Chapter V
The
Ascent of the Sacrifice – 1
The Works of Knowledge – The Psychic
Being
THIS then is in its
foundations the integral knowledge of the Supreme and Infinite to whom we offer
our sacrifice, and this the nature of the sacrifice itself in its triple
character, – a sacrifice of works, a sacrifice of love and adoration, a
sacrifice of knowledge. For even when we speak of the sacrifice of works by
itself, we do not mean the offering only of our outward acts, but of all that is
active and dynamic in us; our internal movements no less than our external
doings are to be consecrated on the one altar. The inner heart of all work that
is made into a sacrifice is a labour of self-discipline and self-perfection by
which we can hope to become conscious and luminous with a Light from above
poured into all our movements of mind, heart, will, sense, life and body. An
increasing light of divine consciousness will make us close in soul and one by
identity in our inmost being and spiritual substance with the Master of the
world-sacrifice, – the supreme object of existence proposed by the ancient
Vedanta; but also it will tend to make us one in our becoming by resemblance to
the Divine in our nature, the mystic sense of the symbol of sacrifice in the
sealed speech of the seers of the Veda.
But if this is to be the
character of the rapid evolution from a mental to a spiritual being
contemplated by the integral Yoga, a question arises full of many perplexities
but of great dynamic importance. How are we to deal with life and works as they
now are, with the activities proper to our still unchanged human nature? An
ascension towards a greater consciousness, an occupation of our mind, life and
body by its powers has been accepted as the outstanding object of the Yoga: but
still life here, not some other life elsewhere, is proposed as the immediate
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field of the action of the Spirit, – a
transformation, not an annihilation of our instrumental being and nature. What
then becomes of the present activities of our being, activities of the mind
turned towards knowledge and the expression of knowledge, activities of our
emotional and sensational parts, activities of outward conduct, creation,
production, the will turned towards mastery over men, things, life, the world,
the forces of Nature? Are they to be abandoned and to be replaced by some other
way of living in which a spiritualised consciousness can find its true
expression and figure? Are they to be maintained as they are in their outward
appearance, but transformed by an inner spirit in the act or enlarged in scope
and liberated into new forms by a reversal of consciousness such as was seen on
earth when man took up the vital activities of the animal to mentalise and
extend and transfigure them by the infusion of reason, thinking will, refined
emotion, an organised intelligence? Or is there to be an abandonment in part, a
preservation only of such of them as can bear a spiritual change and, for the rest,
the creation of a new life expressive, in its form no less than in its
inspiration and motive-force, of the unity, wideness, peace, joy and harmony of
the liberated spirit? It is this problem most of all that has exercised the
minds of those who have tried to trace the paths that lead from the human to
the Divine in the long journey of the Yoga.
Every kind of solution
has been offered from the entire abandonment of works and life, so far as that
is physically possible, to the acceptance of life as it is but with a new
spirit animating and uplifting its movements, in appearance the same as they
were but changed in the spirit behind them and therefore in their inner
significance. The extreme solution insisted on by the world-shunning ascetic or
the inward-turned ecstatical and self-oblivious mystic is evidently foreign to
the purpose of an integral Yoga; for if we are to realise the Divine in the
world, it cannot be done by leaving aside the world-action and action itself
altogether. At a less high pitch it was laid down by the religious mind in
ancient times that one should keep only such actions as are in their nature
part of the seeking, service or cult of the Divine and such others as are
attached to these or, in
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addition, those that are indispensable to the
ordinary setting of life but done in a religious spirit and according to the
injunctions of traditional religion and Scripture. But this is too formalist a
rule for the fulfilment of the free spirit in works, and it is besides professedly
no more than a provisional solution for tiding over the transition from life in
the world to a life in the Beyond which still remains the sole ultimate
purpose. An integral Yoga must lean rather to the catholic injunction of the
Gita that even the liberated soul, living in the Truth, should still do all the
works of life so that the plan of the universal evolution under a secret divine
leading may not languish or suffer. But if all works are to be done with the
same forms and on the same lines as they are now done in the Ignorance, our
gain is only inward and our life is in danger of becoming the dubious and
ambiguous formula of an inner Light doing the works of an outer Twilight, the
perfect Spirit expressing itself in a mould of imperfection foreign to its own
divine nature. If no better can be done for a time, – and during a long period
of transition something like this does inevitably happen, – then so it must
remain till things are ready and the spirit within is powerful enough to impose
its own forms on the life of the body and the world outside; but this can be
accepted only as a transitional stage and not as our soul’s ideal or the
ultimate goal of the passage.
For the same reason the
ethical solution is insufficient; for an ethical rule merely puts a bit in the
mouth of the wild horses of Nature and exercises over them a difficult and
partial control, but it has no power to transform Nature so that she may move
in a secure freedom fulfilling the intuitions that proceed from a divine
self-knowledge. At best its method is to lay down limits, to coerce the devil,
to put the wall of a relative and very doubtful safety around us. This or some
similar device of self-protection may be necessary for a time whether in
ordinary life or in Yoga; but in Yoga it can only be the mark of a transition.
A fundamental transformation and a pure wideness of spiritual life are the aim
before us and, if we are to reach it, we must find a deeper solution, a surer
supra-ethical dynamic principle. To be spiritual within, ethical in the outside
life, this is the ordinary
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religious solution, but it is a compromise; the
spiritualisation of both the inward being and the outward life and not a
compromise between life and the spirit is the goal of which we are the seekers.
