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FIVE Maya: The Energy of The Absolute
MAYA then is the fundamental fact in the Universe, her dualistic system of balanced pairs of opposites is a necessity of intellectual conception; but the possibility of her existence as an inherent energy in the Absolute, outside phenomena, has yet to be established. So long as Science is incomplete and Yoga a secret discipline for the few, the insistent questions of the metaphysician can never be ignored, nor his method grow obsolete. The confident and even arrogant attempt of experimental Science to monopolise the kingdom of mind, to the exclusion of the metaphysical and all other methods, was a rash and premature aggression, — rash because premature; successful at first, its victorious usurping onrush is beginning to stagger and fail, even to lose hold on positions once thought to be permanently secured. The slow resurgence of metaphysics has already begun. Certainly, no metaphysics can be admissible which does not take count of the standards and undoubted results of Science; but until experimental analysis has solved the whole mystery of the Universe, not by speculation through logic (a method stolen from metaphysics with which Science has no business) but by experimental proof and hypotheses checked and confirmed by experimental proof, leaving no phenomenon unaccounted for and no fact ignored, — until then metaphysics must reign where analytic experiment leaves a void. Vedanta, though it bases itself chiefly on the subjective experimental methods of Yoga, and admits no metaphysical hypothesis as valid which is not in agreement with its results, is yet willing to submit its own conclusions to the tests of metaphysical logic. The Vedantic Yogin shrinks at present, because of certain moral scruples, from divulging his arcana to the crowd, but he recognises that so long as he refuses, he has no right to evade the inquisition of the metaphysical logician. Atharvan and Shwetashwatara Page – 32 having spoken, Shankara and Ramanuja must be allowed their arena of verbal discussion. The metaphysical question involved turns upon the nature of Avidya, Nescience, and its possibility in Parabrahman who is, after all, absolute, — Absolute Consciousness and therefore Absolute Knowledge. It is not sound to say that Parabrahman envisaging Maya, becomes capable of Avidya; for envisagement of Maya is simply a metaphorical expression for Avidya itself. Neither can the Vedantist take refuge in the theologian’s evasion of reason by an appeal to lawless Omnipotence, to the credo quia impossibile. The Eternal is undoubtedly in His own nature free and unlimited, but, as undoubtedly. He has deliberately bound Himself in His relation to phenomena by certain fundamental principles; He has willed that certain things shall not and cannot be, and to use a human parallel He is like a King who having promulgated a certain code is as much bound by His own laws as the meanest subject, or like a poet whose imaginations, in themselves free, are limited by laws the moment they begin to take shape. We may say, theoretically, that God being Omnipotent can create something out of nothing, but so long as no single clear instance can be given of a something created out of nothing, the rule of ex nihilo nihil fit remains an universal and fundamental law and to suppose that God has based the Universe on a violation of a fundamental law of the Universe, is to kick Reason out of the house and slam the door against her return. Similarly, if the coexistence of Avidya with Vidya in the same field and as it were interpenetrating each other is against the Law, it does by that very fact become impossible and the theory of Maya will then be proved an error; no appeal to Omnipotence will save it. The objection to Avidya may be stated thus that Absolute Knowledge cannot at the same time not know, cannot imagine a thing to be real which is not real; for such imagination involves an element of self-deception, and self-deception is not possible in the Absolute. But is it really a law of consciousness — for there lies the point — that things can in no sense be at the same time real and unreal, that you cannot by any possibility imagine things to be real which at the same time you know perfectly well Page – 33 to be unreal? The dualist objectors may contend that this impossibility is a law of consciousness. The Vedantin replies at once negatur, your statement is refuted by a host of examples; it is inconsistent with Universal experience. The most utter and avowed unrealities can be and are firmly imaged as realities, seen as realities, sensed as realities, conceived as realities without the mind for a moment admitting that they are indeed real. The mirage of the desert we know after a time to be unreal, but even then we see and firmly image it as a reality, admire the green beauty of those trees and pant for the cool shining delight of those waters. We see dreams and dreams are unrealities, and yet some of them at least are at the same time not positive unrealities, for they image, and sometimes very exactly, events which have happened, are happening or will happen in the future. We see the juggler throw a rope in the air, climb up it, kill the boy who has preceded him and throw down his bleeding limbs piecemeal on the earth; every detail and circumstance of the unreal event corresponding to the event as it would have been, were it real; we do not imagine it to be unreal while it lasts, and we cannot so imagine it; for the visualisation is too clear and consistent, the feelings it awakes in us are too vivid, and yet all the time we perfectly well know that no such thing is happening. Instances of this sort are not easily numbered. But these are distant, unimmediate things and