Chapter
IX
Equality and
the Annihilation of Ego
AN ENTIRE
self-consecration, a complete equality, an unsparing effacement of the ego, a
transforming deliverance of the nature from its ignorant modes of action are the
steps by which the surrender of all the being and nature to the Divine Will can
be prepared and achieved, – a self-giving true, total and without reserve. The
first necessity is an entire spirit of self-consecration in our works; it must
become first the constant will, then the ingrained need in all the being,
finally its automatic but living and conscious habit, the self-existent turn to
do all action as a sacrifice to the Supreme and to the veiled Power present in
us and in all beings and in all the workings of the universe. Life is the altar
of this sacrifice, works are our offering; a transcendent and universal Power
and Presence as yet rather felt or glimpsed than known or seen by us is the
Deity to whom they are offered. This sacrifice, this self-consecration has two
sides to it; there is the work itself and there is the spirit in which it is
done, the spirit of worship to the Master of Works in all that we see, think and
experience.
The work
itself is at first determined by the best light we can command in our
ignorance. It is that which we conceive as the thing that should be done. And
whether it be shaped by our sense of duty, by our feeling for our
fellow-creatures, by our idea of what is for the good of others or the good of
the world or by the direction of one whom we accept as a human Master, wiser
than ourselves and for us the representative of that Lord of all works in whom
we believe but whom we do not yet know, the principle is the same. The
essential of the sacrifice of works must be there and the essential is the surrender
of all desire for the fruit of our works, the renunciation of all attachment to
the result for which yet we labour. For so long as we work with attachment to
the result, the sacrifice is offered not to the Divine, but to our
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ego. We may think otherwise, but we are
deceiving ourselves; we are making our idea of the Divine, our sense of duty,
our feeling for our fellow-creatures, our idea of what is good for the world or
others, even our obedience to the Master a mask for our egoistic satisfactions
and preferences and a specious shield against the demand made on us to root all
desire out of our nature.
At this stage
of the Yoga and even throughout the Yoga this form of desire, this figure of
the ego is the enemy against whom we have to be always on our guard with an
unsleeping vigilance. We need not be discouraged when we find him lurking
within us and assuming all sorts of disguises, but we should be vigilant to
detect him in all his masks and inexorable in expelling his influence. The
illumining Word of this movement is the decisive line of the Gita, “To action
thou hast a right but never under any circumstances to its fruit.” The fruit
belongs solely to the Lord of all works; our only business with it is to prepare
success by a true and careful action and to offer it, if it comes, to the
divine Master. Afterwards even as we have renounced attachment to the fruit, we
must renounce attachment to the work also; at any moment we must be prepared to
change one work, one course or one field of action for another or abandon all
works if that is the clear command of the Master. Otherwise we do the act not
for his sake but for our satisfaction and pleasure in the work, from the
kinetic nature’s need of action or for the fulfilment of our propensities; but these
are all stations and refuges of the ego. However necessary for our ordinary
motion of life, they have to be abandoned in the growth of the spiritual
consciousness and replaced by divine counterparts: an Ananda, an impersonal and
God-directed delight will cast out or supplant the unillumined vital
satisfaction and pleasure, a joyful driving of the Divine Energy the kinetic
need; the fulfilment of the propensities will no longer be an object or a
necessity, there will be instead the fulfilment of the Divine Will through the
natural dynamic truth in action of a free soul and a luminous nature. In the
end, as the attachment to the fruit of the work and to the work itself has been
excised from the heart, so also the last clinging attachment to the idea and sense
of ourselves as the doer has to be relinquished;
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the Divine Shakti must
be known and felt above and within us as the true and sole worker.
