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Section Three Evolution—Psychology Notes Man is a transitional being; he is not final. For in man and high beyond him ascend the radiant degrees that climb to a divine superman hood. There lies our destiny and the liberating key to our aspiring but troubled and limited mundane existence. We mean by man mind imprisoned in a living body. But mind is not the highest possible power of consciousness; for mind is not in possession of Truth, but only its ignorant seeker. Beyond mind is a supramental or gnostic power of consciousness that is in eternal possession of Truth. This supermind is at its source the dynamic consciousness, in its nature at once and inseparably infinite wisdom and infinite will of the divine Knower and Creator. Supermind is superman; a gnostic superman hood is the next distinct and triumphant evolutionary step to be reached by earthly nature. The step from man to superman is the next approaching achievement in the earth’s evolution. It is inevitable because it is at once the intention of the inner Spirit and the logic of Nature’s process. The appearance of a human possibility in a material and animal world was the first glint of some coming divine Light, the first far-off promise of a godhead to be born out of Matter. The appearance of the superman in the human world will be the fulfilment of this divine promise. Out of the material consciousness in which our mind works as a chained slave is emerging the disk of a secret sun of Power and Joy and Knowledge. The supermind will be the formed body of that radiant effulgence.
Superman hood is not man climbed to his own natural zenith, not a superior degree of human greatness, knowledge, power, intelligence, will, character, genius, dynamic force,
saintly ness, love, purity or perfection. Supermind is something beyond mental man and his limits; it is a greater consciousness than the highest consciousness proper to human nature.
Page-53 Man is a mental being whose mentality Works here involved, obscure and degraded in a physical brain. Even in the highest of his kind it is baulked of its luminous possibilities of supreme force and freedom by this dependence, shut off even from its own divine powers, impotent to change our life beyond certain narrow and precarious limits; it is an imprisoned and checked force, most often nothing but a servitor or caterer of interests or a purveyor of amusement to the life and the body. But divine superman will be a gnostic spirit. Supermind in him will lay hands on the mental and physical instruments and, standing above and yet penetrating our lower already manifested parts, it will transform mind, life and body. Mind is the highest force in man. But mind in man is an ignorant, clouded and struggling power. And even when most luminous it is possessed only of a thin, reflected and pallid light. A supermind free, master, expressive of divine glories will be the superman’s central instrument. Its untrammelled movement of self-existent knowledge, spontaneous power and untainted delight will impress the harmony of the life of the gods on the earthly existence.
Man in himself is little more than an ambitious nothing. He is a littleness that reaches to a wideness and a grandeur that are beyond him, a dwarf enamoured of the heights. His mind is a dark ray in the splendours of the universal Mind. His life is a striving, exulting, suffering, an eager passion-tossed and sorrow-stricken or a blindly and dumbly longing petty moment of the universal Life. His body is a labouring perishable speck in the material universe. This cannot be the end of the mysterious upward surge of Nature. There is something beyond, something that mankind shall be; it is seen now only in broken glimpses through rifts in the great wall of hmitations that deny its possibility and existence. An immortal soul is somewhere within him and gives out some sparks of its presence ; above an eternal spirit overshadows him and upholds the soul-continuity of his nature. But this greater spirit is obstructed from descent by the hard lid of
Page-54 his constructed personality ; and that inner luminous soul is wrapped, stifled, oppressed in dense outer coatings. In all but a few the soul is seldom active, in most hardly perceptible. The soul and spirit in man seem rather to exist above and behind his nature than to be a part of his external and visible reality. They are in course of birth rather than born in Matter ; they are for human consciousness possibilities rather than things realised and present. Man’s greatness is not in what he is, but in what he makes possible. His glory is that he is the closed place and secret workshop of a living labour in which superman hood is being made ready by a divine Craftsman. But he is admitted too to a yet greater greatness and it is this that, allowed to be unlike the lower creation, he is partly an artisan of this divine change ; his conscious assent, his consecrated will and participation are needed that into his body may descend the glory that will replace him. His aspiration is earth’s call to the supramental creator. If earth calls and the Supreme answers, the hour can be even now for that immense and glorious transformation. But what shall be the gain to be won for the Earth-consciousness we embody by this unprecedented ascent from mind to supermind and what the ransom of the supramental change ? To what end should man leave his safe human limits for this hazardous adventure ?