Nor can the human confusion of values which obliterates the distinction between
spiritual and moral and even claims that the moral is the only true spiritual
element in our nature be of any use to us; for ethics is a mental control, and
the limited erring mind is not and cannot be the free and ever-luminous spirit.
It is equally impossible to accept the gospel that makes life the one aim,
takes its elements fundamentally as they are and only calls in a half-spiritual
or pseudo-spiritual light to flush and embellish it. Inadequate too is the very
frequent attempt at a misalliance between the vital and the spiritual, a mystic
experience within with an aestheticised intellectual and sensuous Paganism or
exalted hedonism outside leaning upon it and satisfying itself in the glow of a
spiritual sanction; for this too is a precarious and never successful
compromise and it is as far from the divine Truth and its integrality as the
puritanic opposite. These are all stumbling solutions of the fallible human
mind groping for a transaction between the high spiritual summits and the lower
pitch of the ordinary mind-motives and life-motives. Whatever partial truth may
be hidden behind them, that truth can only be accepted when it has been raised
to the spiritual level, tested in the supreme Truth-consciousness and
extricated from the soil and error of the Ignorance.
In sum, it may be safely
affirmed that no solution offered can be anything but provisional until a
Supramental Truth-consciousness is reached by which the appearances of things
are put in their place and their essence revealed and that in them which
derives straight from the spiritual essence. In the meanwhile our only safety
is to find a guiding law of spiritual experience – or else to liberate a light
within that can lead us on the way until that greater direct
Truth-consciousness is reached above us or born within us. For all else in us
that is only outward, all that is not a spiritual sense or seeing, the
constructions, representations or conclusions of the intellect, the suggestions
or instigations of the life-force, the positive necessities of physic-
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cal things are sometimes half-lights, sometimes
false lights that can at best only serve for a while or serve a little and for
the rest either detain or confuse us. The guiding law of spiritual experience
can only come by an opening of human consciousness to the Divine Consciousness;
there must be the power to receive in us the working and command and dynamic
presence of the Divine Shakti and surrender ourselves to her control; it is
that surrender and that control which bring the guidance. But the surrender is
not sure, there is no absolute certitude of the guidance so long as we are
besieged by mind formations and life impulses and instigations of ego which may
easily betray us into the hands of a false experience. This danger can only be
countered by the opening of a now nine-tenths concealed inmost soul or psychic
being that is already there but not commonly active within us. That is the
inner light we must liberate; for the light of this inmost soul is our one sure
illumination so long as we walk still amidst the siege of the Ignorance and the
Truth-consciousness has not taken up the entire control of our Godward
endeavour. The working of the Divine Force in us under the conditions of the
transition and the light of the psychic being turning us always towards a
conscious and seeing obedience to that higher impulsion and away from the
demands and instigations of the Forces of the Ignorance, these between them
create an ever progressive inner law of our action which continues till the
spiritual and supramental can be established in our nature. In the transition
there may well be a period in which we take up all life and action and offer them
to the Divine for purification, change and deliverance of the truth within
them, another period in which we draw back and build a spiritual wall around us
admitting through its gates only such activities as consent to undergo the law
of the spiritual transformation, a third in which a free and all-embracing
action, but with new forms fit for the utter truth of the Spirit, can again be
made possible. These things, however, will be decided by no mental rule but in
the light of the soul within us and by the ordaining force and progressive
guidance of the Divine Power that secretly or overtly first impels, then begins
clearly to control and order and finally takes up the whole burden of the Yoga.
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In accordance with the
triple character of the sacrifice we may divide works too into a triple order,
the works of Knowledge, the works of Love, the works of the Will-in-Life, and
see how this more plastic spiritual rule applies to each province and effects
the transition from the lower to the higher nature.
