emerged
out of the dark prison of Matter, to enlighten its blind instincts, random intuitions,
vague perceptions till it shall become capable of this greater light and higher
ascension. Mind is a passage, not a culmination.
—The Life Divine —The Supermind as Creator, pg. 127-128
Science and metaphysics (either founded on pure intellectual speculation or,
as in India, ultimately on a spiritual vision of things and spiritual experience)
have each its own province and method of inquiry. Science cannot dictate its
conclusions to metaphysics any more than metaphysics can impose its conclusions
on Science. Still, if we accept the reasonable belief that Being and Nature
in all their states have a system of correspondences expressive of a common
Truth underlying them, it is permissible to suppose that truths of the physical
universe can throw some light on the nature as well as the process of the Force
that is active in the universe —not a complete light, for physical Science
is necessarily incomplete in the range of its inquiry and has no clue to the
occult movements of the Force.
—The Life Divine —Life, pg. 178
But there comes a new equipoise, there intervenes a new set of terms which increase
in proportion as Life delivers itself out of this form and begins to evolve
towards conscious Mind; for the middle terms of Life are death and mutual devouring,
hunger and conscious desire, the sense of a limited room and capacity and the
struggle to increase, to expand, to conquer and to possess. These three terms
are the basis of that status of evolution which the Darwinian theory first made
plain to human knowledge. For the phenomenon of death involves in itself a struggle
to survive, since death is only the negative term in which Life hides from itself
and tempts its own positive being to seek for immortality. The phenomenon of
hunger and desire involves a struggle towards a status of satisfaction and security,
since desire is only the stimulus by which Life tempts its own positive being
to rise out of the negation of unfulfilled hunger towards the full possession
of the delight of existence. The phenomenon of limited capacity involves a struggle
towards expansion, mastery and possession, the possession of the self and the
conquest of the environment, since limitation and defect are only the negation
by which Life tempts its own positive being to seek for the perfection of which
it is eternally capable. The struggle for life is not only a struggle to survive,
it is also a struggle for possession and perfection, since only by taking hold
of the environment whether more or less, whether by self-adaptation to it or
by adapting it to oneself either by accepting and conciliating it or by conquering
and changing it, can survival be secured, and equally is it true that only a
greater and greater perfection can assure a continuous permanence, a lasting
survival. It is this truth that Darwinism sought to express in the formula of
the survival of the fittest.
—The Life Divine —The Ascent of Life, pg. 199
This third status is a condition in which we rise progressively beyond the struggle
for life by mutual devouring and the survival of the fittest by that struggle;
for there is more and more a survival by mutual help and a self-perfectioning
by mutual adaptation, interchange and fusion. Life is a self-affirmation of
being, even a development and survival of ego, but of a being that has need
of other beings, an ego that seeks to meet and include other egos and to be
included in their life. The individuals and the aggregates who develop most
the law of association and the law of love, of common help, kindliness, affection,
comradeship, unity, who harmonise most successfully survival and mutual self-giving,
the aggregate increasing the individual and the individual the aggregate, as
well as individual increasing individual and aggregate aggregate by mutual interchange,
will be the fittest for survival in this tertiary status of the evolution.
—The Life Divine —The Ascent of Life, pg. 203
Therefore the material universe was bound in the nature of things to evolve
from its hidden life apparent life, from its hidden mind apparent mind, and
it must in the same nature of things evolve from its hidden Supermind apparent
Supermind and from the concealed Spirit within it the triune glory of Sachchidananda.
The only question is whether the earth is to be a scene of that emergence or
the human creation on this or any other material scene, in this or any other
cycle of the large wheelings of Time, its instrument and vehicle. The ancient
seers believed in this possibility for man and held it to be his divine destiny;
the modern thinker does not even conceive of it or, if he conceived, would deny
or doubt. If he sees a vision of the Superman, it is in the figure of increased
degrees of mentality or vitality; he admits no other emergence, sees nothing
beyond these principles, for these have traced for us up till now our limit
and circle. In this progressive world, with this human creature in whom the
divine spark has been kindled, real wisdom is likely to dwell with the high
aspiration rather than with the denial of aspiration or with the hope that limits
and circumscribes itself within those narrow walls of apparent possibility which
are only our intermediate house of training. In the spiritual order of things,
the higher we project our view and our aspiration, the greater the Truth that
seeks to descend upon us, because it is already there within us and calls for
its release from the covering that conceals it in manifested Nature.
—The Life Divine —The Sevenfold Chord of Being, pg. 269-270
A theory of Maya in the sense of illusion or the unreality of cosmic existence
creates more difficulties than it solves; it does not really solve the problem
of existence, but rather renders it for ever insoluble. For, whether Maya be
an unreality or a non-real reality, the ultimate effects of the theory carry
in them a devastating simplicity of nullification. Ourselves and the universe
fade away into nothingness or else keep for a time only a truth which is little
better than a fiction. In the thesis of the pure unreality of Maya, all experience,
all knowledge as well as all ignorance, the knowledge that frees us no less
than the ignorance that binds us, world-acceptance and world-refusal, are two
sides of an illusion; for there is nothing to accept or refuse, nobody to accept
or refuse it. All the time it was only the immutable superconscient Reality
that at all existed; the bondage and release were only appearances, not a reality.