First consider what was gained when Nature passed from the brute inconscience and inertia of what seems inanimate Matter to the vibrant awakening of sensibility of plant range. Life was gained ; the gain was the first beginnings of a mite groping and involved, reaching a consciousness that stretches out dumbly for growth towards sense vibration, to a preparation for vital yearnings, a living joy and beauty. The plant achieved a first form of life but could not possess it; because this first organised life-consciousness had feeling and seeking but blind, dumb, deaf, chained to the soil and was involved in its own nerve and tissue ; it could not get out of
Page-55 them, could not get behind its nerve self as does the vital mind of the animal; still less could it turn down from above upon it to know and realise and control its own motions as does the observing and thinking mind in man. This was an imprisoned gain, for there was still a gross oppression of the first Inconscience which had covered up with the brute phenomenon of Matter and of Energy of Matter all signs of the Spirit. Nature could in no wise stop here, because she held much in her that was still occult, potential, unexpressed, unorganised, latent; the evolution had perforce to go farther. The animal had to replace the plant at the head and top of Nature. And what then was gained when Nature passed from the obscurity of the plant kingdom to the awakened sense, desire and emotion and the free mobility of animal life ? The gain was liberated sense and feeling and desire and courage and cunning and the contrivance of the objects of desire, passion and action and hunger and battle and conquest and the sex-call and play and pleasure, and all the joy and pain of the conscious living creature. Not only the life of the body which the animal has in common with the plant but a life-mind that appeared for the first time in the earth-story and grew from form to more organised form till it reached in the best the limit of its own formula.
The animal achieved a first form of mind, but could not possess it, because this first organised mind-consciousness was enslaved to a narrow scope, tied to the full functioning of the physical body and brain and nerve, tied to serve the physical life and its desires and needs and passions, limited to the insistent uses of the vital urge, to material longing and feeling and action, bound in its own inferior instrumentation, its spontaneous
combining of association and memory and instinct. It could not get away from them, could not get behind them as man’s intelligence gets behind them to observe them ; still less could it turn down on them from above as do human reason and will to control, enlarge, re-order,
exceed, sublimate.
Page-56 At each capital step of Nature’s ascent there is a reversal of consciousness in the evolving spirit. As when a climber turns on a summit to which he has laboured and looks down with an exalted and wider power of vision on all that was once above or on a level with him but is now below his feet, the evolutionary being not only transcends his past self, his former now exceeded status, but commands from a higher grade of self-experience and vision, with a new apprehending feeling or a new comprehending sight and effectuating power in a greater system of values, all that was once his own consciousness but is now below him and belongs to an inferior creation. This reversal is the sign of a decisive victory and the seal of a radical progress in Nature. The new consciousness attained in the spiritual evolution is always higher in grade and power, always larger, more comprehensive, wider in sight and feeling, richer and finer in faculties, more complex, organic, dominating than the consciousness that was once our own but is now left behind us. There are greater breadth and space, heights before impassable, unexpected depths and intimacies. There is a luminous expansion that is the very sign manual of the Supreme upon his work. Mark that each of the great radical steps forward already taken by Nature has been infinitely greater in its change, incalculably vaster in its consequences than its puny predecessor. There is a miraculous opening to an always richer and wider expression, there is a new illuminating of the creation and a dynamic heightening of its significances. There is in this world we live in no equality of all on a flat level, but a hierarchy of ever-increasing precipitous superiorities pushing their mountain shoulders upwards towards the Supreme. Because man is a mental being, he naturally imagines that mind is the one great leader and actor and creator or the indispensable agent in the universe. But this is an error ; even for knowledge mind is not the only or the greatest possible instru- Page-57 ment, the one aspirant and discoverer. Mind is a clumsy interlude between Nature’s vast and precise subconscient action and the vaster infallible superconscient action of the Godhead. There is nothing mind can do that cannot be better done in the mind’s immobility and thought-free stillness. When mind is still, then Truth gets her chance to be heard in the purity of the silence. Truth cannot be attained by the Mind’s thought but only by identity and silent vision. Truth lives in the calm wordless Light of the eternal spaces ; she does not intervene in the noise and cackle of logical debate. Thought in the mind can at most be Truth’s brilliant and transparent garment; it is not even her body. Look through the robe, not at it and you may see some hint of her form. There can be a thought-body of Truth, but that is the spontaneous supramental Thought and Word that leap fully formed out of the Light, not any difficult mental counterfeit and patchwork. The Supramental Thought is not a means of arriving at Truth, but a way of expressing her ; for Truth in the Supermind is self-found or self-existent. It is an arrow from the Light, not a bridge to reach it. Cease inwardly from thought and word, be motionless within you, look upward into the light and outward into the vast cosmic consciousness that is around you. Be more and more one with the brightness and the vastness. Then will Truth dawn on you from above and flow in you from all around you. But only if the mind is no less intense in its purity than its silence. For in an impure mind the silence will soon fill with misleading lights and false voices, the echo or sublimation of its own vain conceits and opinions or the response to its secret pride, vanity, ambition, lust, greed or desire. The Titans and the Demons will speak to it more readily than the divine Voices.
Silence is indispensable, but also there is needed wideness.
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If the mind is not silent, it cannot receive the lights and voices of the supernal Truth or receiving mixes with them its own nickering tongues and blind pretentious babble. Active, arrogant, noisy it distorts and disfigures what it receives. If it is not wide, it cannot house the effective power and creative force of the Truth. Some light may play there but it becomes narrow, confined and sterile : the Force that is descending is cabined and thwarted and withdraws again to its vast heights from this rebellious foreign plane. Or even if something comes down and remains it is a pearl in the mire ; for no change takes place in the nature or else there is formed only a thin intensity that points narrowly upward to the summits, but can hold little and diffuse less upon the world around it.
