The text
The Synthesis of Yoga
VOLUMES 23 and 24
THE COMPEETE WORKS OE SRI AUROBINDO
© Sri Aurobindo Ashram Trust 1999
Published by Sri Aurobindo Ashram Publication Department
Printed at Sri Aurobindo Ashram Press, Pondicherry
PRINTED IN INDIA
The Synthesis of Yoga
Publisher’s Note
The Synthesis of Yoga first appeared serially in the monthly
review Arya between August 1914 and January 1921. Each
instalment was written immediately before its publication. The
work was left incomplete when the Arya was discontinued. Sri
Aurobindo never attempted to complete the Synthesis-, he did,
however, lightly revise the Introduction, thoroughly revise all
of Part I, “The Yoga of Divine Works”, and significantly revise
several chapters of Part II, “The Yoga of Integral Knowledge”.
More than thirty years elapsed between the first appearance of
the Synthesis in the Arya and the final stages of its incomplete
revision. As a result, there are some differences of terminology
between the revised and unrevised portions of the book.
In 1948 the chapters making up “The Yoga of Divine
Works” were published as a book by the Sri Aurobindo Library,
Madras. No other part of The Synthesis of Yoga appeared in
book-form during Sri Aurobindo’s lifetime. In 1955 an edition
comprising the Introduction and four Parts was brought out by
the Sri Aurobindo International University Centre. The present
edition, which has been checked against all manuscripts and
printed texts, includes for the first time the author’s revisions
to the Introduction and Chapters XV -XVII of Part II, and an
incomplete continuation of Part IV entitled “The Supramental
Time Consciousness”.
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION
THECONDITIONSOFTHE SYNTHESIS
Chapter I
Life and Yoga 5
Chapter II
The Three Steps of Nature 9
Chapter III
The Threefold Life 20
Chapter IV
The Systems of Yoga 31
Chapter V
The Synthesis of the Systems 41
PART I
THE YOGA OF DIVINE WORKS
Chapter I
The Four Aids 53
Chapter II
Self- Consecration 69
Chapter III
Self- Surrender in Works — The Way of the Gita 89
Chapter IV
The Sacrifice, the Triune Path and the Lord of
the Sacrifice 106
Chapter V
The Ascent of the Sacrifice - 1
The Works of Knowledge — The Psychic Being
134
CONTENTS
Chapter VI
The Ascent of the Sacrifice -2
The Works of Love — The Works of Life
158
Chapter VII
Standards of Conduct and Spiritual Freedom
188
Chapter VIII
The Supreme Will
208
Chapter IX
Equality and the Annihilation of Ego
221
Chapter X
The Three Modes of Nature
232
Chapter XI
The Master of the Work
243
Chapter XII
The Divine Work
264
Appendix to Part I
Chapter XIII
The Supermind and the Yoga of Works
279
PART II
THE YOGA OF INTEGRAL KNOWLEDGE
Chapter I
The Object of Knowledge
287
Chapter II
The Status of Knowledge
300
Chapter III
The Purified Understanding
308
Chapter IV
Concentration
317
Chapter V
Renunciation
326
CONTENTS
Chapter VI
The Synthesis of the Disciplines of Knowledge
335
Chapter VII
The Release from Subjection to the Body
343
Chapter VIII
The Release from the Heart and the Mind
350
Chapter IX
The Release from the Ego
356
Chapter X
The Realisation of the Cosmic Self
368
Chapter XI
The Modes of the Self
374
Chapter XII
The Realisation of Sachchidananda
383
Chapter XIII
The Difficulties of the Mental Being
391
Chapter XIV
The Passive and the Active Brahman
400
Chapter XV
The Cosmic Consciousness
409
Chapter XVI
Oneness
419
Chapter XVII
The Soul and Nature
426
Chapter XVIII
The Soul and Its Liberation
436
Chapter XIX
The Planes of Our Existence
446
Chapter XX
The Lower Triple Purusha
457
Chapter XXI
The Ladder of Self-Transcendence
465
CONTENTS
Chapter XXII
Vijnana or Gnosis
475
Chapter XXIII
The Conditions of Attainment to the Gnosis
488
Chapter XXIV
Gnosis and Ananda
498
Chapter XXV
The Higher and the Lower Knowledge
511
Chapter XXVI
Samadhi
519
Chapter XXVII
Hathayoga
528
Chapter XXVIII
Rajayoga
536
PART III
THE YOGA OF DIVINE LOVE
Chapter I
Love and the Triple Path
545
Chapter II
The Motives of Devotion
552
Chapter III
The Godward Emotions
561
The Gradations of the Supermind 811
Chapter XXII
The Supramental Thought and Knowledge 825
Chapter XXIII
The Supramental Instruments — Thought-Process 841
Chapter XXIV
The Supramental Sense 862
Chapter XXV
Towards the Supramental Time Vision 885
Appendix to Part IV
Chapter XXVI
The Supramental Time Consciousness 907
The Synthesis of Yoga
“All life is Yoga.”
Sri Aurobindo in 1950
Introduction
The Conditions of the Synthesis
Chapter I
Life and Yoga
There are two necessities of Nature’s workings which
seem always to intervene in the greater forms of human
activity, whether these belong to our ordinary fields of
movement or seek those exceptional spheres and fulfilments
which appear to us high and divine. Every such form tends to¬
wards a harmonised complexity and totality which again breaks
apart into various channels of special effort and tendency, only
to unite once more in a larger and more puissant synthesis. Sec¬
ondly, development into forms is an imperative rule of effective
manifestation; yet all truth and practice too strictly formulated
becomes old and loses much, if not all, of its virtue; it must be
constantly renovated by fresh streams of the spirit revivifying
the dead or dying vehicle and changing it, if it is to acquire a
new life. To be perpetually reborn is the condition of a material
immortality. We are in an age, full of the throes of travail, when
all forms of thought and activity that have in themselves any
strong power of utility or any secret virtue of persistence are
being subjected to a supreme test and given their opportunity of
rebirth. The world today presents the aspect of a huge cauldron
of Medea in which all things are being cast, shredded into pieces,
experimented on, combined and recombined either to perish and
provide the scattered material of new forms or to emerge rejuve¬
nated and changed for a fresh term of existence. Indian Yoga, in
its essence a special action or formulation of certain great powers
of Nature, itself specialised, divided and variously formulated,
is potentially one of these dynamic elements of the future life of
humanity. The child of immemorial ages, preserved by its vitality
and truth into our modern times, it is now emerging from the se¬
cret schools and ascetic retreats in which it had taken refuge and
is seeking its place in the future sum of living human powers and
utilities. But it has first to rediscover itself, bring to the surface
6
The Conditions of the Synthesis
But it has first to rediscover itself, bring to the surface
6
The Conditions of the Synthesis
the profoundest reason of its being in that general truth and that
unceasing aim of Nature which it represents, and find by virtue
of this new self-knowledge and self-appreciation its own recov¬
ered and larger synthesis. Reorganising itself, it will enter more
easily and powerfully into the reorganised life of the race which
its processes claim to lead within into the most secret penetralia
and upward to the highest altitudes of existence and personality.
In the right view both of life and of Yoga all life is either
consciously or subconsciously a Yoga. For we mean by this term
a methodised effort towards self-perfection by the expression of
the secret potentialities latent in the being and — highest condi¬
tion of victory in that effort — a union of the human individual
with the universal and transcendent Existence we see partially
expressed in man and in the Cosmos. But all life, when we look
behind its appearances, is a vast Yoga of Nature who attempts
in the conscious and the subconscious to realise her perfection in
an ever-increasing expression of her yet unrealised potentialities
and to unite herself with her own divine reality. In man, her
thinker, she for the first time upon this Earth devises self-
conscious means and willed arrangements of activity by which
this great purpose may be more swiftly and puissantly attained.
Yoga, as Swami Vivekananda has said, may be regarded as a
means of compressing one’s evolution into a single life or a few
years or even a few months of bodily existence. A given system
of Yoga, then, can be no more than a selection or a compression,
into narrower but more energetic forms of intensity, of the gen¬
eral methods which are already being used loosely, largely, in a
leisurely movement, with a profuser apparent waste of material
and energy but with a more complete combination by the great
Mother in her vast upward labour. It is this view of Yoga that
can alone form the basis for a sound and rational synthesis
of Yogic methods. For then Yoga ceases to appear something
mystic and abnormal which has no relation to the ordinary
processes of the World-Energy or the purpose she keeps in view
in her two great movements of subjective and objective self-
fulfilment; it reveals itself rather as an intense and exceptional
use of powers that she has already manifested or is progressively
Life and Yoga
7
organising in her less exalted but more general operations.
Yogic methods have something of the same relation to the
customary psychological workings of man as has the scientific
handling of the force of electricity or of steam to their normal
operations in Nature. And they, too, like the operations of Sci¬
ence, are formed upon a knowledge developed and confirmed
by regular experiment, practical analysis and constant result. All
Rajayoga, for instance, depends on this perception and experi¬
ence that our inner elements, combinations, functions, forces,
can be separated or dissolved, can be new-combined and set to
novel and formerly impossible workings or can be transformed
and resolved into a new general synthesis by fixed internal
processes. Hathayoga similarly depends on this perception and
experience that the vital forces and functions to which our life is
normally subjected and whose ordinary operations seem set and
indispensable, can be mastered and the operations changed or
suspended with results that would otherwise be impossible and
that seem miraculous to those who have not seized the rationale
of their process. And if in some other of its forms this character
of Yoga is less apparent, because they are more intuitive and
less mechanical, nearer, like the Yoga of Devotion, to a supernal
ecstasy or, like the Yoga of Knowledge, to a supernal infinity of
consciousness and being, yet they too start from the use of some
principal faculty in us by ways and for ends not contemplated in
its everyday spontaneous workings. All methods grouped under
the common name of Yoga are special psychological processes
founded on a fixed truth of Nature and developing, out of nor¬
mal functions, powers and results which were always latent but
which her ordinary movements do not easily or do not often
manifest.
But as in physical knowledge the multiplication of scientific
processes has its disadvantages, as that tends, for instance, to
develop a victorious artificiality which overwhelms our natural
human life under a load of machinery and to purchase cer¬
tain forms of freedom and mastery at the price of an increased
servitude, so the preoccupation with Yogic processes and their
exceptional results may have its disadvantages and losses. The
8
The Conditions of the Synthesis
The
8
The Conditions of the Synthesis
Yogin tends to draw away from the common existence and lose
his hold upon it; he tends to purchase wealth of spirit by an
impoverishment of his human activities, the inner freedom by
an outer death. If he gains God, he loses life, or if he turns
his efforts outward to conquer life, he is in danger of losing
God. Therefore we see in India that a sharp incompatibility has
been created between life in the world and spiritual growth and
perfection, and although the tradition and ideal of a victorious
harmony between the inner attraction and the outer demand
remains, it is little or else very imperfectly exemplified. In fact,
when a man turns his vision and energy inward and enters on
the path of Yoga, he is popularly supposed to be lost inevitably
to the great stream of our collective existence and the secular
effort of humanity. So strongly has the idea prevailed, so much
has it been emphasised by prevalent philosophies and religions
that to escape from life is now commonly considered as not
only the necessary condition, but the general object of Yoga. No
synthesis of Yoga can be satisfying which does not, in its aim,
reunite God and Nature in a liberated and perfected human life
or, in its method, not only permit but favour the harmony of our
inner and outer activities and experiences in the divine consum¬
mation of both. For man is precisely that term and symbol of a
higher Existence descended into the material world in which it is
possible for the lower to transfigure itself and put on the nature
of the higher and the higher to reveal itself in the forms of the
lower. To avoid the life which is given him for the realisation of
that possibility, can never be either the indispensable condition
or the whole and ultimate object of his supreme endeavour or
of his most powerful means of self-fulfilment. It can only be
a temporary necessity under certain conditions or a specialised
extreme effort imposed on the individual so as to prepare a
greater general possibility for the race. The true and full object
and utility of Yoga can only be accomplished when the conscious
Yoga in man becomes, like the subconscious Yoga in Nature,
outwardly conterminous with life itself and we can once more,
looking out both on the path and the achievement, say in a more
perfect and luminous sense: “All life is Yoga.”
Chapter II
The Three Steps of Nature
WE RECOGNISE then, in the past developments of
Yoga, a specialising and separative tendency which,
like all things in Nature, had its justifying and even
imperative utility and we seek a synthesis of the specialised aims
and methods which have, in consequence, come into being.
But in order that we may be wisely guided in our effort, we
must know, first, the general principle and purpose underlying
this separative impulse and, next, the particular utilities upon
which the method of each school of Yoga is founded. Eor the
general principle we must interrogate the universal workings
of Nature herself, recognising in her no merely specious and
illusive activity of a distorting Maya, but the cosmic energy
and working of God Himself in His universal being formulating
and inspired by a vast, an infinite and yet a minutely selective
Wisdom, prajhd prasrtd purdni of the Upanishad, Wisdom that
went forth from the Eternal since the beginning. Eor the par¬
ticular utilities we must cast a penetrative eye on the different
methods of Yoga and distinguish among the mass of their de¬
tails the governing idea which they serve and the radical force
which gives birth and energy to their processes of effectuation.
Afterwards we may more easily find the one common princi¬
ple and the one common power from which all derive their
being and tendency, towards which all subconsciously move
and in which, therefore, it is possible for all consciously to
unite.
The progressive self-manifestation of Nature in man, termed
in modern language his evolution, must necessarily depend
upon three successive elements. There is that which is already
evolved; there is that which, still imperfect, still partly fluid,
is persistently in the stage of conscious evolution; and there
is that which is to be evolved and may perhaps be already
10
The Conditions of the Synthesis
There is that which is already
evolved; there is that which, still imperfect, still partly fluid,
is persistently in the stage of conscious evolution; and there
is that which is to be evolved and may perhaps be already
10
The Conditions of the Synthesis
displayed, if not constantly, then occasionally or with some
regularity of recurrence, in primary formations or in others
more developed and, it may well be, even in some, however
rare, that are near to the highest possible realisation of our
present humanity. For the march of Nature is not drilled to a
regular and mechanical forward stepping. She reaches constantly
beyond herself even at the cost of subsequent deplorable retreats.
She has rushes; she has splendid and mighty outbursts; she
has immense realisations. She storms sometimes passionately
forward hoping to take the kingdom of heaven by violence.
And these self-exceedings are the revelation of that in her
which is most divine or else most diabolical, but in either case
the most puissant to bring her rapidly forward towards her
goal.
That which Nature has evolved for us and has firmly
founded is the bodily life. She has effected a certain combina¬
tion and harmony of the two inferior but most fundamentally
necessary elements of our action and progress upon earth, —
Matter, which, however the too ethereally spiritual may despise
it, is our foundation and the first condition of all our energies
and realisations, and the Life-Energy which is our means of
existence in a material body and the basis there even of our
mental and spiritual activities. She has successfully achieved a
certain stability of her constant material movement which is
at once sufficiently steady and durable and sufficiently pliable
and mutable to provide a fit dwelling-place and instrument for
the progressively manifesting god in humanity. This is what is
meant by the fable in the Aitareya Upanishad which tells us
that the gods rejected the animal forms successively offered to
them by the Divine Self and only when man was produced,
cried out, “This indeed is perfectly made,” and consented to
enter in. She has effected also a working compromise between
the inertia of matter and the active Life that lives in and feeds
on it, by which not only is vital existence sustained, but the
fullest developments of mentality are rendered possible. This
equilibrium constitutes the basic status of Nature in man and
is termed in the language of Yoga his gross body composed
The Three Steps of Nature
11
This
equilibrium constitutes the basic status of Nature in man and
is termed in the language of Yoga his gross body composed
The Three Steps of Nature
11
of the material or food sheath and the nervous system or vital
vehicled
If, then, this inferior equilibrium is the basis and first means
of the higher movements which the universal Power contem¬
plates and if it constitutes the vehicle in which the Divine here
seeks to reveal Itself, if the Indian saying is true that the body
is the instrument provided for the fulfilment of the right law of
our nature, then any final recoil from the physical life must be a
turning away from the completeness of the divine Wisdom and
a renunciation of its aim in earthly manifestation. Such a refusal
may be, owing to some secret law of their development, the right
attitude for certain individuals, but never the aim intended for
mankind. It can be, therefore, no integral Yoga which ignores
the body or makes its annulment or its rejection indispensable
to a perfect spirituality. Rather, the perfecting of the body also
should be the last triumph of the Spirit and to make the bodily
life also divine must be God’s final seal upon His work in the
universe. The obstacle which the physical presents to the spiri¬
tual is no argument for the rejection of the physical; for in the
unseen providence of things our greatest difficulties are our best
opportunities. A supreme difficulty is Nature’s indication to us
of a supreme conquest to be won and an ultimate problem to be
solved; it is not a warning of an inextricable snare to be shunned
or of an enemy too strong for us from whom we must flee.
Equally, the vital and nervous energies in us are there for
a great utility; they too demand the divine realisation of their
possibilities in our ultimate fulfilment. The great part assigned
to this element in the universal scheme is powerfully emphasised
by the catholic wisdom of the Upanishads. “As the spokes of
a wheel in its nave, so in the Life-Energy is all established,
the triple knowledge and the Sacrifice and the power of the
strong and the purity of the wise. Under the control of the Life-
Energy is all this that is established in the triple heaven.”^ It is
therefore no integral Yoga that kills these vital energies, forces
them into a nerveless quiescence or roots them out as the source
annakosa and pranakosa. Prasna Upanishad 11. 6 and 13.
12
The Conditions of the Synthesis
Prasna Upanishad 11. 6 and 13.
12
The Conditions of the Synthesis
of noxious activities. Their purification, not their destruction, —
their transformation, control and utilisation is the aim in view
with which they have been created and developed in us.
If the bodily life is what Nature has firmly evolved for us as
her base and first instrument, it is our mental life that she is evolv¬
ing as her immediate next aim and superior instrument. This in
her ordinary exaltations is the lofty preoccupying thought in her;
this, except in her periods of exhaustion and recoil into a repose¬
ful and recuperating obscurity, is her constant pursuit wherever
she can get free from the trammels of her first vital and physical
realisations. For here in man we have a distinction which is of
the utmost importance. He has in him not a single mentality, but
a double and a triple, the mind material and nervous, the pure
intellectual mind which liberates itself from the illusions of the
body and the senses, and a divine mind above intellect which
in its turn liberates itself from the imperfect modes of the logi¬
cally discriminative and imaginative reason. Mind in man is first
emmeshed in the life of the body, where in the plant it is entirely
involved and in animals always imprisoned. It accepts this life
as not only the first but the whole condition of its activities and
serves its needs as if they were the entire aim of existence. But the
bodily life in man is a base, not the aim, his first condition and
not his last determinant. In the just idea of the ancients man is
essentially the thinker, the Mann, the mental being who leads the
life and the body,^ not the animal who is led by them. The true
human existence, therefore, only begins when the intellectual
mentality emerges out of the material and we begin more and
more to live in the mind independent of the nervous and physical
obsession and in the measure of that liberty are able to accept
rightly and rightly to use the life of the body. For freedom and
not a skilful subjection is the true means of mastery. A free, not
a compulsory acceptance of the conditions, the enlarged and
sublimated conditions of our physical being, is the high human
ideal. But beyond this intellectual mentality is the divine.
The mental life thus evolving in man is not, indeed, a
3
manomayah pranasariraneta. Mundaka Upanishad 11. 2. 8.
The Three Steps of Nature
13
But beyond this intellectual mentality is the divine.
The mental life thus evolving in man is not, indeed, a
3
manomayah pranasariraneta. Mundaka Upanishad 11. 2. 8.
The Three Steps of Nature
13
common possession. In actual appearance it would seem as if
it were only developed to the fullest in individuals and as if
there were great numbers and even the majority in whom it
is either a small and ill-organised part of their normal nature
or not evolved at all or latent and not easily made active.
Certainly, the mental life is not a finished evolution of Nature;
it is not yet firmly founded in the human animal. The sign is
that the fine and full equilibrium of vitality and matter, the
sane, robust, long-lived human body is ordinarily found only
in races or classes of men who reject the effort of thought, its
disturbances, its tensions, or think only with the material mind.
Civilised man has yet to establish an equilibrium between the
fully active mind and the body; he does not normally possess it.
Indeed, the increasing effort towards a more intense mental life
seems to create, frequently, an increasing disequilibrium of the
human elements, so that it is possible for eminent scientists to
describe genius as a form of insanity, a result of degeneration,
a pathological morbidity of Nature. The phenomena which are
used to justify this exaggeration, when taken not separately, but
in connection with all other relevant data, point to a different
truth. Genius is one attempt of the universal Energy to so
quicken and intensify our intellectual powers that they shall
be prepared for those more puissant, direct and rapid faculties
which constitute the play of the supra-intellectual or divine
mind. It is not, then, a freak, an inexplicable phenomenon, but
a perfectly natural next step in the right line of her evolution.
She has harmonised the bodily life with the material mind, she
is harmonising it with the play of the intellectual mentality; for
that, although it tends to a depression of the full animal and
vital vigour, need not produce active disturbances. And she is
shooting yet beyond in the attempt to reach a still higher level.
Nor are the disturbances created by her process as great as is
often represented. Some of them are the crude beginnings of
new manifestations; others are an easily corrected movement
of disintegration, often fruitful of fresh activities and always a
small price to pay for the far-reaching results that she has in view.
We may perhaps, if we consider all the circumstances, come
14
We may perhaps, if we consider all the circumstances, come
14
The Conditions of the Synthesis
to this conclusion that mental life, far from being a recent ap¬
pearance in man, is the swift repetition in him of a previous
achievement from which the Energy in the race had undergone
one of her deplorable recoils. The savage is perhaps not so
much the first forefather of civilised man as the degenerate
descendant of a previous civilisation. For if the actuality of
intellectual achievement is unevenly distributed, the capacity is
spread everywhere. It has been seen that in individual cases even
the racial type considered by us the lowest, the negro fresh from
the perennial barbarism of Central Africa, is capable, without
admixture of blood, without waiting for future generations, of
the intellectual culture, if not yet of the intellectual accomplish¬
ment of the dominant European. Even in the mass men seem
to need, in favourable circumstances, only a few generations to
cover ground that ought apparently to be measured in the terms
of millenniums. Either, then, man by his privilege as a mental be¬
ing is exempt from the full burden of the tardy laws of evolution
or else he already represents and with helpful conditions and
in the right stimulating atmosphere can always display a high
level of material capacity for the activities of the intellectual life.
It is not mental incapacity, but the long rejection or seclusion
from opportunity and withdrawal of the awakening impulse
that creates the savage. Barbarism is an intermediate sleep, not
an original darkness.
Moreover the whole trend of modern thought and modern
endeavour reveals itself to the observant eye as a large conscious
effort of Nature in man to effect a general level of intellectual
equipment, capacity and farther possibility by universalising the
opportunities which modern civilisation affords for the men¬
tal life. Even the preoccupation of the European intellect, the
protagonist of this tendency, with material Nature and the ex¬
ternalities of existence is a necessary part of the effort. It seeks
to prepare a sufficient basis in man’s physical being and vital
energies and in his material environment for his full mental
possibilities. By the spread of education, by the advance of the
backward races, by the elevation of depressed classes, by the
multiplication of labour-saving appliances, by the movement
The Three Steps of Nature
15
By the spread of education, by the advance of the
backward races, by the elevation of depressed classes, by the
multiplication of labour-saving appliances, by the movement
The Three Steps of Nature
15
towards ideal social and economic conditions, by the labour
of Science towards an improved health, longevity and sound
physique in civilised humanity, the sense and drift of this vast
movement translates itself in easily intelligible signs. The right
or at least the ultimate means may not always be employed,
but their aim is the right preliminary aim, — a sound individ¬
ual and social body and the satisfaction of the legitimate needs
and demands of the material mind, sufficient ease, leisure, equal
opportunity, so that the whole of mankind and no longer only
the favoured race, class or individual may be free to develop the
emotional and intellectual being to its full capacity. At present
the material and economic aim may predominate, but always,
behind, there works or there waits in reserve the higher and
major impulse.
And when the preliminary conditions are satisfied, when the
great endeavour has found its base, what will be the nature of
that farther possibility which the activities of the intellectual life
must serve? If Mind is indeed Nature’s highest term, then the en¬
tire development of the rational and imaginative intellect and the
harmonious satisfaction of the emotions and sensibilities must
be to themselves sufficient. But if, on the contrary, man is more
than a reasoning and emotional animal, if beyond that which is
being evolved, there is something that has to be evolved, then it
may well be that the fullness of the mental life, the suppleness,
flexibility and wide capacity of the intellect, the ordered richness
of emotion and sensibility may be only a passage towards the
development of a higher life and of more powerful faculties
which are yet to manifest and to take possession of the lower
instrument, just as mind itself has so taken possession of the
body that the physical being no longer lives only for its own
satisfaction but provides the foundation and the materials for a
superior activity.
The assertion of a higher than the mental life is the whole
foundation of Indian philosophy and its acquisition and organ¬
isation is the veritable object served by the methods of Yoga.
Mind is not the last term of evolution, not an ultimate aim, but,
like body, an instrument. It is even so termed in the language of
16
The Conditions of the Synthesis
Mind is not the last term of evolution, not an ultimate aim, but,
like body, an instrument. It is even so termed in the language of
16
The Conditions of the Synthesis
Yoga, the inner instrument/ And Indian tradition asserts that
this which is to be manifested is not a new term in human ex¬
perience, but has been developed before and has even governed
humanity in certain periods of its development. In any case, in or¬
der to be known it must at one time have been partly developed.
And if since then Nature has sunk back from her achievement,
the reason must always be found in some unrealised harmony,
some insufficiency of the intellectual and material basis to which
she has now returned, some over-specialisation of the higher to
the detriment of the lower existence.
But what then constitutes this higher or highest existence to
which our evolution is tending? In order to answer the question
we have to deal with a class of supreme experiences, a class
of unusual conceptions which it is difficult to represent accu¬
rately in any other language than the ancient Sanskrit tongue
in which alone they have been to some extent systematised.
The only approximate terms in the English language have other
associations and their use may lead to many and even serious
inaccuracies. The terminology of Yoga recognises besides the
status of our physical and vital being, termed the gross body
and doubly composed of the food sheath and the vital vehicle,
besides the status of our mental being, termed the subtle body
and singly composed of the mind sheath or mental vehicle,^ a
third, supreme and divine status of supra-mental being, termed
the causal body and composed of a fourth and a fifth vehicle'’
which are described as those of knowledge and bliss. But this
knowledge is not a systematised result of mental questionings
and reasonings, not a temporary arrangement of conclusions
and opinions in the terms of the highest probability, but rather a
pure self-existent and self-luminous Truth. And this bliss is not a
supreme pleasure of the heart and sensations with the experience
of pain and sorrow as its background, but a delight also self-
existent and independent of objects and particular experiences,
a self-delight which is the very nature, the very stuff, as it were,
of a transcendent and infinite existence.
^ antahkarana. ^ manah-kosa. ^ vijiianakosa and anandakosa.
The Three Steps of Nature
17
^ antahkarana. ^ manah-kosa. ^ vijiianakosa and anandakosa.
The Three Steps of Nature
17
Do such psychological conceptions correspond to anything
real and possible? All Yoga asserts them as its ultimate experi¬
ence and supreme aim. They form the governing principles of
our highest possible state of consciousness, our widest possible
range of existence. There is, we say, a harmony of supreme
faculties, corresponding roughly to the psychological faculties
of revelation, inspiration and intuition, yet acting not in the
intuitive reason or the divine mind, but on a still higher plane,
which see Truth directly face to face, or rather live in the truth
of things both universal and transcendent and are its formula¬
tion and luminous activity. And these faculties are the light of
a conscious existence superseding the egoistic and itself both
cosmic and transcendent, the nature of which is Bliss. These are
obviously divine and, as man is at present apparently consti¬
tuted, superhuman states of consciousness and activity. A trinity
of transcendent existence, self-awareness and self-delight^ is,
indeed, the metaphysical description of the supreme Atman,
the self-formulation, to our awakened knowledge, of the Un¬
knowable whether conceived as a pure Impersonality or as a
cosmic Personality manifesting the universe. But in Yoga they
are regarded also in their psychological aspects as states of sub¬
jective existence to which our waking consciousness is now alien,
but which dwell in us in a superconscious plane and to which,
therefore, we may always ascend.
For, as is indicated by the name, causal body {kdrana), as
opposed to the two others which are instruments {karana), this
crowning manifestation is also the source and effective power
of all that in the actual evolution has preceded it. Our mental
activities are, indeed, a derivation, selection and, so long as they
are divided from the truth that is secretly their source, a defor¬
mation of the divine knowledge. Our sensations and emotions
have the same relation to the Bliss, our vital forces and actions
to the aspect of Will or Force assumed by the divine conscious¬
ness, our physical being to the pure essence of that Bliss and
Consciousness. The evolution which we observe and of which
7
saccidananda.
18
The Conditions of the Synthesis
The evolution which we observe and of which
7
saccidananda.
18
The Conditions of the Synthesis
we are the terrestrial summit may be considered, in a sense, as an
inverse manifestation, by which these supreme Powers in their
unity and their diversity use, develop and perfect the imperfect
substance and activities of Matter, of Life and of Mind so that
they, the inferior modes, may express in mutable relativity an
increasing harmony of the divine and eternal states from which
they are born. If this be the truth of the universe, then the goal
of evolution is also its cause, it is that which is immanent in its
elements and out of them is liberated. But the liberation is surely
imperfect if it is only an escape and there is no return upon the
containing substance and activities to exalt and transform them.
The immanence itself would have no credible reason for being
if it did not end in such a transfiguration. But if human mind
can become capable of the glories of the divine Light, human
emotion and sensibility can be transformed into the mould and
assume the measure and movement of the supreme Bliss, human
action not only represent but feel itself to be the motion of a
divine and non-egoistic Force and the physical substance of our
being sufficiently partake of the purity of the supernal essence,
sufficiently unify plasticity and durable constancy to support
and prolong these highest experiences and agencies, then all the
long labour of Nature will end in a crowning justification and
her evolutions reveal their profound significance.
So dazzling is even a glimpse of this supreme existence and
so absorbing its attraction that, once seen, we feel readily jus¬
tified in neglecting all else for its pursuit. Even, by an opposite
exaggeration to that which sees all things in Mind and the men¬
tal life as an exclusive ideal. Mind comes to be regarded as
an unworthy deformation and a supreme obstacle, the source
of an illusory universe, a negation of the Truth and itself to be
denied and all its works and results annulled if we desire the final
liberation. But this is a half-truth which errs by regarding only
the actual limitations of Mind and ignores its divine intention.
The ultimate knowledge is that which perceives and accepts God
in the universe as well as beyond the universe; the integral Yoga
is that which, having found the Transcendent, can return upon
the universe and possess it, retaining the power freely to descend
The Three Steps of Nature
19
as well as ascend the great stair of existence. For if the eternal
Wisdom exists at all, the faculty of Mind also must have some
high use and destiny. That use must depend on its place in the
ascent and in the return and that destiny must be a fulfilment
and transfiguration, not a rooting out or an annulling.
We perceive, then, these three steps in Nature, a bodily life
which is the basis of our existence here in the material world,
a mental life into which we emerge and by which we raise the
bodily to higher uses and enlarge it into a greater completeness,
and a divine existence which is at once the goal of the other
two and returns upon them to liberate them into their highest
possibilities. Regarding none of them as either beyond our reach
or below our nature and the destruction of none of them as
essential to the ultimate attainment, we accept this liberation
and fulfilment as part at least and a large and important part of
the aim of Yoga.
Chapter III
The Threefold Life
Nature, then, is an evolution or progressive self-mani¬
festation of an eternal and secret existence, with three
successive forms as her three steps of ascent. And we
have consequently as the condition of all our activities these
three mutually interdependent possibilities, the bodily life, the
mental existence and the veiled spiritual being which is in the
involution the cause of the others and in the evolution their re¬
sult. Preserving and perfecting the physical, fulfilling the mental,
it is Nature’s aim and it should be ours to unveil in the perfected
body and mind the transcendent activities of the Spirit. As the
mental life does not abrogate but works for the elevation and
better utilisation of the bodily existence, so too the spiritual
should not abrogate but transfigure our intellectual, emotional,
aesthetic and vital activities.
For man, the head of terrestrial Nature, the sole earthly
frame in which her full evolution is possible, is a triple birth. He
has been given a living frame in which the body is the vessel and
life the dynamic means of a divine manifestation. His activity is
centred in a progressive mind which aims at perfecting itself as
well as the house in which it dwells and the means of life that it
uses, and is capable of awaking by a progressive self-realisation
to its own true nature as a form of the Spirit. He culminates
in what he always really was, the illumined and beatific spirit
which is intended at last to irradiate life and mind with its now
concealed splendours.
He culminates
in what he always really was, the illumined and beatific spirit
which is intended at last to irradiate life and mind with its now
concealed splendours.
Since this is the plan of the divine Energy in humanity, the
whole method and aim of our existence must work by the inter¬
action of these three elements in the being. As a result of their
separate formulation in Nature, man has open to him a choice
between three kinds of life, the ordinary material existence, a
life of mental activity and progress and the unchanging spiritual
The Threefold Life
21
beatitude. But he can, as he progresses, combine these three
forms, resolve their discords into a harmonious rhythm and so
create in himself the whole godhead, the perfect Man.
In ordinary Nature they have each their own characteristic
and governing impulse.
The characteristic energy of bodily Life is not so much
in progress as in persistence, not so much in individual self¬
enlargement as in self-repetition. There is, indeed, in physical
Nature a progression from type to type, from the vegetable to the
animal, from the animal to man; for even in inanimate Matter
Mind is at work. But once a type is marked off physically, the
chief immediate preoccupation of the terrestrial Mother seems to
be to keep it in being by a constant reproduction. For Life always
seeks immortality; but since individual form is impermanent
and only the idea of a form is permanent in the consciousness
that creates the universe, — for there it does not perish, — such
constant reproduction is the only possible material immortality.
Self-preservation, self-repetition, self-multiplication are neces¬
sarily, then, the predominant instincts of all material existence.
Material life seems ever to move in a fixed cycle.
The characteristic energy of pure Mind is change, and
the more our mentality acquires elevation and organisation,
the more this law of Mind assumes the aspect of a continual
enlargement, improvement and better arrangement of its gains
and so of a continual passage from a smaller and simpler to a
larger and more complex perfection. For Mind, unlike bodily
life, is infinite in its field, elastic in its expansion, easily variable
in its formations. Change, then, self-enlargement and self-
improvement are its proper instincts. Mind too moves in cycles,
but these are ever-enlarging spirals. Its faith is perfectibility, its
watchword is progress.
Change, then, self-enlargement and self-
improvement are its proper instincts. Mind too moves in cycles,
but these are ever-enlarging spirals. Its faith is perfectibility, its
watchword is progress.
The characteristic law of Spirit is self-existent perfection
and immutable infinity. It possesses always and in its own right
the immortality which is the aim of Life and the perfection
which is the goal of Mind. The attainment of the eternal and the
realisation of that which is the same in all things and beyond all
things, equally blissful in universe and outside it, untouched by
22
The Conditions of the Synthesis
the imperfections and limitations of the forms and activities in
which it dwells, are the glory of the spiritual life.
In each of these forms Nature acts both individually and
collectively; for the Eternal affirms Himself equally in the single
form and in the group-existence, whether family, clan and na¬
tion or groupings dependent on less physical principles or the
supreme group of all, our collective humanity. Man also may
seek his own individual good from any or all of these spheres of
activity, or identify himself in them with the collectivity and live
for it, or, rising to a truer perception of this complex universe,
harmonise the individual realisation with the collective aim. For
as it is the right relation of the soul with the Supreme, while it
is in the universe, neither to assert egoistically its separate being
nor to blot itself out in the Indefinable, but to realise its unity
with the Divine and the world and unite them in the individual,
so the right relation of the individual with the collectivity is nei¬
ther to pursue egoistically his own material or mental progress or
spiritual salvation without regard to his fellows, nor for the sake
of the community to suppress or maim his proper development,
but to sum up in himself all its best and completest possibilities
and pour them out by thought, action and all other means on
his surroundings so that the whole race may approach nearer to
the attainment of its supreme personalities.