* *
It is natural from the
point of view of the Yoga to divide into two categories the activities of the
human mind in its pursuit of knowledge. There is the supreme supra-intellectual
knowledge which concentrates itself on the discovery of the One and Infinite in
its transcendence or tries to penetrate by intuition, contemplation, direct
inner contact into the ultimate truths behind the appearances of Nature; there
is the lower science which diffuses itself in an outward knowledge of phenomena,
the disguises of the One and Infinite as it appears to us in or through the
more exterior forms of the world-manifestation around us. These two, an upper
and a lower hemisphere, in the form of them constructed or conceived by men
within the mind’s ignorant limits, have even there separated themselves, as
they developed, with some sharpness…. Philosophy, sometimes spiritual or at
least intuitive, sometimes abstract and intellectual, sometimes
intellectualising spiritual experience or supporting with a logical apparatus
the discoveries of the spirit, has claimed always to take the fixation of
ultimate Truth as its province. But even when it did not separate itself on
rarefied metaphysical heights from the knowledge that belongs to the practical
world and the pursuit of ephemeral objects, intellectual Philosophy by its
habit of abstraction has seldom been a power for life. It has been sometimes
powerful for high speculation, pursuing mental Truth for its own sake without
any ulterior utility or object, sometimes for a subtle gymnastic of the mind in
a mistily bright cloud-land of words and ideas, but it has walked or
acrobatised far from the more tangible realities of existence. Ancient
Philosophy in Europe was more dynamic, but
only for the few; in India in its more
spiritualised forms, it strongly influenced but without transforming the life
of the race…. Religion did not attempt, like Philosophy, to live
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alone on the heights; its aim was rather to take
hold of man’s parts of life even more than his parts of mind and draw them
Godwards; it professed to build a bridge between spiritual Truth and the vital
and material human existence; it strove to subordinate and reconcile the lower
to the higher, make life serviceable to God, Earth obedient to Heaven. It has
to be admitted that too often this necessary effort had the opposite result of
making Heaven a sanction for Earth’s desires; for, continually, the religious
idea has been turned into an excuse for the worship and service of the human
ego. Religion, leaving constantly its little shining core of spiritual
experience, has lost itself in the obscure mass of its ever extending ambiguous
compromises with life: in attempting to satisfy the thinking mind, it more
often succeeded in oppressing or fettering it with a mass of theological
dogmas; while seeking to net the human heart, it fell itself into pits of
pietistic emotionalism and sensationalism; in the act of annexing the vital
nature of man to dominate it, it grew itself vitiated and fell a prey to all
the fanaticism, homicidal fury, savage or harsh turn for oppression,
pullulating falsehood, obstinate attachment to ignorance to which that vital
nature is prone; its desire to draw the physical in man towards God betrayed it
into chaining itself to ecclesiastic mechanism, hollow ceremony and lifeless
ritual. The corruption of the best produced the worst by that strange chemistry
of the power of life which generates evil out of good even as it can also
generate good out of evil. At the same time in a vain effort at self-defence
against this downward gravitation, Religion was driven to cut existence into
two by a division of knowledge, works, art, life itself into two opposite
categories, the spiritual and the worldly, religious and mundane, sacred and
profane; but this defensive distinction itself became conventional and
artificial and aggravated rather than healed the disease…. On their side
Science and Art and the knowledge of Life, although at first they served or
lived in the shadow of Religion, ended by emancipating themselves, became
estranged or hostile, or have even recoiled with indifference, contempt or
scepticism from what seem to them the cold, barren and distant or unsubstantial
and illusory heights of unreality to which metaphysical Philosophy and Religion
aspire. For a time
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the divorce has been as complete as the
one-sided intolerance of the human mind could make it and threatened even to
end in a complete extinction of all attempt at a higher or a more spiritual
knowledge. Yet even in the earthward life a higher knowledge is indeed the one
thing that is throughout needful, and without it the lower sciences and
pursuits, however fruitful, however rich, free, miraculous in the abundance of
their results, become easily a sacrifice offered without due order and to false
gods; corrupting, hardening in the end the heart of man, limiting his mind’s
horizons, they confine in a stony material imprisonment or lead to a final
baffling incertitude and disillusionment. A sterile agnosticism awaits us above
the brilliant phosphorescence of a half-knowledge that is still the Ignorance.
A Yoga turned towards an
all-embracing realisation of the Supreme will not despise the works or even the
dreams, if dreams they are, of the Cosmic Spirit or shrink from the splendid
toil and many-sided victory which he has assigned to himself in the human
creature. But its first condition for this liberality is that our works in the
world too must be part of the sacrifice offered to the Highest and to none
else, to the Divine Shakti and to no other Power, in the right spirit and with
the right knowledge, by the free soul and not by the hypnotised bondslave of
material Nature. If a division of works has to be made, it is between those that
are nearest to the heart of the sacred flame and those that are least touched
or illumined by it because they are more at a distance, or between the fuel
that burns strongly and brightly and the logs that if too thickly heaped on the
altar may impede the ardour of the fire by their rather damp, heavy and
diffused abundance. But, otherwise, apart from this division, all activities of
knowledge that seek after or express Truth are in themselves rightful materials
for a complete offering; none ought necessarily to be excluded from the wide
framework of the divine life. The mental and physical sciences which examine
into the laws and forms and processes of things, those which concern the life
of men and animals, the social, political, linguistic and historical and those
which seek to know and control the labours and activities by which man subdues
and utilises his world and environment, and the noble and beautiful Arts which
are at once work and knowledge,
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– for every well-made and significant poem,
picture, statue or building is an act of creative knowledge, a living discovery
of the consciousness, a figure of Truth, a dynamic form of mental and vital
self-expression or world-expression, – all that seeks, all that finds, all that
voices or figures is a realisation of something of the play of the Infinite and
to that extent can be made a means of God-realisation or of divine formation.
But the Yogin has to see that it is no longer done as part of an ignorant
mental life; it can be accepted by him only if by the feeling, the remembrance,
the dedication within it, it is turned into a movement of the spiritual
consciousness and becomes a part of its vast grasp of comprehensive
illuminating knowledge.