Page-59 A progressive evolution of the visible and invisible instruments of the Spirit is the whole law of the earth nature ; that too is the fundamental value which underlies all the other values of its existence and its process and gives them their significance. Spirit has concealed itself in inconscient matter. It evolves, for itself first of all and as if that were its only preoccupation, forms of matter by the working of matter forces. It is only when this has been sufficiently done, that it thinks of life. And yet a subconscient fife and its imprisoned forces were there all the time in matter and its forces and are there even in its most apparently inanimate forms.. .. Afterwards came an evolution of mind in many forms by the working of liberated mind-forces. In those life-forces in matter and even in the very substance of matter mind was latent. An evolution of mind in the living form by a working of liberated mind-forces was the third chapter of the story. The third chapter is not completed, neither will it be the end of the narrative. The evolution of the earth nature is not finished because it has manifested only three powers out of the seven-fold scale of consciousness that is involved in manifested Nature. It has brought out from its apparent inconscience only the three powers of Mind and Life and Matter.
Mind emerges out of life in matter ; it is incapable of manifesting directly in the material form. It is there, but it acts mechanically in the somnambulism of an original force of inconscience and inertia. This and no more is what we mean by the inconscience of Matter; for although consciousness is there, it is involved, inorganic, mechanical in its action; it supports the works of Force by its inherent presence, but
Page-60 not by its light of active intelligence. This is why material Nature does the works of a supreme and miraculous intelligence and yet there seems to be no intervention of any indwelling Seer or Thinker. Ether and material space are different names for the same thing. Space, in its origin at least if not in its universal character, is an extension of the substance of consciousness in which motion of energy can take place for the relations of being with being or force with force and for the building up of symbolic forms on which this interchange can be supported. Ether is space supporting the works of material energy and the symbolic forms it creates ; it is, speaking paradoxically but to the point, immaterial or essential matter. I Evolution is the one eternal dynamic law and hidden process of the earth-nature. An evolution of the instruments of the spirit in a medium of Matter is the whole fundamental significance of the values of the earth-existence. All its other laws are its values of operation and process ; this spiritual evolution is its own pervading secret sense. The history of the earth is first an evolution of organised forms by the working of material forces. There follows on this initial stage an evolution of life in the form and an organisation of a hierarchy of living forms by the working of the liberated life-forces. The next step is an evolution of mind in living bodies and an organisation of more and more conscious lives by the process of developing mind-forces. But this is not the end ; for there are higher powers of consciousness beyond mind which await their turn and must have their act in the great play, their part of the creative Lila.
Matter, the medium of all this evolution, is seemingly
Page-61 inconscient and inanimate ; but it appears to us so only because we are unable to sense consciousness outside a certain limited range, a fixed scale or gamut to which we have access. Below us there are lower ranges to which we are insensible and these we call subconscious or inconscience. Above us are higher ranges which are, to our inferior nature, an unseizable super-conscience. The difficulty of Matter is not an absolute inconscience, but an obscured consciousness limited by its own movement —vaguely, dumbly, blindly self-aware, not really responsive to anything outside its own form and forces. At its worst it can be called not so much inconscience as nescience. The awakening of a greater and yet greater consciousness in this Nescience is the miracle of the universe of Matter. This nescience of Matter is a veiled, an involved or somnambulist consciousness which contains all the latent powers of the Spirit. In every particle, atom, molecule, cell of Matter there lives hidden and works unknown all the omniscience of the Eternal and all the omnipotence of the Infinite. The evolution of forms and powers by which Matter will become more and more conscious until passing beyond form and life and mind it becomes aware, with the supernal awareness, of the eternal and infinite Spirit in its own highest ranges, this is the meaning of earth-existence. The slow self-manifesting birth of God in Matter is the purpose of the terrestrial Lila.
Matter is at once a force and a substance. Matter is original being, Brahman, made concrete in atomic division. Matter is original substance-force, Brahman-Shakti, made active in an obscure involution of the Spirit’s powers in a self-forgetful nescience. Matter-force casts matter-substance, material Shakti casts Matter Brahman into form expressive of its own most characteristic powers. When that has been done, the physical world is ready for the splendid intrusion of conscious Life into the force-driven inertia of material substance.
Page-62 Matter is’ not the only force, not the only substance. For Life and Mind and what is beyond Mind are also forces that are substances, but of another kind and degree. Spirit is the original force-substance; all these others are kinds and derivations of the force of Spirit, degrees and modifications of the substance of Spirit. Matter too is nothing but a power and degree of the Spirit; Matter too is substance of the Eternal. The Matter that we see and sense is only an outermost sheath and crating; behind it are other subtler degrees of physical substance which are less dense with the atomic nescience, and it is easier for life, mind and other powers to enter into them and operate. If the finer invisible physical layers or couches did not exist supporting this gross visible pliyical world, that world could not abide; for then the fine operations of transmission between Spirit and Maner could not be executed at all and it is these that render the grosser visible operations possible. The evolution would be impossible; life and mind and beyond-mind would be unable to manifest in the material universe. There is not only this material plane of being that we see, there is a physical life-plane proper to the vital physical operation of Nature. There is a physical mind-plane proper to a mental physical operation of Nature. There is a physical supermind plane proper to the supramental physical operation of Nature. There is too a plane of physical-spirit power or infinite physical Being-Consciousness-Force-Bliss proper to the spiritual physical operations of Nature. It is only when we have discovered and separated these planes of Nature and of our physical being and analysed the synthesis of their contributions to the whole play that we shall discover how the evolution of vital, mental and spiritual consciousness became possible in inconscient Matter.