It follows that the object of the material life must be to fulfil,
above all things, the vital aim of Nature. The whole aim of the
material man is to live, to pass from birth to death with as much
comfort or enjoyment as may be on the way, but anyhow to live.
He can subordinate this aim, but only to physical Nature’s other
instincts, the reproduction of the individual and the conservation
of the type in the family, class or community. Self, domesticity,
the accustomed order of the society and of the nation are the
constituents of the material existence. Its immense importance in
the economy of Nature is self-evident, and commensurate is the
importance of the human type which represents it. He assures
her of the safety of the framework she has made and of the
orderly continuance and conservation of her past gains.
But by that very utility such men and the life they lead are
The Threefold Life
23
condemned to be limited, irrationally conservative and earth-
bound. The customary routine, the customary institutions, the
inherited or habitual forms of thought, — these things are the
life-breath of their nostrils. They admit and jealously defend
the changes compelled by the progressive mind in the past, but
combat with equal zeal the changes that are being made by it
in the present. For to the material man the living progressive
thinker is an ideologue, dreamer or madman. The old Semites
who stoned the living prophets and adored their memories when
dead, were the very incarnation of this instinctive and unin¬
telligent principle in Nature. In the ancient Indian distinction
between the once born and the twice born, it is to this mate¬
rial man that the former description can be applied. He does
Nature’s inferior works; he assures the basis for her higher ac¬
tivities; but not to him easily are opened the glories of her second
birth.
He does
Nature’s inferior works; he assures the basis for her higher ac¬
tivities; but not to him easily are opened the glories of her second
birth.
Yet he admits so much of spirituality as has been enforced on
his customary ideas by the great religious outbursts of the past
and he makes in his scheme of society a place, venerable though
not often effective, for the priest or the learned theologian who
can be trusted to provide him with a safe and ordinary spiritual
pabulum. But to the man who would assert for himself the
liberty of spiritual experience and the spiritual life, he assigns,
if he admits him at all, not the vestment of the priest but the
robe of the Sannyasin. Outside society let him exercise his dan¬
gerous freedom. So he may even serve as a human lightning-rod
receiving the electricity of the Spirit and turning it away from
the social edifice.
Nevertheless it is possible to make the material man and his
life moderately progressive by imprinting on the material mind
the custom of progress, the habit of conscious change, the fixed
idea of progression as a law of life. The creation by this means
of progressive societies in Europe is one of the greatest triumphs
of Mind over Matter. But the physical nature has its revenge; for
the progress made tends to be of the grosser and more outward
kind and its attempts at a higher or a more rapid movement bring
about great wearinesses, swift exhaustions, startling recoils.
24
The Conditions of the Synthesis
It is possible also to give the material man and his life a
moderate spirituality by accustoming him to regard in a religious
spirit all the institutions of life and its customary activities. The
creation of such spiritualised communities in the East has been
one of the greatest triumphs of Spirit over Matter. Yet here, too,
there is a defect; for this often tends only to the creation of a
religious temperament, the most outward form of spirituality.
Its higher manifestations, even the most splendid and puissant,
either merely increase the number of souls drawn out of social
life and so impoverish it or disturb the society for a while by
a momentary elevation. The truth is that neither the mental
effort nor the spiritual impulse can suffice, divorced from each
other, to overcome the immense resistance of material Nature.
She demands their alliance in a complete effort before she will
suffer a complete change in humanity. But, usually, these two
great agents are unwilling to make to each other the necessary
concessions.
She demands their alliance in a complete effort before she will
suffer a complete change in humanity. But, usually, these two
great agents are unwilling to make to each other the necessary
concessions.
The mental life concentrates on the aesthetic, the ethical and
the intellectual activities. Essential mentality is idealistic and a
seeker after perfection. The subtle self, the brilliant Atman, ^ is
ever a dreamer. A dream of perfect beauty, perfect conduct,
perfect Truth, whether seeking new forms of the Eternal or
revitalising the old, is the very soul of pure mentality. But it
knows not how to deal with the resistance of Matter. There it is
hampered and inefficient, works by bungling experiments and
has either to withdraw from the struggle or submit to the grey
actuality. Or else, by studying the material life and accepting the
conditions of the contest, it may succeed, but only in imposing
temporarily some artificial system which infinite Nature either
rends and casts aside or disfigures out of recognition or by with¬
drawing her assent leaves as the corpse of a dead ideal. Eew and
far between have been those realisations of the dreamer in Man
which the world has gladly accepted, looks back to with a fond
memory and seeks, in its elements, to cherish.
^ who dwells in Dream, the inly conscious, the enjoyer of abstractions, the Brilliant.
Mandukya Upanishad 4.
The Threefold Life
25
When the gulf between actual life and the temperament of
the thinker is too great, we see as the result a sort of withdrawing
of the Mind from life in order to act with a greater freedom in its
own sphere. The poet living among his brilliant visions, the artist
absorbed in his art, the philosopher thinking out the problems
of the intellect in his solitary chamber, the scientist, the scholar
caring only for their studies and their experiments, were often
in former days, are even now not unoften the Sannyasins of the
intellect. To the work they have done for humanity, all its past
bears record.
To the work they have done for humanity, all its past
bears record.
But such seclusion is justified only by some special activity.
Mind finds fully its force and action only when it casts itself
upon life and accepts equally its possibilities and its resistances
as the means of a greater self-perfection. In the struggle with
the difficulties of the material world the ethical development of
the individual is firmly shaped and the great schools of conduct
are formed; by contact with the facts of life Art attains to vital¬
ity, Thought assures its abstractions, the generalisations of the
philosopher base themselves on a stable foundation of science
and experience.
This mixing with life may, however, be pursued for the sake
of the individual mind and with an entire indifference to the
forms of the material existence or the uplifting of the race. This
indifference is seen at its highest in the Epicurean discipline and
is not entirely absent from the Stoic; and even altruism does the
works of compassion more often for its own sake than for the
sake of the world it helps. But this too is a limited fulfilment. The
progressive mind is seen at its noblest when it strives to elevate
the whole race to its own level whether by sowing broadcast
the image of its own thought and fulfilment or by changing the
material life of the race into fresh forms, religious, intellectual,
social or political, intended to represent more nearly that ideal of
truth, beauty, justice, righteousness with which the man’s own
soul is illumined. Failure in such a field matters little; for the
mere attempt is dynamic and creative. The struggle of Mind to
elevate life is the promise and condition of the conquest of life
by that which is higher even than Mind.
26
The Conditions of the Synthesis
Failure in such a field matters little; for the
mere attempt is dynamic and creative. The struggle of Mind to
elevate life is the promise and condition of the conquest of life
by that which is higher even than Mind.
26
The Conditions of the Synthesis
That highest thing, the spiritual existence, is concerned with
what is eternal but not therefore entirely aloof from the tran¬
sient. For the spiritual man the mind’s dream of perfect beauty is
realised in an eternal love, beauty and delight that has no depen¬
dence and is equal behind all objective appearances; its dream
of perfect Truth in the supreme, self-existent, self-apparent and
eternal Verity which never varies, but explains and is the secret
of all variations and the goal of all progress; its dream of perfect
action in the omnipotent and self-guiding Law that is inherent
for ever in all things and translates itself here in the rhythm of
the worlds. What is fugitive vision or constant effort of creation
in the brilliant Self is an eternally existing Reality in the Self that
knows^ and is the Lord.
But if it is often difficult for the mental life to accommodate
itself to the dully resistant material activity, how much more
difficult must it seem for the spiritual existence to live on in
a world that appears full not of the Truth but of every lie and
illusion, not of Love and Beauty but of an encompassing discord
and ugliness, not of the Law of Truth but of victorious selfishness
and sin? Therefore the spiritual life tends easily in the saint and
Sannyasin to withdraw from the material existence and reject it
either wholly and physically or in the spirit. It sees this world as
the kingdom of evil or of ignorance and the eternal and divine
either in a far-off heaven or beyond where there is no world and
no life. It separates itself inwardly, if not also physically, from
the world’s impurities; it asserts the spiritual reality in a spotless
isolation. This withdrawal renders an invaluable service to the
material life itself by forcing it to regard and even to bow down
to something that is the direct negation of its own petty ideals,
sordid cares and egoistic self-content.
But the work in the world of so supreme a power as spiritual
force cannot be thus limited. The spiritual life also can return
upon the material and use it as a means of its own greater
The Unified, in whom conscious thought is concentrated, who is all delight and
enjoyer of delight, the Wise. . . . He is the Lord of all, the Omniscient, the inner Guide.
Mandukya Upanishad 5, 6.
. . . He is the Lord of all, the Omniscient, the inner Guide.
Mandukya Upanishad 5, 6.
The Threefold Life
27
fullness. Refusing to be blinded by the dualities, the appear¬
ances, it can seek in all appearances whatsoever the vision of the
same Lord, the same eternal Truth, Beauty, Love, Delight. The
Vedantic formula of the Self in all things, all things in the Self
and all things as becomings of the Self is the key to this richer
and all-embracing Yoga.
But the spiritual life, like the mental, may thus make use
of this outward existence for the benefit of the individual with
a perfect indifference to any collective uplifting of the merely
symbolic world which it uses. Since the Eternal is for ever the
same in all things and all things the same to the Eternal, since
the exact mode of action and the result are of no importance
compared with the working out in oneself of the one great
realisation, this spiritual indifference accepts no matter what
environment, no matter what action, dispassionately, prepared
to retire as soon as its own supreme end is realised. It is so
that many have understood the ideal of the Gita. Or else the
inner love and bliss may pour itself out on the world in good
deeds, in service, in compassion, the inner Truth in the giving
of knowledge, without therefore attempting the transformation
of a world which must by its inalienable nature remain a battle¬
field of the dualities, of sin and virtue, of truth and error, of joy
and suffering.
But if Progress also is one of the chief terms of world-
existence and a progressive manifestation of the Divine the true
sense of Nature, this limitation also is invalid. It is possible
for the spiritual life in the world, and it is its real mission, to
change the material life into its own image, the image of the
Divine. Therefore, besides the great solitaries who have sought
and attained their self-liberation, we have the great spiritual
teachers who have also liberated others and, supreme of all,
the great dynamic souls who, feeling themselves stronger in the
might of the Spirit than all the forces of the material life banded
together, have thrown themselves upon the world, grappled with
it in a loving wrestle and striven to compel its consent to its
own transfiguration. Ordinarily, the effort is concentrated on a
mental and moral change in humanity, but it may extend itself
28
The Conditions of the Synthesis
Ordinarily, the effort is concentrated on a
mental and moral change in humanity, but it may extend itself
28
The Conditions of the Synthesis
also to the alteration of the forms of our life and its institutions
so that they too may be a better mould for the inpourings of
the Spirit. These attempts have been the supreme landmarks
in the progressive development of human ideals and the divine
preparation of the race. Every one of them, whatever its outward
results, has left Earth more capable of Heaven and quickened in
its tardy movements the evolutionary Yoga of Nature.
In India, for the last thousand years and more, the spiritual
life and the material have existed side by side to the exclusion
of the progressive mind. Spirituality has made terms for itself
with Matter by renouncing the attempt at general progress. It
has obtained from society the right of free spiritual development
for all who assume some distinctive symbol, such as the garb
of the Sannyasin, the recognition of that life as man’s goal and
those who live it as worthy of an absolute reverence, and the
casting of society itself into such a religious mould that its most
customary acts should be accompanied by a formal reminder of
the spiritual symbolism of life and its ultimate destination. On
the other hand, there was conceded to society the right of inertia
and immobile self-conservation. The concession destroyed much
of the value of the terms. The religious mould being fixed, the
formal reminder tended to become a routine and to lose its living
sense. The constant attempts to change the mould by new sects
and religions ended only in a new routine or a modification of
the old; for the saving element of the free and active mind had
been exiled. The material life, handed over to the Ignorance, the
purposeless and endless duality, became a leaden and dolorous
yoke from which flight was the only escape.
The schools of Indian Yoga lent themselves to the com¬
promise. Individual perfection or liberation was made the aim,
seclusion of some kind from the ordinary activities the condi¬
tion, the renunciation of life the culmination. The teacher gave
his knowledge only to a small circle of disciples. Or if a wider
movement was attempted, it was still the release of the individual
soul that remained the aim. The pact with an immobile society
was, for the most part, observed.
The utility of the compromise in the then actual state of the
The Threefold Life
29
The pact with an immobile society
was, for the most part, observed.
The utility of the compromise in the then actual state of the
The Threefold Life
29
world cannot be doubted. It secured in India a society which
lent itself to the preservation and the worship of spirituality, a
country apart in which as in a fortress the highest spiritual ideal
could maintain itself in its most absolute purity unoverpowered
by the siege of the forces around it. But it was a compromise,
not an absolute victory. The material life lost the divine impulse
to growth, the spiritual preserved by isolation its height and
purity, but sacrificed its full power and serviceableness to the
world. Therefore, in the divine Providence the country of the
Yogins and the Sannyasins has been forced into a strict and
imperative contact with the very element it had rejected, the
element of the progressive Mind, so that it might recover what
was now wanting to it.
We have to recognise once more that the individual exists
not in himself alone but in the collectivity and that individual
perfection and liberation are not the whole sense of God’s inten¬
tion in the world. The free use of our liberty includes also the
liberation of others and of mankind; the perfect utility of our
perfection is, having realised in ourselves the divine symbol, to
reproduce, multiply and ultimately universalise it in others.
Therefore from a concrete view of human life in its threefold
potentialities we come to the same conclusion that we had drawn
from an observation of Nature in her general workings and the
three steps of her evolution. And we begin to perceive a complete
aim for our synthesis of Yoga.
Spirit is the crown of universal existence; Matter is its basis;
Mind is the link between the two. Spirit is that which is eter¬
nal; Mind and Matter are its workings. Spirit is that which is
concealed and has to be revealed; mind and body are the means
by which it seeks to reveal itself. Spirit is the image of the Lord
of the Yoga; mind and body are the means He has provided for
reproducing that image in phenomenal existence. All Nature is
an attempt at a progressive revelation of the concealed Truth, a
more and more successful reproduction of the divine image.
But what Nature aims at for the mass in a slow evolution.
Yoga effects for the individual by a rapid revolution. It works
by a quickening of all her energies, a sublimation of all her
30
The Conditions of the Synthesis
But what Nature aims at for the mass in a slow evolution.
Yoga effects for the individual by a rapid revolution. It works
by a quickening of all her energies, a sublimation of all her
30
The Conditions of the Synthesis
faculties. While she develops the spiritual life with difficulty and
has constantly to fall back from it for the sake of her lower
realisations, the sublimated force, the concentrated method of
Yoga can attain directly and carry with it the perfection of the
mind and even, if she will, the perfection of the body. Nature
seeks the Divine in her own symbols: Yoga goes beyond Nature
to the Lord of Nature, beyond universe to the Transcendent and
can return with the transcendent light and power, with the fiat
of the Omnipotent.
But their aim is one in the end. The generalisation of Yoga in
humanity must be the last victory of Nature over her own delays
and concealments. Even as now by the progressive mind in Sci¬
ence she seeks to make all mankind fit for the full development
of the mental life, so by Yoga must she inevitably seek to make
all mankind fit for the higher evolution, the second birth, the
spiritual existence. And as the mental life uses and perfects the
material, so will the spiritual use and perfect the material and the
mental existence as the instruments of a divine self-expression.
The ages when that is accomplished, are the legendary Satya or
Krita^ Yugas, the ages of the Truth manifested in the symbol,
of the great work done when Nature in mankind, illumined,
satisfied and blissful, rests in the culmination of her endeavour.
It is for man to know her meaning, no longer misunderstand¬
ing, vilifying or misusing the universal Mother, and to aspire
always by her mightiest means to her highest ideal.
3
Satya means Truth; Krita, effected or completed.
Chapter IV
The Systems of Yoga
These relations between the different psychological divi¬
sions of the human being and these various utilities and
objects of effort founded on them, such as we have seen
them in our brief survey of the natural evolution, we shall find
repeated in the fundamental principles and methods of the differ¬
ent schools of Yoga. And if we seek to combine and harmonise
their central practices and their predominant aims, we shall find
that the basis provided by Nature is still our natural basis and
the condition of their synthesis.
And if we seek to combine and harmonise
their central practices and their predominant aims, we shall find
that the basis provided by Nature is still our natural basis and
the condition of their synthesis.
In one respect Yoga exceeds the normal operation of cosmic
Nature and climbs beyond her. Eor the aim of the Universal
Mother is to embrace the Divine in her own play and creations
and there to realise It. But in the highest flights of Yoga she
reaches beyond herself and realises the Divine in Itself exceed¬
ing the universe and even standing apart from the cosmic play.
Therefore by some it is supposed that this is not only the highest
but also the one true or exclusively preferable object of Yoga.
Yet it is always through something which she has formed in
her evolution that Nature thus overpasses her evolution. It is the
individual heart that by sublimating its highest and purest emo¬
tions attains to the transcendent Bliss or the ineffable Nirvana,
the individual mind that by converting its ordinary functionings
into a knowledge beyond mentality knows its oneness with the
Ineffable and merges its separate existence in that transcendent
unity. And always it is the individual, the Self conditioned in its
experience by Nature and working through her formations, that
attains to the Self unconditioned, free and transcendent.
In practice three conceptions are necessary before there can
be any possibility of Yoga; there must be, as it were, three con¬
senting parties to the effort, — God, Nature and the human soul
or, in more abstract language, the Transcendental, the Universal
32
The Conditions of the Synthesis
and the Individual. If the individual and Nature are left to
themselves, the one is bound to the other and unable to ex¬
ceed appreciably her lingering march. Something transcendent
is needed, free from her and greater, which will act upon us and
her, attracting us upward to Itself and securing from her by good
grace or by force her consent to the individual ascension.
Something transcendent
is needed, free from her and greater, which will act upon us and
her, attracting us upward to Itself and securing from her by good
grace or by force her consent to the individual ascension.
It is this truth which makes necessary to every philosophy
of Yoga the conception of the Ishwara, Lord, supreme Soul or
supreme Self, towards whom the effort is directed and who gives
the illuminating touch and the strength to attain. Equally true
is the complementary idea so often enforced by the Yoga of
devotion that as the Transcendent is necessary to the individual
and sought after by him, so also the individual is necessary
in a sense to the Transcendent and sought after by It. If the
Bhakta seeks and yearns after Bhagavan, Bhagavan also seeks
and yearns after the Bhakta.^ There can be no Yoga of knowl¬
edge without a human seeker of the knowledge, the supreme
subject of knowledge and the divine use by the individual of the
universal faculties of knowledge; no Yoga of devotion without
the human God-lover, the supreme object of love and delight
and the divine use by the individual of the universal faculties of
spiritual, emotional and aesthetic enjoyment; no Yoga of works
without the human worker, the supreme Will, Master of all
works and sacrifices, and the divine use by the individual of the
universal faculties of power and action. However Monistic may
be our intellectual conception of the highest truth of things, in
practice we are compelled to accept this omnipresent Trinity.
For the contact of the human and individual consciousness
with the divine is the very essence of Yoga. Yoga is the union
of that which has become separated in the play of the universe
with its own true self, origin and universality. The contact may
take place at any point of the complex and intricately organised
consciousness which we call our personality. It may be effected in
the physical through the body; in the vital through the action of
^ Bhakta, the devotee or lover of God; Bhagavan, God, the Lord of Love and Delight.
The third term of the trinity is Bhagavat, the divine revelation of Love.
The Systems of Yoga
33
The third term of the trinity is Bhagavat, the divine revelation of Love.
The Systems of Yoga
33
those functionings which determine the state and the experiences
of our nervous being; through the mentality, whether by means
of the emotional heart, the active will or the understanding mind,
or more largely by a general conversion of the mental conscious¬
ness in all its activities. It may equally be accomplished through
a direct awakening to the universal or transcendent Truth and
Bliss by the conversion of the central ego in the mind. And
according to the point of contact that we choose will be the type
of the Yoga that we practise.
For if, leaving aside the complexities of their particular pro¬
cesses, we fix our regard on the central principle of the chief
schools of Yoga still prevalent in India, we find that they arrange
themselves in an ascending order which starts from the lowest
rung of the ladder, the body, and ascends to the direct contact
between the individual soul and the transcendent and universal
Self. Hathayoga selects the body and the vital functionings as
its instruments of perfection and realisation; its concern is with
the gross body. Rajayoga selects the mental being in its different
parts as its lever-power; it concentrates on the subtle body. The
triple Path of Works, of Love and of Knowledge uses some part
of the mental being, will, heart or intellect as a starting-point
and seeks by its conversion to arrive at the liberating Truth,
Beatitude and Infinity which are the nature of the spiritual life.
Its method is a direct commerce between the human Purusha in
the individual body and the divine Purusha who dwells in every
body and yet transcends all form and name.
Hathayoga aims at the conquest of the life and the body
whose combination in the food sheath and the vital vehicle con¬
stitutes, as we have seen, the gross body and whose equilibrium is
the foundation of all Nature’s workings in the human being. The
equilibrium established by Nature is sufficient for the normal
egoistic life; it is insufficient for the purpose of the Hathayogin.
For it is calculated on the amount of vital or dynamic force
necessary to drive the physical engine during the normal span of
human life and to perform more or less adequately the various
workings demanded of it by the individual life inhabiting this
frame and the world-environment by which it is conditioned.
34
The Conditions of the Synthesis
34
The Conditions of the Synthesis
Hathayoga therefore seeks to rectify Nature and establish an¬
other equilibrium by which the physical frame will be able to
sustain the inrush of an increasing vital or dynamic force of
Prana indefinite, almost infinite in its quantity or intensity. In
Nature the equilibrium is based upon the individualisation of
a limited quantity and force of the Prana; more than that the
individual is by personal and hereditary habit unable to bear,
use or control. In Hathayoga, the equilibrium opens a door to
the universalisation of the individual vitality by admitting into
the body, containing, using and controlling a much less fixed
and limited action of the universal energy.
The chief processes of Hathayoga are dsana and prdndydma.
By its numerous dsanas or fixed postures it first cures the body
of that restlessness which is a sign of its inability to contain
without working them off in action and movement the vital
forces poured into it from the universal Life- Ocean, gives to it an
extraordinary health, force and suppleness and seeks to liberate
it from the habits by which it is subjected to ordinary physical
Nature and kept within the narrow bounds of her normal oper¬
ations. In the ancient tradition of Hathayoga it has always been
supposed that this conquest could be pushed so far even as to
conquer to a great extent the force of gravitation. By various
subsidiary but elaborate processes the Hathayogin next con¬
trives to keep the body free from all impurities and the nervous
system unclogged for those exercises of respiration which are
his most important instruments. These are called prdndydma,
the control of the breath or vital power; for breathing is the
chief physical functioning of the vital forces. Pranayama, for
the Hathayogin, serves a double purpose. First, it completes
the perfection of the body. The vitality is liberated from many
of the ordinary necessities of physical Nature; robust health,
prolonged youth, often an extraordinary longevity are attained.
On the other hand, Pranayama awakens the coiled-up serpent of
the Pranic dynamism in the vital sheath and opens to the Yogin
fields of consciousness, ranges of experience, abnormal faculties
denied to the ordinary human life while it puissantly intensi¬
fies such normal powers and faculties as he already possesses.
The Systems of Yoga
35
These advantages can be farther secured and emphasised by
other subsidiary processes open to the Hathayogin.
The Systems of Yoga
35
These advantages can be farther secured and emphasised by
other subsidiary processes open to the Hathayogin.
The results of Hathayoga are thus striking to the eye and
impose easily on the vulgar or physical mind. And yet at the
end we may ask what we have gained at the end of all this
stupendous labour. The object of physical Nature, the preser¬
vation of the mere physical life, its highest perfection, even in
a certain sense the capacity of a greater enjoyment of physical
living have been carried out on an abnormal scale. But the weak¬
ness of Hathayoga is that its laborious and difficult processes
make so great a demand on the time and energy and impose
so complete a severance from the ordinary life of men that the
utilisation of its results for the life of the world becomes either
impracticable or is extraordinarily restricted. If in return for this
loss we gain another life in another world within, the mental,
the dynamic, these results could have been acquired through
other systems, through Rajayoga, through Tantra, by much less
laborious methods and held on much less exacting terms. On
the other hand the physical results, increased vitality, prolonged
youth, health, longevity are of small avail if they must be held
by us as misers of ourselves, apart from the common life, for
their own sake, not utilised, not thrown into the common sum
of the world’s activities. Hathayoga attains large results, but at
an exorbitant price and to very little purpose.
Rajayoga takes a higher flight. It aims at the liberation and
perfection not of the bodily, but of the mental being, the control
of the emotional and sensational life, the mastery of the whole
apparatus of thought and consciousness. It fixes its eyes on the
citta, that stuff of mental consciousness in which all these ac¬
tivities arise, and it seeks, even as Hathayoga with its physical
material, first to purify and to tranquillise. The normal state of
man is a condition of trouble and disorder, a kingdom either
at war with itself or badly governed; for the lord, the Purusha,
is subjected to his ministers, the faculties, subjected even to his
subjects, the instruments of sensation, emotion, action, enjoy¬
ment. Swarajya, self-rule, must be substituted for this subjection.
First, therefore, the powers of order must be helped to overcome
36
The Conditions of the Synthesis
Swarajya, self-rule, must be substituted for this subjection.
First, therefore, the powers of order must be helped to overcome
36
The Conditions of the Synthesis
the powers of disorder. The preliminary movement of Rajayoga
is a careful self-discipline by which good habits of mind are
substituted for the lawless movements that indulge the lower
nervous being. By the practice of truth, by renunciation of all
forms of egoistic seeking, by abstention from injury to others,
by purity, by constant meditation and inclination to the divine
Purusha who is the true lord of the mental kingdom, a pure,
glad, clear state of mind and heart is established.
This is the first step only. Afterwards, the ordinary activities
of the mind and sense must be entirely quieted in order that the
soul may be free to ascend to higher states of consciousness and
acquire the foundation for a perfect freedom and self-mastery.
But Rajayoga does not forget that the disabilities of the ordi¬
nary mind proceed largely from its subjection to the reactions
of the nervous system and the body. It adopts therefore from
the Hathayogic system its devices of dsana and prdndydma,
but reduces their multiple and elaborate forms in each case to
one simplest and most directly effective process sufficient for
its own immediate object. Thus it gets rid of the Hathayogic
complexity and cumbrousness while it utilises the swift and
powerful efficacy of its methods for the control of the body
and the vital functions and for the awakening of that internal
dynamism, full of a latent supernormal faculty, typified in Yogic
terminology by the kundalini, the coiled and sleeping serpent
of Energy within. This done, the system proceeds to the perfect
quieting of the restless mind and its elevation to a higher plane
through concentration of mental force by the successive stages
which lead to the utmost inner concentration or ingathered state
of the consciousness which is called Samadhi.
By Samadhi, in which the mind acquires the capacity of
withdrawing from its limited waking activities into freer and
higher states of consciousness, Rajayoga serves a double pur¬
pose. It compasses a pure mental action liberated from the
confusions of the outer consciousness and passes thence to the
higher supra-mental planes on which the individual soul enters
into its true spiritual existence. But also it acquires the capacity
of that free and concentrated energising of consciousness on
The Systems of Yoga
37
But also it acquires the capacity
of that free and concentrated energising of consciousness on
The Systems of Yoga
37
its object which our philosophy asserts as the primary cosmic
energy and the method of divine action upon the world. By
this capacity the Yogin, already possessed of the highest supra-
cosmic knowledge and experience in the state of trance, is able
in the waking state to acquire directly whatever knowledge
and exercise whatever mastery may be useful or necessary to
his activities in the objective world. For the ancient system of
Rajayoga aimed not only at Swarajya, self-rule or subjective
empire, the entire control by the subjective consciousness of all
the states and activities proper to its own domain, but included
Samrajya as well, outward empire, the control by the subjective
consciousness of its outer activities and environment.
We perceive that as Hathayoga, dealing with the life and
body, aims at the supernormal perfection of the physical life and
its capacities and goes beyond it into the domain of the mental
life, so Rajayoga, operating with the mind, aims at a supernor¬
mal perfection and enlargement of the capacities of the mental
life and goes beyond it into the domain of the spiritual existence.
But the weakness of the system lies in its excessive reliance on
abnormal states of trance. This limitation leads first to a certain
aloofness from the physical life which is our foundation and the
sphere into which we have to bring our mental and spiritual
gains. Especially is the spiritual life, in this system, too much
associated with the state of Samadhi. Our object is to make the
spiritual life and its experiences fully active and fully utilisable
in the waking state and even in the normal use of the functions.
But in Rajayoga it tends to withdraw into a subliminal plane at
the back of our normal experiences instead of descending and
possessing our whole existence.
The triple Path of devotion, knowledge and works attempts
the province which Rajayoga leaves unoccupied. It differs from
Rajayoga in that it does not occupy itself with the elaborate
training of the whole mental system as the condition of perfec¬
tion, but seizes on certain central principles, the intellect, the
heart, the will, and seeks to convert their normal operations by
turning them away from their ordinary and external preoccu¬
pations and activities and concentrating them on the Divine. It
38
The Conditions of the Synthesis
It
38
The Conditions of the Synthesis
differs also in this, — and here from the point of view of an
integral Yoga there seems to be a defect, — that it is indifferent
to mental and bodily perfection and aims only at purity as a
condition of the divine realisation. A second defect is that as
actually practised it chooses one of the three parallel paths
exclusively and almost in antagonism to the others instead of
effecting a synthetic harmony of the intellect, the heart and the
will in an integral divine realisation.
The Path of Knowledge aims at the realisation of the unique
and supreme Self. It proceeds by the method of intellectual
reflection, vicdra, to right discrimination, viveka. It observes
and distinguishes the different elements of our apparent or phe¬
nomenal being and rejecting identification with each of them
arrives at their exclusion and separation in one common term
as constituents of Prakriti, of phenomenal Nature, creations of
Maya, the phenomenal consciousness. So it is able to arrive at
its right identification with the pure and unique Self which is not
mutable or perishable, not determinable by any phenomenon or
combination of phenomena. From this point the path, as ordi¬
narily followed, leads to the rejection of the phenomenal worlds
from the consciousness as an illusion and the final immergence
without return of the individual soul in the Supreme.
But this exclusive consummation is not the sole or inevitable
result of the Path of Knowledge. For, followed more largely and
with a less individual aim, the method of Knowledge may lead
to an active conquest of the cosmic existence for the Divine no
less than to a transcendence. The point of this departure is the
realisation of the supreme Self not only in one’s own being but
in all beings and, finally, the realisation of even the phenome¬
nal aspects of the world as a play of the divine consciousness
and not something entirely alien to its true nature. And on the
basis of this realisation a yet further enlargement is possible, the
conversion of all forms of knowledge, however mundane, into
activities of the divine consciousness utilisable for the perception
of the one and unique Object of knowledge both in itself and
through the play of its forms and symbols. Such a method might
well lead to the elevation of the whole range of human intellect
The Systems of Yoga
39
and perception to the divine level, to its spiritualisation and to
the justification of the cosmic travail of knowledge in humanity.
Such a method might
well lead to the elevation of the whole range of human intellect
The Systems of Yoga
39
and perception to the divine level, to its spiritualisation and to
the justification of the cosmic travail of knowledge in humanity.
The Path of Devotion aims at the enjoyment of the supreme
Love and Bliss and utilises normally the conception of the
supreme Lord in His personality as the divine Lover and enjoyer
of the universe. The world is then realised as a play of the
Lord, with our human life as its final stage, pursued through
the different phases of self-concealment and self-revelation. The
principle of Bhakti Yoga is to utilise all the normal relations of
human life into which emotion enters and apply them no longer
to transient worldly relations, but to the joy of the All-Loving,
the All-Beautiful and the All-Blissful. Worship and meditation
are used only for the preparation and increase of intensity of
the divine relationship. And this Yoga is catholic in its use of all
emotional relations, so that even enmity and opposition to God,
considered as an intense, impatient and perverse form of Love,
is conceived as a possible means of realisation and salvation.
This path, too, as ordinarily practised, leads away from world-
existence to an absorption, of another kind than the Monist’s,
in the Transcendent and Supra-cosmic.
But, here too, the exclusive result is not inevitable. The Yoga
itself provides a first corrective by not confining the play of divine
love to the relation between the supreme Soul and the individ¬
ual, but extending it to a common feeling and mutual worship
between the devotees themselves united in the same realisation
of the supreme Love and Bliss. It provides a yet more general
corrective in the realisation of the divine object of Love in all
beings not only human but animal, easily extended to all forms
whatsoever. We can see how this larger application of the Yoga of
Devotion may be so used as to lead to the elevation of the whole
range of human emotion, sensation and aesthetic perception to
the divine level, its spiritualisation and the justification of the
cosmic labour towards love and joy in our humanity.
The Path of Works aims at the dedication of every human
activity to the supreme Will. It begins by the renunciation of all
egoistic aim for our works, all pursuit of action for an interested
aim or for the sake of a worldly result. By this renunciation it so
40
The Conditions of the Synthesis
It begins by the renunciation of all
egoistic aim for our works, all pursuit of action for an interested
aim or for the sake of a worldly result. By this renunciation it so
40
The Conditions of the Synthesis
purifies the mind and the will that we become easily conscious
of the great universal Energy as the true doer of all our actions
and the Lord of that Energy as their ruler and director with
the individual as only a mask, an excuse, an instrument or,
more positively, a conscious centre of action and phenomenal
relation. The choice and direction of the act is more and more
consciously left to this supreme Will and this universal Energy.
To That our works as well as the results of our works are finally
abandoned. The object is the release of the soul from its bondage
to appearances and to the reaction of phenomenal activities.
Karmayoga is used, like the other paths, to lead to liberation
from phenomenal existence and a departure into the Supreme.
But here too the exclusive result is not inevitable. The end of the
path may be, equally, a perception of the Divine in all energies,
in all happenings, in all activities, and a free and unegoistic
participation of the soul in the cosmic action. So followed it
will lead to the elevation of all human will and activity to the
divine level, its spiritualisation and the justification of the cosmic
labour towards freedom, power and perfection in the human
being.
We can see also that in the integral view of things these three
paths are one. Divine Love should normally lead to the perfect
knowledge of the Beloved by perfect intimacy, thus becoming
a path of Knowledge, and to divine service, thus becoming a
path of Works. So also should perfect Knowledge lead to perfect
Love and Joy and a full acceptance of the works of That which
is known; dedicated Works to the entire love of the Master of
the Sacrifice and the deepest knowledge of His ways and His
being. It is in this triple path that we come most readily to the
absolute knowledge, love and service of the One in all beings
and in the entire cosmic manifestation.
Chapter V
The Synthesis of the Systems
It is in this triple path that we come most readily to the
absolute knowledge, love and service of the One in all beings
and in the entire cosmic manifestation.
Chapter V
The Synthesis of the Systems
By the very nature of the principal Yogic schools, each
covering in its operations a part of the complex human in¬
teger and attempting to bring out its highest possibilities,
it will appear that a synthesis of all of them largely conceived
and applied might well result in an integral Yoga. But they are so
disparate in their tendencies, so highly specialised and elaborated
in their forms, so long confirmed in the mutual opposition of
their ideas and methods that we do not easily find how we can
arrive at their right union.