For all must be done as
a sacrifice, all activities must have the One Divine for their object and the
heart of their meaning. The Yogin’s aim in the sciences that make for knowledge
should be to discover and understand the workings of the Divine
Consciousness-Puissance in man and creatures and things and forces, her
creative significances, her execution of the mysteries, the symbols in which
she arranges the manifestation. The Yogin’s aim in the practical sciences,
whether mental and physical or occult and psychic, should be to enter into the
ways of the Divine and his processes, to know the materials and means for the
work given to us so that we may use that knowledge for a conscious and
faultless expression of the spirit’s mastery, joy and self-fulfilment. The
Yogin’s aim in the Arts should not be a mere aesthetic, mental or vital
gratification, but, seeing the Divine everywhere, worshipping it with a
revelation of the meaning of its own works, to express that One Divine in ideal
forms, the One Divine in principles and forces, the One Divine in gods and men
and creatures and objects. The theory that sees an intimate connection between
religious aspiration and the truest and greatest Art is in essence right; but
we must substitute for the mixed and doubtful religious motive a spiritual
aspiration, vision, interpreting experience. For the wider and more
comprehensive the seeing, the more it contains in itself the sense of the
hidden Divine in humanity and in all things and rises beyond a superficial
religiosity into the spiritual life, the more luminous, flexible, deep and
powerful will the Art be that springs from that high motive. The Yogin’s
distinction from other men is this that he
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lives in a higher and vaster spiritual
consciousness; all his work of knowledge or creation must then spring from
there: it must not be made in the mind, – for it is a greater truth and vision
than mental man’s that he has to express or rather that presses to express
itself through him and mould his works, not for his personal satisfaction, but
for a divine purpose.
At the same time the
Yogin who knows the Supreme is not subject to any need or compulsion in these
activities; for to him they are neither a duty nor a necessary occupation for
the mind nor a high amusement, nor imposed even by the loftiest human purpose.
He is not attached, bound and limited by any nor has he any personal motive of
fame, greatness or personal satisfaction in these works; he can leave or pursue
them as the Divine in him wills, but he need not otherwise abandon them in his
pursuit of the higher integral knowledge. He will do these things just as the
supreme Power acts and creates, for a certain spiritual joy in creation and
expression or to help in the holding together and right ordering or leading of
this world of God’s workings. The Gita teaches that the man of knowledge shall
by his way of life give to those who have not yet the spiritual consciousness,
the love and habit of all works and not only of actions recognised as pious,
religious or ascetic in their character; he should not draw men away from the
world-action by his example. For the world must proceed in its great upward
aspiring; men and nations must not be led to fall away from even an ignorant
activity into a worse ignorance of inaction or to sink down into that miserable
disintegration and tendency of dissolution which comes upon communities and
peoples when there predominates the tamasic principle, the principle whether of
obscure confusion and error or of weariness and inertia. “For I too,” says the
Lord in the Gita, “have no need to do works, since there is nothing I have not
or must yet gain for myself; yet I do works in the world: for if I did not do
works, all laws would fall into confusion, the worlds would sink towards chaos
and I would be the destroyer of these peoples.” The spiritual life does not
need, for its purity, to destroy interest in all things except the
Inexpressible or to cut at the roots of the Sciences, the Arts and Life. It may
well be one of the effects of an integral spiritual knowledge and activity to lift
them out of
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their limitations, substitute for our mind’s
ignorant, limited, tepid or trepidant pleasure in them a free, intense and
uplifting urge of delight and supply a new source of creative spiritual power
and illumination by which they can be carried more swiftly and profoundly
towards their absolute light in knowledge and their yet undreamed possibilities
and most dynamic energy of content and form and practice. The one thing needful
must be pursued first and always; but all things else come with it as its
outcome and have not so much to be added to us as recovered and reshaped in its
self-light and as portions of its self-expressive force.
* *
This then is the true
relation between divine and human knowledge; it is not a separation into
disparate fields, sacred and profane, that is the heart of the difference, but
the character of the consciousness behind the working. All is human knowledge
that proceeds from the ordinary mental consciousness interested in the outside
or upper layers of things, in process, in phenomena for their own sake or for
the sake of some surface utility or mental or vital satisfaction of Desire or
of the Intelligence. But the same activity of knowledge can become part of the
Yoga if it proceeds from the spiritual or spiritualising consciousness which
seeks and finds in all that it surveys or penetrates the presence of the
timeless Eternal and the ways of manifestation of the Eternal in Time. It is
evident that the need of a concentration indispensable for the transition out
of the Ignorance may make it necessary for the seeker to gather together his
energies and focus them only on that which will help the transition and to
leave aside or subordinate for the time all that is not directly turned towards
the one object. He may find that this or that pursuit of human knowledge with
which he was accustomed to deal by the surface power of the mind still brings
him by reason of this tendency or habit out of the depths to the surface or
down from the heights which he has climbed or is nearing to lower levels. These
activities then may have to be intermitted or put aside until, secure in a
higher consciousness, he is able to turn its powers on all the mental fields;
then, subjected to that light or taken up into it, they are turned,
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by the transformation of his consciousness, into
a province of the spiritual and divine. All that cannot be so transformed or
refuses to be part of a divine consciousness he will abandon without
hesitation, but not from any preconceived prejudgment of its unfitness or its
incapacity to be an element of the new inner life. There can be no fixed mental
test or principle for these things; he will therefore follow no unalterable
rule, but accept or repel an activity of the mind according to his feeling,
insight or experience until the greater Power and Light are there to turn their
unerring scrutiny on all that is below and choose or reject their material out
of what the human evolution has prepared for the divine labour.