for some of them the evidence may not be considered ample. Let us come nearer to our daily life. We see a stone and we note its properties of solidity and immobility, nor can we by any persuasion be induced to imagine it as anything else but solid and immobile; and we are right, for it is both: and yet we know that its immobility and solidity are not real, that it is, and to a vision sensible of the infinitesimal would appear, a world of the most active motion, of myriads of atoms with spaces between them. Again, if there is one thing that is real to me, it is this, that I am vertical and upright, whatever the people at the Antipodes may be and that I walk in all directions horizontally along the earth; and yet alas! I know that I am in reality not vertical but nearer the horizontal, walking often vertically up and down the earth like a fly on the wall. I know it perfectly, yet if I were constantly to translate Page – 34 my knowledge into imagination, a padded room in bedlam would soon be the only place for me. This is indeed the singular and amazing law of our consciousness that it is perfectly capable of holding two contradictory conceptions at the same time and with equal strength. We accept the knowledge which Science places at our disposal, but we perpetually act upon the images which Nescience creates. I know that the sun does not rise or set, does not move round the earth, does not sail through the heavens marking the time of day as it proceeds, but in my daily life I act precisely on the supposition that this unreality really happens; I hourly and momently conceive it and firmly image it as real and sometimes regulate on it my every movement. The eternal belligerents. Science and Nescience, have come in this matter of the sun’s motion, as in so many others, to a working compromise. To me as an untrammelled Will to live who by the subtle intellectual part of me, can wander through Eternity and place myself as a spectator in the centre of the sun or even outside the material Universe the better to observe its motions, the phenomenon of the earth’s movement round the sun is the reality, and even Nescience consents that I shall work on it as an acknowledged fact in the operations of pure intellect; but to me as a trammelled body unable to leave the earth and bound down in my daily life to the ministry of my senses, the phenomenon of the sun’s movement round the earth is the reality and to translate my intellectual knowledge into the stuff of my daily imaginations would be intolerably inconvenient; it would take my secure resting-place, the earth, from under my feet and make havoc of my life in sensation; even Science therefore consents that I shall work on the evidence of my senses as an acknowledged fact in my material life of earth-bounded existence. In this duplicity of standpoint we see as in a glass darkly some image of the manner in which the Absolute wills to be phenomenally conditioned; at once knows perfectly what is, yet chooses to image what is not, having infinite Science, yet makes room for self-limiting Nescience. It is not necessary to labour the point, or to range through all scientific knowledge for instances; in the light of modern knowledge the objection to the coexistence of Vidya and Avidya cannot stand; it is a perpetual Page – 35 fact in the daily economy of Consciousness. Yes, it may be argued, but this does not establish it as anything more than a possibility in regard to the Absolute. A state of things true throughout the range of phenomenal existence, may cease to operate at the point where phenomena themselves cease. The possibility, however, once granted, Vedanta is entitled to put forward Maya as the one successful explanation yet advanced of this manifold existence; first, because Maya does explain the whole of existence metaphysically and is at the same time a universal, scientifically observable fact ranging through the whole Universe and fundamentally present in every operation of Consciousness; secondly, because it does transcend phenomena as well as inform them, it has its absolute as well as its conditioned state and is therefore not only possible in the Absolute but must be the Absolute Himself in manifestation; and thirdly, because no other possible explanation can logically contain both the truth of sheer transcendent Absoluteness of the Brahman and the palpable, imperative existence of the phenomenal Universe.1 Illogical theories, theories which part company with reason, theories which, instead of basing themselves in observed laws, take their stand in the void, may be had in plenty. Maya is no theory but a fact; no mere result of logic or speculation, but of careful observation and yet unassailable by logic, and unsurpassable by speculation. One of the most remarkable manifestations of Avidya in human consciousness, presenting in its nature and laws of working a close analogy to its parent is the power of imagination, — the power of bodying forth images which may either be reabsorbed into the individual consciousness which gave them forth or outlast it. Of the latter kind poetical creation is a salient example. At a certain time in a certain country one named Shakespeare created a new world by the force of his Avidya, his faculty of imagining what is not. That world is as real and unreal today as it was when Shakespeare created it or in more accurate Vedantic language asṛjata, loosed it forth, from the causal