An undiscriminating combination in block would not be a
synthesis, but a confusion. Nor would a successive practice of
each of them in turn be easy in the short span of our human
life and with our limited energies, to say nothing of the waste
of labour implied in so cumbrous a process. Sometimes, indeed,
Hathayoga and Rajayoga are thus successively practised. And in
a recent unique example, in the life of Ramakrishna Paramhansa,
we see a colossal spiritual capacity first driving straight to the
divine realisation, taking, as it were, the kingdom of heaven
by violence, and then seizing upon one Yogic method after an¬
other and extracting the substance out of it with an incredible
rapidity, always to return to the heart of the whole matter, the
realisation and possession of God by the power of love, by
the extension of inborn spirituality into various experience and
by the spontaneous play of an intuitive knowledge. Such an
example cannot be generalised. Its object also was special and
temporal, to exemplify in the great and decisive experience of a
master-soul the truth, now most necessary to humanity, towards
which a world long divided into jarring sects and schools is with
difficulty labouring, that all sects are forms and fragments of a
single integral truth and all disciplines labour in their different
ways towards one supreme experience. To know, be and possess
42
The Conditions of the Synthesis
the Divine is the one thing needful and it includes or leads up
to all the rest; towards this sole good we have to drive and
this attained, all the rest that the divine Will chooses for us, all
necessary form and manifestation, will be added.
The synthesis we propose cannot, then, be arrived at either
by combination in mass or by successive practice. It must there¬
fore be effected by neglecting the forms and outsides of the
Yogic disciplines and seizing rather on some central principle
common to all which will include and utilise in the right place
and proportion their particular principles, and on some central
dynamic force which is the common secret of their divergent
methods and capable therefore of organising a natural selection
and combination of their varied energies and different utilities.
This was the aim which we set before ourselves at first when we
entered upon our comparative examination of the methods of
Nature and the methods of Yoga and we now return to it with
the possibility of hazarding some definite solution.
We observe, first, that there still exists in India a remarkable
Yogic system which is in its nature synthetical and starts from
a great central principle of Nature, a great dynamic force of
Nature; but it is a Yoga apart, not a synthesis of other schools.
This system is the way of the Tantra. Owing to certain of its
developments Tantra has fallen into discredit with those who
are not Tantrics; and especially owing to the developments of
its left-hand path, the Varna Marga, which not content with
exceeding the duality of virtue and sin and instead of replacing
them by spontaneous rightness of action seemed, sometimes,
to make a method of self-indulgence, a method of unrestrained
social immorality. Nevertheless, in its origin, Tantra was a great
and puissant system founded upon ideas which were at least
partially true. Even its twofold division into the right-hand and
left-hand paths, Dakshina Marga and Varna Marga, started from
a certain profound perception. In the ancient symbolic sense of
the words Dakshina and Varna, it was the distinction between
the way of Knowledge and the way of Ananda, — Nature in man
liberating itself by right discrimination in power and practice of
its own energies, elements and potentialities and Nature in man
The Synthesis of the Systems
43
liberating itself by joyous acceptance in power and practice of
its own energies, elements and potentialities. But in both paths
there was in the end an obscuration of principles, a deformation
of symbols and a fall.
But in both paths
there was in the end an obscuration of principles, a deformation
of symbols and a fall.
If, however, we leave aside, here also, the actual methods
and practices and seek for the central principle, we find, first,
that Tantra expressly differentiates itself from the Vedic methods
of Yoga. In a sense, all the schools we have hitherto examined
are Vedantic in their principle; their force is in knowledge, their
method is knowledge, though it is not always discernment by
the intellect, but may be, instead, the knowledge of the heart ex¬
pressed in love and faith or a knowledge in the will working out
through action. In all of them the lord of the Yoga is the Purusha,
the Conscious Soul that knows, observes, attracts, governs. But
in Tantra it is rather Prakriti, the Nature-Soul, the Energy, the
Will-in-Power executive in the universe. It was by learning and
applying the intimate secrets of this Will-in-Power, its method,
its Tantra, that the Tantric Yogin pursued the aims of his dis¬
cipline, — mastery, perfection, liberation, beatitude. Instead of
drawing back from manifested Nature and its difficulties, he
confronted them, seized and conquered. But in the end, as is
the general tendency of Prakriti, Tantric Yoga largely lost its
principle in its machinery and became a thing of formulae and
occult mechanism still powerful when rightly used but fallen
from the clarity of their original intention.
We have in this central Tantric conception one side of the
truth, the worship of the Energy, the Shakti, as the sole effective
force for all attainment. We get the other extreme in the Vedantic
conception of the Shakti as a power of Illusion and in the search
after the silent inactive Purusha as the means of liberation from
the deceptions created by the active Energy. But in the integral
conception the Conscious Soul is the Eord, the Nature-Soul is
his executive Energy. Purusha is of the nature of Sat, the being of
conscious self-existence pure and infinite; Shakti or Prakriti is of
the nature of Chit, — it is power of the Purusha’s self-conscious
existence, pure and infinite. The relation of the two exists be¬
tween the poles of rest and action. When the Energy is absorbed
44
The Conditions of the Synthesis
The relation of the two exists be¬
tween the poles of rest and action. When the Energy is absorbed
44
The Conditions of the Synthesis
in the bliss of conscious self-existence, there is rest; when the
Purusha pours itself out in the action of its Energy, there is
action, creation and the enjoyment or Ananda of becoming. But
if Ananda is the creator and begetter of all becoming, its method
is Tapas or force of the Purusha’s consciousness dwelling upon
its own infinite potentiality in existence and producing from it
truths of conception or real Ideas, vijhdna, which, proceeding
from an omniscient and omnipotent Self-existence, have the
surety of their own fulfilment and contain in themselves the
nature and law of their own becoming in the terms of mind,
life and matter. The eventual omnipotence of Tapas and the
infallible fulfilment of the Idea are the very foundation of all
Yoga. In man we render these terms by Will and Faith, — a will
that is eventually self-effective because it is of the substance of
Knowledge and a faith that is the reflex in the lower conscious¬
ness of a Truth or real Idea yet unrealised in the manifestation.
It is this self-certainty of the Idea which is meant by the Gita
when it says, yo yac-chraddhah sa eva sah, “whatever is a man’s
faith or the sure Idea in him, that he becomes.”
We see, then, what from the psychological point of view,
— and Yoga is nothing but practical psychology, — is the con¬
ception of Nature from which we have to start. It is the self-
fulfilment of the Purusha through his Energy. But the movement
of Nature is twofold, higher and lower, or, as we may choose
to term it, divine and undivine. The distinction exists indeed for
practical purposes only; for there is nothing that is not divine,
and in a larger view it is as meaningless, verbally, as the distinc¬
tion between natural and supernatural, for all things that are
are natural. All things are in Nature and all things are in God.
But, for practical purposes, there is a real distinction. The lower
Nature, that which we know and are and must remain so long
as the faith in us is not changed, acts through limitation and
division, is of the nature of Ignorance and culminates in the life
of the ego; but the higher Nature, that to which we aspire, acts
by unification and transcendence of limitation, is of the nature
of Knowledge and culminates in the life divine. The passage
from the lower to the higher is the aim of Yoga; and this passage
The Synthesis of the Systems
45
The passage
from the lower to the higher is the aim of Yoga; and this passage
The Synthesis of the Systems
45
may effect itself by the rejection of the lower and escape into the
higher, — the ordinary view-point, — or by the transformation
of the lower and its elevation to the higher Nature. It is this,
rather, that must be the aim of an integral Yoga.
But in either case it is always through something in the lower
that we must rise into the higher existence, and the schools of
Yoga each select their own point of departure or their own
gate of escape. They specialise certain activities of the lower
Prakrit! and turn them towards the Divine. But the normal
action of Nature in us is an integral movement in which the
full complexity of all our elements is affected by and affects all
our environments. The whole of life is the Yoga of Nature. The
Yoga that we seek must also be an integral action of Nature,
and the whole difference between the Yogin and the natural
man will be this, that the Yogin seeks to substitute in himself for
the integral action of the lower Nature working in and by ego
and division the integral action of the higher Nature working in
and by God and unity. If indeed our aim be only an escape from
the world to God, synthesis is unnecessary and a waste of time;
for then our sole practical aim must be to find out one path out
of the thousand that lead to God, one shortest possible of short
cuts, and not to linger exploring different paths that end in the
same goal. But if our aim be a transformation of our integral
being into the terms of God-existence, it is then that a synthesis
becomes necessary.
The method we have to pursue, then, is to put our whole
conscious being into relation and contact with the Divine and to
call Him in to transform our entire being into His. Thus in a sense
God Himself, the real Person in us, becomes the sadhaka of the
sadhana^ as well as the Master of the Yoga by whom the lower
personality is used as the centre of a divine transfiguration and
the instrument of its own perfection. In effect, the pressure of the
Tapas, the force of consciousness in us dwelling in the Idea of the
divine Nature upon that which we are in our entirety, produces
^ Sadhana, the practice by which perfection, siddhi, is attained; sadhaka, the Yogin
who seeks by that practice the siddhi.
46
The Conditions of the Synthesis
46
The Conditions of the Synthesis
its own realisation. The divine and all-knowing and all-effecting
descends upon the limited and obscure, progressively illumines
and energises the whole lower nature and substitutes its own
action for all the terms of the inferior human light and mortal
activity.
In psychological fact this method translates itself into the
progressive surrender of the ego with its whole field and all its
apparatus to the Beyond-ego with its vast and incalculable but
always inevitable workings. Certainly, this is no short cut or easy
sadhana. It requires a colossal faith, an absolute courage and
above all an unflinching patience. For it implies three stages of
which only the last can be wholly blissful or rapid, — the attempt
of the ego to enter into contact with the Divine, the wide, full
and therefore laborious preparation of the whole lower Nature
by the divine working to receive and become the higher Nature,
and the eventual transformation. In fact, however, the divine
Strength, often unobserved and behind the veil, substitutes itself
for our weakness and supports us through all our failings of
faith, courage and patience. It “makes the blind to see and the
lame to stride over the hills.” The intellect becomes aware of
a Law that beneficently insists and a succour that upholds; the
heart speaks of a Master of all things and Friend of man or a
universal Mother who upholds through all stumblings. There¬
fore this path is at once the most difficult imaginable and yet,
in comparison with the magnitude of its effort and object, the
most easy and sure of all.
There are three outstanding features of this action of the
higher when it works integrally on the lower nature. In the first
place it does not act according to a fixed system and succession
as in the specialised methods of Yoga, but with a sort of free,
scattered and yet gradually intensive and purposeful working
determined by the temperament of the individual in whom it
operates, the helpful materials which his nature offers and the
obstacles which it presents to purification and perfection. In a
sense, therefore, each man in this path has his own method of
Yoga. Yet are there certain broad lines of working common to
all which enable us to construct not indeed a routine system, but
The Synthesis of the Systems
47
yet some kind of Shastra or scientific method of the synthetic
Yoga.
Yet are there certain broad lines of working common to
all which enable us to construct not indeed a routine system, but
The Synthesis of the Systems
47
yet some kind of Shastra or scientific method of the synthetic
Yoga.
Secondly, the process, being integral, accepts our nature such
as it stands organised by our past evolution and without reject¬
ing anything essential compels all to undergo a divine change.
Everything in us is seized by the hands of a mighty Artificer
and transformed into a clear image of that which it now seeks
confusedly to present. In that ever-progressive experience we
begin to perceive how this lower manifestation is constituted
and that everything in it, however seemingly deformed or petty
or vile, is the more or less distorted or imperfect figure of some
element or action in the harmony of the divine Nature. We begin
to understand what the Vedic Rishis meant when they spoke of
the human forefathers fashioning the gods as a smith forges the
crude material in his smithy.
Thirdly, the divine Power in us uses all life as the means of
this integral Yoga. Every experience and outer contact with our
world-environment, however trifling or however disastrous, is
used for the work, and every inner experience, even to the most
repellent suffering or the most humiliating fall, becomes a step
on the path to perfection. And we recognise in ourselves with
opened eyes the method of God in the world. His purpose of
light in the obscure, of might in the weak and fallen, of delight in
what is grievous and miserable. We see the divine method to be
the same in the lower and in the higher working; only in the one
it is pursued tardily and obscurely through the subconscious in
Nature, in the other it becomes swift and self-conscious and the
instrument confesses the hand of the Master. All life is a Yoga
of Nature seeking to manifest God within itself. Yoga marks the
stage at which this effort becomes capable of self-awareness and
therefore of right completion in the individual. It is a gathering
up and concentration of the movements dispersed and loosely
combined in the lower evolution.
An integral method and an integral result. Eirst, an integral
realisation of Divine Being; not only a realisation of the One in
its indistinguishable unity, but also in its multitude of aspects
which are also necessary to the complete knowledge of it by
48
The Conditions of the Synthesis
Eirst, an integral
realisation of Divine Being; not only a realisation of the One in
its indistinguishable unity, but also in its multitude of aspects
which are also necessary to the complete knowledge of it by
48
The Conditions of the Synthesis
the relative consciousness; not only realisation of unity in the
Self, but of unity in the infinite diversity of activities, worlds and
creatures.
Therefore, also, an integral liberation. Not only the freedom
born of unbroken contact and identification of the individual
being in all its parts with the Divine, sdyujya-mukti, by which it
can become free^ even in its separation, even in the duality; not
only the sdlokya-mukti by which the whole conscious existence
dwells in the same status of being as the Divine, in the state of
Sachchidananda; but also the acquisition of the divine nature by
the transformation of this lower being into the human image of
the Divine, sadharmya-mukti, and the complete and final release
of all, the liberation of the consciousness from the transitory
mould of the ego and its unification with the One Being, univer¬
sal both in the world and the individual and transcendentally
one both in the world and beyond all universe.
By this integral realisation and liberation, the perfect har¬
mony of the results of Knowledge, Love and Works. For there
is attained the complete release from ego and identification in
being with the One in all and beyond all. But since the attaining
consciousness is not limited by its attainment, we win also the
unity in Beatitude and the harmonised diversity in Love, so that
all relations of the play remain possible to us even while we
retain on the heights of our being the eternal oneness with the
Beloved. And by a similar wideness, being capable of a freedom
in spirit that embraces life and does not depend upon withdrawal
from life, we are able to become without egoism, bondage or
reaction the channel in our mind and body for a divine action
poured out freely upon the world.
The divine existence is of the nature not only of freedom,
but of purity, beatitude and perfection. An integral purity which
shall enable on the one hand the perfect reflection of the divine
Being in ourselves and on the other the perfect outpouring of its
Truth and Law in us in the terms of life and through the right
^ As the Jivanmukta, who is entirely free even without dissolution of the bodily life in
a final Samadhi.
The Synthesis of the Systems
49
The Synthesis of the Systems
49
functioning of the complex instrument we are in our outer parts,
is the condition of an integral liberty. Its result is an integral
beatitude, in which there becomes possible at once the Ananda
of all that is in the world seen as symbols of the Divine and
the Ananda of that which is not-world. And it prepares the
integral perfection of our humanity as a type of the Divine in
the conditions of the human manifestation, a perfection founded
on a certain free universality of being, of love and joy, of play of
knowledge and of play of will in power and will in unegoistic
action. This integrality also can be attained by the integral Yoga.
Perfection includes perfection of mind and body, so that the
highest results of Rajayoga and Hathayoga should be contained
in the widest formula of the synthesis finally to be effected by
mankind. At any rate a full development of the general mental
and physical faculties and experiences attainable by humanity
through Yoga must be included in the scope of the integral
method. Nor would these have any raison d’etre unless em¬
ployed for an integral mental and physical life. Such a mental
and physical life would be in its nature a translation of the
spiritual existence into its right mental and physical values. Thus
we would arrive at a synthesis of the three degrees of Nature and
of the three modes of human existence which she has evolved
or is evolving. We would include in the scope of our liberated
being and perfected modes of activity the material life, our base,
and the mental life, our intermediate instrument.
Nor would the integrality to which we aspire be real or even
possible, if it were confined to the individual. Since our divine
perfection embraces the realisation of ourselves in being, in life
and in love through others as well as through ourselves, the
extension of our liberty and of its results in others would be the
inevitable outcome as well as the broadest utility of our libera¬
tion and perfection. And the constant and inherent attempt of
such an extension would be towards its increasing and ultimately
complete generalisation in mankind.
The divinising of the normal material life of man and of
his great secular attempt of mental and moral self-culture in the
individual and the race by this integralisation of a widely perfect
50
The Yoga of Divine Works
The divinising of the normal material life of man and of
his great secular attempt of mental and moral self-culture in the
individual and the race by this integralisation of a widely perfect
50
The Yoga of Divine Works
spiritual existence would thus be the crown alike of our indi¬
vidual and of our common effort. Such a consummation being
no other than the kingdom of heaven within reproduced in the
kingdom of heaven without, would be also the true fulfilment
of the great dream cherished in different terms by the world’s
religions.
The widest synthesis of perfection possible to thought is
the sole effort entirely worthy of those whose dedicated vision
perceives that God dwells concealed in humanity.
Part I
The Yoga of Divine Works
Chapter I
The Four Aids
YOGA-SIDDHI, the perfection that comes from the prac¬
tice of Yoga, can be best attained by the combined
working of four great instruments. There is, first, the
knowledge of the truths, principles, powers and processes that
govern the realisation — sdstra. Next comes a patient and per¬
sistent action on the lines laid down by this knowledge, the
force of our personal effort — utsdha. There intervenes, third,
uplifting our knowledge and effort into the domain of spiritual
experience, the direct suggestion, example and influence of the
Teacher — guru. Last comes the instrumentality of Time — kdla;
for in all things there is a cycle of their action and a period of
the divine movement.
The supreme Shastra of the integral Yoga is the eternal Veda
secret in the heart of every thinking and living being. The lotus
of the eternal knowledge and the eternal perfection is a bud
closed and folded up within us. It opens swiftly or gradually,
petal by petal, through successive realisations, once the mind of
man begins to turn towards the Eternal, once his heart, no longer
compressed and confined by attachment to finite appearances,
becomes enamoured, in whatever degree, of the Infinite. All life,
all thought, all energising of the faculties, all experiences passive
or active, become thenceforward so many shocks which disinte¬
grate the teguments of the soul and remove the obstacles to the
inevitable efflorescence. He who chooses the Infinite has been
chosen by the Infinite. He has received the divine touch without
which there is no awakening, no opening of the spirit; but once
it is received, attainment is sure, whether conquered swiftly in
the course of one human life or pursued patiently through many
54
The Yoga of Divine Works
stadia of the cycle of existence in the manifested universe.
Nothing can be taught to the mind which is not already
concealed as potential knowledge in the unfolding soul of the
creature. So also all perfection of which the outer man is capable,
is only a realising of the eternal perfection of the Spirit within
him. We know the Divine and become the Divine, because we
are That already in our secret nature. All teaching is a revealing,
all becoming is an unfolding. Self- attainment is the secret; self-
knowledge and an increasing consciousness are the means and
the process.
The usual agency of this revealing is the Word, the thing
heard (sruta). The Word may come to us from within; it may
come to us from without. But in either case, it is only an agency
for setting the hidden knowledge to work. The word within may
be the utterance of the inmost soul in us which is always open
to the Divine; or it may be the word of the secret and universal
Teacher who is seated in the hearts of all. There are rare cases
in which none other is needed, for all the rest of the Yoga is
an unfolding under that constant touch and guidance; the lotus
of the knowledge discloses itself from within by the power of
irradiating effulgence which proceeds from the Dweller in the
lotus of the heart. Great indeed, but few are those to whom self-
knowledge from within is thus sufficient and who do not need to
pass under the dominant influence of a written book or a living
teacher.
Ordinarily, the Word from without, representative of the
Divine, is needed as an aid in the work of self-unfolding; and
it may be either a word from the past or the more powerful
word of the living Guru. In some cases this representative word
is only taken as a sort of excuse for the inner power to awaken
and manifest; it is, as it were, a concession of the omnipotent and
omniscient Divine to the generality of a law that governs Nature.
Thus it is said in the Upanishads of Krishna, son of Devaki, that
he received a word of the Rishi Ghora and had the knowledge.
So Ramakrishna, having attained by his own internal effort the
central illumination, accepted several teachers in the different
paths of Yoga, but always showed in the manner and swiftness
The Four Aids
55
of his realisation that this acceptance was a concession to the
general rule by which effective knowledge must be received as
by a disciple from a Guru.
But usually the representative influence occupies a much
larger place in the life of the sadhaka. If the Yoga is guided by
a received written Shastra, — some Word from the past which
embodies the experience of former Yogins, — it may be practised
either by personal effort alone or with the aid of a Guru. The
spiritual knowledge is then gained through meditation on the
truths that are taught and it is made living and conscious by
their realisation in the personal experience; the Yoga proceeds
by the results of prescribed methods taught in a Scripture or
a tradition and reinforced and illumined by the instructions of
the Master. This is a narrower practice, but safe and effective
within its limits, because it follows a well-beaten track to a long
familiar goal.
For the sadhaka of the integral Yoga it is necessary to re¬
member that no written Shastra, however great its authority or
however large its spirit, can be more than a partial expression of
the eternal Knowledge. He will use, but never bind himself even
by the greatest Scripture. Where the Scripture is profound, wide,
catholic, it may exercise upon him an influence for the highest
good and of incalculable importance. It may be associated in
his experience with his awakening to crowning verities and his
realisation of the highest experiences. His Yoga may be governed
for a long time by one Scripture or by several successively, — if
it is in the line of the great Hindu tradition, by the Gita, for
example, the Upanishads, the Veda. Or it may be a good part
of his development to include in its material a richly varied
experience of the truths of many Scriptures and make the future
opulent with all that is best in the past. But in the end he must
take his station, or better still, if he can, always and from the
beginning he must live in his own soul beyond the limitations
of the word that he uses. The Gita itself thus declares that the
Yogin in his progress must pass beyond the written Truth, —
sabdabrahmativartate — beyond all that he has heard and all
that he has yet to hear, — srotavyasya srutasya ca. For he is not
56
The Yoga of Divine Works
the sadhaka of a book or of many books; he is a sadhaka of the
Infinite.
For he is not
56
The Yoga of Divine Works
the sadhaka of a book or of many books; he is a sadhaka of the
Infinite.
Another kind of Shastra is not Scripture, but a statement
of the science and methods, the effective principles and way of
working of the path of Yoga which the sadhaka elects to follow.
Each path has its Shastra, either written or traditional, passing
from mouth to mouth through a long line of Teachers. In India
a great authority, a high reverence even is ordinarily attached to
the written or traditional teaching. All the lines of the Yoga
are supposed to be fixed and the Teacher who has received
the Shastra by tradition and realised it in practice guides the
disciple along the immemorial tracks. One often even hears the
objection urged against a new practice, a new Yogic teaching, the
adoption of a new formula, “It is not according to the Shastra.”
But neither in fact nor in the actual practice of the Yogins is
there really any such entire rigidity of an iron door shut against
new truth, fresh revelation, widened experience. The written or
traditional teaching expresses the knowledge and experiences
of many centuries systematised, organised, made attainable to
the beginner. Its importance and utility are therefore immense.
But a great freedom of variation and development is always
practicable. Even so highly scientific a system as Rajayoga can
be practised on other lines than the organised method of Patan-
jali. Each of the three paths of the trimdrga^ breaks into many
bypaths which meet again at the goal. The general knowledge on
which the Yoga depends is fixed, but the order, the succession,
the devices, the forms must be allowed to vary; for the needs
and particular impulsions of the individual nature have to be
satisfied even while the general truths remain firm and constant.
An integral and synthetic Yoga needs especially not to be
bound by any written or traditional Shastra; for while it em¬
braces the knowledge received from the past, it seeks to organise
it anew for the present and the future. An absolute liberty of
experience and of the restatement of knowledge in new terms
and new combinations is the condition of its self-formation.
^ The triple path of Knowledge, Devotion and Works.
The Four Aids
57
An absolute liberty of
experience and of the restatement of knowledge in new terms
and new combinations is the condition of its self-formation.
^ The triple path of Knowledge, Devotion and Works.
The Four Aids
57
Seeking to embrace all life in itself, it is in the position not
of a pilgrim following the highroad to his destination, but, to
that extent at least, of a path-finder hewing his way through
a virgin forest. For Yoga has long diverged from life and the
ancient systems which sought to embrace it, such as those of
our Vedic forefathers, are far away from us, expressed in terms
which are no longer accessible, thrown into forms which are
no longer applicable. Since then mankind has moved forward
on the current of eternal Time and the same problem has to be
approached from a new starting-point.
By this Yoga we not only seek the Infinite, but we call upon
the Infinite to unfold himself in human life. Therefore the Shastra
of our Yoga must provide for an infinite liberty in the receptive
human soul. A free adaptability in the manner and the type of the
individual’s acceptance of the Universal and Transcendent into
himself is the right condition for the full spiritual life in man.
Vivekananda, pointing out that the unity of all religions must
necessarily express itself by an increasing richness of variety
in its forms, said once that the perfect state of that essential
unity would come when each man had his own religion, when
not bound by sect or traditional form he followed the free self¬
adaptation of his nature in its relations with the Supreme. So
also one may say that the perfection of the integral Yoga will
come when each man is able to follow his own path of Yoga,
pursuing the development of his own nature in its upsurging
towards that which transcends the nature. For freedom is the
final law and the last consummation.
Meanwhile certain general lines have to be formed which
may help to guide the thought and practice of the sadhaka.
But these must take as much as possible the form of general
truths, general statements of principle, the most powerful broad
directions of effort and development rather than a fixed system
which has to be followed as a routine. All Shastra is the outcome
of past experience and a help to future experience. It is an aid
and a partial guide. It puts up signposts, gives the names of
the main roads and the already explored directions, so that the
traveller may know whither and by what paths he is proceeding.
58
The Yoga of Divine Works
It is an aid
and a partial guide. It puts up signposts, gives the names of
the main roads and the already explored directions, so that the
traveller may know whither and by what paths he is proceeding.
58
The Yoga of Divine Works
The rest depends on personal effort and experience and
upon the power of the Guide.
The development of the experience in its rapidity, its amplitude,
the intensity and power of its results, depends primarily, in the
beginning of the path and long after, on the aspiration and per¬
sonal effort of the sadhaka. The process of Yoga is a turning of
the human soul from the egoistic state of consciousness absorbed
in the outward appearances and attractions of things to a higher
state in which the Transcendent and Universal can pour itself
into the individual mould and transform it. The first determining
element of the siddhi is, therefore, the intensity of the turning,
the force which directs the soul inward. The power of aspiration
of the heart, the force of the will, the concentration of the mind,
the perseverance and determination of the applied energy are
the measure of that intensity. The ideal sadhaka should be able
to say in the Biblical phrase, “My zeal for the Lord has eaten me
up.” It is this zeal for the Lord, — utsdha, the zeal of the whole
nature for its divine results, vydkulatd, the heart’s eagerness for
the attainment of the Divine, — that devours the ego and breaks
up the limitations of its petty and narrow mould for the full
and wide reception of that which it seeks, that which, being
universal, exceeds and, being transcendent, surpasses even the
largest and highest individual self and nature.
But this is only one side of the force that works for perfec¬
tion. The process of the integral Yoga has three stages, not indeed
sharply distinguished or separate, but in a certain measure suc¬
cessive. There must be, first, the effort towards at least an initial
and enabling self-transcendence and contact with the Divine;
next, the reception of that which transcends, that with which
we have gained communion, into ourselves for the transforma¬
tion of our whole conscious being; last, the utilisation of our
transformed humanity as a divine centre in the world. So long
as the contact with the Divine is not in some considerable degree
established, so long as there is not some measure of sustained
The Four Aids
59
So long
as the contact with the Divine is not in some considerable degree
established, so long as there is not some measure of sustained
The Four Aids
59
identity, sdyujya, the element of personal effort must normally
predominate. But in proportion as this contact establishes itself,
the sadhaka must become conscious that a force other than his
own, a force transcending his egoistic endeavour and capacity,
is at work in him and to this Power he learns progressively to
submit himself and delivers up to it the charge of his Yoga. In the
end his own will and force become one with the higher Power; he
merges them in the divine Will and its transcendent and universal
Force. He finds it thenceforward presiding over the necessary
transformation of his mental, vital and physical being with an
impartial wisdom and provident effectivity of which the eager
and interested ego is not capable. It is when this identification
and this self-merging are complete that the divine centre in the
world is ready. Purified, liberated, plastic, illumined, it can begin
to serve as a means for the direct action of a supreme Power in
the larger Yoga of humanity or superhumanity, of the earth’s
spiritual progression or its transformation.
Always indeed it is the higher Power that acts. Our sense
of personal effort and aspiration comes from the attempt of
the egoistic mind to identify itself in a wrong and imperfect
way with the workings of the divine Force. It persists in apply¬
ing to experience on a supernormal plane the ordinary terms
of mentality which it applies to its normal experiences in the
world. In the world we act with the sense of egoism; we claim
the universal forces that work in us as our own; we claim as
the effect of our personal will, wisdom, force, virtue the selec¬
tive, formative, progressive action of the Transcendent in this
frame of mind, life and body. Enlightenment brings to us the
knowledge that the ego is only an instrument; we begin to
perceive and feel that these things are our own in the sense
that they belong to our supreme and integral Self, one with the
Transcendent, not to the instrumental ego. Our limitations and
distortions are our contribution to the working; the true power
in it is the Divine’s. When the human ego realises that its will
is a tool, its wisdom ignorance and childishness, its power an
infant’s groping, its virtue a pretentious impurity, and learns to
trust itself to that which transcends it, that is its salvation. The
60
The Yoga of Divine Works
The
60
The Yoga of Divine Works
apparent freedom and self-assertion of our personal being to
which we are so profoundly attached, conceal a most pitiable
subjection to a thousand suggestions, impulsions, forces which
we have made extraneous to our little person. Our ego, boasting
of freedom, is at every moment the slave, toy and puppet of
countless beings, powers, forces, influences in universal Nature.
The self-abnegation of the ego in the Divine is its self-fulfilment;
its surrender to that which transcends it is its liberation from
bonds and limits and its perfect freedom.
But still, in the practical development, each of the three
stages has its necessity and utility and must be given its time or
its place. It will not do, it cannot be safe or effective to begin
with the last and highest alone. It would not be the right course,
either, to leap prematurely from one to another. For even if from
the beginning we recognise in mind and heart the Supreme, there
are elements of the nature which long prevent the recognition
from becoming realisation. But without realisation our mental
belief cannot become a dynamic reality; it is still only a figure
of knowledge, not a living truth, an idea, not yet a power. And
even if realisation has begun, it may be dangerous to imagine
or to assume too soon that we are altogether in the hands of
the Supreme or are acting as his instrument. That assumption
may introduce a calamitous falsity; it may produce a helpless
inertia or, magnifying the movements of the ego with the Divine
Name, it may disastrously distort and ruin the whole course of
the Yoga. There is a period, more or less prolonged, of internal
effort and struggle in which the individual will has to reject the
darkness and distortions of the lower nature and to put itself
resolutely or vehemently on the side of the divine Light. The
mental energies, the heart’s emotions, the vital desires, the very
physical being have to be compelled into the right attitude or
trained to admit and answer to the right influences. It is only
then, only when this has been truly done, that the surrender of
the lower to the higher can be effected, because the sacrifice has
become acceptable.
The personal will of the sadhaka has first to seize on the
egoistic energies and turn them towards the light and the right;
The Four Aids
61
The personal will of the sadhaka has first to seize on the
egoistic energies and turn them towards the light and the right;
The Four Aids
61
once turned, he has still to train them to recognise that always,
always to accept, always to follow that. Progressing, he learns,
still using the personal will, personal effort, personal energies, to
employ them as representatives of the higher Power and in con¬
scious obedience to the higher Influence. Progressing yet farther,
his will, effort, energy become no longer personal and separate,
but activities of that higher Power and Influence at work in the
individual. But there is still a sort of gulf or distance which
necessitates an obscure process of transit, not always accurate,
sometimes even very distorting, between the divine Origin and
the emerging human current. At the end of the process, with
the progressive disappearance of egoism and impurity and ig¬
norance, this last separation is removed; all in the individual
becomes the divine working.
As the supreme Shastra of the integral Yoga is the eternal Veda
secret in the heart of every man, so its supreme Guide and
Teacher is the inner Guide, the World-Teacher, jagad-guru, secret
within us. It is he who destroys our darkness by the resplendent
light of his knowledge; that light becomes within us the increas¬
ing glory of his own self-revelation. He discloses progressively
in us his own nature of freedom, bliss, love, power, immortal
being. He sets above us his divine example as our ideal and
transforms the lower existence into a reflection of that which it
contemplates. By the inpouring of his own influence and pres¬
ence into us he enables the individual being to attain to identity
with the universal and transcendent.
What is his method and his system? He has no method and
every method. His system is a natural organisation of the highest
processes and movements of which the nature is capable. Ap¬
plying themselves even to the pettiest details and to the actions
the most insignificant in their appearance with as much care and
thoroughness as to the greatest, they in the end lift all into the
Light and transform all. For in his Yoga there is nothing too
small to be used and nothing too great to be attempted. As the
62
The Yoga of Divine Works
For in his Yoga there is nothing too
small to be used and nothing too great to be attempted. As the
62
The Yoga of Divine Works
servant and disciple of the Master has no business with pride
or egoism because all is done for him from above, so also he
has no right to despond because of his personal deficiencies or
the stumblings of his nature. For the Force that works in him is
impersonal — or superpersonal — and infinite.
The full recognition of this inner Guide, Master of the Yoga,
lord, light, enjoyer and goal of all sacrifice and effort, is of
the utmost importance in the path of integral perfection. It is
immaterial whether he is first seen as an impersonal Wisdom,
Love and Power behind all things, as an Absolute manifesting
in the relative and attracting it, as one’s highest Self and the
highest Self of all, as a Divine Person within us and in the world,
in one of his — or her — numerous forms and names or as the
ideal which the mind conceives. In the end we perceive that he is
all and more than all these things together. The mind’s door of
entry to the conception of him must necessarily vary according
to the past evolution and the present nature.
This inner Guide is often veiled at first by the very intensity
of our personal effort and by the ego’s preoccupation with itself
and its aims. As we gain in clarity and the turmoil of egois¬
tic effort gives place to a calmer self-knowledge, we recognise
the source of the growing light within us. We recognise it ret¬
rospectively as we realise how all our obscure and conflicting
movements have been determined towards an end that we only
now begin to perceive, how even before our entrance into the
path of the Yoga the evolution of our life has been designedly led
towards its turning-point. For now we begin to understand the
sense of our struggles and efforts, successes and failures. At last
we are able to seize the meaning of our ordeals and sufferings
and can appreciate the help that was given us by all that hurt
and resisted and the utility of our very falls and stumblings. We
recognise this divine leading afterwards, not retrospectively but
immediately, in the moulding of our thoughts by a transcen¬
dent Seer, of our will and actions by an all-embracing Power,
of our emotional life by an all-attracting and all-assimilating
Bliss and Love. We recognise it too in a more personal relation
that from the first touched or at the last seizes us; we feel the
The Four Aids
63
We recognise it too in a more personal relation
that from the first touched or at the last seizes us; we feel the
The Four Aids
63
eternal presence of a supreme Master, Friend, Lover, Teacher.
We recognise it in the essence of our being as that develops into
likeness and oneness with a greater and wider existence; for
we perceive that this miraculous development is not the result
of our own efforts: an eternal Perfection is moulding us into
its own image. One who is the Lord or Ishwara of the Yogic
philosophies, the Guide in the conscious being {caitya guru or
antarydmin), the Absolute of the thinker, the Unknowable of
the Agnostic, the universal Force of the materialist, the supreme
Soul and the supreme Shakti, the One who is differently named
and imaged by the religions, is the Master of our Yoga.
To see, know, become and fulfil this One in our inner selves
and in all our outer nature, was always the secret goal and
becomes now the conscious purpose of our embodied existence.
To be conscious of him in all parts of our being and equally
in all that the dividing mind sees as outside our being, is the
consummation of the individual consciousness. To be possessed
by him and possess him in ourselves and in all things is the term
of all empire and mastery. To enjoy him in all experience of
passivity and activity, of peace and of power, of unity and of
difference is the happiness which the Jiva, the individual soul
manifested in the world, is obscurely seeking. This is the entire
definition of the aim of integral Yoga; it is the rendering in
personal experience of the truth which universal Nature has
hidden in herself and which she travails to discover. It is the
conversion of the human soul into the divine soul and of natural
life into divine living.
The surest way towards this integral fulfilment is to find the
Master of the secret who dwells within us, open ourselves con¬
stantly to the divine Power which is also the divine Wisdom and
Love and trust to it to effect the conversion. But it is difficult
for the egoistic consciousness to do this at all at the beginning.