But there is more; for beyond these many couches of the physical existence are
other supra-physical degrees, many layers of Life, many layers of Mind, planes
of Supermind, of Bliss, of Consciousness-Force and of infinite Being on Page-63 which the physical existence depends for its origination and its continuance. It is the higher planes that constantly unfold unseen energies which have raised its evolution from the obscurity in which it began to the splendour of a light of consciousness to which the highest human mind shall only be the feeble glimmer of a glow-worm fire before the sun in its naming glories. This is the stupendous hierarchy of the grades of consciousness between the darkest Matter and the most luminous Spirit. Consciousness in Matter has to go on climbing to the very top of the series and return with all it has to give us before the evolution can utterly fulfil its purpose. Matter, Life, Mind, Supermind or Gnosis, and beyond these the quadruple power of a supreme Being-Consciousness-Force-Bliss : these are the grades of the evolutionary ascent from Inconscience to the Super conscious. Life does not wholly come into the earth from outside it; its principle is there always in material things. But, imprisoned in the apparent inanimate inertia of Matter, it is bound by its movements and unable to manifest its own independent or dominant existence. Life is there in the earth, rock, metal, gas, atom, electron and the other more subtle yet undiscovered forces and particles that constitute material energy and form. It is in everything, but at first a hardly detectable presence, organised only to support secretly material energies, processes, formations and transformations; it is there as an involved power for the building and expression of form of Matter, not for the expression of Life. It is not in possession of itself, not self-conscious in the form, not pushed towards self-manifestation; a helpless tool and instrument, not a free agent, it is a servant of Matter and a-slave of the Form, not the master of the house.
But above the material world there is a plane of dominant Life that presses down upon this material universe and seeks to pour into it whatever it can of its own types, powers, forces,
Page-64 impulsions, manifesting creative godheads. When in the material world form is ready, the Gods and the Life-Daemons of this higher plane are attracted to put their creative touch upon Matter. Then there comes a rapid and sudden efflorescence of Life; the plant, the animalcule, the insect, the animal appear. A life-soul and a life-force with its many and always more complex movements are manifested in what seemed once to be inert and inanimate substance. Life-souls, life-minds, animal existences are born and evolve; a new world appears that is born and contained in this world of Matter and yet surpasses it in its true dynamic nature. II Involution of a superconscient Spirit in inconscient Matter is the secret of this visible and apparent world and the evolution of this Superconscient out of inconscient Nature is the keyword of the earth’s riddle. Earth-life is the self-chosen habitation of a great Divinity and his agonic will is to change it from a blind prison into his splendid mansion and high heaven-reaching temple. The nature of the Divinity in the world is the immutable stability of an eternal existence that puts on superficial mutable forms, the indivisible light of an infinite consciousness that breaks out into multiform detail and groping of knowledge, the illimitable movement of an omnipotent force that works out its marvels in self-imposed limits, the calm and ecstasy of an immeasurable Delight that creates waves and rhythms of the outward-going and inward-drawing intensities of its own all-possessing and self-possessing bliss. This will be the nature of our own fourfold experience when it will work in us in its unveiled nature; and if that manifestation had been from the beginning there would have been no problem of terrestrial existence.
But this Godhead here, whether within us or outside us in things and forces and
creatures, started from an involution
Page-65 in inconscient Nature and began by the manifestation of its apparent opposites. In Non-existence, discontinuity and void, the appearance of a blind inconscient Force, in the creations of that Force a principle of difficult labour and suffering and pain : out of these opposites the Spirit in Matter has chosen to evolve its might and light and infinity and beatitude. III Before there could be any evolution, there must needs be an involution of the Divine. Otherwise there would be not an evolution but a successive creation of things new, not contained in their antecedents, not their inevitable consequences or processes in a sequence, but arbitrarily willed or miraculously conceived by an inexplicable Chance, a stumbhng fortunate Force or an external Creator. All that is to change. The long process of terrestrial formation and creation, the ambiguous miracle of life, the struggle of mind to appear and grow in an apparent vast Ignorance and to reign there as interpreter and creator and master, the intimations of a greater something that passes beyond the finite marvel of Mind to the infinite marvels of the Spirit, are not a meaningless and fortuitous passing result of some cosmic Chance with its huge combination of coincidences; they are not the lucky play of some blind material Force. These things are and can be only because of something eternal and divine that concealed itself in energy and form of Matter. The secret of the terrestrial evolution is the slow and progressive liberation of this latent indwelling spirit, the difficult appearance of Something or Someone already involved with all its potential forces in a first formal basis of supporting substance, its greater slowly emerging movements locked up in an initial expressive power of Matter.