All attachment to world-existence is an illusion, but the call for liberation
is also a circumstance of the illusion; it is something that was created in
Maya which by its liberation is extinguished in Maya. But this nullification
cannot be compelled to stop short in its devastating advance at the boundary
fixed for it by a spiritual Illusionism. For if all other experiences of the
individual consciousness in the universe are illusions, then what guarantee
is there that its spiritual experiences are not illusions, including even its
absorbed self-experience of the supreme Self which is conceded to us as utterly
real? For if cosmos is untrue, our experience of the cosmic consciousness, of
the universal Self, of Brahman as all these beings or as the self of all these
beings, the One in all, all in the One has no secure foundation, since it reposes
in one of its terms on an illusion, on a construction of Maya. That term, the
cosmic term, has to crumble, for all these beings which we saw as the Brahman
were illusions; then what is our assurance of our experience of the other term,
the pure Self, the silent, static or absolute Reality, since that too comes
to us in a mind moulded of delusion and formed in a body created by an Illusion?
An overwhelming self-evident convincingness, an experience of absolute authenticity
in the realisation or experience is not an unanswerable proof of sole reality
or sole finality: for other spiritual experiences such as that of the omnipresent
Divine Person, Lord of a real Universe, have the same convincing, authentic
and final character. It is open to the intellect which has once arrived at the
conviction of the unreality of all other things, to take a farther step and
deny the reality of Self and of all existence. The Buddhists took this last
step and refused reality to the Self on the ground that it was as much as the
rest a construction of the mind; they cut not only God but the eternal Self
and impersonal Brahman out of the picture.
An uncompromising theory of Illusion solves no problem of our existence; it
only cuts the problem out for the individual by showing him a way of exit: in
its extreme form and effect, our being and its action become null and without
sanction, its experience, aspiration, endeavour lose their significance; all,
the one incommunicable relationless Truth excepted and the turning away to it,
become equated with illusion of being, are part of a universal Illusion and
themselves illusions. God and our-selves and the universe become myths of Maya;
for God is only a reflection of Brahman in Maya, ourselves are only a reflection
of Brahman in illusory individuality, the world is only an imposition on the
Brahman's incommunicable self-existence. There is a less drastic nullification
if a certain reality is admitted for the being even within the illusion, a certain
validity for the experience and knowledge by which we grow into the spirit:
but this is only if the temporal has a valid reality and the experience in it
has a real validity, and in that case what we are in front of is not an illusion
taking the unreal for real but an ignorance misapprehending the real. Otherwise
if the beings of whom Brahman is the self are illusory, its selfhood is not
valid, it is part of an illusion; the experience of self is also an illusion:
the experience "I am That" is vitiated by an ignorant conception,
for there is no I, only That; the experience "I am He" is doubly ignorant,
for it assumes a conscious Eternal, a Lord of the universe, a Cosmic Being,
but there can be no such thing if there is no reality in the universe. A real
solution of existence can only stand upon a truth that accounts for our existence
and world-existence, reconciles their truth, their right relation and the truth
of their relation to whatever transcendent Reality is the source of everything.
But this implies some reality of individual and cosmos, some true relation of
the One Existence and all existences, of relative experience and of the Absolute.
The theory of Illusion cuts the knot of the world problem, it does not disentangle it; it is an escape, not a solution: a flight of the spirit is not a sufficient victory for the being embodied in this world of the becoming; it effects a separation from Nature, not a liberation and fulfilment of our nature. This eventual outcome satisfies only one element, sublimates only one impulse of our being; it leaves the rest out in the cold to perish in the twilight of the unreal reality of Maya. As in Science, so in metaphysical thought, that general and ultimate solution is likely to be the best which includes and accounts for all so that each truth of experience takes its place in the whole: that knowledge is likely to be the highest knowledge which illumines, integralises, harmonises the significance of all knowledge and accounts for, finds the basic and, one might almost say, the justifying reason of our ignorance and illusion while it cures them; this is the supreme experience which gathers together all experience in the truth of a supreme and all-reconciling oneness. Illusionism unifies by elimination; it deprives all knowledge and experience, except the one supreme merger, of reality and significance.
—The Life Divine —Reality and the Cosmic Illusion, pg. 466-9
This then is the origin, this the nature, these the boundaries of the Ignorance.
Its origin is a limitation of knowledge, its distinctive character a separation
of the being from its own integrality and entire reality; its boundaries are
determined by this separative development of the consciousness, for it shuts
us to our true self and to the true self and whole nature of things and obliges
us to live in an apparent surface existence. A return or a progress to integrality,
a disappearance of the limitation, a breaking down of separativeness, an overpassing
of boundaries, a recovery of our essential and whole reality must be the sign
and opposite character of the inner turn towards Knowledge. There must be a
replacement of a limited and separative by an essential and integral consciousness
identified with the original truth and the whole truth of self and existence.
The integral Knowledge is something that is already there in the integral Reality:
it is not a new or still non-existent thing that has to be created, acquired,
learned, or uncovered, it is a Truth that is self-revealed to a spiritual endeavour:
for it is there veiled in our deeper and greater self; it is the very stuff
of our own spiritual consciousness, and it is by awaking to it even in our surface
self that we have to possess it. There is an integral self-knowledge that we
have to recover and, because the world-self also is our self, an integral world-knowledge.
A knowledge that can be learned or constructed by the mind exists and has its
value, but is not what is meant when we speak of the Knowledge and the Ignorance.
—The Life Divine —Reality and the Integral Knowledge, pg. 635