And, if done at all, it is still difficult to do it perfectly and in
every strand of our nature. It is difficult at first because our
64
The Yoga of Divine Works
But it is difficult
for the egoistic consciousness to do this at all at the beginning.
And, if done at all, it is still difficult to do it perfectly and in
every strand of our nature. It is difficult at first because our
64
The Yoga of Divine Works
egoistic habits of thought, of sensation, of feeling block up the
avenues by which we can arrive at the perception that is needed.
It is difficult afterwards because the faith, the surrender, the
courage requisite in this path are not easy to the ego-clouded
soul. The divine working is not the working which the egoistic
mind desires or approves; for it uses error in order to arrive at
truth, suffering in order to arrive at bliss, imperfection in order
to arrive at perfection. The ego cannot see where it is being led;
it revolts against the leading, loses confidence, loses courage.
These failings would not matter; for the divine Guide within
is not offended by our revolt, not discouraged by our want of
faith or repelled by our weakness; he has the entire love of the
mother and the entire patience of the teacher. But by withdraw¬
ing our assent from the guidance we lose the consciousness,
though not all the actuality — not, in any case, the eventuality
— of its benefit. And we withdraw our assent because we fail to
distinguish our higher Self from the lower through which he is
preparing his self-revelation. As in the world, so in ourselves, we
cannot see God because of his workings and, especially, because
he works in us through our nature and not by a succession of
arbitrary miracles. Man demands miracles that he may have
faith; he wishes to be dazzled in order that he may see. And
this impatience, this ignorance may turn into a great danger and
disaster if, in our revolt against the divine leading, we call in
another distorting Force more satisfying to our impulses and
desires and ask it to guide us and give it the Divine Name.
But while it is difficult for man to believe in something
unseen within himself, it is easy for him to believe in some¬
thing which he can image as extraneous to himself. The spiritual
progress of most human beings demands an extraneous support,
an object of faith outside us. It needs an external image of God;
or it needs a human representative, — Incarnation, Prophet or
Guru; or it demands both and receives them. For according
to the need of the human soul the Divine manifests himself
as deity, as human divine or in simple humanity — using that
thick disguise, which so successfully conceals the Godhead, for
a means of transmission of his guidance.
The Four Aids
65
The Hindu discipline of spirituality provides for this need of
the soul by the conceptions of the Ishta Devata, the Avatar and
the Guru. By the Ishta Devata, the chosen deity, is meant, — not
some inferior Power, but a name and form of the transcendent
and universal Godhead. Almost all religions either have as their
base or make use of some such name and form of the Divine.
Its necessity for the human soul is evident. God is the All and
more than the All. But that which is more than the All, how
shall man conceive? And even the All is at first too hard for
him; for he himself in his active consciousness is a limited and
selective formation and can open himself only to that which is
in harmony with his limited nature. There are things in the All
which are too hard for his comprehension or seem too terrible
to his sensitive emotions and cowering sensations. Or, simply,
he cannot conceive as the Divine, cannot approach or cannot
recognise something that is too much out of the circle of his
ignorant or partial conceptions. It is necessary for him to con¬
ceive God in his own image or in some form that is beyond
himself but consonant with his highest tendencies and seizable
by his feelings or his intelligence. Otherwise it would be dif¬
ficult for him to come into contact and communion with the
Divine.
Otherwise it would be dif¬
ficult for him to come into contact and communion with the
Divine.
Even then his nature calls for a human intermediary so
that he may feel the Divine in something entirely close to his
own humanity and sensible in a human influence and example.
This call is satisfied by the Divine manifest in a human appear¬
ance, the Incarnation, the Avatar — Krishna, Christ, Buddha.
Or if this is too hard for him to conceive, the Divine represents
himself through a less marvellous intermediary, — Prophet or
Teacher. For many who cannot conceive or are unwilling to
accept the Divine Man, are ready to open themselves to the
supreme man, terming him not incarnation but world-teacher
or divine representative.
This also is not enough; a living influence, a living example, a
present instruction is needed. For it is only the few who can make
the past Teacher and his teaching, the past Incarnation and his
example and influence a living force in their lives. For this need
66
The Yoga of Divine Works
also the Hindu discipline provides in the relation of the Guru
and the disciple. The Guru may sometimes be the Incarnation
or World-Teacher; but it is sufficient that he should represent to
the disciple the divine wisdom, convey to him something of the
divine ideal or make him feel the realised relation of the human
soul with the Eternal.
The sadhaka of the integral Yoga will make use of all these
aids according to his nature; but it is necessary that he should
shun their limitations and cast from himself that exclusive ten¬
dency of egoistic mind which cries, “My God, my Incarnation,
my Prophet, my Guru,” and opposes it to all other realisation in
a sectarian or a fanatical spirit. All sectarianism, all fanaticism
must be shunned; for it is inconsistent with the integrity of the
divine realisation.
On the contrary, the sadhaka of the integral Yoga will not
be satisfied until he has included all other names and forms of
Deity in his own conception, seen his own Ishta Devata in all
others, unified all Avatars in the unity of Him who descends in
the Avatar, welded the truth in all teachings into the harmony
of the Eternal Wisdom.
Nor should he forget the aim of these external aids which is
to awaken his soul to the Divine within him. Nothing has been
finally accomplished if that has not been accomplished. It is not
sufficient to worship Krishna, Christ or Buddha without, if there
is not the revealing and the formation of the Buddha, the Christ
or Krishna in ourselves. And all other aids equally have no other
purpose; each is a bridge between man’s unconverted state and
the revelation of the Divine within him.
The Teacher of the integral Yoga will follow as far as he may
the method of the Teacher within us. He will lead the disciple
through the nature of the disciple. Teaching, example, influence,
— these are the three instruments of the Guru. But the wise
Teacher will not seek to impose himself or his opinions on the
passive acceptance of the receptive mind; he will throw in only
The Four Aids
67
what is productive and sure as a seed which will grow under
the divine fostering within. He will seek to awaken much more
than to instruct; he will aim at the growth of the faculties and
the experiences by a natural process and free expansion. He
will give a method as an aid, as a utilisable device, not as an
imperative formula or a fixed routine. And he will be on his
guard against any turning of the means into a limitation, against
the mechanising of process. His whole business is to awaken the
divine light and set working the divine force of which he himself
is only a means and an aid, a body or a channel.
The example is more powerful than the instruction; but it
is not the example of the outward acts nor that of the personal
character which is of most importance. These have their place
and their utility; but what will most stimulate aspiration in
others is the central fact of the divine realisation within him
governing his whole life and inner state and all his activities.
This is the universal and essential element; the rest belongs to
individual person and circumstance. It is this dynamic realisation
that the sadhaka must feel and reproduce in himself according
to his own nature; he need not strive after an imitation from
outside which may well be sterilising rather than productive of
right and natural fruits.
It is this dynamic realisation
that the sadhaka must feel and reproduce in himself according
to his own nature; he need not strive after an imitation from
outside which may well be sterilising rather than productive of
right and natural fruits.
Influence is more important than example. Influence is not
the outward authority of the Teacher over his disciple, but the
power of his contact, of his presence, of the nearness of his soul
to the soul of another, infusing into it, even though in silence,
that which he himself is and possesses. This is the supreme sign
of the Master. For the greatest Master is much less a Teacher than
a Presence pouring the divine consciousness and its constituting
light and power and purity and bliss into all who are receptive
around him.
And it shall also be a sign of the teacher of the integral Yoga
that he does not arrogate to himself Guruhood in a humanly
vain and self-exalting spirit. His work, if he has one, is a trust
from above, he himself a channel, a vessel or a representative.
He is a man helping his brothers, a child leading children, a
Light kindling other lights, an awakened Soul awakening souls.
68
The Yoga of Divine Works
at highest a Power or Presence of the Divine calling to him other
powers of the Divine.
The sadhaka who has all these aids is sure of his goal. Even a fall
will be for him only a means of rising and death a passage to¬
wards fulfilment. For once on this path, birth and death become
only processes in the development of his being and the stages of
his journey.
Time is the remaining aid needed for the effectivity of the
process. Time presents itself to human effort as an enemy or a
friend, as a resistance, a medium or an instrument. But always
it is really the instrument of the soul.
Time is a field of circumstances and forces meeting and
working out a resultant progression whose course it measures.
To the ego it is a tyrant or a resistance, to the Divine an in¬
strument. Therefore, while our effort is personal. Time appears
as a resistance, for it presents to us all the obstruction of the
forces that conflict with our own. When the divine working and
the personal are combined in our consciousness, it appears as a
medium and a condition. When the two become one, it appears
as a servant and instrument.
When the divine working and
the personal are combined in our consciousness, it appears as a
medium and a condition. When the two become one, it appears
as a servant and instrument.
The ideal attitude of the sadhaka towards Time is to have
an endless patience as if he had all eternity for his fulfilment
and yet to develop the energy that shall realise now and with an
ever-increasing mastery and pressure of rapidity till it reaches
the miraculous instantaneousness of the supreme divine Trans¬
formation.
Chapter II
Self-Consecration
All yoga is in its nature a new birth; it is a birth out of
the ordinary, the mentalised material life of man into a
higher spiritual consciousness and a greater and diviner
being. No Yoga can be successfully undertaken and followed
unless there is a strong awakening to the necessity of that larger
spiritual existence. The soul that is called to this deep and vast
inward change, may arrive in different ways to the initial depar¬
ture. It may come to it by its own natural development which
has been leading it unconsciously towards the awakening; it may
reach it through the influence of a religion or the attraction of
a philosophy; it may approach it by a slow illumination or leap
to it by a sudden touch or shock; it may be pushed or led to
it by the pressure of outward circumstances or by an inward
necessity, by a single word that breaks the seals of the mind or
by long reflection, by the distant example of one who has trod
the path or by contact and daily influence. According to the
nature and the circumstances the call will come.
But in whatever way it comes, there must be a decision of
the mind and the will and, as its result, a complete and effective
self-consecration. The acceptance of a new spiritual idea-force
and upward orientation in the being, an illumination, a turning
or conversion seized on by the will and the heart’s aspiration,
— this is the momentous act which contains as in a seed all the
results that the Yoga has to give. The mere idea or intellectual
seeking of something higher beyond, however strongly grasped
by the mind’s interest, is ineffective unless it is seized on by the
heart as the one thing desirable and by the will as the one thing to
be done. For truth of the Spirit has not to be merely thought but
to be lived, and to live it demands a unified single-mindedness
of the being; so great a change as is contemplated by the Yoga is
not to be effected by a divided will or by a small portion of the
70
The Yoga of Divine Works
energy or by a hesitating mind. He who seeks the Divine must
consecrate himself to God and to God only.
If the change comes suddenly and decisively by an overpow¬
ering influence, there is no further essential or lasting difficulty.
The choice follows upon the thought, or is simultaneous with it,
and the self-consecration follows upon the choice. The feet are
already set upon the path, even if they seem at first to wander un¬
certainly and even though the path itself may be only obscurely
seen and the knowledge of the goal may be imperfect. The secret
Teacher, the inner Guide is already at work, though he may not
yet manifest himself or may not yet appear in the person of
his human representative. Whatever difficulties and hesitations
may ensue, they cannot eventually prevail against the power
of the experience that has turned the current of the life. The
call, once decisive, stands; the thing that has been born cannot
eventually be stifled. Even if the force of circumstances prevents a
regular pursuit or a full practical self-consecration from the first,
still the mind has taken its bent and persists and returns with
an ever-increasing effect upon its leading preoccupation. There
is an ineluctable persistence of the inner being, and against it
circumstances are in the end powerless, and no weakness in the
nature can for long be an obstacle.
But this is not always the manner of the commencement.
The sadhaka is often led gradually and there is a long space
between the first turning of the mind and the full assent of
the nature to the thing towards which it turns. There may at
first be only a vivid intellectual interest, a forcible attraction
towards the idea and some imperfect form of practice. Or per¬
haps there is an effort not favoured by the whole nature, a
decision or a turn imposed by an intellectual influence or dic¬
tated by personal affection and admiration for someone who is
himself consecrated and devoted to the Highest. In such cases, a
long period of preparation may be necessary before there comes
the irrevocable consecration; and in some instances it may not
come. There may be some advance, there may be a strong effort,
even much purification and many experiences other than those
that are central or supreme; but the life will either be spent in
Self-Consecration
71
There may be some advance, there may be a strong effort,
even much purification and many experiences other than those
that are central or supreme; but the life will either be spent in
Self-Consecration
71
preparation or, a certain stage having been reached, the mind
pushed by an insufficient driving-force may rest content at the
limit of the effort possible to it. Or there may even be a recoil to
the lower life, — what is called in the ordinary parlance of Yoga
a fall from the path. This lapse happens because there is a defect
at the very centre. The intellect has been interested, the heart
attracted, the will has strung itself to the effort, but the whole
nature has not been taken captive by the Divine. It has only
acquiesced in the interest, the attraction or the endeavour. There
has been an experiment, perhaps even an eager experiment, but
not a total self-giving to an imperative need of the soul or to
an unforsakable ideal. Even such imperfect Yoga has not been
wasted; for no upward effort is made in vain. Even if it fails in the
present or arrives only at some preparatory stage or preliminary
realisation, it has yet determined the soul’s future.
But if we desire to make the most of the opportunity that
this life gives us, if we wish to respond adequately to the call
we have received and to attain to the goal we have glimpsed,
not merely advance a little towards it, it is essential that there
should be an entire self-giving. The secret of success in Yoga is
to regard it not as one of the aims to be pursued in life, but as
the one and only aim, not as an important part of life, but as
the whole of life.
And since Yoga is in its essence a turning away from the or¬
dinary material and animal life led by most men or from the
more mental but still limited way of living followed by the few
to a greater spiritual life, to the way divine, every part of our
energies that is given to the lower existence in the spirit of that
existence is a contradiction of our aim and our self-dedication.
On the other hand, every energy or activity that we can convert
from its allegiance to the lower and dedicate to the service of
the higher is so much gained on our road, so much taken from
the powers that oppose our progress. It is the difficulty of this
wholesale conversion that is the source of all the stumblings in
72
The Yoga of Divine Works
It is the difficulty of this
wholesale conversion that is the source of all the stumblings in
72
The Yoga of Divine Works
the path of Yoga. For our entire nature and its environment, all
our personal and all our universal self, are full of habits and of
influences that are opposed to our spiritual rebirth and work
against the whole-heartedness of our endeavour. In a certain
sense we are nothing but a complex mass of mental, nervous
and physical habits held together by a few ruling ideas, desires
and associations, — an amalgam of many small self-repeating
forces with a few major vibrations. What we propose in our
Yoga is nothing less than to break up the whole formation of
our past and present which makes up the ordinary material and
mental man and to create a new centre of vision and a new
universe of activities in ourselves which shall constitute a divine
humanity or a superhuman nature.
The first necessity is to dissolve that central faith and vision
in the mind which concentrate it on its development and satis¬
faction and interests in the old externalised order of things. It
is imperative to exchange this surface orientation for the deeper
faith and vision which see only the Divine and seek only after
the Divine. The next need is to compel all our lower being to
pay homage to this new faith and greater vision. All our nature
must make an integral surrender; it must offer itself in every part
and every movement to that which seems to the unregenerated
sense-mind so much less real than the material world and its
objects. Our whole being — soul, mind, sense, heart, will, life,
body — must consecrate all its energies so entirely and in such
a way that it shall become a fit vehicle for the Divine. This is
no easy task; for everything in the world follows the fixed habit
which is to it a law and resists a radical change. And no change
can be more radical than the revolution attempted in the integral
Yoga. Everything in us has constantly to be called back to the
central faith and will and vision. Every thought and impulse has
to be reminded in the language of the Upanishad that “That is
the divine Brahman and not this which men here adore.” Every
vital fibre has to be persuaded to accept an entire renunciation
of all that hitherto represented to it its own existence. Mind has
to cease to be mind and become brilliant with something beyond
it. Life has to change into a thing vast and calm and intense and
Self-Consecration
73
Mind has
to cease to be mind and become brilliant with something beyond
it. Life has to change into a thing vast and calm and intense and
Self-Consecration
73
powerful that can no longer recognise its old blind eager narrow
self of petty impulse and desire. Even the body has to submit
to a mutation and be no longer the clamorous animal or the
impeding clod it now is, but become instead a conscious servant
and radiant instrument and living form of the spirit.
The difficulty of the task has led naturally to the pursuit of
easy and trenchant solutions; it has generated and fixed deeply
the tendency of religions and of schools of Yoga to separate
the life of the world from the inner life. The powers of this
world and their actual activities, it is felt, either do not belong
to God at all or are for some obscure and puzzling cause, Maya
or another, a dark contradiction of the divine Truth. And on
their own opposite side the powers of the Truth and their ideal
activities are seen to belong to quite another plane of conscious¬
ness than that, obscure, ignorant and perverse in its impulses
and forces, on which the life of the earth is founded. There
appears at once the antinomy of a bright and pure kingdom of
God and a dark and impure kingdom of the devil; we feel the
opposition of our crawling earthly birth and life to an exalted
spiritual God-consciousness; we become readily convinced of
the incompatibility of life’s subjection to Maya with the soul’s
concentration in pure Brahman existence. The easiest way is to
turn away from all that belongs to the one and to retreat by
a naked and precipitous ascent into the other. Thus arises the
attraction and, it would seem, the necessity of the principle of
exclusive concentration which plays so prominent a part in the
specialised schools of Yoga; for by that concentration we can
arrive through an uncompromising renunciation of the world at
an entire self-consecration to the One on whom we concentrate.
It is no longer incumbent on us to compel all the lower activities
to the difficult recognition of a new and higher spiritualised life
and train them to be its agents or executive powers. It is enough
to kill or quiet them and keep at most the few energies necessary,
on one side, for the maintenance of the body and, on the other,
for communion with the Divine.
The very aim and conception of an integral Yoga debar us
from adopting this simple and strenuous high-pitched process.
74
The Yoga of Divine Works
The very aim and conception of an integral Yoga debar us
from adopting this simple and strenuous high-pitched process.
74
The Yoga of Divine Works
The hope of an integral transformation forbids us to take a
short cut or to make ourselves light for the race by throwing
away our impedimenta. For we have set out to conquer all our¬
selves and the world for God; we are determined to give him
our becoming as well as our being and not merely to bring the
pure and naked spirit as a bare offering to a remote and secret
Divinity in a distant heaven or abolish all we are in a holocaust
to an immobile Absolute. The Divine that we adore is not only
a remote extra-cosmic Reality, but a half-veiled Manifestation
present and near to us here in the universe. Life is the field of a
divine manifestation not yet complete: here, in life, on earth, in
the body, — ihaiva, as the Upanishads insist, — we have to un¬
veil the Godhead; here we must make its transcendent greatness,
light and sweetness real to our consciousness, here possess and,
as far as may be, express it. Life then we must accept in our
Yoga in order utterly to transmute it; we are forbidden to shrink
from the difficulties that this acceptance may add to our struggle.
Our compensation is that even if the path is more rugged, the
effort more complex and bafflingly arduous, yet after a certain
point we gain an immense advantage. For once our minds are
reasonably fixed in the central vision and our wills are on the
whole converted to the single pursuit. Life becomes our helper.
Intent, vigilant, integrally conscious, we can take every detail
of its forms and every incident of its movements as food for
the sacrificial Fire within us. Victorious in the struggle, we can
compel Earth herself to be an aid towards our perfection and
can enrich our realisation with the booty torn from the Powers
that oppose us.
There is another direction in which the ordinary practice of Yoga
arrives at a helpful but narrowing simplification which is denied
to the sadhaka of the integral aim. The practice of Yoga brings us
face to face with the extraordinary complexity of our own being,
the stimulating but also embarrassing multiplicity of our person¬
ality, the rich endless confusion of Nature. To the ordinary man
Self-Consecration
75
The practice of Yoga brings us
face to face with the extraordinary complexity of our own being,
the stimulating but also embarrassing multiplicity of our person¬
ality, the rich endless confusion of Nature. To the ordinary man
Self-Consecration
75
who lives upon his own waking surface, ignorant of the self’s
depths and vastnesses behind the veil, his psychological existence
is fairly simple. A small but clamorous company of desires, some
imperative intellectual and aesthetic cravings, some tastes, a few
ruling or prominent ideas amid a great current of unconnected
or ill-connected and mostly trivial thoughts, a number of more
or less imperative vital needs, alternations of physical health
and disease, a scattered and inconsequent succession of joys and
griefs, frequent minor disturbances and vicissitudes and rarer
strong searchings and upheavals of mind or body, and through
it all Nature, partly with the aid of his thought and will, partly
without or in spite of it, arranging these things in some rough
practical fashion, some tolerable disorderly order, — this is the
material of his existence. The average human being even now
is in his inward existence as crude and undeveloped as was
the bygone primitive man in his outward life. But as soon as
we go deep within ourselves, — and Yoga means a plunge into
all the multiple profundities of the soul, — we find ourselves
subjectively, as man in his growth has found himself objectively,
surrounded by a whole complex world which we have to know
and to conquer.
The most disconcerting discovery is to find that every part of
us — intellect, will, sense-mind, nervous or desire self, the heart,
the body — has each, as it were, its own complex individuality
and natural formation independent of the rest; it neither agrees
with itself nor with the others nor with the representative ego
which is the shadow cast by some central and centralising self
on our superficial ignorance. We find that we are composed not
of one but many personalities and each has its own demands
and differing nature. Our being is a roughly constituted chaos
into which we have to introduce the principle of a divine order.
Moreover, we find that inwardly too, no less than outwardly,
we are not alone in the world; the sharp separateness of our ego
was no more than a strong imposition and delusion; we do not
exist in ourselves, we do not really live apart in an inner privacy
or solitude. Our mind is a receiving, developing and modify¬
ing machine into which there is being constantly passed from
76
Our mind is a receiving, developing and modify¬
ing machine into which there is being constantly passed from
76
The Yoga of Divine Works
moment to moment a ceaseless foreign flux, a streaming mass of
disparate materials from above, from below, from outside. Much
more than half our thoughts and feelings are not our own in the
sense that they take form out of ourselves; of hardly anything
can it be said that it is truly original to our nature. A large part
comes to us from others or from the environment, whether as
raw material or as manufactured imports; but still more largely
they come from universal Nature here or from other worlds
and planes and their beings and powers and influences; for we
are overtopped and environed by other planes of consciousness,
mind planes, life planes, subtle matter planes, from which our
life and action here are fed, or fed on, pressed, dominated,
made use of for the manifestation of their forms and forces.
The difficulty of our separate salvation is immensely increased
by this complexity and manifold openness and subjection to the
in-streaming energies of the universe. Of all this we have to take
account, to deal with it, to know what is the secret stuff of our
nature and its constituent and resultant motions and to create
in it all a divine centre and a true harmony and luminous order.
In the ordinary paths of Yoga the method used for dealing
with these conflicting materials is direct and simple. One or
another of the principal psychological forces in us is selected as
our single means for attaining to the Divine; the rest is quieted
into inertia or left to starve in its smallness. The Bhakta, seizing
on the emotional forces of the being, the intense activities of
the heart, abides concentrated in the love of God, gathered up
as into a single one-pointed tongue of fire; he is indifferent to
the activities of thought, throws behind him the importunities
of the reason, cares nothing for the mind’s thirst for knowledge.
All the knowledge he needs is his faith and the inspirations
that well up from a heart in communion with the Divine. He
has no use for any will to works that is not turned to the di¬
rect worship of the Beloved or the service of the temple. The
man of Knowledge, self-confined by a deliberate choice to the
force and activities of discriminative thought, finds release in
the mind’s hushed inward-drawn endeavour. He concentrates
on the idea of the self, succeeds by a subtle inner discernment
Self-Consecration
77
He concentrates
on the idea of the self, succeeds by a subtle inner discernment
Self-Consecration
77
in distinguishing its silent presence amid the veiling activities of
Nature, and through the perceptive idea arrives at the concrete
spiritual experience. He is indifferent to the play of the emotions,
deaf to the hunger-call of passion, closed to the activities of Life,
— the more blessed he, the sooner they fall away from him and
leave him free, still and mute, the eternal non-doer. The body is
his stumbling-block, the vital functions are his enemies; if their
demands can be reduced to a minimum, that is his great good
fortune. The endless difficulties that arise from the environing
world are dismissed by erecting firmly against them a defence of
outer physical and inner spiritual solitude; safe behind a wall of
inner silence, he remains impassive and untouched by the world
and by others. To be alone with oneself or alone with the Divine,
to walk apart with God and his devotees, to entrench oneself in
the single self-ward endeavour of the mind or Godward passion
of the heart is the trend of these Yogas. The problem is solved by
the excision of all but the one central difficulty which pursues
the one chosen motive-force; into the midst of the dividing calls
of our nature the principle of an exclusive concentration comes
sovereignly to our rescue.
But for the sadhaka of the integral Yoga this inner or this
outer solitude can only be incidents or periods in his spiritual
progress. Accepting life, he has to bear not only his own burden,
but a great part of the world’s burden too along with it, as a con¬
tinuation of his own sufficiently heavy load. Therefore his Yoga
has much more of the nature of a battle than others; but this is
not only an individual battle, it is a collective war waged over a
considerable country. He has not only to conquer in himself the
forces of egoistic falsehood and disorder, but to conquer them
as representatives of the same adverse and inexhaustible forces
in the world. Their representative character gives them a much
more obstinate capacity of resistance, an almost endless right to
recurrence. Often he finds that even after he has won persistently
his own personal battle, he has still to win it over and over again
in a seemingly interminable war, because his inner existence has
already been so much enlarged that not only it contains his
own being with its well-defined needs and experiences, but is in
78
The Yoga of Divine Works
solidarity with the being of others, because in himself he contains
the universe.
Nor is the seeker of the integral fulfilment permitted to
solve too arbitrarily even the conflict of his own inner members.
He has to harmonise deliberate knowledge with unquestion¬
ing faith; he must conciliate the gentle soul of love with the
formidable need of power; the passivity of the soul that lives
content in transcendent calm has to be fused with the activity of
the divine helper and the divine warrior. To him as to all seekers
of the spirit there are offered for solution the oppositions of
the reason, the clinging hold of the senses, the perturbations of
the heart, the ambush of the desires, the clog of the physical
body; but he has to deal in another fashion with their mutual
and internal conflicts and their hindrance to his aim, for he must
arrive at an infinitely more difficult perfection in the handling of
all this rebel matter. Accepting them as instruments for the divine
realisation and manifestation, he has to convert their jangling
discords, to enlighten their thick darknesses, to transfigure them
separately and all together, harmonising them in themselves and
with each other, — integrally, omitting no grain or strand or
vibration, leaving no iota of imperfection anywhere. An exclu¬
sive concentration, or even a succession of concentrations of
that kind, can be in his complex work only a temporary conve¬
nience; it has to be abandoned as soon as its utility is over. An
all-inclusive concentration is the difficult achievement towards
which he must labour.
Concentration is indeed the first condition of any Yoga, but it
is an all-receiving concentration that is the very nature of the
integral Yoga. A separate strong fixing of the thought, of the
emotions or of the will on a single idea, object, state, inner
movement or principle is no doubt a frequent need here also;
but this is only a subsidiary helpful process. A wide massive
opening, a harmonised concentration of the whole being in all
its parts and through all its powers upon the One who is the All
Self-Consecration
79
is the larger action of this Yoga without which it cannot achieve
its purpose. For it is the consciousness that rests in the One and
that acts in the All to which we aspire; it is this that we seek to
impose on every element of our being and on every movement of
our nature. This wide and concentrated totality is the essential
character of the Sadhana and its character must determine its
practice.
This wide and concentrated totality is the essential
character of the Sadhana and its character must determine its
practice.
But even though the concentration of all the being on the
Divine is the character of the Yoga, yet is our being too complex
a thing to be taken up easily and at once, as if we were taking
up the world in a pair of hands, and set in its entirety to a
single task. Man in his effort at self-transcendence has usually
to seize on some one spring or some powerful leverage in the
complicated machine that his nature is; this spring or lever he
touches in preference to others and uses it to set the machine in
motion towards the end that he has in view. In his choice it is
always Nature itself that should be his guide. But here it must be
Nature at her highest and widest in him, not at her lowest or in
some limiting movement. In her lower vital activities it is desire
that Nature takes as her most powerful leverage; but the distinct
character of man is that he is a mental being, not a merely vital
creature. As he can use his thinking mind and will to restrain
and correct his life impulses, so too he can bring in the action
of a still higher luminous mentality aided by the deeper soul in
him, the psychic being, and supersede by these greater and purer
motive-powers the domination of the vital and sensational force
that we call desire. He can entirely master or persuade it and
offer it up for transformation to its divine Master. This higher
mentality and this deeper soul, the psychic element in man, are
the two grappling hooks by which the Divine can lay hold upon
his nature.
The higher mind in man is something other, loftier, purer,
vaster, more powerful than the reason or logical intelligence.
The animal is a vital and sensational being; man, it is said,
is distinguished from the animal by the possession of reason.
But that is a very summary, a very imperfect and misleading
account of the matter. For reason is only a particular and limited
80
The Yoga of Divine Works
But that is a very summary, a very imperfect and misleading
account of the matter. For reason is only a particular and limited
80
The Yoga of Divine Works
utilitarian and instrumental activity that proceeds from some¬
thing much greater than itself, from a power that dwells in an
ether more luminous, wider, illimitable. The true and ultimate, as
distinguished from the immediate or intermediate importance of
our observing, reasoning, inquiring, judging intelligence is that
it prepares the human being for the right reception and right
action of a Light from above which must progressively replace
in him the obscure light from below that guides the animal.
The latter also has a rudimentary reason, a kind of thought,
a soul, a will and keen emotions; even though less developed,
its psychology is yet the same in kind as man’s. But all these
capacities in the animal are automatically moved and strictly
limited, almost even constituted by the lower nervous being. All
animal perceptions, sensibilities, activities are ruled by nervous
and vital instincts, cravings, needs, satisfactions, of which the
nexus is the life-impulse and vital desire. Man too is bound,
but less bound, to this automatism of the vital nature. Man
can bring an enlightened will, an enlightened thought and en¬
lightened emotions to the difficult work of his self-development;
he can more and more subject to these more conscious and
reflecting guides the inferior function of desire. In proportion as
he can thus master and enlighten his lower self, he is man and no
longer an animal. When he can begin to replace desire altogether
by a still greater enlightened thought and sight and will in touch
with the Infinite, consciously subject to a diviner will than his
own, linked to a more universal and transcendent knowledge,
he has commenced the ascent towards the superman; he is on
his upward march towards the Divine.
It is, then, in the highest mind of thought and light and will
or it is in the inner heart of deepest feeling and emotion that we
must first centre our consciousness, — in either of them or, if we
are capable, in both together, — and use that as our leverage to
lift the nature wholly towards the Divine. The concentration of
an enlightened thought, will and heart turned in unison towards
one vast goal of our knowledge, one luminous and infinite source
of our action, one imperishable object of our emotion is the
starting-point of the Yoga. And the object of our seeking must be
Self-Consecration
81
And the object of our seeking must be
Self-Consecration
81
the very fount of the Light which is growing in us, the very origin
of the Force which we are calling to move our members. Our
one objective must be the Divine himself to whom, knowingly
or unknowingly, something always aspires in our secret nature.
There must be a large, many-sided yet single concentration of the
thought on the idea, the perception, the vision, the awakening
touch, the soul’s realisation of the one Divine. There must be
a flaming concentration of the heart on the seeking of the All
and Eternal and, when once we have found him, a deep plunging
and immersion in the possession and ecstasy of the All-Beautiful.
There must be a strong and immovable concentration of the will
on the attainment and fulfilment of all that the Divine is and a
free and plastic opening of it to all that he intends to manifest
in us. This is the triple way of the Yoga.
But on that which as yet we know not how shall we concentrate?
And yet we cannot know the Divine unless we have achieved this
concentration of our being upon him. A concentration which
culminates in a living realisation and the constant sense of the
presence of the One in ourselves and in all of which we are
aware, is what we mean in Yoga by knowledge and the effort
after knowledge. It is not enough to devote ourselves by the
reading of Scriptures or by the stress of philosophic reasoning
to an intellectual understanding of the Divine; for at the end of
our long mental labour we might know all that has been said of
the Eternal, possess all that can be thought about the Infinite and
yet we might not know him at all. This intellectual preparation
can indeed be the first stage in a powerful Yoga, but it is not
indispensable: it is not a step which all need or can be called upon
to take. Yoga would be impossible, except for a very few, if the
intellectual figure of knowledge arrived at by the speculative or
meditative Reason were its indispensable condition or a binding
preliminary. All that the Light from above asks of us that it may
begin its work is a call from the soul and a sufficient point of
support in the mind. This support can be reached through an
82
The Yoga of Divine Works
All that the Light from above asks of us that it may
begin its work is a call from the soul and a sufficient point of
support in the mind. This support can be reached through an
82
The Yoga of Divine Works
insistent idea of the Divine in the thought, a corresponding will
in the dynamic parts, an aspiration, a faith, a need in the heart.
Any one of these may lead or predominate, if all cannot move
in unison or in an equal rhythm. The idea may be and must
in the beginning be inadequate; the aspiration may be narrow
and imperfect, the faith poorly illumined or even, as not surely
founded on the rock of knowledge, fluctuating, uncertain, easily
diminished; often even it may be extinguished and need to be
lit again with difficulty like a torch in a windy pass. But if once
there is a resolute self-consecration from deep within, if there is
an awakening to the soul’s call, these inadequate things can be a
sufficient instrument for the divine purpose. Therefore the wise
have always been unwilling to limit man’s avenues towards God;
they would not shut against his entry even the narrowest portal,
the lowest and darkest postern, the humblest wicket-gate. Any
name, any form, any symbol, any offering has been held to be
sufficient if there is the consecration along with it; for the Divine
knows himself in the heart of the seeker and accepts the sacrifice.
Any
name, any form, any symbol, any offering has been held to be
sufficient if there is the consecration along with it; for the Divine
knows himself in the heart of the seeker and accepts the sacrifice.
But still the greater and wider the moving idea-force be¬
hind the consecration, the better for the seeker; his attainment
is likely to be fuller and more ample. If we are to attempt an
integral Yoga, it will be as well to start with an idea of the Divine
that is itself integral. There should be an aspiration in the heart
wide enough for a realisation without any narrow limits. Not
only should we avoid a sectarian religious outlook, but also all
one-sided philosophical conceptions which try to shut up the In¬
effable in a restricting mental formula. The dynamic conception
or impelling sense with which our Yoga can best set out would be
naturally the idea, the sense of a conscious all-embracing but all-
exceeding Infinite. Our uplook must be to a free, all-powerful,
perfect and blissful One and Oneness in which all beings move
and live and through which all can meet and become one. This
Eternal will be at once personal and impersonal in his self¬
revelation and touch upon the soul. He is personal because he is
the conscious Divine, the infinite Person who casts some broken
reflection of himself in the myriad divine and undivine personal¬
ities of the universe. He is impersonal because he appears to us
Self-Consecration
83
He is personal because he is
the conscious Divine, the infinite Person who casts some broken
reflection of himself in the myriad divine and undivine personal¬
ities of the universe. He is impersonal because he appears to us
Self-Consecration
83
as an infinite Existence, Consciousness and Ananda and because
he is the fount, base and constituent of all existences and all
energies, the very material of our being and mind and life and
body, our spirit and our matter. The thought, concentrating on
him, must not merely understand in an intellectual form that he
exists, or conceive of him as an abstraction, a logical necessity;
it must become a seeing thought able to meet him here as the
Inhabitant in all, realise him in ourselves, watch and take hold
on the movement of his forces. He is the one Existence: he is
the original and universal Delight that constitutes all things and
exceeds them: he is the one infinite Consciousness that composes
all consciousnesses and informs all their movements: he is the
one illimitable Being who sustains all action and experience: his
will guides the evolution of things towards their yet unrealised
but inevitable aim and plenitude. To him the heart can consecrate
itself, approach him as the supreme Beloved, beat and move in
him as in a universal sweetness of Eove and a living sea of
Delight. Eor his is the secret Joy that supports the soul in all
its experiences and maintains even the errant ego in its ordeals
and struggles till all sorrow and suffering shall cease. His is the
Eove and the Bliss of the infinite divine Eover who is drawing all
things by their own path towards his happy oneness. On him the
Will can unalterably fix as the invisible Power that guides and
fulfils it and as the source of its strength. In the impersonality
this actuating Power is a self-illumined Eorce that contains all
results and calmly works until it accomplishes, in the personality
an all-wise and omnipotent Master of the Yoga whom nothing
can prevent from leading it to its goal. This is the faith with
which the seeker has to begin his seeking and endeavour; for
in all his effort here, but most of all in his effort towards the
Unseen, mental man must perforce proceed by faith. When the
realisation comes, the faith divinely fulfilled and completed will
be transformed into an eternal flame of knowledge.