Man the thinker and seeker could not be here if he were not an embodied portion of an all-conscious Infinite that is superconscient above him but lies also hidden in the
Page-66 inconscience of the material universe. Matter is the apparent beginning of the evolution but it is not its end. The development of form is not the most important or the most significant part of the evolutionary process; it is one sign of the thing that is being done, but it is not its essence. Material form is only a support and means for the progressive manifestation of the Spirit. If all were chance or play of inconscient or inconsequent Force, there would be no reason why man with all his imperfections should not be the last word of this feat of unconscious intelligence or this haphazard miracle. It is because the Divine Spirit is there and his manifestation, the meaning of the movement is that a new power must emerge in the series that started from Matter. The material universe would be a waste of wonderful desert if Life had not appeared as the first index to some marvellous utility and an ultimate profound and moving significance. But life too by itself would be a movement without sequence to its purposeful initiation or light to its own mystery if in Life there were not concealed an interpretative or at least a seeking power of consciousness that could turn upon its powers and way to grasp and direct them towards their own realised issue. Because this infinite Spirit and eternal Divinity is here concealed in the process of material Nature, the evolution of a power beyond Mind is not only possible, but inevitable. If all were result of cosmic Chance there need be no necessity of its appearance, even as there was no necessity for any embarrassing emergence of a stumbling and striving vital consciousness in the mechanical whirl of Matter. And if all were the works of a mechanical Force, then too mind need not have unexpectedly appeared as a superior mechanism labouring to deal with Nature’s grosser first machine and supermind would be still more a superfluity and a luminous insolence. Or, if a limited experimenting external Creator were the inventor of this universe, there would be no reason Page-67
why he should not stop short at mind, content- with the ingenuity of his labour. But since the Divinity is involved here and is emerging, it is inevitable that all his powers or degrees of power should emerge one after the other till the whole glory is embodied and visible.
Page-68 Psychology is the science of consciousness and its states and operations in Nature and, if that can be glimpsed or experienced, its states and operations beyond what we know as Nature. It is not enough to observe and know the movements of our surface nature and the superficial nature of other living creatures, just as it is not enough for Science to observe and know as electricity only the movements of lightning in the clouds or for the astronomer to observe and know only those movements and properties of the stars that are visible to the unaided eye. Here as there a whole world of occult phenomena have to be laid bare and brought under control before the psychologist can hope to be master of his province. Our observable consciousness, that which we call ourselves, is only the little visible part of our being. It is a small field below which are depths and farther depths and widths and ever wider widths which support and supply it but to which it has no visible access. All that is our self, our being ; what we see at the top is only our ego and its visible nature. Even the movements of this little surface nature cannot be understood nor its true law discovered until we know all that is below or behind and supplies it—and know too all that is around it and above. For below this conscient nature is the vast Inconscient out of which we come. The Inconscient is greater, deeper, more original, more potent to shape and govern what we are and do than our little derivative conscient nature. Inconscient to us, to our surface view, but not inconscient in itself or to itself, it is a sovereign guide, worker, determinant, creator. Not to know it is not to know our nether origins and the origin of the most part of what we are and do. And the Inconscient is not all.
For behind our little frontal ego and nature is a whole
Page-69 subliminal kingdom of inner consciousness with- many planes and provinces. There are in that kingdom many powers, movements, personalities which are part of ourselves and help to form our little surface personality and its powers and movements. This inner self, these inner persons we do not know, but they know us and observe and dictate our speech, our thoughts, feelings, doings even more directly than the Inconscient below us. Around us too is a circumconscient Universal of which we are a portion. This circumconscience is pouring its forces, suggestions, stimuli, compulsions into us at every moment of our existence. Around us is a universal Mind of which our mind is a formation and our thoughts, feelings, will, impulses are continually little more than a personally modified reception and transcription of its thought-waves, its force-currents, its foam of emotion and sensation, its billows of impulse. Around us is a permanent universal Life of which our petty flow of life-formation that begins and ceases is only a small dynamic wave. Page-70 All that exists or can exist in this or any other universe can be rendered into terms of consciousness ; there is nothing that cannot be known. This knowing need not be always a mental knowledge. For the greater part of existence is either above or below mind, and mind can know only in directly what is above or what is below it. But the one true and complete way of knowing is by direct knowledge. All can be rendered into terms of consciousness because all is either a creation of consciousness or else one of its forms. All exists in an infinite conscious existence and is a part or a form of it. In proportion as one can share directly or indirectly, completely or incompletely in the eternal awareness of this Infinite, or momentarily contact or enter into, or formulate some superior or inferior power of its consciousness or knowledge, one can know what it knows in part or whole, by a direct knowing or an indirect coming to knowledge. A conscious, half-conscious or subconscious participation in the awareness of the Infinite is the basis of all knowledge. All things are inhabited by this consciousness, even the things that seem to us inconscient, and the consciousness in one form can communicate or contact with the consciousness in another or else penetrate or contain or identify with it. This in one form or another is the true process of all knowledge ; the rest is ignorant appearance. All things are one self; it is the one Knower who knows himself everywhere, from