How precisely or by what
stages this progression and change will take place must depend on the form,
need and powers of the individual nature. In the spiritual domain the essence
is always one, but there is yet an infinite variety and, at any rate in the
integral Yoga, the rigidity of a strict and precise mental rule is seldom
applicable; for, even when they walk in the same direction, no two natures
proceed on exactly the same lines, in the same series of steps or with quite
identical stages of their progress. It may yet be said that a logical
succession of the states of progress would be very much in this order. First,
there is a large turning in which all the natural mental activities proper to
the individual nature are taken up or referred to a higher standpoint and
dedicated by the soul in us, the psychic being, the priest of the sacrifice, to
the divine service; next, there is an attempt at an ascent of the being and a
bringing down of the Light and Power proper to some new height of consciousness
gained by its upward effort into the whole action of the knowledge. Here there
may be a strong concentration on the inward central change of the consciousness
and an abandonment of a large part of the outward-going mental life or else its
relegation to a small and subordinate place. At different stages it or parts of
it may be taken up again from time to time to see how far the new inner psychic
and spiritual consciousness can be brought into its movements; but that compulsion
of the temperament or the nature which in human beings necessitates one kind of
activity or another and makes it seem almost an indispensable portion of
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the existence, will diminish and eventually no
attachment will be left, no lower compulsion or driving force felt anywhere.
Only the Divine will matter, the Divine alone will be the one need of the whole
being; if there is any compulsion to activity it will be not that of implanted
desire or of force of Nature, but the luminous driving of some greater
Consciousness-Force which is becoming more and more the sole motive power of
the whole existence. On the other hand, it is possible at any period of the
inner spiritual progress that one may experience an extension rather than a
restriction of the activities; there may be an opening of new capacities of
mental creation and new provinces of knowledge by the miraculous touch of the
Yoga-Shakti. Aesthetic feeling, the power of artistic creation in one field or
many fields together, talent or genius of literary expression, a faculty of
metaphysical thinking, any power of eye or ear or hand or mind-power may awaken
where none was apparent before. The Divine within may throw these latent riches
out from the depths in which they were hidden or a Force from above may pour
down its energies to equip the instrumental nature for the activity or the
creation of which it is meant to be a channel or a builder. But, whatever may
be the method or the course of development chosen by the hidden Master of the
Yoga, the common culmination of this stage is the growing consciousness of him
alone as the mover, decider, shaper of all the movements of the mind and all
the activities of knowledge.
There are two signs of
the transformation of the seeker’s mind of knowledge and works of knowledge
from the process of the Ignorance to the process of a liberated consciousness
working partly, then wholly in the light of the Spirit. There is first a
central change of the consciousness and a growing direct experience, vision,
feeling of the Supreme and the cosmic existence, the Divine in itself and the
Divine in all things; the mind will be taken up into a growing preoccupation
with this first and foremost and will feel itself heightening, widening into a
more and more illumined means of expression of the one fundamental knowledge.
But also the central Consciousness in its turn will take up more and more the
outer mental activities of knowledge and turn them into a parcel of itself or
an annexed province; it will infuse
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into them its more authentic movement and make a
more and more spiritualised and illumined mind its instrument in these surface
fields, its new conquests, as well as in its own deeper spiritual empire. And
this will be the second sign, the sign of a certain completion and perfection,
that the Divine himself has become the Knower and all the inner movements,
including the activities of what was once a purely human mental action, have
become his field of knowledge. There will be less and less individual choice,
opinion, preference, less and less of intellectualisation, mental weaving,
cerebral galley-slave labour; a Light within will see all that has to be seen,
know all that has to be known, develop, create, organise. It will be the Inner
Knower who will do in the liberated and universalised mind of the individual
the works of an all-comprehending knowledge.
These two changes are
the signs of a first effectuation in which the activities of the mental nature
are lifted up, spiritualised, widened, universalised, liberated, led to a
consciousness of their true purpose as an instrumentation of the Divine
creating and developing its manifestation in the temporal universe. But this
cannot be the whole scope of the transformation; for it is not in these limits
that the integral seeker can cease from his ascension or confine the widening
of his nature. For, if it were so, knowledge would still remain a working of
the mind, liberated, universalised, spiritualised, but still, as all mind must
be, comparatively restricted, relative, imperfect in the very essence of its
dynamism; it would reflect luminously great constructions of Truth, but not
move in the domain where Truth is authentic, direct, sovereign and native.
There is an ascension still to be made from this height, by which the
spiritualised mind will exceed itself and transmute into a supramental power of
knowledge. Already in the process of spiritualisation it will have begun to
pass out of the brilliant poverty of the human intellect; it will mount
successively into the pure broad reaches of a higher mind, and next into the
gleaming belts of a still greater free Intelligence illumined with a Light from
above. At this point it will begin to feel more freely, admit with a less mixed
response the radiant beginnings of an Intuition, not illumined, but luminous in
itself, true in itself, no longer entirely mental and therefore subjected to
the abun-
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dant intrusion of error.
Here too is not an end, for it must rise beyond into the very domain of that
untruncated Intuition, the first direct light from the self-awareness of
essential Being and, beyond it, attain that from which this light comes. For
there is an Overmind behind Mind, a Power more original and dynamic which
supports Mind, sees it as a diminished radiation from itself, uses it as a
transmitting belt of passage downward or an instrument for the creations of the
Ignorance. The last step of the ascension would be the surpassing of Overmind
itself or its return into its own still greater origin, its conversion into the
supramental light of the Divine Gnosis. For there in the supramental Light is
the seat of a divine Truth-consciousness that has native in it, as no other
consciousness below it can have, the power to organise the works of a Truth
which is no longer tarnished by the shadow of the cosmic Inconscience and
Ignorance. There to reach and thence to bring down a supramental dynamism that
can transform the Ignorance is the distant but imperative supreme goal of the
integral Yoga.