Into all our endeavour upward the lower element of desire will
84
The Yoga of Divine Works
When the
realisation comes, the faith divinely fulfilled and completed will
be transformed into an eternal flame of knowledge.
Into all our endeavour upward the lower element of desire will
84
The Yoga of Divine Works
at first naturally enter. For what the enlightened will sees as the
thing to be done and pursues as the crown to be conquered,
what the heart embraces as the one thing delightful, that in us
which feels itself limited and opposed and, because it is limited,
craves and struggles, will seek with the troubled passion of an
egoistic desire. This craving life-force or desire-soul in us has to
be accepted at first, but only in order that it may be transformed.
Even from the very beginning it has to be taught to renounce all
other desires and concentrate itself on the passion for the Divine.
This capital point gained, it has to be taught to desire, not for
its own separate sake, but for God in the world and for the
Divine in ourselves; it has to fix itself upon no personal spiritual
gain, though of all possible spiritual gains we are sure, but on
the great work to be done in us and others, on the high coming
manifestation which is to be the glorious fulfilment of the Divine
in the world, on the Truth that has to be sought and lived and
enthroned for ever. But last, most difficult for it, more difficult
than to seek with the right object, it has to be taught to seek in the
right manner; for it must learn to desire, not in its own egoistic
way, but in the way of the Divine. It must insist no longer, as
the strong separative will always insists, on its own manner of
fulfilment, its own dream of possession, its own idea of the right
and the desirable; it must yearn to fulfil a larger and greater Will
and consent to wait upon a less interested and ignorant guidance.
Thus trained. Desire, that great unquiet harasser and troubler of
man and cause of every kind of stumbling, will become fit to be
transformed into its divine counterpart. For desire and passion
too have their divine forms; there is a pure ecstasy of the soul’s
seeking beyond all craving and grief, there is a Will of Ananda
that sits glorified in the possession of the supreme beatitudes.
For desire and passion
too have their divine forms; there is a pure ecstasy of the soul’s
seeking beyond all craving and grief, there is a Will of Ananda
that sits glorified in the possession of the supreme beatitudes.
When once the object of concentration has possessed and
is possessed by the three master instruments, the thought, the
heart and the will, — a consummation fully possible only when
the desire-soul in us has submitted to the Divine Law, — the
perfection of mind and life and body can be effectively fulfilled
in our transmuted nature. This will be done, not for the personal
satisfaction of the ego, but that the whole may constitute a fit
Self-Consecration
85
temple for the Divine Presence, a faultless instrument for the
divine work. For that work can be truly performed only when
the instrument, consecrated and perfected, has grown fit for
a selfless action, — and that will be when personal desire and
egoism are abolished, but not the liberated individual. Even
when the little ego has been abolished, the true spiritual Person
can still remain and God’s will and work and delight in him and
the spiritual use of his perfection and fulfilment. Our works will
then be divine and done divinely; our mind and life and will,
devoted to the Divine, will be used to help fulfil in others and
in the world that which has been first realised in ourselves, —
all that we can manifest of the embodied Unity, Love, Freedom,
Strength, Power, Splendour, immortal Joy which is the goal of
the Spirit’s terrestrial adventure.
The Yoga must start with an effort or at least a settled turn
towards this total concentration. A constant and unfailing will
of consecration of all ourselves to the Supreme is demanded of
us, an offering of our whole being and our many-chambered
nature to the Eternal who is the All. The effective fullness of our
concentration on the one thing needful to the exclusion of all
else will be the measure of our self-consecration to the One who
is alone desirable. But this exclusiveness will in the end exclude
nothing except the falsehood of our way of seeing the world
and our will’s ignorance. For our concentration on the Eternal
will be consummated by the mind when we see constantly the
Divine in itself and the Divine in ourselves, but also the Divine
in all things and beings and happenings. It will be consummated
by the heart when all emotion is summed up in the love of the
Divine, — of the Divine in itself and for itself, but love too of the
Divine in all its beings and powers and personalities and forms
in the Universe. It will be consummated by the will when we feel
and receive always the divine impulsion and accept that alone as
our sole motive force; but this will mean that, having slain to the
last rebellious straggler the wandering impulses of the egoistic
nature, we have universalised ourselves and can accept with a
constant happy acceptance the one divine working in all things.
This is the first fundamental siddhi of the integral Yoga.
86
The Yoga of Divine Works
It is nothing less that is meant in the end when we speak
of the absolute consecration of the individual to the Divine. But
this total fullness of consecration can only come by a constant
progression when the long and difficult process of transforming
desire out of existence is completed in an ungrudging measure.
Perfect self-consecration implies perfect self-surrender.
But
this total fullness of consecration can only come by a constant
progression when the long and difficult process of transforming
desire out of existence is completed in an ungrudging measure.
Perfect self-consecration implies perfect self-surrender.
For here, there are two movements with a transitional stage
between them, two periods of this Yoga, — one of the process of
surrender, the other of its crown and consequence. In the first the
individual prepares himself for the reception of the Divine into
his members. For all this first period he has to work by means of
the instruments of the lower Nature, but aided more and more
from above. But in the later transitional stage of this movement
our personal and necessarily ignorant effort more and more
dwindles and a higher Nature acts; the eternal Shakti descends
into this limited form of mortality and progressively possesses
and transmutes it. In the second period the greater movement
wholly replaces the lesser, formerly indispensable first action; but
this can be done only when our self-surrender is complete. The
ego person in us cannot transform itself by its own force or will
or knowledge or by any virtue of its own into the nature of the
Divine; all it can do is to fit itself for the transformation and make
more and more its surrender to that which it seeks to become. As
long as the ego is at work in us, our personal action is and must
always be in its nature a part of the lower grades of existence; it
is obscure or half-enlightened, limited in its field, very partially
effective in its power. If a spiritual transformation, not a mere
illumining modification of our nature, is to be done at all, we
must call in the Divine Shakti to effect that miraculous work
in the individual; for she alone has the needed force, decisive,
all-wise and illimitable. But the entire substitution of the divine
for the human personal action is not at once entirely possible.
All interference from below that would falsify the truth of the
superior action must first be inhibited or rendered impotent.
Self-Consecration
87
But the entire substitution of the divine
for the human personal action is not at once entirely possible.
All interference from below that would falsify the truth of the
superior action must first be inhibited or rendered impotent.
Self-Consecration
87
and it must be done by our own free choice. A continual and
always repeated refusal of the impulsions and falsehoods of the
lower nature is asked from us and an insistent support to the
Truth as it grows in our parts; for the progressive settling into
our nature and final perfection of the incoming informing Light,
Purity and Power needs for its development and sustenance our
free acceptance of it and our stubborn rejection of all that is
contrary to it, inferior or incompatible.
In the first movement of self-preparation, the period of per¬
sonal effort, the method we have to use is this concentration of
the whole being on the Divine that it seeks and, as its corollary,
this constant rejection, throwing out, kath arsis, of all that is not
the true Truth of the Divine. An entire consecration of all that
we are, think, feel and do will be the result of this persistence.
This consecration in its turn must culminate in an integral self¬
giving to the Highest; for its crown and sign of completion is
the whole nature’s all-comprehending absolute surrender. In the
second stage of the Yoga, transitional between the human and
the divine working, there will supervene an increasing purified
and vigilant passivity, a more and more luminous divine response
to the Divine Force, but not to any other; and there will be as
a result the growing inrush of a great and conscious miraculous
working from above. In the last period there is no effort at
all, no set method, no fixed sadhana; the place of endeavour
and tapasya will be taken by a natural, simple, powerful and
happy disclosing of the flower of the Divine out of the bud of
a purified and perfected terrestrial nature. These are the natural
successions of the action of the Yoga.
These are the natural
successions of the action of the Yoga.
These movements are indeed not always or absolutely ar¬
ranged in a strict succession to each other. The second stage
begins in part before the first is completed; the first continues
in part until the second is perfected; the last divine working
can manifest from time to time as a promise before it is finally
settled and normal to the nature. Always too there is something
higher and greater than the individual which leads him even in
his personal labour and endeavour. Often he may become, and
remain for a time, wholly conscious, even in parts of his being
88
The Yoga of Divine Works
permanently conscious, of this greater leading behind the veil,
and that may happen long before his whole nature has been
purified in all its parts from the lower indirect control. Even, he
may be thus conscious from the beginning; his mind and heart,
if not his other members, may respond to that seizing and pene¬
trating guidance with a certain initial completeness from the very
first steps of the Yoga. But it is the constant and complete and
uniform action of the great direct control that more and more
distinguishes the transitional stage as it proceeds and draws to
its close. This predominance of a greater diviner leading, not
personal to ourselves, indicates the nature’s increasing ripeness
for a total spiritual transformation. It is the unmistakable sign
that the self-consecration has not only been accepted in princi¬
ple but is fulfilled in act and power. The Supreme has laid his
luminous hand upon a chosen human vessel of his miraculous
Light and Power and Ananda.
Chapter III
Self-Surrender in Works —
The Way of the Gita
The Supreme has laid his
luminous hand upon a chosen human vessel of his miraculous
Light and Power and Ananda.
Chapter III
Self-Surrender in Works —
The Way of the Gita
Life, not a remote silent or high- uplifted ecstatic Beyond-
Life alone, is the field of our Yoga. The transformation of
our superficial, narrow and fragmentary human way of
thinking, seeing, feeling and being into a deep and wide spiritual
consciousness and an integrated inner and outer existence and
of our ordinary human living into the divine way of life must
be its central purpose. The means towards this supreme end is
a self-giving of all our nature to the Divine. Everything must be
given to the Divine within us, to the universal All and to the
transcendent Supreme. An absolute concentration of our will,
our heart and our thought on that one and manifold Divine, an
unreserved self-consecration of our whole being to the Divine
alone — this is the decisive movement, the turning of the ego
to That which is infinitely greater than itself, its self-giving and
indispensable surrender.
The life of the human creature, as it is ordinarily lived, is
composed of a half-fixed, half-fluid mass of very imperfectly
ruled thoughts, perceptions, sensations, emotions, desires, en¬
joyments, acts, mostly customary and self-repeating, in part only
dynamic and self-developing, but all centred around a superficial
ego. The sum of movement of these activities eventuates in an
internal growth which is partly visible and operative in this life,
partly a seed of progress in lives hereafter. This growth of the
conscious being, an expansion, an increasing self-expression,
a more and more harmonised development of his constituent
members is the whole meaning and all the pith of human
existence. It is for this meaningful development of consciousness
by thought, will, emotion, desire, action and experience, leading
in the end to a supreme divine self-discovery, that Man, the
90
The Yoga of Divine Works
mental being, has entered into the material body. All the rest
is either auxiliary and subordinate or accidental and otiose;
that only matters which sustains and helps the evolution of his
nature and the growth or rather the progressive unfolding and
discovery of his self and spirit.
All the rest
is either auxiliary and subordinate or accidental and otiose;
that only matters which sustains and helps the evolution of his
nature and the growth or rather the progressive unfolding and
discovery of his self and spirit.
The aim set before our Yoga is nothing less than to hasten
this supreme object of our existence here. Its process leaves be¬
hind the ordinary tardy method of slow and confused growth
through the evolution of Nature. For the natural evolution is
at its best an uncertain growth under cover, partly by the pres¬
sure of the environment, partly by a groping education and
an ill-lighted purposeful effort, an only partially illumined and
half-automatic use of opportunities with many blunders and
lapses and relapses; a great portion of it is made up of apparent
accidents and circumstances and vicissitudes, — though veiling
a secret divine intervention and guidance. In Yoga we replace
this confused crooked crab-motion by a rapid, conscious and
self-directed evolution which is planned to carry us, as far as
can be, in a straight line towards the goal set before us. In a
certain sense it may be an error to speak of a goal anywhere in
a progression which may well be infinite. Still we can conceive
of an immediate goal, an ulterior objective beyond our present
achievement towards which the soul in man can aspire. There
lies before him the possibility of a new birth; there can be an
ascent into a higher and wider plane of being and its descent to
transform his members. An enlarged and illumined conscious¬
ness is possible that shall make of him a liberated spirit and a
perfected force — and, if spread beyond the individual, it might
even constitute a divine humanity or else a new, a supramental
and therefore a superhuman race. It is this new birth that we
make our aim: a growth into a divine consciousness is the whole
meaning of our Yoga, an integral conversion to divinity not only
of the soul but of all the parts of our nature.
Our purpose in Yoga is to exile the limited outward-looking
Self-Surrender in Works — The Way of the Gita 91
Our purpose in Yoga is to exile the limited outward-looking
Self-Surrender in Works — The Way of the Gita 91
ego and to enthrone God in its place as the ruling Inhabitant
of the nature. And this means, first, to disinherit desire and
no longer accept the enjoyment of desire as the ruling human
motive. The spiritual life will draw its sustenance not from
desire but from a pure and selfless spiritual delight of essential
existence. And not only the vital nature in us whose stamp is
desire, but the mental being too must undergo a new birth and a
transfiguring change. Our divided, egoistic, limited and ignorant
thought and intelligence must disappear; in its place there must
stream in the catholic and faultless play of a shadowless divine
illumination which shall culminate in the end in a natural
self-existent Truth-consciousness free from groping half-truth
and stumbling error. Our confused and embarrassed ego-centred
small-motived will and action must cease and make room for the
total working of a swiftly powerful, lucidly automatic, divinely
moved and guided unfallen Force. There must be implanted and
activised in all our doings a supreme, impersonal, unfaltering
and unstumbling will in spontaneous and untroubled unison
with the will of the Divine. The unsatisfying surface play of
our feeble egoistic emotions must be ousted and there must be
revealed instead a secret deep and vast psychic heart within that
waits behind them for its hour; all our feelings, impelled by
this inner heart in which dwells the Divine, will be transmuted
into calm and intense movements of a twin passion of divine
Love and manifold Ananda. This is the definition of a divine
humanity or a supramental race. This, not an exaggerated or
even a sublimated energy of human intellect and action, is the
type of the superman whom we are called to evolve by our Yoga.
In the ordinary human existence an outgoing action is ob¬
viously three-fourths or even more of our life. It is only the
exceptions, the saint and the seer, the rare thinker, poet and
artist who can live more within themselves; these indeed, at
least in the most intimate parts of their nature, shape themselves
more in inner thought and feeling than in the surface act. But it
is not either of these sides separated from the other, but rather a
harmony of the inner and the outer life made one in fullness and
transfigured into a play of something that is beyond them which
92
The Yoga of Divine Works
But it
is not either of these sides separated from the other, but rather a
harmony of the inner and the outer life made one in fullness and
transfigured into a play of something that is beyond them which
92
The Yoga of Divine Works
will create the form of a perfect living. A Yoga of works, a union
with the Divine in our will and acts — and not only in knowl¬
edge and feeling — is then an indispensable, an inexpressibly
important element of an integral Yoga. The conversion of our
thought and feeling without a corresponding conversion of the
spirit and body of our works would be a maimed achievement.
But if this total conversion is to be done, there must be a con¬
secration of our actions and outer movements as much as of our
mind and heart to the Divine. There must be accepted and pro¬
gressively accomplished a surrender of our capacities of working
into the hands of a greater Power behind us and our sense of be¬
ing the doer and worker must disappear. All must be given for a
more direct use into the hands of the divine Will which is hidden
by these frontal appearances; for by that permitting Will alone
is our action possible. A hidden Power is the true Lord and over¬
ruling Observer of our acts and only he knows through all the
ignorance and perversion and deformation brought in by the ego
their entire sense and ultimate purpose. There must be effected
a complete transformation of our limited and distorted egoistic
life and works into the large and direct outpouring of a greater
divine Life, Will and Energy that now secretly supports us. This
greater Will and Energy must be made conscious in us and mas¬
ter; no longer must it remain, as now, only a superconscious,
upholding and permitting Eorce. There must be achieved an
undistorted transmission through us of the all-wise purpose and
process of a now hidden omniscient Power and omnipotent
Knowledge which will turn into its pure, unobstructed, happily
consenting and participating channel all our transmuted nature.
This total consecration and surrender and this resultant entire
transformation and free transmission make up the whole funda¬
mental means and the ultimate aim of an integral Karmayoga.
This total consecration and surrender and this resultant entire
transformation and free transmission make up the whole funda¬
mental means and the ultimate aim of an integral Karmayoga.
Even for those whose first natural movement is a conse¬
cration, a surrender and a resultant entire transformation of
the thinking mind and its knowledge, or a total consecration,
surrender and transformation of the heart and its emotions, the
consecration of works is a needed element in that change. Oth¬
erwise, although they may find God in other-life, they will not be
Self-Surrender in Works — The Way of the Gita 93
able to fulfil the Divine in life; life for them will be a meaningless
undivine inconsequence. Not for them the true victory that shall
be the key to the riddle of our terrestrial existence; their love
will not be the absolute love triumphant over self, their knowl¬
edge will not be the total consciousness and the all-embracing
knowledge. It is possible, indeed, to begin with knowledge or
Godward emotion solely or with both together and to leave
works for the final movement of the Yoga. But there is then this
disadvantage that we may tend to live too exclusively within,
subtilised in subjective experience, shut off in our isolated inner
parts; there we may get incrusted in our spiritual seclusion and
find it difficult later on to pour ourselves triumphantly outwards
and apply to life our gains in the higher Nature. When we turn
to add this external kingdom also to our inner conquests, we
shall find ourselves too much accustomed to an activity purely
subjective and ineffective on the material plane. There will be an
immense difficulty in transforming the outer life and the body.
Or we shall find that our action does not correspond with the
inner light: it still follows the old accustomed mistaken paths,
still obeys the old normal imperfect influences; the Truth within
us continues to be separated by a painful gulf from the ignorant
mechanism of our external nature. This is a frequent experience
because in such a process the Light and Power come to be self-
contained and unwilling to express themselves in life or to use
the physical means prescribed for the Earth and her processes.
It is as if we were living in another, a larger and subtler world
and had no divine hold, perhaps little hold of any kind, upon
the material and terrestrial existence.
It is as if we were living in another, a larger and subtler world
and had no divine hold, perhaps little hold of any kind, upon
the material and terrestrial existence.
But still each must follow his nature, and there are always
difficulties that have to be accepted for some time if we are to
pursue our natural path of Yoga. Yoga is after all primarily a
change of the inner consciousness and nature, and if the balance
of our parts is such that this must be done first with an initial
exclusiveness and the rest left for later handling, we must accept
the apparent imperfection of the process. Yet would the ideal
working of an integral Yoga be a movement, even from the
beginning, integral in its process and whole and many-sided in
94
The Yoga of Divine Works
its progress. In any case our present preoccupation is with a
Yoga, integral in its aim and complete movement, but starting
from works and proceeding by works although at each step
more and more moved by a vivifying divine love and more and
more illumined by a helping divine knowledge.
The greatest gospel of spiritual works ever yet given to the race,
the most perfect system of Karmayoga known to man in the past,
is to be found in the Bhagavad Gita. In that famous episode of the
Mahabharata the great basic lines of Karmayoga are laid down
for all time with an incomparable mastery and the infallible eye
of an assured experience. It is true that the path alone, as the
ancients saw it, is worked out fully: the perfect fulfilment, the
highest secret^ is hinted rather than developed; it is kept back
as an unexpressed part of a supreme mystery. There are obvious
reasons for this reticence; for the fulfilment is in any case a
matter for experience and no teaching can express it. It cannot
be described in a way that can really be understood by a mind
that has not the effulgent transmuting experience. And for the
soul that has passed the shining portals and stands in the blaze
of the inner light, all mental and verbal description is as poor
as it is superfluous, inadequate and an impertinence. All divine
consummations have perforce to be figured by us in the inapt and
deceptive terms of a language which was made to fit the normal
experience of mental man; so expressed, they can be rightly
understood only by those who already know, and, knowing,
are able to give these poor external terms a changed, inner and
transfigured sense. As the Vedic Rishis insisted in the beginning,
the words of the supreme wisdom are expressive only to those
who are already of the wise. The Gita at its cryptic close may
seem by its silence to stop short of that solution for which we
are seeking; it pauses at the borders of the highest spiritual mind
and does not cross them into the splendours of the supramental
^ rahasyam uttamam.
Self-Surrender in Works — The Way of the Gita 95
Light. And yet its secret of dynamic, and not only static, identity
with the inner Presence, its highest mystery of absolute surrender
to the Divine Guide, Lord and Inhabitant of our nature, is the
central secret. This surrender is the indispensable means of the
supramental change and, again, it is through the supramental
change that the dynamic identity becomes possible.
This surrender is the indispensable means of the
supramental change and, again, it is through the supramental
change that the dynamic identity becomes possible.
What then are the lines of Karmayoga laid down by the
Gita? Its key principle, its spiritual method, can be summed
up as the union of two largest and highest states or powers of
consciousness, equality and oneness. The kernel of its method
is an unreserved acceptance of the Divine in our life as in our
inner self and spirit. An inner renunciation of personal desire
leads to equality, accomplishes our total surrender to the Divine,
supports a delivery from dividing ego which brings us oneness.
But this must be a oneness in dynamic force and not only in
static peace or inactive beatitude. The Gita promises us freedom
for the spirit even in the midst of works and the full energies of
Nature, if we accept subjection of our whole being to that which
is higher than the separating and limiting ego. It proposes an
integral dynamic activity founded on a still passivity; a largest
possible action irrevocably based on an immobile calm is its
secret, — free expression out of a supreme inward silence.
All things here are the one and indivisible eternal transcen¬
dent and cosmic Brahman that is in its seeming divided in things
and creatures; in seeming only, for in truth it is always one
and equal in all things and creatures and the division is only a
phenomenon of the surface. As long as we live in the ignorant
seeming, we are the ego and are subject to the modes of Nature.
Enslaved to appearances, bound to the dualities, tossed between
good and evil, sin and virtue, grief and joy, pain and pleasure,
good fortune and ill fortune, success and failure, we follow help¬
lessly the iron or gilt and iron round of the wheel of Maya. At
best we have only the poor relative freedom which by us is igno¬
rantly called free-will. But that is at bottom illusory, since it is the
modes of Nature that express themselves through our personal
will; it is force of Nature, grasping us, ungrasped by us that de¬
termines what we shall will and how we shall will it. Nature, not
96
The Yoga of Divine Works
Nature, not
96
The Yoga of Divine Works
an independent ego, chooses what object we shall seek, whether
by reasoned will or unreflecting impulse, at any moment of our
existence. If, on the contrary, we live in the unifying reality of
the Brahman, then we go beyond the ego and overstep Nature.
For then we get back to our true self and become the spirit; in
the spirit we are above the impulsion of Nature, superior to her
modes and forces. Attaining to a perfect equality in the soul,
mind and heart, we realise our true self of oneness, one with all
beings, one too with That which expresses itself in them and in
all that we see and experience. This equality and this oneness
are the indispensable twin foundation we must lay down for a
divine being, a divine consciousness, a divine action. Not one
with all, we are not spiritual, not divine. Not equal-souled to
all things, happenings and creatures, we cannot see spiritually,
cannot know divinely, cannot feel divinely towards others. The
Supreme Power, the one Eternal and Infinite is equal to all things
and to all beings; and because it is equal, it can act with an ab¬
solute wisdom according to the truth of its works and its force
and according to the truth of each thing and of every creature.
This is also the only true freedom possible to man, — a
freedom which he cannot have unless he outgrows his mental
separativeness and becomes the conscious soul in Nature. The
only free will in the world is the one divine Will of which Nature
is the executrix; for she is the master and creator of all other
wills. Human free-will can be real in a sense, but, like all things
that belong to the modes of Nature, it is only relatively real.
The mind rides on a swirl of natural forces, balances on a poise
between several possibilities, inclines to one side or another,
settles and has the sense of choosing: but it does not see, it is
not even dimly aware of the Force behind that has determined
its choice. It cannot see it, because that Force is something
total and to our eyes indeterminate. At most mind can only
distinguish with an approach to clarity and precision some out
of the complex variety of particular determinations by which
this Force works out her incalculable purposes. Partial itself, the
mind rides on a part of the machine, unaware of nine-tenths of
its motor agencies in Time and environment, unaware of its past
Self-Surrender in Works — The Way of the Gita 97
Partial itself, the
mind rides on a part of the machine, unaware of nine-tenths of
its motor agencies in Time and environment, unaware of its past
Self-Surrender in Works — The Way of the Gita 97
preparation and future drift; but because it rides, it thinks that
it is directing the machine. In a sense it counts: for that clear
inclination of the mind which we call our will, that firm settling
of the inclination which presents itself to us as a deliberate
choice, is one of Nature’s most powerful determinants; but it
is never independent and sole. Behind this petty instrumental
action of the human will there is something vast and powerful
and eternal that oversees the trend of the inclination and presses
on the turn of the will. There is a total Truth in Nature greater
than our individual choice. And in this total Truth, or even
beyond and behind it, there is something that determines all
results; its presence and secret knowledge keep up steadily in
the process of Nature a dynamic, almost automatic perception
of the right relations, the varying or persistent necessities, the
inevitable steps of the movement. There is a secret divine Will,
eternal and infinite, omniscient and omnipotent, that expresses
itself in the universality and in each particular of all these
apparently temporal and finite inconscient or half-conscient
things. This is the Power or Presence meant by the Gita when it
speaks of the Lord within the heart of all existences who turns all
creatures as if mounted on a machine by the illusion of Nature.
This is the Power or Presence meant by the Gita when it
speaks of the Lord within the heart of all existences who turns all
creatures as if mounted on a machine by the illusion of Nature.
This divine Will is not an alien Power or Presence; it is
intimate to us and we ourselves are part of it: for it is our own
highest Self that possesses and supports it. Only, it is not our
conscious mental will; it rejects often enough what our con¬
scious will accepts and accepts what our conscious will rejects.
For while this secret One knows all and every whole and each
detail, our surface mind knows only a little part of things. Our
will is conscious in the mind, and what it knows, it knows by
the thought only; the divine Will is superconscious to us because
it is in its essence supra-mental, and it knows all because it is
all. Our highest Self which possesses and supports this universal
Power is not our ego-self, not our personal nature; it is something
transcendent and universal of which these smaller things are only
foam and flowing surface. If we surrender our conscious will and
allow it to be made one with the will of the Eternal, then, and
then only, shall we attain to a true freedom; living in the divine
98
The Yoga of Divine Works
liberty, we shall no longer cling to this shackled so-called free¬
will, a puppet freedom ignorant, illusory, relative, bound to the
error of its own inadequate vital motives and mental figures.
A distinction has to be firmly seized in our consciousness, the
capital distinction between mechanical Nature and the free Lord
of Nature, between the Ishwara or single luminous divine Will
and the many executive modes and forces of the universe.
Nature, — not as she is in her divine Truth, the conscious
Power of the Eternal, but as she appears to us in the Ignorance,
— is executive Force, mechanical in her steps, not consciously
intelligent to our experience of her, although all her works are
instinct with an absolute intelligence. Not in herself master, she
is full of a self-aware Power^ which has an infinite mastery and,
because of this Power driving her, she rules all and exactly fulfils
the work intended in her by the Ishwara. Not enjoying but en¬
joyed, she bears in herself the burden of all enjoyments. Nature
as Prakrit! is an inertly active Force, — for she works out a
movement imposed upon her; but within her is One that knows,
Not enjoying but en¬
joyed, she bears in herself the burden of all enjoyments. Nature
as Prakrit! is an inertly active Force, — for she works out a
movement imposed upon her; but within her is One that knows,
— some Entity sits there that is aware of all her motion and pro¬
cess. Prakrit! works containing the knowledge, the mastery, the
delight of the Purusha, the Being associated with her or seated
within her; but she can participate in them only by subjection
and reflection of that which fills her. Purusha knows and is still
and inactive; he contains the action of Prakrit! within his con¬
sciousness and knowledge and enjoys it. He gives the sanction
to Prakriti’s works and she works out what is sanctioned by him
for his pleasure. Purusha himself does not execute; he maintains
Prakrit! in her action and allows her to express in energy and
process and formed result what he perceives in his knowledge.
This is the distinction made by the Sankhyas; and although it
is not all the true truth, not in any way the highest truth either
^ This Power is the conscious divine Shakti of the Ishwara, the transcendent and
universal Mother.
Self-Surrender in Works — The Way of the Gita 99
of Purusha or of Prakriti, still it is a valid and indispensable
practical knowledge in the lower hemisphere of existence.
Self-Surrender in Works — The Way of the Gita 99
of Purusha or of Prakriti, still it is a valid and indispensable
practical knowledge in the lower hemisphere of existence.
The individual soul or the conscious being in a form may
identify itself with this experiencing Purusha or with this ac¬
tive Prakriti. If it identifies itself with Prakriti, it is not master,
enjoyer and knower, but reflects the modes and workings of
Prakriti. It enters by its identification into that subjection and
mechanical working which is characteristic of her. And even, by
an entire immersion in Prakriti, this soul becomes inconscient or
subconscient, asleep in her forms as in the earth and the metal
or almost asleep as in plant life. There, in that inconscience, it
is subject to the domination of tamas, the principle, the power,
the qualitative mode of obscurity and inertia: sattwa and rajas
are there, but they are concealed in the thick coating of tamas.
Emerging into its own proper nature of consciousness but not yet
truly conscious, because there is still too great a domination of
tamas in the nature, the embodied being becomes more and more
subject to rajas, the principle, the power, the qualitative mode of
action and passion impelled by desire and instinct. There is then
formed and developed the animal nature, narrow in conscious¬
ness, rudimentary in intelligence, rajaso-tamasic in vital habit
and impulse. Emerging yet farther from the great Inconscience
towards a spiritual status the embodied being liberates sattwa,
the mode of light, and acquires a relative freedom and mastery
and knowledge and with it a qualified and conditioned sense
of inner satisfaction and happiness. Man, the mental being in
a physical body, should be but is not, except in a few among
this multitude of ensouled bodies, of this nature. Ordinarily he
has too much in him of the obscure earth-inertia and a troubled
ignorant animal life-force to be a soul of light and bliss or even a
mind of harmonious will and knowledge. There is here in man an
incomplete and still hampered and baffled ascension towards the
true character of the Purusha, free, master, knower and enjoyer.
Eor these are in human and earthly experience relative modes,
none giving its single and absolute fruit; all are intermixed with
each other and there is not the pure action of any one of them
anywhere. It is their confused and inconstant interaction that
100
The Yoga of Divine Works
determines the experiences of the egoistic human consciousness
swinging in Nature’s uncertain balance.
It is their confused and inconstant interaction that
100
The Yoga of Divine Works
determines the experiences of the egoistic human consciousness
swinging in Nature’s uncertain balance.
The sign of the immersion of the embodied soul in Prakriti is
the limitation of consciousness to the ego. The vivid stamp of this
limited consciousness can be seen in a constant inequality of the
mind and heart and a confused conflict and disharmony in their
varied reactions to the touches of experience. The human reac¬
tions sway perpetually between the dualities created by the soul’s
subjection to Nature and by its often intense but narrow struggle
for mastery and enjoyment, a struggle for the most part ineffec¬
tive. The soul circles in an unending round of Nature’s alluring
and distressing opposites, success and failure, good fortune and
ill fortune, good and evil, sin and virtue, joy and grief, pain
and pleasure. It is only when, awaking from its immersion in
Prakriti, it perceives its oneness with the One and its oneness
with all existences that it can become free from these things
and found its right relation to this executive world-Nature.
Then it becomes indifferent to her inferior modes, equal-minded
to her dualities, capable of mastery and freedom; it is seated
above her as the high-throned knower and witness filled with
the calm intense unalloyed delight of his own eternal existence.
The embodied spirit continues to express its powers in action,
but it is no longer involved in ignorance, no longer bound by its
works; its actions have no longer a consequence within it, but
only a consequence outside in Prakriti. The whole movement of
Nature becomes to its experience a rising and falling of waves
on the surface that make no difference to its own unfathomable
peace, its wide delight, its vast universal equality or its boundless
God-existence.^
^ It is not indispensable for the Karmayoga to accept implicitly all the philosophy of
the Gita. We may regard it, if we like, as a statement of psychological experience useful
as a practical basis for the Yoga; here it is perfectly valid and in entire consonance with
a high and wide experience. For this reason I have thought it well to state it here, as far
as possible in the language of modern thought, omitting all that belongs to metaphysics
rather than to psychology.
Self-Surrender in Works — The Way of the Gita 101
These are the conditions of our effort and they point to an ideal
which can be expressed in these or in equivalent formulae.
Self-Surrender in Works — The Way of the Gita 101
These are the conditions of our effort and they point to an ideal
which can be expressed in these or in equivalent formulae.
To live in God and not in the ego; to move, vastly founded,
not in the little egoistic consciousness, but in the consciousness
of the All-Soul and the Transcendent.
To be perfectly equal in all happenings and to all beings,
and to see and feel them as one with oneself and one with the
Divine; to feel all in oneself and all in God; to feel God in all,
oneself in all.
To act in God and not in the ego. And here, first, not to
choose action by reference to personal needs and standards, but
in obedience to the dictates of the living highest Truth above
us. Next, as soon as we are sufficiently founded in the spiritual
consciousness, not to act any longer by our separate will or
movement, but more and more to allow action to happen and
develop under the impulsion and guidance of a divine Will that
surpasses us. And last, the supreme result, to be exalted into an
identity in knowledge, force, consciousness, act, joy of existence
with the Divine Shakti; to feel a dynamic movement not domi¬
nated by mortal desire and vital instinct and impulse and illusive
mental free-will, but luminously conceived and evolved in an
immortal self-delight and an infinite self-knowledge. For this is
the action that comes by a conscious subjection and merging of
the natural man into the divine Self and eternal Spirit; it is the
Spirit that for ever transcends and guides this world-Nature.
But by what practical steps of self-discipline can we arrive at
this consummation?
The elimination of all egoistic activity and of its foundation,
the egoistic consciousness, is clearly the key to the consumma¬
tion we desire. And since in the path of works action is the
knot we have first to loosen, we must endeavour to loosen it
where it is centrally tied, in desire and in ego; for otherwise we
shall cut only stray strands and not the heart of our bondage.
These are the two knots of our subjection to this ignorant and
102
The Yoga of Divine Works
These are the two knots of our subjection to this ignorant and
102
The Yoga of Divine Works
divided Nature, desire and ego-sense. And of these two desire
has its native home in the emotions and sensations and instincts
and from there affects thought and volition; ego-sense lives in¬
deed in these movements, but it casts its deep roots also in the
thinking mind and its will and it is there that it becomes fully self-
conscious. These are the twin obscure powers of the obsessing
world-wide Ignorance that we have to enlighten and eliminate.
In the field of action desire takes many forms, but the most
powerful of all is the vital self’s craving or seeking after the fruit
of our works. The fruit we covet may be a reward of internal
pleasure; it may be the accomplishment of some preferred idea or
some cherished will or the satisfaction of the egoistic emotions,
or else the pride of success of our highest hopes and ambitions.
Or it may be an external reward, a recompense entirely material,
— wealth, position, honour, victory, good fortune or any other
fulfilment of vital or physical desire. But all alike are lures by
which egoism holds us. Always these satisfactions delude us with
the sense of mastery and the idea of freedom, while really we
are harnessed and guided or ridden and whipped by some gross
or subtle, some noble or ignoble, figure of the blind Desire that
drives the world. Therefore the first rule of action laid down
by the Gita is to do the work that should be done without any
desire for the fruit, niskama karma.