* *
The
renunciation of attachment to the work and its fruit is the beginning of a wide
movement towards an absolute equality in the mind and soul which must become
all-enveloping if we are to be perfect in the spirit. For the worship of the Master
of works demands a clear recognition and glad acknowledgment of him in
ourselves, in all things and in all happenings. Equality is the sign of this
adoration; it is the soul’s ground on which true sacrifice and worship can be
done. The Lord is there equally in all beings, we have to make no essential
distinctions between ourselves and others, the wise and the ignorant, friend
and enemy, man and animal, the saint and the sinner. We must hate none, despise
none, be repelled by none; for in all we have to see the One disguised or
manifested at his pleasure. He is a little revealed in one or more revealed in
another or concealed and wholly distorted in others according to his will and
his knowledge of what is best for that which he intends to become in form in
them and to do in works in their nature. All is our self, one self that has
taken many shapes. Hatred and disliking and scorn and repulsion, clinging and
attachment and preference are natural, necessary, inevitable at a certain
stage: they attend upon or they help to make and maintain Nature’s choice in
us. But to the Karmayogin they are a survival, a stumbling-block, a process of
the Ignorance and, as he progresses, they fall away from his nature. The
child-soul needs them for its growth; but they drop from an adult in the divine
culture. In the God-nature to which we have to rise there can be an adamantine,
even a destructive severity but not hatred, a divine irony but not scorn, a calm,
clear-seeing and forceful rejection but not repulsion and dislike. Even what we
have to destroy, we must not abhor or fail to recognise as a disguised and
temporary movement of the Eternal.
And since all
things are the one Self in its manifestation, we shall have equality of soul
towards the ugly and the beautiful, the maimed and the perfect, the noble and
the vulgar, the
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pleasant and the
unpleasant, the good and the evil. Here also there will be no hatred, scorn and
repulsion, but instead the equal eye that sees all things in their real
character and their appointed place. For we shall know that all things express
or disguise, develop or distort, as best they can or with whatever defect they
must, under the circumstances intended for them, in the way possible to the
immediate status or function or evolution of their nature, some truth or fact,
some energy or potential of the Divine necessary by its presence in the
progressive manifestation both to the whole of the present sum of things and
for the perfection of the ultimate result. That truth is what we must seek and
discover behind the transitory expression; undeterred by appearances, by the
deficiencies or the disfigurements of the expression, we can then worship the Divine
for ever unsullied, pure, beautiful and perfect behind his masks. All indeed
has to be changed, not ugliness accepted but divine beauty, not imperfection
taken as our resting-place but perfection striven after, the supreme good made
the universal aim and not evil. But what we do has to be done with a spiritual
understanding and knowledge, and it is a divine good, beauty, perfection,
pleasure that has to be followed after, not the human standards of these
things. If we have not equality, it is a sign that we are still pursued by the
Ignorance, we shall truly understand nothing and it is more than likely that we
shall destroy the old imperfection only to create another: for we are substituting
the appreciations of our human mind and desire-soul for the divine values.
Equality does
not mean a fresh ignorance or blindness; it does not call for and need not
initiate a greyness of vision and a blotting out of all hues. Difference is
there, variation of expression is there and this variation we shall appreciate,
– far more justly than we could when the eye was clouded by a partial and
erring love and hate, admiration and scorn, sympathy and antipathy, attraction
and repulsion. But behind the variation we shall always see the Complete and
Immutable who dwells within it and we shall feel, know or at least, if it is hidden
from us, trust in the wise purpose and divine necessity of the particular
manifestation, whether it appear to our human standards harmonious and perfect
or crude and unfinished or even false and evil.
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And so too we
shall have the same equality of mind and soul towards all happenings, painful
or pleasurable, defeat and success, honour and disgrace, good repute and
ill-repute, good fortune and evil fortune. For in all happenings we shall see the
will of the Master of all works and results and a step in the evolving
expression of the Divine. He manifests himself, to those who have the inner eye
that sees, in forces and their play and results as well as in things and in
creatures. All things move towards a divine event; each experience, suffering
and want no less than joy and satisfaction is a necessary link in the carrying
out of a universal movement which it is our business to understand and second.