one centre or another in the multiplicity of his play. Otherwise no knowledge would be possible. The sense of a greater or even of an ultimate Self need not be limited to a negative and empty wideness whose one character is to be without limitations or features. The first extreme push of our recoil from what we now are or think ourselves to be may and does often at first carry us over into this annihilating experience. A negation of our present error, Page-71 a release from our petty irksome aching bonds -may seem to be the only thing worth having, the only thing true. The rest is infinity, freedom, peace. We feel an Infinite that needs nothing but its own infinite to fill it. We rejoice in a freedom of which any form, name or description, any creative activity, any movement, any impulse would be a disturbing denial and the beginning of a relapse into the error of will and desire, the ignorance of the illusory finite. To accept nothing but the bare bliss of infinity is the condition of this peace. The mind escaping from itself denies all thought, all form-making, all motion or play of any kind ; for that would be a grievous return to itself, a miserable imprisonment and renewed hard-labour. The life released from the toil of labouring and striving and living demands only immobility and no more to be, a sleep of force, the surety and rest of an immutable status. The body accepts denial and dissolution, for to be dissolved is to cease to breathe and suffer. A bodiless, lifeless, mindless infinite breadth and supreme silence shows to us that we are in contact with the Absolute. … All existence,—as the mind and sense know existence, —is manifestation of an Eternal and Infinite which is to the mind and sense unknowable but not unknowable to its own self-awareness. Whatever the manifestation may be, spiritual or material or other, it has behind it something that is beyond itself, and even if we reached the highest possible heights of the manifested existence there would be still beyond that even an Unmanifested from which it came. The Unmanifested Supreme is beyond all definition and description by mind or speech ; no definition the mind can make, affirmative or negative, which can be at all expressive of it or adequate.
To the mind this Unmanifest can present itself as a Self, a supreme Nihil (Tao or Sunyam), a featureless Absolute, an Indeterminate, a blissful Nirvana of manifested existence,
Page-72 a Non-Being-out of which Being came or a Being of silence out of which a world-illusion came. But all these are mental formulas expressing the mind’s approach to it, not That but impressions which fall from That upon the receiving consciousness, not the true essence or nature (Swarup) of the Eternal and Infinite. Even the words Eternal and Infinite are only symbolic expressions through which the mind feels without grasping some vague impression of this Supreme. If we say of it neti neti, this can mean nothing except that nothing in the world or beyond it of which the mind can take cognisance is the Supreme in its entirety or its essence. If we say of initiate, this can mean at the most that what we see of it in the world or beyond is some indication of something that is there beyond and by traveling through all these indications to their absolutes we may get a step or two nearer to the Absolute of all absolutes, this Supreme. Both formulas have a truth in them, but neither touches the secret truth of the Supreme. Page-73 Obviously we must leave far behind us the current theory of Karma and its shallow attempt to justify the ways of the Cosmic Spirit by forcing on them a crude identity with the summary notions of law and justice, the crude and often savagely primitive methods of reward and punishment, lure and deterrent dear to the surface human mind. There is here a more authentic and spiritual truth at the base of Nature’s action and a far less mechanically calculable movement. Here is no rigid and narrow ethical law bound down to a petty human significance, no teaching of a child soul by a mixed system of blows and lollipops, no unprofitable wheel of a brutal cosmic justice automatically moved in the traces of man’s ignorant judgments and earthly desires and instincts. Life and rebirth do not follow these artificial constructions, but a movement spiritual and intimate to the deepest intention of Nature. A cosmic Will and Wisdom observant of the ascending march of the soul’s consciousness and experience as it emerges out of subconscient Matter and climbs to its own luminous divinity, fixes the norm and constantly enlarges the lines—or, let us say, since law is a too mechanical conception, the truth of Karma. For what we understand by law is a single immutably habitual movement or recurrence in Nature fruitful of a determined sequence of things and that sequence must be clear, precise, limited to its formula, invariable. If it is not that, if there is too much flexibility of movement, if there intervenes too embarrassing a variety or crisscross of action and reaction, a too rich complex of forces, the narrow uncompromising incompetence of our logical intelligence finds there not law but an incertitude and a chaos. Our reason must be allowed to cut and hew and arbitrarily select its suitable circumstances, isolate its immutable data, skeletonise or mechanise life; otherwise it stands open-mouthed at a loss unable to think Page-74 with precision or act with effect in a field of subtle and indefinite measures. It must be allowed to deal with mighty Nature as it deals with human society, politics, ethics, conduct; for it can understand and do good work only where it is licensed to build and map out its own artificial laws, erect a clear, precise, rigid, infallible system and leave as little room as possible for the endless flexibility and variety and complexity that presses from the Infinite upon our mind and life. Moved by this need we endeavour to forge for our own souls and for the cosmic Spirit even such a single and inflexible law of Karma as we would ourselves have made had the rule of the world been left to us. Not this mysterious universe would we have made, but the pattern of a rational cosmos fitted to our call for a simple definite guidance in action and for a well-marked thumb rule facile and clear to our limited intelligence. But this force we call Karma turns out to be no such precise and invariable mechanism as we hoped; it is rather a thing of many planes that changes its face and walk and very substance as it mounts from level to higher level, and on each plane even as it is not one movement but an indefinite complex of many spiral movements hard enough for us to harmonise together or to find out whatever secret harmony unknown to us and incalculable these complexities are weaving out in this mighty field of the dealings of the soul with Nature.