As the light of each of
these higher powers is turned upon the human activities of knowledge, any
distinction of sacred and profane, human and divine, begins more and more to
fade until it is finally abolished as otiose; for whatever is touched and
thoroughly penetrated by the Divine Gnosis is transfigured and becomes a
movement of its own Light and Power, free from the turbidity and limitations of
the lower intelligence. It is not a separation of some activities, but a
transformation of them all by the change of the informing consciousness that is
the way of liberation, an ascent of the sacrifice of knowledge to a greater and
ever greater light and force. All the works of mind and intellect must be first
heightened and widened, then illumined, lifted into the domain of a higher
Intelligence, afterwards translated into workings of a greater non-mental
Intuition, these again transformed into the dynamic outpourings of the Overmind
radiance, and those transfigured into the full light and sovereignty of the
supramental Gnosis. It is this that the evolution of consciousness in the world
carries prefigured but latent in its seed and in the straining tense intention
of its process; nor can that process, that evolution cease till it has evolved
the instruments of a
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perfect in place of its
now imperfect manifestation of the Spirit.
* *
If knowledge is the
widest power of the consciousness and its function is to free and illumine, yet
love is the deepest and most intense and its privilege is to be the key to the most
profound and secret recesses of the Divine Mystery. Man, because he is a mental
being, is prone to give the highest importance to the thinking mind and its
reason and will and to its way of approach and effectuation of Truth and, even,
he is inclined to hold that there is no other. The heart with its emotions and
incalculable movements is to the eye of his intellect an obscure, uncertain and
often a perilous and misleading power which needs to be kept in control by the
reason and the mental will and intelligence. And yet there is in the heart or
behind it a profounder mystic light which, if not what we call intuition, – for
that, though not of the mind, yet descends through the mind – has yet a direct
touch upon Truth and is nearer to the Divine than the human intellect in its
pride of knowledge. According to the ancient teaching the seat of the immanent
Divine, the hidden Purusha, is in the mystic heart, – the secret heart-cave,
hŗdaye guhāyām, as the Upanishads put it, – and, according to
the experience of many Yogins, it is from its depths that there comes the voice
or the breath of the inner oracle.
This ambiguity, these
opposing appearances of depth and blindness are created by the double character
of the human emotive being. For there is in front in man a heart of vital
emotion similar to the animal’s, if more variously developed; its emotions are
governed by egoistic passion, blind instinctive affections and all the play of
the life-impulses with their imperfections, perversions, often sordid degradations,
– heart besieged and given over to the lusts, desires, wraths, intense or
fierce demands or little greeds and mean pettinesses of an obscure and fallen
life-force and debased by its slavery to any and every impulse. This mixture of
the emotive heart and the sensational hungering vital creates in man a false
soul of desire; it is this that is the crude and dangerous element which the
reason rightly dis-
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trusts and feels a need to control, even though
the actual control or rather coercion it succeeds in establishing over our raw
and insistent vital nature remains always very uncertain and deceptive. But the
true soul of man is not there; it is in the true invisible heart hidden in some
luminous cave of the nature: there under some infiltration of the divine Light
is our soul, a silent inmost being of which few are even aware; for if all have
a soul, few are conscious of their true soul or feel its direct impulse. There
dwells the little spark of the Divine which supports the obscure mass of our
nature and around it grows the psychic being, the formed soul or the real Man
within us. It is as this psychic being in him grows and the movements of the
heart reflect its divinations and impulsions that man becomes more and more
aware of his soul, ceases to be a superior animal and, awakening to glimpses of
the godhead within him, admits more and more its intimations of a deeper life
and consciousness and an impulse towards things divine. It is one of the
decisive moments of the integral Yoga when this psychic being, liberated,
brought out from the veil to the front, can pour the full flood of its
divinations, seeings and impulsions on the mind, life and body of man and
begins to prepare the upbuilding of divinity in the earthly nature.
As in the works of
knowledge, so in dealing with the workings of the heart, we are obliged to make
a preliminary distinction between two categories of movements, those that are
either moved by the true soul or aid towards its liberation and rule in the
nature and those that are turned to the satisfaction of the unpurified vital
nature. But the distinctions ordinarily laid down in this sense are of little
use for the deeper spiritual purpose of Yoga. Thus a division can be made
between religious emotions and mundane feelings and it can be laid down as a
rule of spiritual life that the religious emotions alone should be cultivated
and all worldly feelings and passions must be rejected and fall away from our
existence. This in practice would mean the religious life of the saint or
devotee, alone within with the Divine or linked only to others in a common
God-love or at the most pouring out the fountains of a sacred, religious or
pietistic love on the world outside. But religious emotion itself is too cons-
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tantly invaded by the turmoil
and obscurity of the vital movements and it is often either crude or narrow or
fanatical or mixed with movements that are not signs of the spirit’s
perfection. It is evident besides that even at the best an intense figure of
sainthood clamped in rigid hieratic lines is quite other than the wide ideal of
an integral Yoga. A larger psychic and emotional relation with God and the
world, more deep and plastic in its essence, more wide and embracing in its
movements, more capable of taking up in its sweep the whole of life, is
imperative.
