Book I
Omnipresent Reality and the Universe
Chapter I
The Human Aspiration
She follows to the goal of those that are passing on beyond, she is the first in
the eternal succession of the dawns that are coming,—Usha widens bringing out
that which lives, awakening someone who was dead.... What is her scope when she
harmonises with the dawns that shone out before and those that now must shine?
She desires the ancient
mornings and fulfils their light; projecting forwards her illumination she
enters into communion with the rest that are to come.
Kutsa Angirasa—Rig Veda.*
Footnote:
I. 113. 8, 10.
Threefold are those supreme births of this divine force that is in the world,
they are true, they are desirable; he moves there wide-overt within the Infinite
and shines pure, luminous and fulfilling.... That which is immortal in
mortals and possessed of the truth, is a god and established inwardly as an
energy working out in our divine powers.... Become high-uplifted, O Strength,
pierce all veils, manifest in us the things of the Godhead.
Vamadeva—Rig Veda.*
Footnote:
IV. 1. 7; IV. 2. 1; IV. 4. 5.
The earliest preoccupation of man in his awakened thoughts and, as it seems, his
inevitable and ultimate preoccupation,—for it survives the longest periods of
scepticism and returns after every banishment,—is also the highest which his
thought can envisage. It manifests itself in the divination of Godhead, the
impulse towards perfection, the search after pure Truth and unmixed Bliss, the
sense of a secret immortality. The ancient dawns of human knowledge have left us
their witness to this constant aspiration; today we see a humanity satiated but
not satisfied by victorious analysis of the externalities of Nature preparing to
return to its primeval longings. The earliest formula of Wisdom promises to be
its last,—God, Light, Freedom, Immortality.
Why could you say our analysis just concern the externalities of Nature?
Because we do know that there is always deep between the existence of detail and the existence of the Entireness. That is not thing itself.
Why can we be satisfied by our victorious analysis of the externalities of Nature?
Because we are living within the detail of life, we die within the detail of life. When do we need anything other except the detail of our life? How many living people are aware of the trivialness of our "inevitable" death? We have habit of neglecting the feasibility of our spirit.
These persistent ideals of the race are at once the contradiction of its normal experience and the affirmation of higher and deeper experiences which are abnormal to humanity and only to be attained, in their organised entirety, by a revolutionary individual effort or an evolutionary general progression. To know, possess and be the divine being in an animal and egoistic consciousness, to convert our twilit or obscure physical mentality into the plenary supramental illumination, to build peace and a self-existent bliss where there is only a stress of transitory satisfactions besieged by physical pain and emotional suffering, to establish an infinite freedom in a world which presents itself as a group of mechanical necessities, to discover and realise the immortal life in a body subjected to death and constant mutation,—this is offered to us as the manifestation of God in Matter and the goal of Nature in her terrestrial evolution. To the ordinary material intellect which takes its present organisation of consciousness for the limit of its possibilities, the direct contradiction of the unrealised ideals with the realised fact is a final argument against their validity.
Our normal life: we possess a physical body subjected to death and constant mutation; the only reason that we have to live is the possibility that we can chase the satisfactions which are ofen transitory besieged by physical pain and emotional suffering.
One of method that Ideals,
But if we take a more deliberate view of the world's workings, that direct
opposition appears rather as part of Nature's profoundest method and the seal of
her completest sanction.
For all problems of existence are essentially problems of harmony. They arise
from the perception of an unsolved discord and the instinct of an undiscovered
agreement or unity. To rest content with an unsolved discord is possible for the
practical and more animal part of man, but impossible for his fully awakened
mind, and usually even his practical parts only
escape from the general necessity either by shutting out the problem or by
accepting a rough, utilitarian and unillumined compromise. For essentially, all
Nature seeks a harmony, life and matter in their own sphere as much as mind in
the arrangement of its perceptions. The greater the apparent disorder of
the materials offered or the apparent disparateness, even to irreconcilable
opposition, of the elements that have to be utilised, the stronger is the spur,
and it drives towards a more subtle and puissant order than can normally be the
result of a less difficult endeavour. The accordance of active Life with a
material of form in which the condition of activity itself seems to be inertia,
is one problem of opposites that Nature has solved and seeks always to solve
better with greater complexities; for its perfect solution would be the
material immortality of a fully organised mind-supporting animal body. The
accordance of conscious mind and conscious will with a form and a life in
themselves not overtly self-conscious and capable at best of a mechanical or
sub-conscious will is another problem of opposites in which she has produced
astonishing results and aims always at higher marvels; for there her ultimate
miracle would be an animal consciousness no longer seeking but possessed of
Truth and Light, with the practical omnipotence which would result from the
possession of a direct and perfected knowledge. Not only, then, is the upward
impulse of man towards the accordance of yet higher opposites rational in
itself, but it is the only logical completion of a rule and an effort that seem
to be a fundamental method of Nature and the very sense of her universal
strivings.
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 farther 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 or 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.