¹ Of course I am not prepared, in these limits, to develop the final argument, that would imply a detailed examination of all metaphysical systems, which would be in itself the labour of a life-time. Page – 36 world within him. Within the limits of that world, Iago is real to Othello, Othello to Desdemona, and all are real to any and every consciousness which can for a time abstract itself from this world, its self-created surroundings and enter the world of Shakespeare. We are aware of them, observe them, grow in knowledge about them, see them act, hear them speak, feel for their griefs and sorrows; and even when we return to our own world, they do not always leave us, but sometimes come with us and influence our actions. The astonishing power of poetical creation towards moulding life and history, has not yet been sufficiently observed; yet it was after all Achilles, the swift-footed son of Peleus, who thundered through Asia at the head of his legions, dragged Batis at his chariot-wheels and hurled the Iranian to his fall, — Achilles, the son of Peleus, who never lived except as an image, — nay, does not omniscient learning tell us, that even his creator never lived, or was only a haphazard assortment of poets who somehow got themselves collectively nicknamed Homer ? Yet these images, which we envisage as real and confess by our words, thoughts, feelings, and sometimes even by our actions to be real, are all the time and we know them perfectly well to be as mythical as the dream, the mirage and the juggler on his rope. There is no Othello, no Iago, no Desdemona but all these are merely varieties of name and form, not of Shakespeare, but in which Shakespeare is immanent and which still exist merely because Shakespeare is immanent in them. Nevertheless he who best succeeds in imaging forth these children of illusion, this strange harmonic Maya, is ever adjudged by us to be the best poet. Creator or Maker, even though others may link words more sweetly together or dovetail incidents more deftly. The parallel between this work of imagination and the creation of phenomena and no less between the relation of the author to his creatures and the relation of the Conditioned Brahman to His creatures is astonishingly close in most of their details no less than in their general nature. Observe, for instance, that in all that multitude of figures vicious and virtuous, wise and foolish, he their creator who gave them forth, their Self and reality without whom they cannot exist, is unaffected by their crimes and virtues, irresponsible and free. The Lord…. What then ? Is this analogy anything Page – 37 more than poetic fancy, or is not after all, the whole idea of Brahman and Maya itself a mere poetic fancy? Perhaps, but not more fanciful or unreal, in that case, than the Universe itself and its motions; for the principle and working of the two are identical. Let us ask ourselves, what it is that has happened when a great work of creation takes place and how it is that Shakespeare’s creatures are still living to us, now that Shakespeare himself is dead and turned to clay. Singular indeed that Shakes-pear’s creations should be immortal and Shakespeare himself a mere short-lived conglomeration of protoplasmic cells! We notice first that Shakespeare’s dramatic creatures are only a selection or anthology from among the teeming images which peopled that wonderful mind; there were thousands of pictures in that gallery which were never produced for the admiration of the ages. This is a truth to which every creator whether he use stone or colour or words for his thought-symbols will bear emphatic testimony. There was therefore a subtler and vaster world in Shakespeare than the world we know him to have bodied forth into tangible material of literature. Secondly we note that all these imaginations already existed in Shakespeare unmanifested and unformed before they took shape and body; for certainly they did not come from outside. Shakespeare took his materials from this legend or that play, this chronicle or that history? His framework possibly, but not his creations; Hamlet did not come from the legend or the play, nor Cassius or King Henry from the history or the chronicle. No, Shakespeare contained in himself all his creatures, and therefore transcended and exceeded them; he was and is more than they or even than their sum and total; for they are merely limited manifestations of him under the conditions of time and space, and he would have been the same Shakespeare, even if we had not a scene or a line of him to know him by; only the world of imagination would have remained latent in him instead of manifest, avyakta instead of vyakta. Once manifest, his creatures are preserved immortally, not by print or manuscript, for the Veda has survived thousands of years without print or manuscript, — but, by words, shall we say? no, for words or sounds are only the physical Page – 38 substance, the atoms out of which their shapes are built, and can be entirely rearranged, — by translation, for example, — without our losing Othello and Desdemona, just as the indwelling soul can take a new body without being necessarily changed by the transmigration. Othello and Desdemona are embodied in sounds or words, but thought is their finer and immortal substance. It is the subtler world of thought in Shakespeare from which they have been selected and bodied forth in sounds, and into the world of thought they originally proceeded from a reservoir of life deeper than thought itself, from an ocean of being which our analysis has not yet fathomed. Now, let us translate these facts into the conceptions of Vedanta. Parabrahman self-limited in the name and form of Shakespeare, dwells deepest in him invisible to consciousness as the unmanifest world of that something more elemental than thought (may it not be causal, elemental Will?), in which Shakespeare’s imaginations lie as yet unformed and undifferentiated; then he comes to a surface of consciousness visible to Shakespeare as the inwardly manifest world of subtle matter or thought in which those imaginations take subtle thought-shapes and throng; finally, he rises