A simple rule in appearance, and yet how difficult to carry
out with anything like an absolute sincerity and liberating entire¬
ness! In the greater part of our action we use the principle very
little if at all, and then even mostly as a sort of counterpoise to
the normal principle of desire and to mitigate the extreme action
of that tyrant impulse. At best, we are satisfied if we arrive at a
modified and disciplined egoism not too shocking to our moral
sense, not too brutally offensive to others. And to our partial
self-discipline we give various names and forms; we habituate
ourselves by practice to the sense of duty, to a firm fidelity to
principle, a stoical fortitude or a religious resignation, a quiet
or an ecstatic submission to God’s will. But it is not these things
that the Gita intends, useful though they are in their place; it
aims at something absolute, unmitigated, uncompromising, a
Self-Surrender in Works — The Way of the Gita 103
But it is not these things
that the Gita intends, useful though they are in their place; it
aims at something absolute, unmitigated, uncompromising, a
Self-Surrender in Works — The Way of the Gita 103
turn, an attitude that will change the whole poise of the soul.
Not the mind’s control of vital impulse is its rule, but the strong
immobility of an immortal spirit.
The test it lays down is an absolute equality of the mind and
the heart to all results, to all reactions, to all happenings. If good
fortune and ill fortune, if respect and insult, if reputation and
obloquy, if victory and defeat, if pleasant event and sorrowful
event leave us not only unshaken but untouched, free in the
emotions, free in the nervous reactions, free in the mental view,
not responding with the least disturbance or vibration in any
spot of the nature, then we have the absolute liberation to which
the Gita points us, but not otherwise. The tiniest reaction is a
proof that the discipline is imperfect and that some part of us
accepts ignorance and bondage as its law and clings still to the
old nature. Our self-conquest is only partially accomplished; it
is still imperfect or unreal in some stretch or part or smallest
spot of the ground of our nature. And that little pebble of
imperfection may throw down the whole achievement of the
Yoga!
There are certain semblances of an equal spirit which must
not be mistaken for the profound and vast spiritual equality
which the Gita teaches. There is an equality of disappointed
resignation, an equality of pride, an equality of hardness and
indifference: all these are egoistic in their nature. Inevitably they
come in the course of the sadhana, but they must be rejected
or transformed into the true quietude. There is too, on a higher
level, the equality of the stoic, the equality of a devout resig¬
nation or a sage detachment, the equality of a soul aloof from
the world and indifferent to its doings. These too are insuffi¬
cient; first approaches they can be, but they are at most early
soul-phases only or imperfect mental preparations for our entry
into the true and absolute self-existent wide evenness of the
spirit.
For it is certain that so great a result cannot be arrived at
immediately and without any previous stages. At first we have to
learn to bear the shocks of the world with the central part of our
being untouched and silent, even when the surface mind, heart.
104
The Yoga of Divine Works
At first we have to
learn to bear the shocks of the world with the central part of our
being untouched and silent, even when the surface mind, heart.
104
The Yoga of Divine Works
life are strongly shaken; unmoved there on the bedrock of our
life, we must separate the soul watching behind or immune deep
within from these outer workings of our nature. Afterwards,
extending this calm and steadfastness of the detached soul to its
instruments, it will become slowly possible to radiate peace from
the luminous centre to the darker peripheries. In this process
we may take the passing help of many minor phases; a certain
stoicism, a certain calm philosophy, a certain religious exaltation
may help us towards some nearness to our aim, or we may call in
even less strong and exalted but still useful powers of our mental
nature. In the end we must either discard or transform them and
arrive instead at an entire equality, a perfect self-existent peace
within and even, if we can, a total unassailable, self-poised and
spontaneous delight in all our members.
But how then shall we continue to act at all? For ordinarily
the human being acts because he has a desire or feels a mental,
vital or physical want or need; he is driven by the necessities
of the body, by the lust of riches, honours or fame, or by a
craving for the personal satisfactions of the mind or the heart
or a craving for power or pleasure. Or he is seized and pushed
about by a moral need or, at least, the need or the desire of
making his ideas or his ideals or his will or his party or his
country or his gods prevail in the world. If none of these desires
nor any other must be the spring of our action, it would seem
as if all incentive or motive power had been removed and action
itself must necessarily cease. The Gita replies with its third great
secret of the divine life. All action must be done in a more
and more Godward and finally a God-possessed consciousness;
our works must be a sacrifice to the Divine and in the end
a surrender of all our being, mind, will, heart, sense, life and
body to the One must make God-love and God-service our only
motive. This transformation of the motive force and very char¬
acter of works is indeed its master idea; it is the foundation of
its unique synthesis of works, love and knowledge. In the end
not desire, but the consciously felt will of the Eternal remains
as the sole driver of our action and the sole originator of its
initiative.
Self-Surrender in Works — The Way of the Gita 105
In the end
not desire, but the consciously felt will of the Eternal remains
as the sole driver of our action and the sole originator of its
initiative.
Self-Surrender in Works — The Way of the Gita 105
Equality, renunciation of all desire for the fruit of our works,
action done as a sacrifice to the supreme Lord of our nature and
of all nature, — these are the three first Godward approaches in
the Gita’s way of Karmayoga.
Chapter IV
The Sacrifice, the Triune Path
and the Lord of the Sacrifice
The law of sacrifice is the common divine action that was
thrown out into the world in its beginning as a symbol
of the solidarity of the universe. It is by the attraction
of this law that a divinising principle, a saving power descends
to limit and correct and gradually to eliminate the errors of
an egoistic and self-divided creation. This descent, this sacrifice
of the Purusha, the Divine Soul submitting itself to Force and
Matter so that it may inform and illuminate them, is the seed of
redemption of this world of Inconscience and Ignorance. “For
with sacrifice as their companion,” says the Gita, “the All-Father
created these peoples.” The acceptance of the law of sacrifice is
a practical recognition by the ego that it is neither alone in the
world nor chief in the world. It is its admission that, even in this
much fragmented existence, there is beyond itself and behind
that which is not its own egoistic person, something greater and
completer, a diviner All which demands from it subordination
and service. Indeed, sacrifice is imposed and, where need be,
compelled by the universal World-Force; it takes it even from
those who do not consciously recognise the law, — inevitably,
because this is the intrinsic nature of things. Our ignorance or
our false egoistic view of life can make no difference to this
eternal bedrock truth of Nature. For this is the truth in Nature,
that this ego which thinks itself a separate independent being
and claims to live for itself, is not and cannot be independent
nor separate, nor can it live to itself even if it would, but rather
all are linked together by a secret Oneness. Each existence is
continually giving out perforce from its stock; out of its mental
receipts from Nature or its vital and physical assets and acquisi¬
tions and belongings a stream goes to all that is around it. And
The Sacrifice and the Lord of the Sacrifice
107
And
The Sacrifice and the Lord of the Sacrifice
107
always again it receives something from its environment gratis or
in return for its voluntary or involuntary tribute. For it is only by
this giving and receiving that it can effect its own growth while at
the same time it helps the sum of things. At length, though at first
slowly and partially, we learn to make the conscious sacrifice;
even, in the end, we take joy to give ourselves and what we
envisage as belonging to us in a spirit of love and devotion to
That which appears for the moment other than ourselves and is
certainly other than our limited personalities. The sacrifice and
the divine return for our sacrifice then become a gladly accepted
means towards our last perfection; for it is recognised now as
the road to the fulfilment in us of the eternal purpose.
But, most often, the sacrifice is done unconsciously, egoisti-
cally and without knowledge or acceptance of the true meaning
of the great world-rite. It is so that the vast majority of earth-
creatures do it; and, when it is so done, the individual derives
only a mechanical minimum of natural inevitable profit, achieves
by it only a slow painful progress limited and tortured by the
smallness and suffering of the ego. Only when the heart, the will
and the mind of knowledge associate themselves with the law
and gladly follow it, can there come the deep joy and the happy
fruitfulness of divine sacrifice. The mind’s knowledge of the law
and the heart’s gladness in it culminate in the perception that it
is to our own Self and Spirit and the one Self and Spirit of all that
we give. And this is true even when our self-offering is still to our
fellow-creatures or to lesser Powers and Principles and not yet to
the Supreme. “Not for the sake of the wife,” says Yajnavalkya
in the Upanishad, “but for the sake of the Self is the wife dear to
us.” This in the lower sense of the individual self is the hard fact
behind the coloured and passionate professions of egoistic love;
but in a higher sense it is the inner significance of that love too
which is not egoistic but divine. All true love and all sacrifice are
in their essence Nature’s contradiction of the primary egoism and
its separative error; it is her attempt to turn from a necessary first
fragmentation towards a recovered oneness. All unity between
creatures is in its essence a self-finding, a fusion with that from
which we have separated, a discovery of one’s self in others.
108
The Yoga of Divine Works
All unity between
creatures is in its essence a self-finding, a fusion with that from
which we have separated, a discovery of one’s self in others.
108
The Yoga of Divine Works
But it is only a divine love and unity that can possess in
the light what the human forms of these things seek for in
the darkness. For the true unity is not merely an association
and agglomeration like that of physical cells joined by a life of
common interests; it is not even an emotional understanding,
sympathy, solidarity or close drawing together. Only then are
we really unified with those separated from us by the divisions
of Nature, when we annul the division and find ourselves in
that which seemed to us not ourselves. Association is a vital and
physical unity; its sacrifice is that of mutual aid and concessions.
Nearness, sympathy, solidarity create a mental, moral and emo¬
tional unity; theirs is a sacrifice of mutual support and mutual
gratifications. But the true unity is spiritual; its sacrifice is a mu¬
tual self-giving, an interfusion of our inner substance. The law of
sacrifice travels in Nature towards its culmination in this com¬
plete and unreserved self-giving; it awakens the consciousness
of one common self in the giver and the object of the sacrifice.
This culmination of sacrifice is the height even of human love and
devotion when it tries to become divine; for there too the highest
peak of love points into a heaven of complete mutual self-giving,
its summit is the rapturous fusing of two souls into one.
This profounder idea of the world-wide law is at the heart of
the teaching about works given in the Gita; a spiritual union with
the Highest by sacrifice, an unreserved self-giving to the Eternal
is the core of its doctrine. The vulgar conception of sacrifice
is an act of painful self-immolation, austere self-mortification,
difficult self-effacement; this kind of sacrifice may go even as
far as self-mutilation and self-torture. These things may be tem¬
porarily necessary in man’s hard endeavour to exceed his natural
self; if the egoism in his nature is violent and obstinate, it has
to be met sometimes by an answering strong internal repression
and counterbalancing violence. But the Gita discourages any
excess of violence done to oneself; for the self within is really
the Godhead evolving, it is Krishna, it is the Divine; it has not to
be troubled and tortured as the Titans of the world trouble and
torture it, but to be increased, fostered, cherished, luminously
opened to a divine light and strength and joy and wideness. It
It
The Sacrifice and the Lord of the Sacrifice
109
is not one’s self, but the band of the spirit’s inner enemies that
we have to discourage, expel, slay upon the altar of the growth
of the spirit; these can be ruthlessly excised, whose names are
desire, wrath, inequality, greed, attachment to outward pleasures
and pains, the cohort of usurping demons that are the cause of
the soul’s errors and sufferings. These should be regarded not
as part of oneself but as intruders and perverters of our self’s
real and diviner nature; these have to be sacrificed in the harsher
sense of the word, whatever pain in going they may throw by
reflection on the consciousness of the seeker.
But the true essence of sacrifice is not self-immolation, it
is self-giving; its object not self-effacement, but self-fulfilment;
its method not self-mortification, but a greater life, not self-
mutilation, but a transformation of our natural human parts
into divine members, not self-torture, but a passage from a lesser
satisfaction to a greater Ananda. There is only one thing painful
in the beginning to a raw or turbid part of the surface nature;
it is the indispensable discipline demanded, the denial necessary
for the merging of the incomplete ego. But for that there can
be a speedy and enormous compensation in the discovery of a
real greater or ultimate completeness in others, in all things, in
the cosmic oneness, in the freedom of the transcendent Self and
Spirit, in the rapture of the touch of the Divine. Our sacrifice
is not a giving without any return or any fruitful acceptance
from the other side; it is an interchange between the embodied
soul and conscious Nature in us and the eternal Spirit. For even
though no return is demanded, yet there is the knowledge deep
within us that a marvellous return is inevitable. The soul knows
that it does not give itself to God in vain; claiming nothing, it
yet receives the infinite riches of the divine Power and Presence.
Last, there is to be considered the recipient of the sacrifice
and the manner of the sacrifice. The sacrifice may be offered to
others or it may be offered to divine Powers; it may be offered to
the cosmic All or it may be offered to the transcendent Supreme.
The worship given may take any shape from the dedication of a
leaf or flower, a cup of water, a handful of rice, a loaf of bread,
to consecration of all that we possess and the submission of all
110
The Yoga of Divine Works
The worship given may take any shape from the dedication of a
leaf or flower, a cup of water, a handful of rice, a loaf of bread,
to consecration of all that we possess and the submission of all
110
The Yoga of Divine Works
that we are. Whoever the recipient, whatever the gift, it is the
Supreme, the Eternal in things, who receives and accepts it, even
if it be rejected or ignored by the immediate recipient. For the
Supreme who transcends the universe, is yet here too, however
veiled, in us and in the world and in its happenings; he is there
as the omniscient Witness and Receiver of all our works and
their secret Master. All our actions, all our efforts, even our sins
and stumblings and sufferings and struggles are obscurely or
consciously, known to us and seen or else unknown and in a
disguise, governed in their last result by the One. All is turned
towards him in his numberless forms and offered through them
to the single Omnipresence. In whatever form and with whatever
spirit we approach him, in that form and with that spirit he
receives the sacrifice.
And the fruit also of the sacrifice of works varies accord¬
ing to the work, according to the intention in the work and
according to the spirit that is behind the intention. But all other
sacrifices are partial, egoistic, mixed, temporal, incomplete, —
even those offered to the highest Powers and Principles keep this
character: the result too is partial, limited, temporal, mixed in
its reactions, effective only for a minor or intermediate purpose.
The one entirely acceptable sacrifice is a last and highest and ut¬
termost self-giving, — it is that surrender made face to face, with
devotion and knowledge, freely and without any reserve to One
who is at once our immanent Self, the environing constituent
All, the Supreme Reality beyond this or any manifestation and,
secretly, all these together, concealed everywhere, the immanent
Transcendence. For to the soul that wholly gives itself to him,
God also gives himself altogether. Only the one who offers
his whole nature, finds the Self. Only the one who can give
everything, enjoys the Divine All everywhere. Only a supreme
self-abandonment attains to the Supreme. Only the sublimation
by sacrifice of all that we are, can enable us to embody the
Highest and live here in the immanent consciousness of the
transcendent Spirit.
The Sacrifice and the Lord of the Sacrifice
111
Only the sublimation
by sacrifice of all that we are, can enable us to embody the
Highest and live here in the immanent consciousness of the
transcendent Spirit.
The Sacrifice and the Lord of the Sacrifice
111
This, in short, is the demand made on us, that we should turn
our whole life into a conscious sacrifice. Every moment and
every movement of our being is to be resolved into a contin¬
uous and a devoted self-giving to the Eternal. All our actions,
not less the smallest and most ordinary and trifling than the
greatest and most uncommon and noble, must be performed
as consecrated acts. Our individualised nature must live in the
single consciousness of an inner and outer movement dedicated
to Something that is beyond us and greater than our ego. No
matter what the gift or to whom it is presented by us, there must
be a consciousness in the act that we are presenting it to the
one divine Being in all beings. Our commonest or most grossly
material actions must assume this sublimated character; when
we eat, we should be conscious that we are giving our food to
that Presence in us; it must be a sacred offering in a temple and
the sense of a mere physical need or self-gratification must pass
away from us. In any great labour, in any high discipline, in any
difficult or noble enterprise, whether undertaken for ourselves,
for others or for the race, it will no longer be possible to stop
short at the idea of the race, of ourselves or of others. The
thing we are doing must be consciously offered as a sacrifice of
works, not to these, but either through them or directly to the
One Godhead; the Divine Inhabitant who was hidden by these
figures must be no longer hidden but ever present to our soul,
our mind, our sense. The workings and results of our acts must
be put in the hands of that One in the feeling that that Presence
is the Infinite and Most High by whom alone our labour and
our aspiration are possible. Eor in his being all takes place; for
him all labour and aspiration are taken from us by Nature and
offered on his altar. Even in those things in which Nature is
herself very plainly the worker and we only the witnesses of her
working and its containers and supporters, there should be the
same constant memory and insistent consciousness of a work
and of its divine Master. Our very inspiration and respiration,
our very heart-beats can and must be made conscious in us as
the living rhythm of the universal sacrifice.
It is clear that a conception of this kind and its effective
112
Our very inspiration and respiration,
our very heart-beats can and must be made conscious in us as
the living rhythm of the universal sacrifice.
It is clear that a conception of this kind and its effective
112
The Yoga of Divine Works
practice must carry in them three results that are of a central
importance for our spiritual ideal. It is evident, to begin with,
that, even if such a discipline is begun without devotion, it leads
straight and inevitably towards the highest devotion possible;
for it must deepen naturally into the completest adoration imag¬
inable, the most profound God-love. There is bound up with it
a growing sense of the Divine in all things, a deepening com¬
munion with the Divine in all our thought, will and action and
at every moment of our lives, a more and more moved conse¬
cration to the Divine of the totality of our being. Now these
implications of the Yoga of works are also of the very essence of
an integral and absolute Bhakti. The seeker who puts them into
living practice makes in himself continually a constant, active
and effective representation of the very spirit of self-devotion,
and it is inevitable that out of it there should emerge the most
engrossing worship of the Highest to whom is given this service.
An absorbing love for the Divine Presence to whom he feels
an always more intimate closeness, grows upon the consecrated
worker. And with it is born or in it is contained a universal
love too for all these beings, living forms and creatures that
are habitations of the Divine — not the brief restless grasping
emotions of division, but the settled selfless love that is the
deeper vibration of oneness. In all the seeker begins to meet
the one Object of his adoration and service. The way of works
turns by this road of sacrifice to meet the path of Devotion; it
can be itself a devotion as complete, as absorbing, as integral as
any the desire of the heart can ask for or the passion of the mind
can imagine.
The way of works
turns by this road of sacrifice to meet the path of Devotion; it
can be itself a devotion as complete, as absorbing, as integral as
any the desire of the heart can ask for or the passion of the mind
can imagine.
Next, the practice of this Yoga demands a constant inward
remembrance of the one central liberating knowledge, and a con¬
stant active externalising of it in works comes in too to intensify
the remembrance. In all is the one Self, the one Divine is all; all
are in the Divine, all are the Divine and there is nothing else in the
universe, — this thought or this faith is the whole background
until it becomes the whole substance of the consciousness of the
worker. A memory, a self-dynamising meditation of this kind,
must and does in its end turn into a profound and uninterrupted
The Sacrifice and the Lord of the Sacrifice
113
vision and a vivid and all-embracing consciousness of that which
we so powerfully remember or on which we so constantly med¬
itate. For it compels a constant reference at each moment to
the Origin of all being and will and action and there is at
once an embracing and exceeding of all particular forms and
appearances in That which is their cause and upholder. This
way cannot go to its end without a seeing vivid and vital, as
concrete in its way as physical sight, of the works of the uni¬
versal Spirit everywhere. On its summits it rises into a constant
living and thinking and willing and acting in the presence of
the Supramental, the Transcendent. Whatever we see and hear,
whatever we touch and sense, all of which we are conscious, has
to be known and felt by us as That which we worship and serve;
all has to be turned into an image of the Divinity, perceived
as a dwelling-place of his Godhead, enveloped with the eternal
Omnipresence. In its close, if not long before it, this way of
works turns by communion with the Divine Presence, Will and
Force into a way of Knowledge more complete and integral than
any the mere creature intelligence can construct or the search of
the intellect can discover.
Lastly, the practice of this Yoga of sacrifice compels us to
renounce all the inner supports of egoism, casting them out of
our mind and will and actions, and to eliminate its seed, its
presence, its influence out of our nature. All must be done for
the Divine; all must be directed towards the Divine. Nothing
must be attempted for ourselves as a separate existence; nothing
done for others, whether neighbours, friends, family, country or
mankind or other creatures merely because they are connected
with our personal life and thought and sentiment or because
the ego takes a preferential interest in their welfare. In this way
of doing and seeing all works and all life become only a daily
dynamic worship and service of the Divine in the unbounded
temple of his own vast cosmic existence. Life becomes more and
more the sacrifice of the eternal in the individual constantly self-
offered to the eternal Transcendence. It is offered in the wide
sacrificial ground of the field of the eternal cosmic Spirit; and
the Force too that offers it is the eternal Force, the omnipresent
114
The Yoga of Divine Works
Mother. Therefore is this way a way of union and communion
by acts and by the spirit and knowledge in the act as complete
and integral as any our Godward will can hope for or our soul’s
strength execute.
It has all the power of a way of works integral and absolute,
but because of its law of sacrifice and self-giving to the Divine
Self and Master, it is accompanied on its one side by the whole
power of the path of Love and on the other by the whole power
of the path of Knowledge. At its end all these three divine Pow¬
ers work together, fused, united, completed, perfected by each
other.
At its end all these three divine Pow¬
ers work together, fused, united, completed, perfected by each
other.
The Divine, the Eternal is the Lord of our sacrifice of works
and union with him in all our being and consciousness and in its
expressive instruments is the one object of the sacrifice; the steps
of the sacrifice of works must therefore be measured, first, by
the growth in our nature of something that brings us nearer to
divine Nature, but secondly also by an experience of the Divine,
his presence, his manifestation to us, an increasing closeness and
union with that Presence. But the Divine is in his essence infinite
and his manifestation too is multitudinously infinite. If that is
so, it is not likely that our true integral perfection in being and
in nature can come by one kind of realisation alone; it must
combine many different strands of divine experience. It cannot
be reached by the exclusive pursuit of a single line of identity till
that is raised to its absolute; it must harmonise many aspects of
the Infinite. An integral consciousness with a multiform dynamic
experience is essential for the complete transformation of our
nature.
There is one fundamental perception indispensable towards
any integral knowledge or many-sided experience of this Infinite.
It is to realise the Divine in its essential self and truth unaltered
by forms and phenomena. Otherwise we are likely to remain
caught in the net of appearances or wander confusedly in a
chaotic multitude of cosmic or particular aspects, and if we
The Sacrifice and the Lord of the Sacrifice
115
Otherwise we are likely to remain
caught in the net of appearances or wander confusedly in a
chaotic multitude of cosmic or particular aspects, and if we
The Sacrifice and the Lord of the Sacrifice
115
avoid this confusion, it will be at the price of getting chained to
some mental formula or shut up in a limited personal experi¬
ence. The one secure and all-reconciling truth which is the very
foundation of the universe is this that life is the manifestation of
an uncreated Self and Spirit, and the key to life’s hidden secret
is the true relation of this Spirit with its own created existences.
There is behind all this life the look of an eternal Being upon its
multitudinous becomings; there is around and everywhere in it
the envelopment and penetration of a manifestation in time by
an unmanifested timeless Eternal. But this knowledge is valueless
for Yoga if it is only an intellectual and metaphysical notion void
of life and barren of consequence; a mental realisation alone
cannot be sufficient for the seeker. For what Yoga searches after
is not truth of thought alone or truth of mind alone, but the
dynamic truth of a living and revealing spiritual experience.
There must awake in us a constant indwelling and enveloping
nearness, a vivid perception, a close feeling and communion,
a concrete sense and contact of a true and infinite Presence
always and everywhere. That Presence must remain with us as
the living, pervading Reality in which we and all things exist
and move and act, and we must feel it always and everywhere,
concrete, visible, inhabiting all things; it must be patent to us as
their true Self, tangible as their imperishable Essence, met by us
closely as their inmost Spirit. To see, to feel, to sense, to contact
in every way and not merely to conceive this Self and Spirit here
in all existences and to feel with the same vividness all existences
in this Self and Spirit, is the fundamental experience which must
englobe all other knowledge.
This infinite and eternal Self of things is an omnipresent
Reality, one existence everywhere; it is a single unifying presence
and not different in different creatures; it can be met, seen or felt
in its completeness in each soul or each form in the universe. For
its infinity is spiritual and essential and not merely a boundless¬
ness in Space or an endlessness in Time; the Infinite can be felt
in an infinitesimal atom or in a second of time as convincingly
as in the stretch of the aeons or the stupendous enormity of the
intersolar spaces. The knowledge or experience of it can begin
116
The Yoga of Divine Works
anywhere and express itself through anything; for the Divine is
in all, and all is the Divine.
The knowledge or experience of it can begin
116
The Yoga of Divine Works
anywhere and express itself through anything; for the Divine is
in all, and all is the Divine.
This fundamental experience will yet begin differently for
different natures and take long to develop all the Truth that
it conceals in its thousand aspects. I see perhaps or feel in
myself or as myself first the eternal Presence and afterwards
only can extend the vision or sense of this greater self of mine
to all creatures. I then see the world in me or as one with
me. I perceive the universe as a scene in my being, the play
of its processes as a movement of forms and souls and forces
in my cosmic spirit; I meet myself and none else everywhere.
Not, be it well noted, with the error of the Asura, the Titan,
who lives in his own inordinately magnified shadow, mistakes
ego for the self and spirit and tries to impose his fragmentary
personality as the one dominant existence upon all his sur¬
roundings. For, having the knowledge, I have already seized
this reality that my true self is the non-ego, so always my
greater Self is felt by me either as an impersonal vastness or
an essential Person containing yet beyond all personalities or
as both these together; but in any case, whether Impersonal
or illimitable Personal or both together, it is an ego-exceeding
Infinite. If I have sought it out and found it first in the form
of it I call myself rather than in others, it is only because
there it is easiest for me, owing to the subjectivity of my con¬
sciousness, to find it, to know it at once and to realise it.
But if the narrow instrumental ego does not begin to merge
in this Self as soon as it is seen, if the smaller external mind-
constructed I refuses to disappear into that greater permanent
uncreated spiritual I, then my realisation is either not genuine
or radically imperfect. There is somewhere in me an egoistic
obstacle; some part of my nature has opposed a self-regarding
and self-preserving denial to the all-swallowing truth of the
Spirit.
On the other hand — and to some this is an easier way — I
may see the Divinity first in the world outside me, not in myself
but in others. I meet it there from the beginning as an indwelling
and all-containing Infinite that is not bound up with all these
The Sacrifice and the Lord of the Sacrifice
117
I meet it there from the beginning as an indwelling
and all-containing Infinite that is not bound up with all these
The Sacrifice and the Lord of the Sacrifice
117
forms, creatures and forces which it bears on its surface. Or else
I see and feel it as a pure solitary Self and Spirit which contains
all these powers and existences, and I lose my sense of ego in the
silent Omnipresence around me. Afterwards it is this that begins
to pervade and possess my instrumental being and out of it seem
to proceed all my impulsions to action, all my light of thought
and speech, all the formations of my consciousness and all its
relations and impacts with other soul-forms of this one world¬
wide Existence. I am already no longer this little personal self,
but That with something of itself put forward which sustains a
selected form of its workings in the universe.
There is another basic realisation, the most extreme of all,
that yet comes sometimes as the first decisive opening or an
early turn of the Yoga. It is the awakening to an ineffable high
transcendent Unknowable above myself and above this world
in which I seem to move, a timeless and spaceless condition or
entity which is at once, in some way compelling and convincing
to an essential consciousness in me, the one thing that is to it
overwhelmingly real. This experience is usually accompanied by
an equally compelling sense either of the dreamlike or shadowy
illusoriness of all things here or else of their temporary, derivative
and only half-real character. For a time at least all around me
may seem to be a moving of cinematographic shadow forms
or surface figures and my own action may appear as a fluid
formulation from some Source ungrasped as yet and perhaps
unseizable above or outside me. To remain in this consciousness,
to carry out this initiation or follow out this first suggestion of
the character of things would be to proceed towards the goal
of dissolution of self and world in the Unknowable, — Moksha,
Nirvana. But this is not the only line of issue; it is possible,
on the contrary, for me to wait till through the silence of this
timeless unfilled liberation I begin to enter into relations with
that yet ungrasped Source of myself and my actions; then the
void begins to fill, there emerges out of it or there rushes into
it all the manifold Truth of the Divine, all the aspects and man¬
ifestations and many levels of a dynamic Infinite. At first this
experience imposes on the mind and then on all our being an
118
The Yoga of Divine Works
At first this
experience imposes on the mind and then on all our being an
118
The Yoga of Divine Works
absolute, a fathomless, almost an abysmal peace and silence.
Overpowered and subjugated, stilled, liberated from itself, the
mind accepts the Silence itself as the Supreme. But afterwards the
seeker discovers that all is there for him contained or new-made
in that silence or through it descends upon him from a greater
concealed transcendent Existence. For this Transcendent, this
Absolute is not a mere peace of signless emptiness; it has its
own infinite contents and riches of which ours are debased and
diminished values. If there were not that Source of all things,
there could be no universe; all powers, all works and activities
would be an illusion, all creation and manifestation would be
impossible.
These are the three fundamental realisations, so fundamen¬
tal that to the Yogin of the way of Knowledge they seem ultimate,
sufficient in themselves, destined to overtop and replace all oth¬
ers. And yet for the integral seeker, whether accorded to him
at an early stage suddenly and easily by a miraculous grace or
achieved with difficulty after a long progress and endeavour, they
are neither the sole truth nor the full and only clues to the integral
truth of the Eternal, but rather the unfilled beginning, the vast
foundation of a greater divine Knowledge. Other realisations
there are that are imperatively needed and must be explored to
the full limit of their possibilities; and if some of them appear to
a first sight to cover only Divine Aspects that are instrumental
to the activity of existence but not inherent in its essence, yet,
when followed to their end through that activity to its everlasting
Source, it is found that they lead to a disclosure of the Divine
without which our knowledge of the Truth behind things would
be left bare and incomplete. These seeming Instrumentals are
the key to a secret without which the Fundamentals themselves
would not unveil all their mystery. All the revelatory aspects of
the Divine must be caught in the wide net of the integral Yoga.
If a departure from the world and its activities, a supreme release
and quietude were the sole aim of the seeker, the three great
The Sacrifice and the Lord of the Sacrifice
119
If a departure from the world and its activities, a supreme release
and quietude were the sole aim of the seeker, the three great
The Sacrifice and the Lord of the Sacrifice
119
fundamental realisations would be sufficient for the fulfilment
of his spiritual life: concentrated in them alone he could suffer
all other divine or mundane knowledge to fall away from him
and himself unencumbered, depart into the eternal Silence. But
he has to take account of the world and its activities, learn
what divine truth there may be behind them and reconcile that
apparent opposition between the Divine Truth and the manifest
creation which is the starting-point of most spiritual experience.
Here, on each line of approach that he can take, he is confronted
with a constant Duality, a separation between two terms of
existence that seem to be opposites and their opposition to be
the very root of the riddle of the universe. Later, he may and does
discover that these are the two poles of One Being, connected
by two simultaneous currents of energy negative and positive in
relation to each other, their interaction the very condition for
the manifestation of what is within the Being, their reunion the
appointed means for the reconciliation of life’s discords and for
the discovery of the integral truth of which he is the seeker.
For on one side he is aware of this Self everywhere, this
everlasting Spirit-Substance — Brahman, the Eternal — the same
self-existence here in time behind each appearance he sees or
senses and timeless beyond the universe. He has this strong
overpowering experience of a Self that is neither our limited
ego nor our mind, life or body, world-wide but not outwardly
phenomenal, yet to some spirit-sense in him more concrete than
any form or phenomenon, universal yet not dependent for its
being on anything in the universe or on the whole totality of the
universe; if all this were to disappear, its extinction would make
no difference to this Eternal of his constant intimate experience.
He is sure of an inexpressible Self-Existence which is the essence
of himself and all things; he is intimately aware of an essential
Consciousness of which thinking mind and life-sense and body-
sense are only partial and diminished figures, a Consciousness
with an illimitable Force in it of which all energies are the out¬
come, but which is yet not explained or accounted for by the
sum or power or nature of all these energies together; he feels, he
lives in an inalienable self-existent Bliss which is not this lesser
120
The Yoga of Divine Works
transient joy or happiness or pleasure. A changeless imperishable
infinity, a timeless eternity, a self-awareness which is not this
receptive and reactive or tentacular mental consciousness, but
is behind and above it and present too below it, even in what
we call Inconscience, a oneness in which there is no possibility
of any other existence, are the fourfold character of this settled
experience. Yet this eternal Self-Existence is seen by him also
as a conscious Time-Spirit bearing the stream of happenings, a
self-extended spiritual Space containing all things and beings,
a Spirit-Substance which is the very form and material of all
that seems non-spiritual, temporary and finite. For all that is
transitory, temporal, spatial, bounded, is yet felt by him to be in
its substance and energy and power no other than the One, the
Eternal, the Infinite.
And yet there is not only in him or before him this eternal
self-aware Existence, this spiritual Consciousness, this infinity of
self-illumined Force, this timeless and endless Beatitude. There is
too, constant also to his experience, this universe in measurable
Space and Time, some kind perhaps of boundless finite, and in it
all is transient, limited, fragmentary, plural, ignorant, exposed to
disharmony and suffering, seeking vaguely for some unrealised
yet inherent harmony of oneness, unconscious or half-conscious
or, even when most conscious, still tied to the original Ignorance
and Inconscience. He is not always in a trance of peace or bliss
and, even if he were, it would be no solution, for he knows
that this would still be going on outside him and yet within
some larger self of him as if for ever. At times these two states
of his spirit seem to exist for him alternately according to his
state of consciousness; at others they are there as two parts of
his being, disparate and to be reconciled, two halves, an upper
and a lower or an inner and an outer half of his existence.
He finds soon that this separation in his consciousness has an
immense liberative power; for by it he is no longer bound to
the Ignorance, the Inconscience; it no longer appears to him the
very nature of himself and things but an illusion which can be
overcome or at least a temporary wrong self-experience, Maya.
It is tempting to regard it as only a contradiction of the Divine,
The Sacrifice and the Lord of the Sacrifice
121
It is tempting to regard it as only a contradiction of the Divine,
The Sacrifice and the Lord of the Sacrifice
121
an incomprehensible mystery-play, masque or travesty of the
Infinite — and so it irresistibly seems to his experience at times,
on one side the luminous verity of Brahman, on the other a dark
illusion of Maya. But something in him will not allow him to cut
existence thus permanently in two and, looking more closely, he
discovers that in this half-light or darkness too is the Eternal —
it is the Brahman who is here with this face of Maya.
This is the beginning of a growing spiritual experience which
reveals to him more and more that what seemed to him dark
incomprehensible Maya was all the time no other than the
Consciousness-Puissance of the Eternal, timeless and illimitable
beyond the universe, but spread out here under a mask of bright
and dark opposites for the miracle of the slow manifestation of
the Divine in Mind and Eife and Matter. All the Timeless presses
towards the play in Time; all in Time turns upon and around
the timeless Spirit. If the separate experience was liberative, this
unitive experience is dynamic and effective. Eor he now not only
feels himself to be in his soul-substance part of the Eternal, in his
essential self and spirit entirely one with the Eternal, but in his
active nature an instrumentation of its omniscient and omnipo¬
tent Consciousness-Puissance. However bounded and relative
its present play in him, he can open to a greater and greater
consciousness and power of it and to that expansion there seems
to be no assignable limit. A level spiritual and supramental of
that Consciousness-Puissance seems even to reveal itself above
him and lean to enter into contact, where there are not these
trammels and limits, and its powers too are pressing upon the
play in Time with the promise of a greater descent and a less dis¬
guised or no longer disguised manifestation of the Eternal. The
once conflicting but now biune duality of Brahman-Maya stands
revealed to him as the first great dynamic aspect of the Self of all
selves, the Master of existence, the Eord of the world-sacrifice
and of his sacrifice.