Let us then call Karma no longer a Law, but rather the many-sided dynamic truth of all action and life, the organic movement here of the Infinite. That was what the ancient thinkers saw in it before it was cut and shredded by lesser minds and turned into an easy and misleading popular formula. Action of Karma follows and takes up many potential lines of the spirit, into its multitudinous surge, many waves and streams of combining and disputing world-forces; it is the
processes of the creative Infinite; it is the long and multiform way of the progression of the individual and the cosmic soul in Nature. Its complexities cannot be unravelled by our physical mind ever bound up in the superficial appearance, nor by our
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vital mind of desire stumbling forward in the- cloud of its own instincts and longings and rash determinations through the maze of these myriad
favoring and opposing forces that surround and urge and drive and hamper us from the visible and invisible worlds. Nor can it be perfectly classified, accounted for, tied up in bundles by the precisions of our logical intelligence in its inveterate search for clear-cut dogmas. On that day only shall we
perfectly decipher what is now to us Nature’s obscure hieroglyph of Karma when there rises in our enlarged consciousness the supramental way of knowledge. The supramental eye can see a hundred meeting and diverging motions in one glance and envelop in the largeness of its harmonising vision of Truth all that to our minds is clash and opposition and the collision and interlocked strife of numberless contending truths and powers. Truth to the supramental sight is at once single and infinite and the complexities of its play serve to bring out with an abundant ease the rich significance of the Eternal’s many-sided oneness.
Page-76 There are three layers of the Supermind corresponding to three activities of the intuitive mind : (1) Interpretative Supermind. First is what I call Interpretative Supermind, corresponding to Intuition. I call it interpretative, because what is a possibility on the mental plane becomes a potentiality on the supramental plane and the Interpretative puts all the potentialities before you. It shows the root cause of events that may become true on the physical plane. When Intuition is changed into its supramental value, it becomes Interpretative Supermind. (2) Representative Supermind. Next comes what I call the Representative Supermind. It represents the actual movements of potentialities and shows what is in operation. When Inspiration is changed into its supramental value, then it becomes this Representative Supermind. Even this is not the highest. There you know certain potentialities in thought and action working and you can in many case s say what would happen or how a certain thing happened if it does. (3) Imperative Supermind.
There is the Imperative Supermind which corresponds to Revelation. That is
always true. Nothing can stand against it. It is knowledge fulfilling itself by
its own inherent power. Page-77 (A) THE SUPREME SELF-CONTAINED ABSOLUTE
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First Absolute The concealed—avyakta avyakta-Supreme, self involved Sachchidananda, Parabrahman (Parameswara-iswari).
Second Absolute Aditi. The Mother, containing in herself the Supreme. The Divine Consciousness, Force, Ananda upholding all the universes. Para Shakti, Para Prakriti, Maha-maya (yayedam dhāryate jagai).
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The Supreme Planes of Infinite Consciousness (1) Sat (implying Chit-Tapas and Ananda) (2) Chit (implying Sat and Ananda) (3) Ananda (implying Sat and Chit-Tapas.) Supermind or Divine Gnosis (The Self-Determining Infinite Consciousness) From the point of view of our ascent upwards this is the Truth-Consciousness as distinguished from all below that belongs to the separative Ignorance.