to a surface of consciousness visible to others besides Shakespeare as the outwardly manifest world, manifest in sound, in which a select number of these imaginations are revealed to universal view. These mighty images live immortally in our minds because Parabrahman in Shakespeare is the same as Parabrahman in ourselves; and because, Shakespeare’s thought is, therefore, water of the same etheric ocean as that which flows through our brains; thought, in fact, is one, although to be revealed to us, it has to be bodied forth and take separate shapes in sound forms which we are accustomed to perceive and understand. Brahman-Brahma as Thought-Creative in Shakespeare brings them forth, Brahman-Vishnu as Thought-Preservative in us maintains them, Brahman-Rudra as Thought-Destructive or Oblivion will one day destroy them; but in all these operations Brahman is one, Thought is one, even as all the Oceans are one. Shakespeare’s world is in every way a parable of ours. There is however a distinction— Shakespeare could not body forth his images into forms palpable Page – 39 in gross matter either because, as other religions believe, that power is denied to man, or because, as Vedantism suggests, mankind has not risen as yet to that pitch of creative force. There is one class of phenomena however in which this defect of identity between individual Imagination and universal Avidya seems to be filled up. The mind can create under certain circumstances images surviving its own dissolution or departure, which do take some kind of form in gross matter or at least matter palpable to the gross senses. For the phenomena of apparitions there is an accumulating mass of evidence. Orthodox Science prefers to ignore the evidence, declines to believe that a prima facie case has been made out for investigation and shuts the gate on farther knowledge with a triple polysyllabic key, mysticism, coincidence, hallucination. Nevertheless, investigated or not, the phenomena persist in occurring. Hauntings, for example, for which there are only scattered indications in Europe, are in India owing to the more strenuous psychical force and more subtle psychical sensitiveness of our physical organisation, fairly common. In these hauntings we have a signal instance of the triumph of imagination. In the majority of cases they are images created by dying or doomed men in their agony which survive the creator, some of them visible, some audible, some both visible and audible, and in rare cases in an unearthly, insufficient, but by no means inefficient manner, palpable. The process of their creation is in essence the same as attends the creation of poetry or the creation of the world; it is tapas or tapasya, — not penance as English scholars will strangely insist on translating it, but HEAT, and tremendous concentration of will, which sets the whole being in a flame, masses all the faculties in closed ranks and hurls them furiously on a single objective. By tapas the world was created; by tapas, says the Moondaca, creative Brahman is piled up, cīyate, gathered and intensified; by tapas the rush of inspiration is effected. This tapas may be on the material plane associated with purpose or entirely dissociated from purpose. In the case of intense horror or grief, fierce agony or terrible excitement on the verge of death it is totally dissociated from any material purpose, it is what would be ordinarily called involuntary, but it receives from its origin an intensity so unparalleled as to create Page – 40 living images of itself which remain and act long after the source has been dissolved or stilled by death. Such is the ultimate power of imagination, though at present it cannot be fully used on the material plane except in a random, fortuitous and totally unpurposed manner. In the manner of its working, then. Imagination is a carefully executed replica of Avidya; and if other marks of her essential identity with Avidya are needed, they can be found. Both are, for instance, preponderatingly purposeless. The workings of Imagination are often totally dissociated, on the material plane at least, from any intelligible purpose and though it is quite possible that the latent part of our consciousness which works below the surface, may have sometimes a purpose of which the superficial part is not aware, yet in the most ordinary workings of Imagination, an absolute purposelessness is surely evident. Certainly, if not purposelessness there is colossal waste. A few hundreds of images were selected from Shakespeare’s mind for a definite artistic purpose, but the thousands that never found verbal expression, many of them with as splendid potentialities as those which did materialise in Hamlet and Macbeth seem to have risen and perished without any useful purpose. The same wastefulness is shown by Nature in her works; how many millions of lives does she not shower forth that a few may be selected for the purposes of evolution! Yet when she chooses to work economically and with set purpose, she like Imagination can become a scrupulous miser of effort and show herself possessed of a magical swiftness and sureness in shaping the means to the end. Neither Nature nor Imagination, therefore, can be supposed to be blind, random energies proceeding from an ungoverned force and teleological only by accident. Their operations are obviously guided by an Intelligence as perfectly capable, when it so wills, of purposing, planning, fitting its means to its ends, economising its materials and labour as any intelligent and careful workman in these days of science and method. We need therefore some explanation why this great universal Intelligence should not be, as a careful workman, always, not occasionally, economical of its materials and labour. Is not the truth this that Nature