On another line of approach another Duality presents itself
to the experience of the seeker. On one side he becomes aware of
a witness recipient observing experiencing Consciousness which
does not appear to act but for which all these activities inside
122
The Yoga of Divine Works
On one side he becomes aware of
a witness recipient observing experiencing Consciousness which
does not appear to act but for which all these activities inside
122
The Yoga of Divine Works
and outside us seem to be undertaken and continue. On the
other side he is aware at the same time of an executive Force
or an energy of Process which is seen to constitute, drive and
guide all conceivable activities and to create a myriad forms
visible to us and invisible and use them as stable supports for
its incessant flux of action and creation. Entering exclusively
into the witness consciousness he becomes silent, untouched,
immobile; he sees that he has till now passively reflected and
appropriated to himself the movements of Nature and it is by
this reflection that they acquired from the witness soul within
him what seemed a spiritual value and significance. But now
he has withdrawn that ascription or mirroring identification;
he is conscious only of his silent self and aloof from all that is
in motion around it; all activities are outside him and at once
they cease to be intimately real; they appear now mechanical,
detachable, endable. Entering exclusively into the kinetic move¬
ment, he has an opposite self-awareness; he seems to his own
perception a mass of activities, a formation and result of forces;
if there is an active consciousness, even some kind of kinetic
being in the midst of it all, yet there is no longer a free soul in
it anywhere. These two different and opposite states of being
alternate in him or else stand simultaneously over against each
other; one silent in the inner being observes but is unmoved and
does not participate; the other active in some outer or surface
self pursues its habitual movements. He has entered into an
intense separative perception of the great duality, Soul-Nature,
Purusha-Prakriti.
But as the consciousness deepens, he becomes aware that
this is only a first frontal appearance. For he finds that it is
by the silent support, permission or sanction of this witness
soul in him that this executive nature can work intimately or
persistently upon his being; if the soul withdraws its sanction,
the movements of Nature in their action upon and within him
become a wholly mechanical repetition, vehement at first as if
seeking still to enforce their hold, but afterwards less and less
dynamic and real. More actively using this power of sanction or
refusal, he perceives that he can, slowly and uncertainly at first.
The Sacrifice and the Lord of the Sacrifice
123
More actively using this power of sanction or
refusal, he perceives that he can, slowly and uncertainly at first.
The Sacrifice and the Lord of the Sacrifice
123
more decisively afterwards, change the movements of Nature.
Eventually in this witness soul or behind it is revealed to him
the presence of a Knower and master Will in Nature, and all
her activities more and more appear as an expression of what
is known and either actively willed or passively permitted by
this Lord of her existence. Prakriti herself now seems to be
mechanical only in the carefully regulated appearance of her
workings, but in fact a conscious Force with a soul within her,
a self-aware significance in her turns, a revelation of a secret
Will and Knowledge in her steps and figures. This Duality, in
aspect separate, is inseparable. Wherever there is Prakriti, there
is Purusha; wherever there is Purusha, there is Prakriti. Even
in his inactivity he holds in himself all her force and energies
ready for projection; even in the drive of her action she carries
with her all his observing and mandatory consciousness as the
whole support and sense of her creative purpose. Once more the
seeker discovers in his experience the two poles of existence of
One Being and the two lines or currents of their energy nega¬
tive and positive in relation to each other which effect by their
simultaneity the manifestation of all that is within it. Here too
he finds that the separative aspect is liberative; for it releases him
from the bondage of identification with the inadequate workings
of Nature in the Ignorance. The unitive aspect is dynamic and
effective; for it enables him to arrive at mastery and perfection;
while rejecting what is less divine or seemingly undivine in her,
he can rebuild her forms and movements in himself according
to a nobler pattern and the law and rhythm of a greater exis¬
tence. At a certain spiritual and supramental level the Duality
becomes still more perfectly Two-in-one, the Master Soul with
the Conscious Force within it, and its potentiality disowns all
barriers and breaks through every limit. Thus this once separate,
now biune Duality of Purusha-Prakriti is revealed to him in all
its truth as the second great instrumental and effective aspect of
the Soul of all souls, the Master of existence, the Lord of the
Sacrifice.
On yet another line of approach the seeker meets another
corresponding but in aspect distinct Duality in which the biune
124
The Yoga of Divine Works
On yet another line of approach the seeker meets another
corresponding but in aspect distinct Duality in which the biune
124
The Yoga of Divine Works
character is more immediately apparent, — the dynamic Duality
of Ishwara-Shakti. On one side he is aware of an infinite and self-
existent Godhead in being who contains all things in an ineffable
potentiality of existence, a Self of all selves, a Soul of all souls, a
spiritual Substance of all substances, an impersonal inexpressible
Existence, but at the same time an illimitable Person who is here
self-represented in numberless personality, a Master of Knowl¬
edge, a Master of Forces, a Lord of love and bliss and beauty, a
single Origin of the worlds, a self-manifester and self-creator, a
Cosmic Spirit, a universal Mind, a universal Life, the conscious
and living Reality supporting the appearance which we sense as
unconscious inanimate Matter. On the other side he becomes
aware of the same Godhead in effectuating consciousness and
power put forth as a self-aware Force that contains and carries
all within her and is charged to manifest it in universal Time and
Space. It is evident to him that here there is one supreme and
infinite Being represented to us in two different sides of itself, ob¬
verse and reverse in relation to each other. All is either prepared
or pre-existent in the Godhead in Being and issues from it and
is upheld by its Will and Presence; all is brought out, carried in
movement by the Godhead in power; all becomes and acts and
develops by her and in her its individual or its cosmic purpose.
It is again a Duality necessary for the manifestation, creating
and enabling that double current of energy which seems always
necessary for the world-workings, two poles of the same Being,
but here closer to each other and always very evidently carrying
each the powers of the other in its essence and its dynamic
nature. At the same time by the fact that the two great elements
of the divine Mystery, the Personal and the Impersonal, are here
fused together, the seeker of the integral Truth feels in the duality
of Ishwara-Shakti his closeness to a more intimate and ultimate
secret of the divine Transcendence and the Manifestation than
that offered to him by any other experience.
For the Ishwari Shakti, divine Conscious-Force and World-
Mother, becomes a mediatrix between the eternal One and the
manifested Many. On one side, by the play of the energies which
she brings from the One, she manifests the multiple Divine in the
The Sacrifice and the Lord of the Sacrifice
On one side, by the play of the energies which
she brings from the One, she manifests the multiple Divine in the
The Sacrifice and the Lord of the Sacrifice
125
universe, involving and evolving its endless appearances out of
her revealing substance; on the other by the reascending current
of the same energies she leads back all towards That from which
they have issued so that the soul in its evolutionary manifestation
may more and more return towards the Divinity there or here put
on its divine character. There is not in her, although she devises
a cosmic mechanism, the character of an inconscient mechanical
Executrix which we find in the first physiognomy of Prakriti, the
Nature-Force; neither is there that sense of an Unreality, creatrix
of illusions or semi-illusions, which is attached to our first view
of Maya. It is at once clear to the experiencing soul that here is a
conscious Power of one substance and nature with the Supreme
from whom she came. If she seems to have plunged us into the
Ignorance and Inconscience in pursuance of a plan we cannot yet
interpret, if her forces present themselves as all these ambiguous
forces of the universe, yet it becomes visible before long that she
is working for the development of the Divine Consciousness in us
and that she stands above drawing us to her own higher entity,
revealing to us more and more the very essence of the Divine
Knowledge, Will and Ananda. Even in the movements of the
Ignorance the soul of the seeker becomes aware of her conscious
guidance supporting his steps and leading them slowly or swiftly,
straight or by many detours out of the darkness into the light
of a greater consciousness, out of mortality into immortality,
out of evil and suffering towards a highest good and felicity of
which as yet his human mind can form only a faint image. Thus
her power is at once liberative and dynamic, creative, effective,
— creative not only of things as they are, but of things that are
to be; for, eliminating the twisted and tangled movements of
his lower consciousness made of the stuff of the Ignorance, it
rebuilds and new-makes his soul and nature into the substance
and forces of a higher divine Nature.
In this Duality too there is possible a separative experience.
At one pole of it the seeker may be conscious only of the Master
of Existence putting forth on him His energies of knowledge,
power and bliss to liberate and divinise; the Shakti may appear
to him only an impersonal Force expressive of these things or
126
The Yoga of Divine Works
an attribute of the Ishwara. At the other pole he may encounter
the World-Mother, creatrix of the universe, putting forth the
Gods and the worlds and all things and existences out of her
spirit-substance. Or even if he sees both aspects, it may be with
an unequal separating vision, subordinating one to the other, re¬
garding the Shakti only as a means for approaching the Ishwara.
There results a one-sided tendency or a lack of balance, a power
of effectuation not perfectly supported or a light of revelation
not perfectly dynamic. It is when a complete union of the two
sides of the Duality is effected and rules his consciousness that
he begins to open to a fuller power that will draw him alto¬
gether out of the confused clash of Ideas and Forces here into
a higher Truth and enable the descent of that Truth to illumine
and deliver and act sovereignly upon this world of Ignorance.
He has begun to lay his hand on the integral secret which in its
fullness can be grasped only when he overpasses the double term
that reigns here of Knowledge inextricably intertwined with an
original Ignorance and crosses the border where spiritual mind
disappears into supramental Gnosis. It is through this third and
most dynamic dual aspect of the One that the seeker begins with
the most integral completeness to enter into the deepest secret
of the being of the Lord of the Sacrifice.
For it is behind the mystery of the presence of personality in
an apparently impersonal universe — as in that of consciousness
manifesting out of the Inconscient, life out of the inanimate,
soul out of brute Matter — that is hidden the solution of the
riddle of existence. Here again is another dynamic Duality more
pervading than appears at first view and deeply necessary to
the play of the slowly self-revealing Power. It is possible for the
seeker in his spiritual experience, standing at one pole of the
Duality, to follow Mind in seeing a fundamental Impersonality
everywhere. The evolving soul in the material world begins from
a vast impersonal Inconscience in which our inner sight yet per¬
ceives the presence of a veiled infinite Spirit; it proceeds with the
emergence of a precarious consciousness and personality that
even at their fullest have the look of an episode, but an episode
that repeats itself in a constant series; it arises through experience
The Sacrifice and the Lord of the Sacrifice
127
of life out of mind into an infinite, impersonal and absolute
Superconscience in which personality, mind-consciousness, life-
consciousness seem all to disappear by a liberating annihilation.
Nirvana. At a lower pitch he still experiences this fundamen¬
tal impersonality as an immense liberating force everywhere. It
releases his knowledge from the narrowness of personal mind,
his will from the clutch of personal desire, his heart from the
bondage of petty mutable emotions, his life from its petty per¬
sonal groove, his soul from ego, and it allows them to embrace
calm, equality, wideness, universality, infinity. A Yoga of works
would seem to require Personality as its mainstay, almost its
source, but here too the impersonal is found to be the most
direct liberating force; it is through a wide egoless impersonality
that one can become a free worker and a divine creator. It is
not surprising that the overwhelming power of this experience
from the impersonal pole of the Duality should have moved
the sages to declare this to be the one way and an impersonal
Superconscience to be the sole truth of the Eternal.
But still to the seeker standing at the opposite pole of the
Duality another line of experience appears which justifies an
intuition deeply-seated behind the heart and in our very life-
force, that personality, like consciousness, life, soul, is not a
brief-lived stranger in an impersonal Eternity, but contains the
very meaning of existence. This fine flower of the cosmic Energy
carries in it a forecast of the aim and a hint of the very motive
of the universal labour. As an occult vision opens in him, he
becomes aware of worlds behind in which consciousness and
personality hold an enormous place and assume a premier value;
even here in the material world to this occult vision the incon¬
science of Matter fills with a secret pervading consciousness, its
inanimation harbours a vibrant life, its mechanism is the device
of an indwelling Intelligence, God and soul are everywhere.
Above all stands an infinite conscious Being who is variously
self-expressed in all these worlds; impersonality is only a first
means of that expression. It is a field of principles and forces, an
equal basis of manifestation; but these forces express themselves
through beings, have conscious spirits at their head and are
128
The Yoga of Divine Works
It is a field of principles and forces, an
equal basis of manifestation; but these forces express themselves
through beings, have conscious spirits at their head and are
128
The Yoga of Divine Works
the emanation of a One Conscious Being who is their source. A
multiple innumerable personality expressing that One is the very
sense and central aim of the manifestation and if now personality
seems to be narrow, fragmentary, restrictive, it is only because it
has not opened to its source or flowered into its own divine truth
and fullness packing itself with the universal and the infinite.
Thus the world-creation is no more an illusion, a fortuitous
mechanism, a play that need not have happened, a flux without
consequence; it is an intimate dynamism of the conscious and
living Eternal.
This extreme opposition of view from the two poles of one
Existence creates no fundamental difficulty for the seeker of
the integral Yoga; for his whole experience has shown him the
necessity of these double terms and their currents of Energy, neg¬
ative and positive in relation to each other, for the manifestation
of what is within the one Existence. Eor himself Personality and
Impersonality have been the two wings of his spiritual ascension
and he has the prevision that he will reach a height where their
helpful interaction will pass into a fusion of their powers and
disclose the integral Reality and release into action the original
force of the Divine. Not only in the fundamental Aspects but in
all the working of his sadhana he has felt their double truth and
mutually complementary working. An impersonal Presence has
dominated from above or penetrated and occupied his nature;
a Eight descending has suffused his mind, life-power, the very
cells of his body, illumined them with knowledge, revealed him
to himself down to his most disguised and unsuspected move¬
ments, exposing, purifying, destroying or brilliantly changing all
that belonged to the Ignorance. A Eorce has poured into him in
currents or like a sea, worked in his being and all its members,
dissolved, new-made, reshaped, transfigured everywhere. A Bliss
has invaded him and shown that it can make suffering and
sorrow impossible and turn pain itself into divine pleasure. A
Eove without limits has joined him to all creatures or revealed to
him a world of inseparable intimacy and unspeakable sweetness
and beauty and begun to impose its law of perfection and its
ecstasy even amidst the disharmony of terrestrial life. A spiritual
The Sacrifice and the Lord of the Sacrifice
129
A spiritual
The Sacrifice and the Lord of the Sacrifice
129
Truth and Right have convicted the good and evil of this world
of imperfection or of falsehood and unveiled a supreme good
and its clue of subtle harmony and its sublimation of action
and feeling and knowledge. But behind all these and in them he
has felt a Divinity who is all these things, a Bringer of Light,
a Guide and All-Knower, a Master of Force, a Giver of Bliss,
Friend, Helper, Father, Mother, Playmate in the world-game,
an absolute Master of his being, his soul’s Beloved and Lover.
All relations known to human personality are there in the soul’s
contact with the Divine; but they rise towards superhuman levels
and compel him towards a divine nature.
It is an integral knowledge that is being sought, an inte¬
gral force, a total amplitude of union with the All and Infinite
behind existence. For the seeker of the integral Yoga no single
experience, no one Divine Aspect, — however overwhelming to
the human mind, sufficient for its capacity, easily accepted as the
sole or the ultimate reality, — can figure as the exclusive truth of
the Eternal. For him the experience of the Divine Oneness carried
to its extreme is more deeply embraced and amply fathomed by
following out to the full the experience of the Divine Multiplicity.
All that is true behind polytheism as well as behind monotheism
falls within the scope of his seeking; but he passes beyond their
superficial sense to human mind to grasp their mystic truth in
the Divine. He sees what is aimed at by the jarring sects and
philosophies and accepts each facet of the Reality in its own
place, but rejects their narrownesses and errors and proceeds
farther till he discovers the One Truth that binds them together.
The reproach of anthropomorphism and anthropolatry cannot
deter him, — for he sees them to be prejudices of the ignorant
and arrogant reasoning intelligence, the abstracting mind turn¬
ing on itself in its own cramped circle. If human relations as
practised now by man are full of smallness and perversity and
ignorance, yet are they disfigured shadows of something in the
Divine and by turning them to the Divine he finds that of which
they are a shadow and brings it down for manifestation in life.
It is through the human exceeding itself and opening itself to a
supreme plenitude that the Divine must manifest itself here, since
130
The Yoga of Divine Works
It is through the human exceeding itself and opening itself to a
supreme plenitude that the Divine must manifest itself here, since
130
The Yoga of Divine Works
that comes inevitably in the course and process of the spiritual
evolution, and therefore he will not despise or blind himself to
the Godhead because it is lodged in a human body, mdnusim
tanum dsritam. Beyond the limited human conception of God,
he will pass to the one divine Eternal, but also he will meet
him in the faces of the Gods, his cosmic personalities supporting
the World-Play, detect him behind the mask of the Vibhutis,
embodied World-Forces or human Leaders, reverence and obey
him in the Guru, worship him in the Avatar. This will be to him
his exceeding good fortune if he can meet one who has realised
or is becoming That which he seeks for and can by opening to
it in this vessel of its manifestation himself realise it. For that is
the most palpable sign of the growing fulfilment, the promise of
the great mystery of the progressive Descent into Matter which
is the secret sense of the material creation and the justification
of terrestrial existence.
Thus reveals himself to the seeker in the progress of the
sacrifice the Lord of the sacrifice. At any point this revelation
can begin; in any aspect the Master of the Work can take up
the work in him and more and more press upon him and it for
the unfolding of his presence. In time all the Aspects disclose
themselves, separate, combine, fuse, are unified together. At the
end there shines through it all the supreme integral Reality, un¬
knowable to Mind which is part of the Ignorance, but knowable
because self-aware in the light of a spiritual consciousness and
a supramental knowledge.
This revelation of a highest Truth or a highest Being, Conscious¬
ness, Power, Bliss and Love, impersonal and personal at once
and so taking up both sides of our own being, — since in us also
is the ambiguous meeting of a Person and a mass of impersonal
principles and forces, — is at once the first aim and the condition
of the ultimate achievement of the sacrifice. The achievement
itself takes the shape of a union of our own existence with That
which is thus made manifest to our vision and experience, and
The Sacrifice and the Lord of the Sacrifice
131
The achievement
itself takes the shape of a union of our own existence with That
which is thus made manifest to our vision and experience, and
The Sacrifice and the Lord of the Sacrifice
131
the union has a threefold character. There is a union in spiritual
essence, by identity; there is a union by the indwelling of our soul
in this highest Being and Consciousness; there is a dynamic union
of likeness or oneness of nature between That and our instru¬
mental being here. The first is the liberation from the Ignorance
and identification with the Real and Eternal, moksa, sdyujya,
which is the characteristic aim of the Yoga of Knowledge. The
second, the dwelling of the soul with or in the Divine, sdmipya,
sdlokya, is the intense hope of all Yoga of love and beatitude.
The third, identity in nature, likeness to the Divine, to be perfect
as That is perfect, is the high intention of all Yoga of power
and perfection or of divine works and service. The combined
completeness of the three together, founded here on a multiple
Unity of the self-manifesting Divine, is the complete result of the
integral Yoga, the goal of its triple Path and the fruit of its triple
sacrifice.
A union by identity may be ours, a liberation and change of
our substance of being into that supreme Spirit-substance, of our
consciousness into that divine Consciousness, of our soul-state
into that ecstasy of spiritual beatitude or that calm eternal bliss
of existence. A luminous indwelling in the Divine can be attained
by us secure against any fall or exile into this lower consciousness
of the darkness and the Ignorance, the soul ranging freely and
firmly in its own natural world of light and joy and freedom
and oneness. And since this is not merely to be attained in some
other existence beyond but pursued and discovered here also,
it can only be by a descent, by a bringing down of the Divine
Truth, by the establishment here of the soul’s native world of
light, joy, freedom, oneness. A union of our instrumental being
no less than of our soul and spirit must change our imperfect
nature into the very likeness and image of Divine Nature; it must
put off the blind, marred, mutilated, discordant movements of
the Ignorance and put on the inherence of that light, peace, bliss,
harmony, universality, mastery, purity, perfection; it must con¬
vert itself into a receptacle of divine knowledge, an instrument
of divine Will-Power and Force of Being, a channel of divine
Love, Joy and Beauty. This is the transformation to be effected.
132
The Yoga of Divine Works
This is the transformation to be effected.
132
The Yoga of Divine Works
an integral transformation of all that we now are or seem to
be, by the joining — Yoga — of the finite being in Time with the
Eternal and Infinite.
All this difficult result can become possible only if there is
an immense conversion, a total reversal of our consciousness, a
supernormal entire transfiguration of the nature. There must be
an ascension of the whole being, an ascension of spirit chained
here and trammelled by its instruments and its environment to
sheer Spirit free above, an ascension of soul towards some bliss¬
ful Super-soul, an ascension of mind towards some luminous
Supermind, an ascension of life towards some vast Super-life,
an ascension of our very physicality to join its origin in some
pure and plastic spirit-substance. And this cannot be a single
swift upsoaring but, like the ascent of the sacrifice described in
the Veda, a climbing from peak to peak in which from each
summit one looks up to the much more that has still to be
done. At the same time there must be a descent too to affirm
below what we have gained above: on each height we conquer
we have to turn to bring down its power and its illumination
into the lower mortal movement; the discovery of the Light for
ever radiant on high must correspond with the release of the
same Light secret below in every part down to the deepest caves
of subconscient Nature. And this pilgrimage of ascension and
this descent for the labour of transformation must be inevitably
a battle, a long war with ourselves and with opposing forces
around us which, while it lasts, may well seem interminable. Lor
all our old obscure and ignorant nature will contend repeatedly
and obstinately with the transforming Influence, supported in
its lagging unwillingness or its stark resistance by most of the
established forces of environing universal Nature; the powers
and principalities and the ruling beings of the Ignorance will not
easily give up their empire.
At first there may have to be a prolonged, often tedious
and painful period of preparation and purification of all our
being till it is ready and fit for an opening to a greater Truth
and Light or to the Divine Influence and Presence. Even when
centrally fitted, prepared, open already, it will still be long before
The Sacrifice and the Lord of the Sacrifice
133
Even when
centrally fitted, prepared, open already, it will still be long before
The Sacrifice and the Lord of the Sacrifice
133
all our movements of mind, life and body, all the multiple and
conflicting members and elements of our personality consent or,
consenting, are able to bear the difficult and exacting process
of the transformation. And hardest of all, even if all in us is
willing, is the struggle we shall have to carry through against the
universal forces attached to the present unstable creation when
we seek to make the final supramental conversion and reversal
of consciousness by which the Divine Truth must be established
in us in its plenitude and not merely what they would more
readily permit, an illumined Ignorance.
It is for this that a surrender and submission to That which
is beyond us enabling the full and free working of its Power
is indispensable. As that self-giving progresses, the work of the
sacrifice becomes easier and more powerful and the prevention
of the opposing Forces loses much of its strength, impulsion and
substance. Two inner changes help most to convert what now
seems difficult or impracticable into a thing possible and even
sure. There takes place a coming to the front of some secret
inmost soul within which was veiled by the restless activity of
the mind, by the turbulence of our vital impulses and by the
obscurity of the physical consciousness, the three powers which
in their confused combination we now call our self. There will
come about as a result a less impeded growth of a Divine Pres¬
ence at the centre with its liberating Light and effective Force
and an irradiation of it into all the conscious and subconscious
ranges of our nature. These are the two signs, one marking our
completed conversion and consecration to the great Quest, the
other the final acceptance by the Divine of our sacrifice.
Chapter V
The Ascent of the Sacrifice -1
The Works of Knowledge — The Psychic Being
These are the two signs, one marking our
completed conversion and consecration to the great Quest, the
other the final acceptance by the Divine of our sacrifice.
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 sacri¬
fice, and this the nature of the sacrifice itself in its triple
character, — a sacrifice of works, a sacrifice of love and adora¬
tion, 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 move¬
ments 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 occu¬
pation 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 field of
The Ascent of the Sacrifice -1
135
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
136
The Yoga of Divine Works
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
136
The Yoga of Divine Works
of the Divine and such others as are attached to these or, in
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 fundamen¬
tal 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
The Ascent of the Sacrifice -1
137
within, ethical in the outside life, this is the ordinary 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 ex¬
alted 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.
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 out¬
ward, all that is not a spiritual sense or seeing, the constructions,
representations or conclusions of the intellect, the suggestions or
138
The Yoga of Divine Works
For all else in us that is only out¬
ward, all that is not a spiritual sense or seeing, the constructions,
representations or conclusions of the intellect, the suggestions or
138
The Yoga of Divine Works
instigations of the life-force, the positive necessities of physical
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 impul¬
sion 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
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
The Ascent of the Sacrifice -1
139
begins clearly to control and order and finally takes up the whole
burden of the Yoga.
In accordance with the triple character of the sacrifice we
may divide works too into a triple order, the works of Knowl¬
edge, 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, contem¬
plation, 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 logi¬
cal 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 acroba-
tised far from the more tangible realities of existence. Ancient
140
The Yoga of Divine Works
Ancient
140
The Yoga of Divine Works
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 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 com¬
promises 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 Eife, although at first they served or lived in the
shadow of Religion, ended by emancipating themselves, became
The Ascent of the Sacrifice -1
141
On their side Science and Art and the
knowledge of Eife, although at first they served or lived in the
shadow of Religion, ended by emancipating themselves, became
The Ascent of the Sacrifice -1
141
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
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 ster¬
ile 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
142
The
mental and physical sciences which examine into the laws and
142
The Yoga of Divine Works
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 activ¬
ities by which man subdues and utilises his world and environ¬
ment, and the noble and beautiful Arts which are at once work
and knowledge, — for every well-made and significant poem,
picture, statue or building is an act of creative knowledge, a liv¬
ing 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 realisa¬
tion 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
The Ascent of the Sacrifice -1
143
The theory
that sees an intimate connection between religious aspiration
and the truest and greatest Art is in essence right; but we must
The Ascent of the Sacrifice -1
143
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 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
144
The Yoga of Divine Works
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 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 knowl¬
edge; 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
The Ascent of the Sacrifice -1
145
It is evident that the need of a concentration
indispensable for the transition out of the Ignorance may make
The Ascent of the Sacrifice -1
145
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, 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 inte¬
gral 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
146
The Yoga of Divine Works
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 com¬
pulsion 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 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.
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147
The Ascent of the Sacrifice -1
147
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 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, spiritu¬
alised, 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, liber¬
ated, universalised, spiritualised, but still, as all mind must be.
148
The Yoga of Divine Works
For, if it were
so, knowledge would still remain a working of the mind, liber¬
ated, universalised, spiritualised, but still, as all mind must be.
148
The Yoga of Divine Works
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 knowl¬
edge. 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 abundant 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 supra¬
mental 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
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149
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 lib¬
eration, 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 trans¬
formed 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 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, hrdaye guhdydm.
150
The Yoga of Divine Works
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.
150
The Yoga of Divine Works
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 emo¬
tive 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, perver¬
sions, often sordid degradations, — a 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 distrusts 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.
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151
The Ascent of the Sacrifice -1
151
As in the works of knowledge, so in dealing with the work¬
ings of the heart, we are obliged to make a preliminary dis¬
tinction 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
constantly 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 perfec¬
tion. 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 emo¬
tional 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 distin¬
guishes 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
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The Yoga of Divine Works
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
152
The Yoga of Divine Works
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 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 flow¬
ers 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 individ¬
ualised 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
Nor can the religio-ethical ideal be a sufficient guide, — for this
is a compromise or compact of mutual concessions for mutual
The Ascent of the Sacrifice -1
153
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 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
154
The Yoga of Divine Works
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 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 sub¬
stitute; 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 suffi¬
ciency of its mental certitudes, when the vital has been steadied
The Ascent of the Sacrifice -1
155
At a certain stage in the Yoga when the mind is sufficiently
quieted and no longer supports itself at every step on the suffi¬
ciency of its mental certitudes, when the vital has been steadied
The Ascent of the Sacrifice -1
155
and subdued and is no longer constantly insistent on its own
rash will, demand and desire, when the physical has been suffi¬
ciently 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
practical momentary truth of the Ignorance, on an inward joy
and not on mere vital pleasure, — for it prefers rather a purify¬
ing 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.
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 Eove that it seeks most, it is the love of the Divine
that is its spur, its goal, its star of Truth shining over the lu¬
minous 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.
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The Yoga of Divine Works
In the first long stage of its growth
and immature existence it has leaned on earthly love, affection.
156
The Yoga of Divine Works
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 com¬
monness 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 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
The Ascent of the Sacrifice -1
157
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.
Chapter VI
The Ascent of the Sacrifice -2
The Works of Love — The Works of Life
IT IS therefore through the sacrifice of love, works and knowl¬
edge with the psychic being as the leader and priest of the
sacrifice that life itself can be transformed into its own true
spiritual figure. If the sacrifice of knowledge rightly done is easily
the largest and purest offering we can bring to the Highest, the
sacrifice of love is not less demanded of us for our spiritual
perfection; it is even more intense and rich in its singleness
and can be made not less vast and pure. This pure wideness
is brought into the intensity of the sacrifice of love when into
all our activities there is poured the spirit and power of a divine
infinite joy and the whole atmosphere of our life is suffused with
an engrossing adoration of the One who is the All and the High¬
est. For then does the sacrifice of love attain its utter perfection
when, offered to the divine All, it becomes integral, catholic and
boundless, and when, uplifted to the Supreme, it ceases to be
the weak, superficial and transient movement men call love and
becomes a pure and grand and deep uniting Ananda.
Although it is a divine love for the supreme and universal
Divine that must be the rule of our spiritual existence, this does
not exclude altogether all forms of individual love or the ties
that draw soul to soul in manifested existence. A psychic change
is demanded, a divestiture of the masks of the Ignorance, a
purification of the egoistic mental, vital and physical movements
that prolong the old inferior consciousness; each movement of
love, spiritualised, must depend no longer on mental prefer¬
ence, vital passion or physical craving, but on the recognition
of soul by soul, — love restored to its fundamental spiritual
and psychic essence with the mind, the vital, the physical as
manifesting instruments and elements of that greater oneness.
The Ascent of the Sacrifice -2
159
In this change the individual love also is converted by a natural
heightening into a divine love for the Divine Inhabitant imma¬
nent in a mind and soul and body occupied by the One in all
creatures.
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159
In this change the individual love also is converted by a natural
heightening into a divine love for the Divine Inhabitant imma¬
nent in a mind and soul and body occupied by the One in all
creatures.
All love, indeed, that is adoration has a spiritual force behind
it, and even when it is offered ignorantly and to a limited object,
something of that splendour appears through the poverty of the
rite and the smallness of its issues. For love that is worship is at
once an aspiration and a preparation: it can bring even within
its small limits in the Ignorance a glimpse of a still more or
less blind and partial but surprising realisation; for there are
moments when it is not we but the One who loves and is loved
in us, and even a human passion can be uplifted and glorified
by a slight glimpse of this infinite Love and Lover. It is for this
reason that the worship of the god, the worship of the idol,
the human magnet or ideal are not to be despised; for these are
steps through which the human race moves towards that blissful
passion and ecstasy of the Infinite which, even in limiting it,
they yet represent for our imperfect vision when we have still to
use the inferior steps Nature has hewn for our feet and admit
the stages of our progress. Certain idolatries are indispensable
for the development of our emotional being, nor will the man
who knows be hasty at any time to shatter the image unless he
can replace it in the heart of the worshipper by the Reality it
figures. Moreover, they have this power because there is always
something in them that is greater than their forms and, even
when we reach the supreme worship, that abides and becomes
a prolongation of it or a part of its catholic wholeness. Our
knowledge is still imperfect in us, love incomplete if even when
we know That which surpasses all forms and manifestations, we
cannot still accept the Divine in creature and object, in man, in
the kind, in the animal, in the tree, in the flower, in the work
of our hands, in the Nature-Force which is then no longer to us
the blind action of a material machinery but a face and power
of the universal Shakti: for in these things too is the presence of
the Eternal.
An ultimate inexpressible adoration offered by us to the
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An ultimate inexpressible adoration offered by us to the
160
The Yoga of Divine Works
Transcendent, to the Highest,^ to the Ineffable, is yet no com¬
plete worship if it is not offered to him wherever he manifests or
wherever even he hides his godhead — in man^ and object and
every creature. An Ignorance is there no doubt which imprisons
the heart, distorts its feelings, obscures the significance of its
offering; all partial worship, all religion which erects a mental
or a physical idol is tempted to veil and protect the truth in it
by a certain cloak of ignorance and easily loses the truth in its
image. But the pride of exclusive knowledge is also a limitation
and a barrier. For there is, concealed behind individual love,
obscured by its ignorant human figure, a mystery which the
mind cannot seize, the mystery of the body of the Divine, the
secret of a mystic form of the Infinite which we can approach
only through the ecstasy of the heart and the passion of the
pure and sublimated sense, and its attraction which is the call
of the divine Flute-player, the mastering compulsion of the All-
Beautiful, can only be seized and seize us through an occult love
and yearning which in the end makes one the Form and the
Formless, and identifies Spirit and Matter. It is that which the
spirit in Love is seeking here in the darkness of the Ignorance and
it is that which it finds when individual human love is changed
into the love of the Immanent Divine incarnate in the material
universe.
As with individual, so with universal Love; all that widening
of the self through sympathy, goodwill, universal benevolence
and beneficence, love of mankind, love of creatures, the attrac¬
tion of all the myriad forms and presences that surround us,
by which mentally and emotionally man escapes from the first
limits of his ego, has to be taken up into a unifying divine love for
the universal Divine. Adoration fulfilled in love, love in Ananda,
— the surpassing love, the self-wrapped ecstasy of transcendent
delight in the Transcendent which awaits us at the end of the
path of Devotion, — has for its wider result a universal love for
all beings, the Ananda of all that is; we perceive behind every veil
the Divine, spiritually embrace in all forms the All-Beautiful. A
param bhavam. manusim tanum asritam.
The Ascent of the Sacrifice -2
161
A
param bhavam. manusim tanum asritam.
The Ascent of the Sacrifice -2
161
universal delight in his endless manifestation flows through us,
taking in its surge every form and movement, but not bound or
stationary in any and always reaching out to a greater and more
perfect expression. This universal love is liberative and dynamic
for transformation; for the discord of forms and appearances
ceases to affect the heart that has felt the one Truth behind
them all and understood their perfect significance. The impartial
equality of soul of the selfless worker and knower is transformed
by the magic touch of divine Love into an all-embracing ecstasy
and million-bodied beatitude. All things become bodies and all
movements the playings of the divine Beloved in his infinite
house of pleasure. Even pain is changed and in their reaction
and even in their essence things painful alter; the forms of pain
fall away, there are created in their place the forms of Ananda.
This is in its essence the nature of the change of conscious¬
ness which turns existence itself into a glorified field of a Divine
Love and Ananda. In its essence it begins for the seeker when
he passes from the ordinary to the spiritual level and looks with
a new heart of luminous vision and feeling on the world and
self and others. It reaches its height when the spiritual becomes
also the supramental level and then also it is possible not only
to feel it in essence but realise it dynamically as a Power for
the transformation of the whole inner life and the whole outer
existence.
It is not altogether difficult for the mind to envisage, even though
it may be difficult for the human will with its many earth-ties
to accept, this transformation of the spirit and nature of love
from the character of a mixed and limited human emotion to a
supreme and all-embracing divine passion. It is when we come to
the works of love that a certain perplexity is likely to intervene.