Over mind or Maya (Over mind takes all Truth that comes down to it from the Supermind, but sets up each Truth as a separate force and idea capable of conflicting with the others as well as cooperating with them. Each over mental being has his own world, each force has its own play and throws itself out to realise its own fulfilment in the cosmic play. All is possible ; and from this separative seat of conflicting and even mutually negating possibilities comes too, as soon as mind, life and matter are thrown out into play the possibility of ignorance, unconsciousness, falsehood, death and suffering.) OVER MIND GRADATION TO MIND OVER MIND GNOSIS (Supermind subdued to the over mind play, limited and serving for true but limited creations)
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Page-84 THE SEVEN SUNS OF THE SUPERMIND 1. The Sun of Supramental Truth,—Knowledge-Power originating the supramental creation. Descent into the Sahasradala. 2. The Sun of Supramental Light and Will-Power, transmitting the Knowledge-Power as dynamic vision and command to create, found and organise the supramental creation. Descent into the Ajna Chakra, the centre between the eyes. 3. The Sun of Supramental Word, embodying the Knowledge-Power, empowered to express and arrange the supramental creation. Descent into the Throat Centre. 4. The Sun of Supramental Love, Beauty, and Bliss, releasing the Soul of the Knowledge-Power to vivify and harmonise the supramental creation. Descent into the Heart-Lotus. 5. The Sun of Supramental Force dynamised as a power and source of life to support the supramental creation. Descent into the navel centre. 6. The Sun of Life-Radiances (Power-Rays) distributing the dynamis and pouring it into concrete formations. Descent into the penultimate centre. 7. The Sun of Supramental Substance-Energy and Form-Energy empowered to embody the supramental life and stabilise the creation. Descent into the Muladhara. Page-85 Bergson—"philosophy of change". "It symbolises the protest of the modern impatient man of action against the great Platonic tradition in philosophy of reason or intellect and static reality." "It substitutes force for inertia, life for death and liberty for fatalism." "Physics and logic are appropriate to the study of the inverse movement, matter, which is life or elan vital pulverised and its method is intellect and logic." "Philosophy is the study of becoming in general and its method is intuition." "Scrap the Platonic tradition and follow Plotinus: ‘Ask me not but understand in silence as I (Nature) am silent and am not wont to speak’." "A philosophy of evolution itself evolving", "positive and empirical" "moulded on experience, determined to base itself on solid grounds, a doctrine in no sense systematic, distinguishes different problems to examine them one by one… enemy of conventionality…antidote to the dogmatic finality of the traditional philosopher." A short-cut through "the turning of the mind homeward, the coincidence of the human consciousness with the living principle". …"the destiny of man will be realised because it is the nature of the elan vital to triumph over matter and environment." 2
The office of intellect is not to fathom reality, but to fabricate and preside over action…intellect cannot comprehend life and reality. Intellect (logic) goes round the object,
Page-86 intuition enters into the object; one stops at the [absolute], the other enters into the absolute. A philosophy of change ? But what is change ? In ordinary parlance change means passage from one condition to another and that would seem to imply passage from one status to another status. The shoot changes into a tree, passes from the status of shoot to the status of tree and there it stops; man passes from the status of young man to the status of old man and the only farther change possible to him is death or dissolution of his status. So it would seem that change is not something isolated which is the sole original and eternal reality, but it is something dependent on status, and if status were non-existent, change also could not exist. For we have to ask, when you speak of change as alone real, change of what, from what, to what? Without this "what" change could not be. Change is evidently the change of some form or state of existence from one condition to another condition. Otherwise, what is it ? To it itself fundamental and absolute, not explicable or definable by any other term than itself, perceivable and intelligible as the sole reality by a naked intuition which feels and cries out "Change, reality" and then falls dumb and can say no more ?
An object changes, a person changes, a condition of things changes. But can it be said that the object is no real object but only a continuity of change, or that a person is not a person but a continuity of change, a condition of things is not a condition and there are no things but there is only a continuity of change ? This seems to be an illustration of the besetting sin of metaphysics—to exalt a word into a reality or an idea into a reality without fathoming what is the reality which it tries to indicate. For to label with a word or a name is not to fathom and to define, to erect a concept is not to fathom. Fathom for us then what is change before you ask us to accept it as the only reality. You may say "I have fathomed it, I have seen it to be the one constant real, but do not ask me to define what it is; listen rather in silence to the silence of Nature and you too will
Page-87 fathom." But what if so listening, I fathom other realities than change—let us say, immutable being as well as mutable force, status as well as change ? To prevent that you plunge into speech and not silence, into dialectics of the intellect instead of the undead table certitudes of intuition, and so abandon your own methodology. If intuition alone is to be used, then you must give a place to my intuition as well as yours, and all, however contradictory in appearance, must stand until a greater intuition comes in to put all in their place, reconcile, include in a consistent whole.
In the world of our experience contradictories often complement and are necessary to each other’s existence. Change is possible only if there is a status from which to change; but status again exists only as a step that pauses, a step in the continuous passage of change or a step on which change pauses before it passes into another step in its creative passage. And behind this relation is a duality of eternal status and eternal motion and behind this duality is something that is neither status nor change but contains both as its aspects— and That is likely to be the true Reality.
Page-88 Yoga— Union with the Self, the Spirit or the Divine, One in all things; the process of an inner and higher consciousness within and above ourselves which makes this possible. Maya — The creative Power of Consciousness by which the world exists. Bhakta — One who approaches the Divine through the heart’s devotion. Jñānī — One who approaches the Divine through spiritual knowledge. Adesa — The inner Command. Mukti — Salvation; liberation from the Ignorance that holds all terrestrial beings. Rsis — Inspired seers, those who see the hidden Truth and hear its word. Avatar — One in whom the Divine Consciousness has descended into human birth for a great world-work. Sanātana Dharma — The eternal religion. Līlā — Existence regarded as a play of the Universal Spirit. Kalpa & Marwantara — Cycles of the universe; Kalpa — a cosmic aeon divided into Manvantaras or aeons of the earth.
Brahman — The Eternal Spirit, Origin and Pervasive Self of the universe.
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