is not universally and in all her works teleological, that Page – 41 purpose is only one minor part of existence more concentrated than most and therefore more intense and triumphant, while for the greater part of her universal operation we must find another explanation than the teleological ? or rather will at once contain and exceed the teleological? If it had only been Shakespeare, Michelangelo, Edison, Beethoven, Napoleon, Schopenhauer, the creators in poetry, art, science, music, life or thought, who possessed imagination, we might then have found an use for their unused imaginations in the greater preparatory richness they gave to the soil from which a few exquisite flowers were to spring. The explanation might not be a good one, little more indeed than a poetical fancy, but it could have passed for want of a better. But every human being possesses the divine faculty, more or less developed; every mind is a teeming world of imaginations; and indeed, imagination, for imagination the opium-smoker’s is more vivid, fertile and gorgeous than Shakespeare’s. Yet hardly in one case out of a thousand are these imaginations of use to the world or anything but a practical hindrance or at best a purposeless pastime, to the dreamer. Imagination is a fundamental energy of consciousness, and this marvellous, indomitable energy works on without caring whether she is put to use or misuse or no use at all; she exists merely for the sake of delight in her own existence. Here I think we touch bottom. Imagination is outside purpose, sometimes above, sometimes below it, sometimes united with it, because she is an inherent energy not of some great teleological Master-Workman, but of Ananda, the Bliss of existence or Will to live; and beyond this delight in existence she has no reason for being. In the same way Maya, the infinite creative energy which peoples the phenomenal Universe, is really some force inherent in the infinite Will to be; and it is for this reason that her operations seem so wasteful from the standpoint of utilitarian economy; for she cares nothing about utilitarianism or economy and is only obeying her fundamental impulse towards phenomenal existence, consciousness, and the pleasure of conscious existence. So far as she has a purpose, it is this, and all the teleologic element in Nature has simply this end, to find more perfect surroundings or more exquisite means or wider opportunities or a grander gust and scope for the pleasure of Page – 42 conscious phenomenal existence. Yet the deepest bliss is after all that which she left and to which she will return, not the broken and pain-bounded bliss of finite life, but the perfect and infinite Bliss of transcendent undivided and illimitable consciousness. She seeks for a while to find that perfect bliss by finite means and in finite things, the heaven of the socialist or anarchist, the heaven of the artist, the heaven of knowledge, the heaven of thought, or a heaven in some other world; but one day she realises that great truth, "The Kingdom of Heaven is within you", and to that after all she returns. This is Maya. One metaphysical test remains to be satisfied before we can be sure that Avidya and Vidya, the outcurve and incurve of Maya, go back to something eternally existent in the Absolute and are not created by phenomenal causes. If inherent in the Absolute, Maya must culminate in conceptions that are themselves absolute, infinite and unconditioned. Vidya tapers off into infinity in the conceptions, sat or Pure Existence, cit or Pure Consciousness, ānanda or Pure Bliss; Avidya rises at her apex into asat. Nothingness, acetanam. Non-sentience, nirānandam, Blisslessness or Misery. Nothingness and Non-sentience are certainly absolute conceptions, infinite and unconditioned ; but the third term of the negative Trinity gives us pause. Absolute pain, blank infinite unconditioned and unrelieved Misery is a conception which Reason shies at and Consciousness refuses, violently refuses to admit as a possibility. A cypher if you like to make metaphysical calculations with, but by itself sheer nought, nowhere discoverable as existing or capable of existence. Yet if infinite misery could be, it would in the very act of being merge into Nothingness, it would lose its name in the very moment of becoming absolute. As a metaphysical conception we may then admit Absolute Blisslessness as a valid third term of the negative Trinity, not as a real or possible state, for no one of the three is a real or possible state. The unreality comes home to us most in the third term, just as reality comes home to us most in the third term of the positive Trinity, because Bliss and its negative blisslessness appeal to us on the material plane vividly and sensibly; the others touch us more indirectly, on the psychic and causal planes. Yet the nothingness Page – 43 of nothingness is taught us by Science, and the unreality of non-sentience will become clear when the nature of sentience is better understood. It will be said that the escape from pleasure as well as pain is after all the common goal of Buddhism and Vedanta. True, escape from limited pleasure which involves pain, escape from pain which is nothing but the limitation of pleasure. Both really seek absolute absence of limitation which is not a negative condition, but a positive infinity and its unspeakable, unmixed bliss; their escape from individuality does not lead them into nothingness, but into infinite existence, their escape from sensation does not purpose the annihilation of sentience but pure absolute consciousness as its goal. Not asat, acetanam, nirānandam, but saccidānandam is the great Reality to which Jivatman rises to envisage, the tat or sole Thing-in-itself to whom by the force of Vidya he tends ever to return. Page – 44 |