To revolt, to condemn, to cry out is the impulse of our unchastened and ignorant
instincts. Revolt like everything else has its uses in the play and is even necessary,
helpful, decreed for the divine development in its own time and stage; but the
movement of an ignorant rebellion belongs to the stage of the soul’s childhood
or to its raw adolescence. The ripened soul does not condemn but seeks to understand
and master, does not cry out but accepts or toils to improve and perfect, does
not revolt inwardly but labours to obey and fulfil and transfigure. Therefore
we shall receive all things with an equal soul from the hands of the Master. Failure
we shall admit as a passage as calmly as success until the hour of the divine
victory arrives. Our souls and minds and bodies will remain unshaken by acutest
sorrow and suffering and pain if in the divine dispensation they come to us, unoverpowered
by intensest joy and pleasure. Thus supremely balanced we shall continue
steadily on our way meeting all things with an equal calm until we are ready
for a more exalted status and can enter into the supreme and universal Ananda.
* *
This equality
cannot come except by a protracted ordeal and patient self-discipline; so long
as desire is strong, equality cannot come at all except in periods of
quiescence and the fatigue of desire, and it is then more likely to be an inert
indifference or desire’s recoil from itself than the true calm and the positive
spiri-
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tual oneness.
Moreover, this discipline or this growth into equality of spirit has its
necessary epochs and stages. Ordinarily we have to begin with a period of endurance;
for we must learn to confront, to suffer and to assimilate all contacts. Each
fibre in us must be taught not to wince away from that which pains and repels
and not to run eagerly towards that which pleases and attracts, but rather to accept,
to face, to bear and to conquer. All touches we must be strong to bear, not
only those that are proper and personal to us but those born of our sympathy or
our conflict with the worlds around, above or below us and with their peoples.
We shall endure tranquilly the action and impact on us of men and things and
forces, the pressure of the Gods and the assaults of Titans; we shall face and
engulf in the unstirred seas of our spirit all that can possibly come to us
down the ways of the soul’s infinite experience. This is the stoical period of
the preparation of equality, its most elementary and yet its heroic age. But
this steadfast endurance of the flesh and heart and mind must be reinforced by
a sustained sense of spiritual submission to a divine Will: this living clay
must yield not only with a stern or courageous acquiescence, but with knowledge
or with resignation, even in suffering, to the touch of the divine Hand that is
preparing its perfection. A sage, a devout or even a tender stoicism of the
God-lover is possible, and these are better than the merely pagan self-reliant
endurance which may lend itself to a too great hardening of the vessel of God:
for this kind prepares the strength that is capable of wisdom and of love; its
tranquillity is a deeply moved calm that passes easily into bliss. The gain of
this period of resignation and endurance is the soul’s strength equal to all
shocks and contacts.
There is next
a period of high-seated impartiality and indifference in which the soul becomes
free from exultation and depression and escapes from the snare of the eagerness
of joy as from the dark net of the pangs of grief and suffering. All things and
persons and forces, all thoughts and feelings and sensations and actions, one’s
own no less than those of others, are regarded from above by a spirit that
remains intact and immutable and is not disturbed by these things. This is the
philosophic period of the preparation of equality, a wide and august movement.
But
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indifference must not
settle into an inert turning away from action and experience; it must not be an
aversion born of weariness, disgust and distaste, a recoil of disappointed or
satiated desire, the sullenness of a baffled and dissatisfied egoism forced
back from its passionate aims. These recoils come inevitably in the unripe soul
and may in some way help the progress by a discouragement of the eager
desire-driven vital nature, but they are not the perfection towards which we
labour. The indifference or the impartiality that we must seek after is a calm
superiority of the high-seated soul above the contacts of things;¹ it regards
and accepts or rejects them but is not moved in the rejection and is not
subjected by the acceptance. It begins to feel itself near, kin to, one with a
silent Self and Spirit self-existent and separate from the workings of Nature
which it supports and makes possible, part of or merged in the motionless calm
Reality that transcends the motion and action of the universe. The gain of this
period of high transcendence is the soul’s peace unrocked and unshaken by the
pleasant ripplings or by the tempestuous waves and billows of the world’s
movement.