A wider formula has been
provided by the secular mind of man of which the basis is the ethical sense;
for it distinguishes between the emotions sanctioned by the ethical sense and
those that are egoistic and selfishly common and mundane. It is the works of
altruism, philanthropy, compassion, benevolence, humanitarianism, service,
labour for the well-being of man and all creatures that are to be our ideal; to
shuffle off the coil of egoism and grow into a soul of self-abnegation that
lives only or mainly for others or for humanity as a whole is the way of man’s
inner evolution according to this doctrine. Or if this is too secular and
mental to satisfy the whole of our being, since there is a deeper religious and
spiritual note there that is left out of account by the humanitarian formula, a
religio-ethical foundation can be provided for it – and such was indeed its
original basis. To the inner worship of the Divine or the Supreme by the
devotion of the heart or to the pursuit of the Ineffable by the seeking of a
highest knowledge can be added a worship through altruistic works or a
preparation through acts of love, of benevolence, of service to mankind or to
those around us. It is indeed by the religio-ethical sense that the law of
universal goodwill or universal compassion or of love and service to the
neighbour, the Vedantic, the Buddhistic, the Christian ideal, was created; only
by a sort of secular refrigeration extinguishing the fervour of the religious element
in it could the humanitarian ideal disengage itself and become the highest
plane of a secular system of mental and moral ethics. For in the religious
system this law of works is a means that ceases when its object is accomplished
or a side issue; it is a part of the cult by which one adores and seeks the
Divinity or it is a penultimate step of the excision of self in the
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passage to Nirvana. In the secular ideal it is
promoted into an object in itself; it becomes a sign of the moral perfection of
the human being, or else it is a condition for a happier state of man upon
earth, a better society, a more united life of the race. But none of these
things satisfy the demand of the soul that is placed before us by the integral
Yoga.
Altruism, philanthropy,
humanitarianism, service are flowers of the mental consciousness and are at
best the mind’s cold and pale imitation of the spiritual flame of universal
Divine Love. Not truly liberative from ego-sense, they widen it at most and
give it a higher and larger satisfaction; impotent in practice to change man’s
vital life and nature, they only modify and palliate its action and daub over
its unchanged egoistic essence. Or if they are intensely followed with an
entire sincerity of the will, it is by an exaggerated amplification of one side
of our nature; in that exaggeration there can be no clue for the full and
perfect divine evolution of the many sides of our individualised being towards
the universal and transcendent Eternal. Nor can the religio-ethical ideal be a
sufficient guide, – for this is a compromise or compact of mutual concessions
for mutual support between a religious urge which seeks to get a closer hold on
earth by taking into itself the higher turns of ordinary human nature and an ethical
urge which hopes to elevate itself out of its own mental hardness and dryness
by some touch of a religious fervour. In making this compact religion lowers
itself to the mental level and inherits the inherent imperfections of mind and
its inability to convert and transform life. The mind is the sphere of the
dualities and, just as it is impossible for it to achieve any absolute Truth
but only truths relative or mixed with error, so it is impossible for it to
achieve any absolute good; for moral good exists as a counterpart and
corrective to evil and has evil always for its shadow, complement, almost its
reason for existence. But the spiritual consciousness belongs to a higher than
the mental plane and there the dualities cease; for there falsehood confronted
with the truth by which it profited through a usurping falsification of it and
evil faced by the good of which it was a perversion or a lurid substitute, are
obliged to perish for want of sustenance and to cease. The integral Yoga,
refusing to rely
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upon the fragile stuff of mental and moral
ideals, puts its whole emphasis in this field on three central dynamic
processes – the development of the true soul or psychic being to take the place
of the false soul of desire, the sublimation of human into divine love, the
elevation of consciousness from its mental to its spiritual and Supramental
plane by whose power alone both the soul and the life-force can be utterly
delivered from the veils and prevarications of the Ignorance.
It is the very nature of
the soul or the psychic being to turn towards the divine Truth as the sunflower
to the sun; it accepts and clings to all that is divine or progressing towards
divinity, and draws back from all that is a perversion or a denial of it, from
all that is false and undivine. Yet the soul is at first but a spark and then a
little flame of godhead burning in the midst of a great darkness; for the most
part it is veiled in its inner sanctum and to reveal itself it has to call on
the mind, the life-force and the physical consciousness and persuade them, as
best they can, to express it; ordinarily, it succeeds at most in suffusing
their outwardness with its inner light and modifying with its purifying
fineness their dark obscurities or their coarser mixture. Even when there is a
formed psychic being able to express itself with some directness in life, it is
still in all but a few a smaller portion of the being – “no bigger in the mass
of the body than the thumb of a man” was the image used by the ancient seers –
and it is not always able to prevail against the obscurity or ignorant
smallness of the physical consciousness, the mistaken surenesses of the mind or
the arrogance and vehemence of the vital nature. This soul is obliged to accept
the human mental, emotive, sensational life as it is, its relations, its
activities, its cherished forms and figures; it has to labour to disengage and
increase the divine element in all this relative truth mixed with a continual
falsifying error, this love turned to the uses of the animal body or the
satisfaction of the vital ego, this life of an average manhood shot with rare
and pale glimpses of godhead and the darker luridities of the demon and the
brute. Unerring in the essence of its will, it is obliged often under the pressure
of its instruments to submit to mistakes of action, wrong placement of feeling,
wrong choice of person, errors in the exact form of its will, in the
circumstances
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of its expression of the infallible inner ideal.