If we can
pass through these two stages of the inner change without being arrested or
fixed in either, we are admitted to a greater divine equality which is capable
of a spiritual ardour and tranquil passion of delight, a rapturous, all-understanding
and all-possessing equality of the perfected soul, an intense and even wideness
and fullness of its being embracing all things. This is the supreme period and
the passage to it is through the joy of a total self-giving to the Divine and
to the universal Mother. For strength is then crowned by a happy mastery, peace
deepens into bliss, the possession of the divine calm is uplifted and made the
ground for the possession of the divine movement. But if this greater
perfection is to arrive, the soul’s impartial high-seatedness looking down from
above on the flux of forms and personalities and movements and forces must be
modified and change into a new sense of strong and calm submission and a
powerful and intense surrender. This submission will be no longer a resigned
acquiescence but a glad acceptance: for there will be no sense of suffering or
of the bearing of a burden or cross; love and
¹ udāsīna.
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delight and the joy of
self-giving will be its brilliant texture. And this surrender will be not only
to a divine Will which we perceive and accept and obey, but to a divine Wisdom
in the Will which we recognise and a divine Love in it which we feel and
rapturously suffer, the wisdom and love of a supreme Spirit and Self of
ourselves and all with which we can achieve a happy and perfect unity. A lonely
power, peace and stillness is the last word of the philosophic equality of the
sage; but the soul in its integral experience liberates itself from this
self-created status and enters into the sea of a supreme and all-embracing
ecstasy of the beginningless and endless beatitude of the Eternal. Then we are at
last capable of receiving all contacts with a blissful equality, because we
feel in them the touch of the imperishable Love and Delight, the happiness
absolute that hides ever in the heart of things. The gain of this culmination
in a universal and equal rapture is the soul’s delight and the opening gates of
the Bliss that is infinite, the Joy that surpasses all understanding.
* *
Before this
labour for the annihilation of desire and the conquest of the soul’s equality
can come to its absolute perfection and fruition, that turn of the spiritual
movement must have been completed which leads to the abolition of the sense of
ego. But for the worker the renunciation of the egoism of action is the most
important element in this change. For even when by giving up the fruits and the
desire of the fruits to the Master of the Sacrifice we have parted with the
egoism of rajasic desire, we may still have kept the egoism of the worker.
Still we are subject to the sense that we are ourselves the doer of the act, ourselves
its source and ourselves the giver of the sanction. It is still the “I” that
chooses and determines, it is still the “I” that undertakes the responsibility
and feels the demerit or the merit. An entire removal of this separative ego-sense is an essential aim of our Yoga. If any ego is to remain
in us for a while, it is only a form of it which knows itself to be a form and
is ready to disappear as soon as a true centre of consciousness is manifested
or built in us. That true centre is a luminous formulation of the one Conscious-
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ness and a pure channel
and instrument of the one Existence. A support for the individual manifestation
and action of the universal Force, it gradually reveals behind it the true
Person in us, the central eternal being, an everlasting being of the Supreme, a
power and portion of the transcendent Shakti.¹
Here too, in
this movement by which the soul divests itself gradually of the obscure robe of
the ego, there is a progress by marked stages. For not only the fruit of works
belongs to the Lord alone, but our works also must be his; he is the true lord
of our actions no less than of our results. This we must not see with the
thinking mind only, it must become entirely true to our entire consciousness
and will. The sadhaka has not only to think and know but to see and feel
concretely and intensely even in the moment of the working and in its
initiation and whole process that his works are not his at all, but are coming
through him from the Supreme Existence. He must be always aware of a Force, a
Presence, a Will that acts through his individual nature. But there is in
taking this turn the danger that he may confuse his own disguised or sublimated
ego or an inferior power with the Lord and substitute its demands for the
supreme dictates. He may fall into a common ambush of this lower nature and
distort his supposed surrender to a higher Power into an excuse for a magnified
and uncontrolled indulgence of his own self-will and even of his desires and
passions. A great sincerity is asked for and has to be imposed not only on the
conscious mind but still more on the subliminal part of us which is full of
hidden movements. For there is there, especially in our subliminal vital nature,
an incorrigible charlatan and actor. The sadhaka must first have advanced far
in the elimination of desire and in the firm equality of his soul towards all
workings and all happenings before he can utterly lay down the burden of his
works on the Divine. At every moment he must proceed with a vigilant eye upon
the deceits of the ego and the ambushes of the misleading Powers of Darkness
who ever represent themselves as the one Source of Light and Truth and take on
them a simulacrum of divine forms in order to capture the soul of the seeker.