Yet is there a divination within it which makes it a surer guide than the
reason or than even the highest desire, and through apparent errors and
stumblings its voice can still lead better than the precise intellect and the
considering mental judgment. This voice of the soul is not what we call
conscience – for that is only a mental and often conventional erring
substitute; It is a deeper and more seldom heard call; yet to follow it when
heard is wisest: even, it is better to wander at the call of one’s soul than to
go apparently straight with the reason and the outward moral mentor. But it is
only when the life turns towards the Divine that the soul can truly come
forward and impose its power on the outer members; for, itself a spark of the
Divine, to grow in flame towards the Divine is its true life and its very
reason of existence.
At a certain stage in
the Yoga when the mind is sufficiently quieted and no longer supports itself at
every step on the sufficiency of its mental certitudes, when the vital has been
steadied and subdued and is no longer constantly insistent on its own rash
will, demand and desire, when the physical has been sufficiently altered not to
bury altogether the inner flame under the mass of its outwardness, obscurity or
inertia, an inmost being, long hidden within and felt only in its rare
influences, is able to come forward and illumine the rest and take up the lead
of the Sadhana. Its character is a one-pointed orientation towards the Divine
or the Highest, one-pointed and yet plastic
in action and movement; it does not create a
rigidity of direction like the one-pointed intellect or a bigotry of the
regnant idea or impulse like the one-pointed vital force; it is at every moment
and with a supple sureness that it points the way to the Truth, automatically
distinguishes the right step from the false, extricates the divine or Godward
movement from the clinging mixture of the undivine. Its action is like a
searchlight showing up all that has to be changed in the nature; it has in it a
flame of will insistent on perfection, on an alchemic transmutation of all the
inner and outer existence. It sees the divine essence everywhere but rejects
the mere mask and the disguising figure. It insists on Truth, on will and
strength and mastery, on Joy and Love and Beauty, but on a Truth of abiding
Knowledge that surpasses the mere prac-
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tical momentary truth of the
Ignorance, on an inward joy and not on mere vital pleasure, – for it prefers
rather a purifying suffering and sorrow to degrading satisfactions, – on love
winged upward and not tied to the stake of egoistic craving or with its feet
sunk in the mire, on beauty restored to its priesthood of interpretation of the
Eternal, on strength and will and mastery as instruments not of the ego but of
the Spirit. Its will is for the divinisation of life, the expression through it
of a higher Truth, its dedication to the Divine and the Eternal.
But the most intimate
character of the psychic is its pressure towards the Divine through a sacred
love, joy and oneness. It is a divine Love that it seeks most, it is the love
of the Divine that is its spur, its goal, its star of Truth shining over the
luminous cave of the nascent or the still obscure cradle of the new-born
godhead within us. In the first long stage of its growth and immature existence
it has leaned on earthly love, affection, tenderness, goodwill, compassion,
benevolence, on all beauty and gentleness and fineness and light and strength
and courage, on all that can help to refine and purify the grossness and
commonness of human nature; but it knows how mixed are these human movements at
their best and at their worst how fallen and stamped with the mark of ego and
self-deceptive sentimental falsehood and the lower self profiting by the
imitation of a soul-movement. At once, emerging, it is ready and eager to break
all the old ties and imperfect emotional activities and replace them by a
greater spiritual Truth of love and oneness. It may still admit the human forms
and movements, but on condition that they are turned towards the One alone. It
accepts only the ties that are helpful, the heart’s and mind’s reverence for
the Guru, the union of the God-seekers, a spiritual compassion for this
ignorant human and animal world and its peoples, the joy and happiness and
satisfaction of beauty that comes from the perception of the Divine everywhere.
It plunges the nature inward towards its meeting with the immanent Divine in
the heart’s secret centre and, while that call is there, no reproach of egoism,
no mere outward summons of altruism or duty or philanthropy or service will
deceive or divert it from its sacred longing and its obedience to the
attraction of the Divinity within it. It lifts the being towards
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a transcendent Ecstasy and is ready to shed all
the downward pull of the world from its wings in its uprising to reach the One
Highest; but it calls down also this transcendent Love and Beatitude to deliver
and transform this world of hatred and strife and division and darkness and
jarring Ignorance. It opens to a universal Divine Love, a vast compassion, an
intense and immense will for the good of all, for the embrace of the
World-Mother enveloping or gathering to her her children, the divine Passion
that has plunged into the night for the redemption of the world from the
universal Inconscience. It is not attracted or misled by mental imitations or
any vital misuse of these great deep-seated Truths of existence; it exposes
them with its detecting search-ray and calls down the entire truth of divine
Love to heal these malformations, to deliver mental, vital, physical love from
their insufficiencies or their perversions and reveal to them their true
abounding share of the intimacy and the oneness, the ascending ecstasy and the
descending rapture.
All true Truth of love
and of the works of love the psychic being accepts in their place: but its
flame mounts always upward and it is eager to push the ascent from lesser to
higher degrees of Truth, since it knows that only by the ascent to a highest
Truth and the descent of that highest Truth can Love be delivered from the
cross and placed upon the throne; for the cross is the sign of the Divine
Descent barred and marred by the transversal line of a cosmic deformation which
turns it into a stake of suffering and misfortune. Only by the ascent to the
original Truth can the deformation be healed and all the works of love, as too
all the works of knowledge and of life, be restored to a divine significance
and become part of an integral spiritual existence.
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