Immediately
he must take the further step of relegating him-
¹ amśah
sanātanah, parā prakrtir jīvabhūtā.
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self to the position of
the Witness. Aloof from the Prakriti, impersonal and dispassionate, he must
watch the executive Nature-Force at work within him and understand its action;
he must learn by this separation to recognise the play of her universal forces,
distinguish her interweaving of light and night, the divine and the undivine,
and detect her formidable Powers and Beings that use the ignorant human
creature. Nature works in us, says the Gita, through the triple quality of
Prakriti, the quality of light and good, the quality of passion and desire and the
quality of obscurity and inertia. The seeker must learn to distinguish, as an
impartial and discerning witness of all that proceeds within this kingdom of
his nature, the separate and the combined action of these qualities; he must
pursue the workings of the cosmic forces in him through all the labyrinth of
their subtle unseen processes and disguises and know every intricacy of the
maze. As he proceeds in this knowledge, he will be able to become the giver of
the sanction and no longer remain an ignorant tool of Nature. At first he must
induce the Nature-Force in its action on his instruments to subdue the working
of its two lower qualities and bring them into subjection to the quality of
light and good and, afterwards, he must persuade that again to offer itself so
that all three may be transformed by a higher Power into their divine
equivalents, supreme repose and calm, divine illumination and bliss, the
eternal divine dynamis, Tapas. The first part of this discipline and change can
be firmly done in principle by the will of the mental being in us; but its full
execution and the subsequent transformation can be done only when the deeper
psychic soul increases its hold on the nature and replaces the mental being as
its ruler. When this happens, he will be ready to make, not only with an
aspiration and intention and an initial and progressive self-abandonment but
with the most intense actuality of dynamic self-giving, the complete
renunciation of his works to the Supreme Will. By degrees his mind of an
imperfect human intelligence will be replaced by a spiritual and illumined mind
and that can in the end enter into the supramental Truth-Light; he will then no
longer act from his nature of the Ignorance with its three modes of confused
and imperfect activity, but from a diviner nature of spiritual calm, light,
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power and bliss. He will
act not from an amalgam of an ignorant mind and will with the drive of a still
more ignorant heart of emotion and the desire of the life-being and the urge
and instinct of the flesh, but first from a spiritualised self and nature and,
last, from a supramental Truth-consciousness and its divine force of supernature.
Thus are made
possible the final steps when the veil of Nature is withdrawn and the seeker is
face to face with the Master of all existence and his activities are merged in
the action of a supreme Energy which is pure, true, perfect and blissful for ever.
Thus can he utterly renounce to the supramental Shakti his works as well as the
fruits of his works and act only as the conscious instrument of the eternal
Worker. No longer giving the sanction, he will rather receive in his instruments
and follow in her hands a divine mandate. No longer doing works, he will accept
their execution through him by her unsleeping Force. No longer willing the
fulfilment of his own mental constructions and the satisfaction of his own emotional
desires, he will obey and participate in an omnipotent Will that is also an
omniscient Knowledge and a mysterious, magical and unfathomable Love and a vast
bottomless sea of the eternal Bliss of Existence.
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