It is possible, as in a certain high exaggeration of the path of
knowledge, to cut here also the knot of the problem, escape
the difficulty of uniting the spirit of love with the crudities of
the world-action by avoiding it; it is open to us, withdrawing
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The Yoga of Divine Works
from outward life and action altogether, to live alone with our
adoration of the Divine in the heart’s silence. It is possible too to
admit only those acts that are either in themselves an expression
of love for the Divine, prayer, praise, symbolic acts of worship
or subordinate activities that may be attached to these things
and partake of their spirit, and to leave aside all else; the soul
turns away to satisfy its inner longing in the absorbed or the
God-centred life of the saint and devotee. It is possible, again,
to open the doors of life more largely and to spend one’s love
of the Divine in acts of service to those around us and to the
race; one can do the works of philanthropy, benevolence and
beneficence, charity and succour to man and beast and every
creature, transfigure them by a kind of spiritual passion, at least
bring into their merely ethical appearance the greater power of
a spiritual motive. This is indeed the solution most commonly
favoured by the religious mind of today and we see it confidently
advanced on all sides as the proper field of action of the God-
seeker or of the man whose life is founded on divine love and
knowledge. But the integral Yoga pushed towards a complete
union of the Divine with the earth-life cannot stop short in this
narrow province or limit this union within the lesser dimensions
of an ethical rule of philanthropy and beneficence. All action
must be made in it part of the God-life, our acts of knowledge,
our acts of power and production and creation, our acts of joy
and beauty and the soul’s pleasure, our acts of will and endeav¬
our and struggle and not our acts only of love and beneficent
service. Its way to do these things will be not outward and
mental, but inward and spiritual, and to that end it will bring
into all activities, whatever they are, the spirit of divine love, the
spirit of adoration and worship, the spirit of happiness in the
Divine and in the beauty of the Divine so as to make all life a
sacrifice of the works of the soul’s love to the Divine, its cult of
the Master of its existence.
It is possible so to turn life into an act of adoration to the
Supreme by the spirit in one’s works; for, says the Gita, “He who
gives to me with a heart of adoration a leaf, a flower, a fruit or a
cup of water, I take and enjoy that offering of his devotion”; and
The Ascent of the Sacrifice -2
163
it is not only any dedicated external gift that can be so offered
with love and devotion, but all our thoughts, all our feelings and
sensations, all our outward activities and their forms and objects
can be such gifts to the Eternal. It is true that the special act or
form of action has its importance, even a great importance, but
it is the spirit in the act that is the essential factor; the spirit
of which it is the symbol or materialised expression gives it its
whole value and justifying significance. Or it may be said that a
complete act of divine love and worship has in it three parts that
are the expressions of a single whole, — a practical worship of
the Divine in the act, a symbol of worship in the form of the act
expressing some vision and seeking or some relation with the
Divine, an inner adoration and longing for oneness or feeling
of oneness in the heart and soul and spirit. It is so that life can
be changed into worship, — by putting behind it the spirit of
a transcendent and universal love, the seeking of oneness, the
sense of oneness; by making each act a symbol, an expression of
Godward emotion or a relation with the Divine; by turning all
we do into an act of worship, an act of the soul’s communion, the
mind’s understanding, the life’s obedience, the heart’s surrender.
In any cult the symbol, the significant rite or expressive
figure is not only a moving and enriching aesthetic element, but
a physical means by which the human being begins to make
outwardly definite the emotion and aspiration of his heart, to
confirm it and to dynamise it. For if without a spiritual aspi¬
ration worship is meaningless and vain, yet the aspiration also
without the act and the form is a disembodied and, for life, an
incompletely effective power. It is unhappily the fate of all forms
in human life to become crystallised, purely formal and therefore
effete, and although form and cult preserve always their power
for the man who can still enter into their meaning, the majority
come to use the ceremony as a mechanical rite and the symbol as
a lifeless sign, and because that kills the soul of religion, cult and
form have in the end to be changed or thrown aside altogether.
There are those even to whom all cult and form are for this
reason suspect and offensive; but few can dispense with the
support of outward symbols and, even, a certain divine element
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The Yoga of Divine Works
There are those even to whom all cult and form are for this
reason suspect and offensive; but few can dispense with the
support of outward symbols and, even, a certain divine element
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The Yoga of Divine Works
in human nature demands them always for the completeness of
its spiritual satisfaction. Always the symbol is legitimate in so
far as it is true, sincere, beautiful and delightful, and even one
may say that a spiritual consciousness without any aesthetic or
emotional content is not entirely or at any rate not integrally
spiritual. In the spiritual life the basis of the act is a spiritual
consciousness perennial and renovating, moved to express itself
always in new forms or able to renew the truth of a form always
by the flow of the spirit, and to so express itself and make every
action a living symbol of some truth of the soul is the very nature
of its creative vision and impulse. It is so that the spiritual seeker
must deal with life and transmute its form and glorify it in its
essence.
It is so that the spiritual seeker
must deal with life and transmute its form and glorify it in its
essence.
A supreme divine Love is a creative Power and, even though
it can exist in itself silent and unchangeable, yet rejoices in
external form and expression and is not condemned to be a
speechless and bodiless godhead. It has even been said that cre¬
ation itself was an act of love or at least the building up of a field
in which Divine Love could devise its symbols and fulfil itself
in act of mutuality and self-giving, and, if not the initial nature
of creation, this may well be its ultimate object and motive. It
does not so appear now because, even if a Divine Love is there
in the world upholding all this evolution of creatures, yet the
stuff of life and its action is made up of an egoistic formation, a
division, a struggle of life and consciousness to exist and survive
in an apparently indifferent, inclement or even hostile world of
inanimate and inconscient Matter. In the confusion and obscu¬
rity of this struggle all are thrown against each other with a
will in each to assert its own existence first and foremost and
only secondarily to assert itself in others and very partially for
others; for even man’s altruism remains essentially egoistic and
must be so till the soul finds the secret of the divine Oneness.
It is to discover that at its supreme source, to bring it from
within and to radiate it out up to the extreme confines of life
that is turned the effort of the Yoga. All action, all creation
must be turned into a form, a symbol of the cult, the adoration,
the sacrifice; it must carry something that makes it bear in it
The Ascent of the Sacrifice -2
165
the stamp of a dedication, a reception and translation of the
Divine Consciousness, a service of the Beloved, a self-giving, a
surrender. This has to be done wherever possible in the outward
body and form of the act; it must be done always in its inward
emotion and an intensity that shows it to be an outflow from
the soul towards the Eternal.
This has to be done wherever possible in the outward
body and form of the act; it must be done always in its inward
emotion and an intensity that shows it to be an outflow from
the soul towards the Eternal.
In itself the adoration in the act is a great and complete
and powerful sacrifice that tends by its self-multiplication to
reach the discovery of the One and make the radiation of the
Divine possible. For devotion by its embodiment in acts not only
makes its own way broad and full and dynamic, but brings at
once into the harder way of works in the world the divinely
passionate element of joy and love which is often absent in its
beginning when it is only the austere spiritual Will that follows
in a struggling uplifting tension the steep ascent, and the heart
is still asleep or bound to silence. If the spirit of divine love can
enter, the hardness of the way diminishes, the tension is light¬
ened, there is a sweetness and joy even in the core of difficulty
and struggle. The indispensable surrender of all our will and
works and activities to the Supreme is indeed only perfect and
perfectly effective when it is a surrender of love. All life turned
into this cult, all actions done in the love of the Divine and in
the love of the world and its creatures seen and felt as the Divine
manifested in many disguises become by that very fact part of
an integral Yoga.
It is the inner offering of the heart’s adoration, the soul of
it in the symbol, the spirit of it in the act, that is the very life of
the sacrifice. If this offering is to be complete and universal, then
a turning of all our emotions to the Divine is imperative. This
is the intensest way of purification for the human heart, more
powerful than any ethical or aesthetic catharsis could ever be
by its half-power and superficial pressure. A psychic fire within
must be lit into which all is thrown with the Divine Name upon
it. In that fire all the emotions are compelled to cast off their
grosser elements and those that are undivine perversions are
burned away and the others discard their insufficiencies, till a
spirit of largest love and a stainless divine delight arises out of the
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The Yoga of Divine Works
flame and smoke and frankincense. It is the divine love which so
emerges that, extended in inward feeling to the Divine in man
and all creatures in an active universal equality, will be more
potent for the perfectibility of life and a more real instrument
than the ineffective mental ideal of brotherhood can ever be. It
is this poured out into acts that could alone create a harmony
in the world and a true unity between all its creatures; all else
strives in vain towards that end so long as Divine Love has not
disclosed itself as the heart of the delivered manifestation in
terrestrial Nature.
It is here that the emergence of the secret psychic being in
us as the leader of the sacrifice is of the utmost importance; for
this inmost being alone can bring with it the full power of the
spirit in the act, the soul in the symbol. It alone can assure, even
while the spiritual consciousness is incomplete, the perennial
freshness and sincerity and beauty of the symbol and prevent
it from becoming a dead form or a corrupted and corrupting
magic; it alone can preserve for the act its power with its sig¬
nificance. All the other members of our being, mind, life-force,
physical or body consciousness, are too much under the control
of the Ignorance to be a sure instrumentation and much less can
they be a guide or the source of an unerring impulse. Always the
greater part of the motive and action of these powers clings to the
old law, the deceiving tablets, the cherished inferior movements
of Nature and they meet with reluctance, alarm or revolt or
obstructing inertia the voices and the forces that call and impel
us to exceed and transform ourselves into a greater being and
a wider Nature. In their major part the response is either a
resistance or a qualified or temporising acquiescence; for even if
they follow the call, they yet tend — when not consciously, then
by automatic habit — to bring into the spiritual action their own
natural disabilities and errors. At every moment they are moved
to take egoistic advantage of the psychic and spiritual influences
and can be detected using the power, joy or light these bring
into us for a lower life-motive. Afterwards too, even when the
seeker has opened to the Divine Love transcendental, universal
or immanent, yet if he tries to pour it into life, he meets the
The Ascent of the Sacrifice -2
167
Afterwards too, even when the
seeker has opened to the Divine Love transcendental, universal
or immanent, yet if he tries to pour it into life, he meets the
The Ascent of the Sacrifice -2
167
power of obscuration and perversion of these lower Nature-
forces. Always they draw away towards pitfalls, pour into that
higher intensity their diminishing elements, seek to capture the
descending Power for themselves and their interests and degrade
it into an aggrandised mental, vital or physical instrumentation
for desire and ego. Instead of a Divine Love creator of a new
heaven and a new earth of Truth and Light, they would hold it
here prisoner as a tremendous sanction and glorifying force of
sublimation to gild the mud of the old earth and colour with
its rose and sapphire the old turbid unreal skies of sentimen¬
talising vital imagination and mental idealised chimera. If that
falsification is permitted, the higher Light and Power and Bliss
withdraw, there is a fall back to a lower status; or else the
realisation remains tied to an insecure half-way and mixture or
is covered and even submerged by an inferior exaltation that
is not the true Ananda. It is for this reason that Divine Love
which is at the heart of all creation and the most powerful of
all redeeming and creative forces has yet been the least frontally
present in earthly life, the least successfully redemptive, the least
creative. Human nature has been unable to bear it in its purity
for the very reason that it is the most powerful, pure, rare and
intense of all the divine energies; what little could be seized has
been corrupted at once into a vital pietistic ardour, a defenceless
religious or ethical sentimentalism, a sensuous or even sensual
erotic mysticism of the roseate coloured mind or passionately
turbid life-impulse and with these simulations compensated its
inability to house the Mystic Flame that could rebuild the world
with its tongues of sacrifice. It is only the inmost psychic being
unveiled and emerging in its full power that can lead the pilgrim
sacrifice unscathed through these ambushes and pitfalls; at each
moment it catches, exposes, repels the mind’s and the life’s false¬
hoods, seizes hold on the truth of the Divine Love and Ananda
and separates it from the excitement of the mind’s ardours and
the blind enthusiasms of the misleading life-force. But all things
that are true at their core in mind and life and the physical being
it extricates and takes with it in the journey till they stand on
the heights, new in spirit and sublime in figure.
But all things
that are true at their core in mind and life and the physical being
it extricates and takes with it in the journey till they stand on
the heights, new in spirit and sublime in figure.
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The Yoga of Divine Works
And yet even the leading of the inmost psychic being is
not found sufficient until it has succeeded in raising itself out
of this mass of inferior Nature to the highest spiritual levels
and the divine spark and flame descended here have rejoined
themselves to their original fiery Ether. For there is there no
longer a spiritual consciousness still imperfect and half lost to
itself in the thick sheaths of human mind, life and body, but
the full spiritual consciousness in its purity, freedom and intense
wideness. There, as it is the eternal Knower that becomes the
Knower in us and mover and user of all knowledge, so it is the
eternal All-Blissful who is the Adored attracting to himself the
eternal divine portion of his being and joy that has gone out into
the play of the universe, the infinite Lover pouring himself out in
the multiplicity of his own manifested selves in a happy Oneness.
All Beauty in the world is there the beauty of the Beloved, and
all forms of beauty have to stand under the light of that eternal
Beauty and submit themselves to the sublimating and transfig¬
uring power of the unveiled Divine Perfection. All Bliss and Joy
are there of the All-Blissful, and all inferior forms of enjoyment,
happiness or pleasure are subjected to the shock of the intensity
of its floods or currents and either they are broken to pieces
as inadequate things under its convicting stress or compelled to
transmute themselves into the forms of the Divine Ananda. Thus
for the individual consciousness a Force is manifested which can
deal sovereignly in it with the diminutions and degradations of
the values of the Ignorance. At last it begins to be possible to
bring down into life the immense reality and intense concreteness
of the love and joy that are of the Eternal. Or at any rate it will
be possible for our spiritual consciousness to raise itself out
of mind into the supramental Light and Force and Vastness;
there in the light and potency of the supramental Gnosis are the
splendour and joy of a power of divine self-expression and self¬
organisation which could rescue and re-create even the world of
the Ignorance into a figure of the Truth of the Spirit.
There in the supramental Gnosis is the fulfilment, the culmi¬
nating height, the all-embracing extent of the inner adoration,
the profound and integral union, the flaming wings of Love
The Ascent of the Sacrifice -2
169
upbearing the power and joy of a supreme Knowledge. For
supramental Love brings an active ecstasy that surpasses the void
passive peace and stillness which is the heaven of the liberated
Mind and does not betray the deeper greater calm which is the
beginning of the supramental silence. The unity of a love which
is able to include in itself all differences without being dimin¬
ished or abrogated by their present limitations and apparent
dissonances is raised to its full potentiality on the supramental
level. For there an intense oneness with all creatures founded on
a profound oneness of the soul with the Divine can harmonise
with a play of relations that only makes the oneness more perfect
and absolute. The power of Love supramentalised can take hold
of all living relations without hesitation or danger and turn them
Godwards delivered from their crude, mixed and petty human
settings and sublimated into the happy material of a divine life.
For it is the very nature of the supramental experience that it can
perpetuate the play of difference without forfeiting or in the least
diminishing either the divine union or the infinite oneness. For
a supramentalised consciousness it would be utterly possible
to embrace all contacts with men and the world in a purified
flame-force and with a transfigured significance, because the
soul would then perceive always as the object of all emotion
and all seeking for love or beauty the One Eternal and could
spiritually use a wide and liberated life-urge to meet and join
with that One Divine in all things and all creatures.
Into the third and last category of the works of sacrifice can
be gathered all that is directly proper to the Yoga of works;
for here is its direct field of effectuation and major province.
It covers the entire range of life’s more visible activities; under
it fall the multiform energies of the Will-to-Life throwing itself
outward to make the most of material existence. It is here that
an ascetic or other-worldly spirituality feels an insurmountable
denial of the Truth which it seeks after and is compelled to turn
away from terrestrial existence, rejecting it as for ever the dark
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The Yoga of Divine Works
It is here that
an ascetic or other-worldly spirituality feels an insurmountable
denial of the Truth which it seeks after and is compelled to turn
away from terrestrial existence, rejecting it as for ever the dark
170
The Yoga of Divine Works
playground of an incurable Ignorance. Yet it is precisely these
activities that are claimed for a spiritual conquest and divine
transformation by the integral Yoga. Abandoned altogether by
the more ascetic disciplines, accepted by others only as a field of
temporary ordeal or a momentary, superficial and ambiguous
play of the concealed spirit, this existence is fully embraced
and welcomed by the integral seeker as a field of fulfilment, a
field for divine works, a field of the total self-discovery of the
concealed and indwelling spirit. A discovery of the Divinity in
oneself is his first object, but a total discovery too of the Divinity
in the world behind the apparent denial offered by its scheme
and figures and, last, a total discovery of the dynamism of some
transcendent Eternal; for by its descent this world and self will
be empowered to break their disguising envelopes and become
divine in revealing form and manifesting process as they now
are secretly in their hidden essence.
This object of the integral Yoga must be accepted wholly
by those who follow it, but the acceptance must not be in ig¬
norance of the immense stumbling-blocks that lie in the way of
the achievement; on the contrary we must be fully aware of the
compelling cause of the refusal of so many other disciplines to
regard even its possibility, much less its imperative character, as
the true meaning of terrestrial existence. For here in the works of
life in the earth-nature is the very heart of the difficulty that has
driven Philosophy to its heights of aloofness and turned away
even the eager eye of Religion from the malady of birth in a
mortal body to a distant Paradise or a silent peace of Nirvana.
A way of pure Knowledge is comparatively straightforward and
easy to the tread of the seeker in spite of our mental limitations
and the pitfalls of the Ignorance; a way of pure Love, although
it has its stumbling-blocks and its sufferings and trials, can in
comparison be as easy as the winging of a bird through the free
azure. For Knowledge and Love are pure in their essence and
become mixed and embarrassed, corrupted and degraded only
when they enter into the ambiguous movement of the life-forces
and are seized by them for the outward life’s crude movements
and obstinately inferior motives. Alone of the three powers Life
The Ascent of the Sacrifice -2
171
Alone of the three powers Life
The Ascent of the Sacrifice -2
171
or at least a certain predominant Will-in-Life has the appearance
of something impure, accursed or fallen in its very essence. At
its contact, wrapped in its dull sheaths or caught in its irides¬
cent quagmires, the divinities themselves become common and
muddy and hardly escape from being dragged downwards into
its perversions and disastrously assimilated to the demon and
the Asura. A principle of dark and dull inertia is at its base; all
are tied down by the body and its needs and desires to a trivial
mind, petty desires and emotions, an insignificant repetition of
small worthless functionings, needs, cares, occupations, pains,
pleasures that lead to nothing beyond themselves and bear the
stamp of an ignorance that knows not its own why and whither.
This physical mind of inertia believes in no divinity other than
its own small earth-gods; it aspires perhaps to a greater com¬
fort, order, pleasure, but asks for no uplifting and no spiritual
deliverance. At the centre we meet a stronger Will of life with a
greater gusto, but it is a blinded Daemon, a perverted spirit and
exults in the very elements that make of life a striving turmoil
and an unhappy imbroglio. It is a soul of human or Titanic desire
clinging to the garish colour, disordered poetry, violent tragedy
or stirring melodrama of this mixed flux of good and evil, joy
and sorrow, light and darkness, heady rapture and bitter torture.
It loves these things and would have more and more of them or,
even when it suffers and cries out against them, can accept or
joy in nothing else; it hates and revolts against higher things and
in its fury would trample, tear or crucify any diviner Power that
has the presumption to offer to make life pure, luminous and
happy and snatch from its lips the fiery brew of that exciting
mixture. Another Will-in-Life there is that is ready to follow the
ameliorating ideal Mind and is allured by its offer to extract
some harmony, beauty, light, nobler order out of life, but this
is a smaller part of the vital nature and can be easily over¬
powered by its more violent or darker duller yoke-comrades;
nor does it readily lend itself to a call higher than that of the
Mind unless that call defeats itself, as Religion usually does,
by lowering its demand to conditions more intelligible to our
obscure vital nature. All these forces the spiritual seeker grows
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The Yoga of Divine Works
All these forces the spiritual seeker grows
172
The Yoga of Divine Works
aware of in himself and finds all around him and has to struggle
and combat incessantly to be rid of their grip and dislodge the
long-entrenched mastery they have exercised over his own being
as over the environing human existence. The difficulty is great;
for their hold is so strong, so apparently invincible that it justifies
the disdainful dictum which compares human nature to a dog’s
tail, — for, straighten it never so much by force of ethics, reli¬
gion, reason or any other redemptive effort, it returns in the end
always to the crooked curl of Nature. And so great is the vim, the
clutch of that more agitated Life-Will, so immense the peril of its
passions and errors, so subtly insistent or persistently invasive,
so obstinate up to the very gates of Heaven the fury of its attack
or the tedious obstruction of its obstacles that even the saint
and the Yogin cannot be sure of their liberated purity or their
trained self-mastery against its intrigue or its violence. All labour
to straighten out this native crookedness strikes the struggling
will as a futility; a flight, a withdrawal to happy Heaven or
peaceful dissolution easily finds credit as the only wisdom and
to find a way not to be born again gets established as the only
remedy for the dull bondage or the poor shoddy delirium or the
blinded and precarious happiness and achievement of earthly
existence.
A remedy yet there should be and is, a way of redress and
a chance of transformation for this troubled vital nature; but
for that the cause of deviation must be found and remedied at
the heart of Life itself and in its very principle, since Life too
is a power of the Divine and not a creation of some malignant
Chance or dark Titanic impulse, however obscure or perverted
may be its actual appearance. In Life itself there is the seed of
its own salvation, it is from the Life-Energy that we must get
our leverage; for though there is a saving light in Knowledge,
a redeeming and transforming force in Love, these cannot be
effective here unless they secure the consent of Life and can
use the instrumentation of some delivered energy at its centre
for a sublimation of the erring human into a divine Life-Force.
It is not possible to cut the difficulty by a splitting up of the
works of sacrifice; we cannot escape it by deciding that we shall
The Ascent of the Sacrifice -2
173
It is not possible to cut the difficulty by a splitting up of the
works of sacrifice; we cannot escape it by deciding that we shall
The Ascent of the Sacrifice -2
173
do only the works of Love and Knowledge and leave aside the
works of will and power, possession and acquisition, production
and fruitful expense of capacity, battle and victory and mastery,
striking away from us the larger part of life because it seems to
be made of the very stuff of desire and ego and therefore doomed
to be a field of disharmony and mere conflict and disorder. For
the division cannot really be made; or, if attempted, it must
fail in its essential purpose, since it would isolate us from the
total energies of the World-Power and sterilise an important
part of integral Nature, just the one force in it that is a necessary
instrument in any world-creative purpose. The Life-Force is an
indispensable intermediary, the effectuating element in Nature
here; mind needs its alliance if the works of mind are not to
remain shining inner formations without a body; the spirit needs
it to give an outer force and form to its manifested possibilities
and arrive at a complete self-expression incarnated in Matter. If
Life refuses the aid of its intermediary energy to the spirit’s other
workings or is itself refused, they are likely to be reduced for
all the effect they can have here to a static seclusion or a golden
impotence; or if anything is done, it will be a partial irradiation
of our action more subjective than objective, modifying exis¬
tence perhaps, but without force to change it. Yet if Life brings
its forces to the spirit but unregenerate, a worse result may
follow since it is likely to reduce the spiritual action of Love or
Knowledge to diminished and corrupted motions or make them
accomplices of its own inferior or perverse workings. Life is
indispensable to the completeness of the creative spiritual reali¬
sation, but life released, transformed, uplifted, not the ordinary
mentalised human-animal life, nor the demoniac or Titanic, nor
even the divine and the undivine mixed together. Whatever may
be done by other world-shunning or heaven-seeking disciplines,
this is the difficult but unavoidable task of the integral Yoga;
it cannot afford to leave unsolved the problem of the outward
works of Life, it must find in them their native Divinity and ally
it firmly and for ever to the divinities of Love and Knowledge.
It is no solution either to postpone dealing with the works
of Life till Love and Knowledge have been evolved to a point
174
It is no solution either to postpone dealing with the works
of Life till Love and Knowledge have been evolved to a point
174
The Yoga of Divine Works
at which they can sovereignly and with safety lay hold on the
Life-Force to regenerate it; for we have seen that they have to
rise to immense heights before they can be secure from the vital
perversion which hampers or hamstrings their power to deliver.
If once our consciousness could reach the heights of a supra-
mental Nature, then indeed these disabilities would disappear.
But here there is the dilemma that it is impossible to reach the
supramental heights with the burden of an unregenerated Life-
Force on our shoulders and equally impossible to regenerate
radically the Will-in-Life without bringing down the infallible
light and unconquerable power that belong to the spiritual and
supramental levels. The Supramental Consciousness is not only
a Knowledge, a Bliss, an intimate Love and Oneness, it is also
a Will, a principle of Power and Force, and it cannot descend
till the element of Will, of Power, of Force in this manifested
Nature is sufficiently developed and sublimated to receive and
bear it. But Will, Power, Force are the native substance of the
Life-Energy, and herein lies the justification for the refusal of Life
to acknowledge the supremacy of Knowledge and Love alone,
— for its push towards the satisfaction of something far more
unreflecting, headstrong and dangerous that can yet venture too
in its own bold and ardent way towards the Divine and Abso¬
lute. Love and Wisdom are not the only aspects of the Divine,
there is also its aspect of Power. As the mind gropes for Knowl¬
edge, as the heart feels out for Love, so the life-force, however
fumblingly or trepidantly, stumbles in search of Power and the
control given by Power. It is a mistake of the ethical or religious
mind to condemn Power as in itself a thing not to be accepted
or sought after because naturally corrupting and evil; in spite
of its apparent justification by a majority of instances, this is at
its core a blind and irrational prejudice. However corrupted and
misused, as Love and Knowledge too are corrupted and misused.
Power is divine and put here for a divine use. Shakti, Will, Power
is the driver of the worlds and, whether it be Knowledge-Force
or Love-Force or Life-Force or Action-Force or Body-Force, is
always spiritual in its origin and divine in its native character.
It is the use of it made in the Ignorance by brute, man or Titan
The Ascent of the Sacrifice -2
175
It is the use of it made in the Ignorance by brute, man or Titan
The Ascent of the Sacrifice -2
175
that has to be cast aside and replaced by its greater natural —
even if to us supernormal — action led by the Light of an inner
consciousness which is in tune with the Infinite and the Eternal.
The integral Yoga cannot reject the works of Life and be satisfied
with an inward experience only; it has to go inward in order to
change the outward, making the Life-Force a part and a working
of a Yoga-Energy which is in touch with the Divine and divine
in its guidance.
All the difficulty in dealing spiritually with the works of Life
arises because the Will-in-Life for its purposes in the Ignorance
has created a false soul of desire and substituted it for that spark
of the Divine which is the true psyche. All or most of the works
of life are at present or seem to be actuated and vitiated by this
soul of desire; even those that are ethical or religious, even those
that wear the guise of altruism, philanthropy, self-sacrifice, self-
denial, are shot through and through with the threads of its
making. This soul of desire is a separative soul of ego and all its
instincts are for a separative self-affirmation; it pushes always,
openly or under more or less shining masks, for its own growth,
for possession, for enjoyment, for conquest and empire. If the
curse of disquiet and disharmony and perversion is to be lifted
from Life, the true soul, the psychic being, must be given its
leading place and there must be a dissolution of the false soul
of desire and ego. But this does not mean that life itself must
be coerced and denied its native line of fulfilment; for behind
this outer life soul of desire there is in us an inner and true
vital being which has not to be dissolved but brought out into
prominence and released to its true working as a power of the
Divine Nature. The prominence of this true vital being under
the lead of the true inmost soul within us is the condition for the
divine fulfilment of the objects of the Life-Force. Those objects
will even remain the same in essence, but transformed in their
inner motive and outer character. The Divine Life-Power too will
be a will for growth, a force of self-affirmation, but affirmation
of the Divine within us, not of the little temporary personality on
the surface, — growth into the true divine Individual, the central
being, the secret imperishable Person who can emerge only by
176
The Yoga of Divine Works
the subordination and disappearance of the ego. This is life’s true
object: growth, but a growth of the spirit in Nature, affirming
and developing itself in mind, life and body; possession, but a
possession by the Divine of the Divine in all things, and not of
things for their own sake by the desire of the ego; enjoyment, but
an enjoyment of the divine Ananda in the universe; battle and
conquest and empire in the shape of a victorious conflict with
the Powers of Darkness, an entire spiritual self-rule and mastery
over inward and outward Nature, a conquest by Knowledge,
Love and Divine Will over the domains of the Ignorance.
These are the conditions and these must be the aims of the
divine effectuation of the works of Life and their progressive
transformation which is the third element of the triple sacrifice.
It is not a rationalisation but a supramentalisation, not a moral¬
ising but a spiritualising of life that is the object of the Yoga. It is
not a handling of externals or superficial psychological motives
that is its main purpose, but a refounding of life and its action
on their hidden divine element; for only such a refounding of life
can bring about its direct government by the secret Divine Power
above us and its transfiguration into a manifest expression of
the Divinity, not as now a disguise and a disfiguring mask of the
eternal Actor. It is a spiritual essential change of consciousness,
not the surface manipulation which is the method of Mind and
Reason, that can alone make Life other than it now is and rescue
it out of its present distressed and ambiguous figure.
It is then by a transformation of life in its very principle, not
by an external manipulation of its phenomena, that the integral
Yoga proposes to change it from a troubled and ignorant into
a luminous and harmonious movement of Nature. There are
three conditions which are indispensable for the achievement of
this central inner revolution and new formation; none of them is
altogether sufficient in itself, but by their united threefold power
the uplifting can be done, the conversion made and completely
made. For, first, life as it is is a movement of desire and it has
The Ascent of the Sacrifice -2
177
For, first, life as it is is a movement of desire and it has
The Ascent of the Sacrifice -2
177
built in us as its centre a desire-soul which refers to itself all the
motions of life and puts in them its own troubled hue and pain of
an ignorant, half-lit, baffled endeavour: for a divine living, desire
must be abolished and replaced by a purer and firmer motive-
power, the tormented soul of desire dissolved and in its stead
there must emerge the calm, strength, happiness of a true vital
being now concealed within us. Next, life as it is is driven or led
partly by the impulse of the life-force, partly by a mind which
is mostly a servant and abettor of the ignorant life-impulse, but
in part also its uneasy and not too luminous or competent guide
and mentor; for a divine life the mind and the life-impulse must
cease to be anything but instruments and the inmost psychic
being must take their place as the leader on the path and the
indicator of a divine guidance. Last, life as it is is turned towards
the satisfaction of the separative ego; ego must disappear and
be replaced by the true spiritual person, the central being, and
life itself must be turned towards the fulfilment of the Divine in
terrestrial existence; it must feel a Divine Force awaking within
it and become an obedient instrumentation of its purpose.
There is nothing that is not ancient and familiar in the first
of these three transforming inner movements; for it has always
been one of the principal objects of spiritual discipline. It has
been best formulated in the already expressed doctrine of the
Gita by which a complete renouncement of desire for the fruits
as the motive of action, a complete annulment of desire itself, the
complete achievement of a perfect equality are put forward as
the normal status of a spiritual being. A perfect spiritual equality
is the one true and infallible sign of the cessation of desire, —
to be equal-souled to all things, unmoved by joy and sorrow,
the pleasant and the unpleasant, success or failure, to look with
an equal eye on high and low, friend and enemy, the virtuous
and the sinner, to see in all beings the manifold manifestation
of the One and in all things the multitudinous play or the slow
masked evolution of the embodied Spirit. It is not a mental quiet,
aloofness, indifference, not an inert vital quiescence, not a pas¬
sivity of the physical consciousness consenting to no movement
or to any movement that is the condition aimed at, though these
178
The Yoga of Divine Works
It is not a mental quiet,
aloofness, indifference, not an inert vital quiescence, not a pas¬
sivity of the physical consciousness consenting to no movement
or to any movement that is the condition aimed at, though these
178
The Yoga of Divine Works
things are sometimes mistaken for this spiritual condition, but
a wide comprehensive unmoved universality such as that of the
Witness Spirit behind Nature. For all here seems to be a mobile
half-ordered half-confused organisation of forces, but behind
them one can feel a supporting peace, silence, wideness, not
inert but calm, not impotent but potentially omnipotent with a
concentrated, stable, immobile energy in it capable of bearing all
the motions of the universe. This Presence behind is equal-souled
to all things: the energy it holds in it can be unloosed for any
action, but no action will be chosen by any desire in the Witness
Spirit; a Truth acts which is beyond and greater than the action
itself or its apparent forms and impulses, beyond and greater
than mind or life-force or body, although it may take for the
immediate purpose a mental, a vital or a physical appearance. It
is when there is this death of desire and this calm equal wideness
in the consciousness everywhere, that the true vital being within
us comes out from the veil and reveals its own calm, intense
and potent presence. For such is the true nature of the vital
being, prdnamaya purusa; it is a projection of the Divine Purusha
into life, — tranquil, strong, luminous, many-energied, obedient
to the Divine Will, egoless, yet or rather therefore capable of
all action, achievement, highest or largest enterprise. The true
Life-Force too reveals itself as no longer this troubled harassed
divided striving surface energy, but a great and radiant Divine
Power, full of peace and strength and bliss, a wide-wayed Angel
of Life with its wings of Might enfolding the universe.
And yet this transformation into a large strength and equal¬
ity is insufficient; for if it opens to us the instrumentation of a
Divine Life, it does not provide its government and initiative. It is
here that the presence of the released psychic being intervenes; it
does not give the supreme government and direction, — for that
is not its function, — but it supplies during the transition from
ignorance to a divine Knowledge a progressive guidance for the
inner and outer life and action; it indicates at each moment
the method, the way, the steps that will lead to that fulfilled
spiritual condition in which a supreme dynamic initiative will
be always there directing the activities of a divinised Life-Force.
The Ascent of the Sacrifice -2
179
The light it sheds illuminates the other parts of the nature which,
for want of any better guidance than their own confused and
groping powers, have been wandering in the rounds of the Ig¬
norance; it gives to mind the intrinsic feeling of the thoughts
and perceptions, to life the infallible sense of the movements
that are misled or misleading and those that are well-inspired;
something like a quiet oracle from within discloses the causes of
our stumblings, warns in time against their repetition, extracts
from experience and intuition the law, not rigid but plastic,
of a just direction for our acts, a right stepping, an accurate
impulse. A will is created that becomes more in consonance
with evolving Truth rather than with the circling and dilatory
mazes of a seeking Error. A determined orientation towards the
greater Light to be, a soul-instinct, a psychic tact and insight
into the true substance, motion and intention of things, coming
always nearer and nearer to a spiritual vision, to a knowledge by
inner contact, inner sight and even identity, begin to replace the
superficial keenness of mental judgment and the eager graspings
of the life-force. The works of Life right themselves, escape from
confusion, substitute for the artificial or legal order imposed by
the intellect and for the arbitrary rule of desire the guidance
of the soul’s inner insight, enter into the profound paths of the
Spirit. Above all, the psychic being imposes on life the law of
the sacrifice of all its works as an offering to the Divine and
the Eternal. Life becomes a call to that which is beyond Life; its
every smallest act enlarges with the sense of the Infinite.
Above all, the psychic being imposes on life the law of
the sacrifice of all its works as an offering to the Divine and
the Eternal. Life becomes a call to that which is beyond Life; its
every smallest act enlarges with the sense of the Infinite.
As an inner equality increases and with it the sense of the
true vital being waiting for the greater direction it has to serve,
as the psychic call too increases in all the members of our na¬
ture, That to which the call is addressed begins to reveal itself,
descends to take possession of the life and its energies and fills
them with the height, intimacy, vastness of its presence and its
purpose. In many, if not most, it manifests something of itself
even before the equality and the open psychic urge or guidance
are there. A call of the veiled psychic element oppressed by the
mass of the outer ignorance and crying for deliverance, a stress
of eager meditation and seeking for knowledge, a longing of the
180
The Yoga of Divine Works
A call of the veiled psychic element oppressed by the
mass of the outer ignorance and crying for deliverance, a stress
of eager meditation and seeking for knowledge, a longing of the
180
The Yoga of Divine Works
heart, a passionate will ignorant yet but sincere may break the
lid that shuts off that Higher from this Lower Nature and open
the floodgates. A little of the Divine Person may reveal itself
or some Light, Power, Bliss, Love out of the Infinite. This may
be a momentary revelation, a flash or a brief-lived gleam that
soon withdraws and waits for the preparation of the nature; but
also it may repeat itself, grow, endure. A long and large and
comprehensive working will then have begun, sometimes lumi¬
nous or intense, sometimes slow and obscure. A Divine Power
comes in front at times and leads and compels or instructs and
enlightens; at others it withdraws into the background and seems
to leave the being to its own resources. All that is ignorant, ob¬
scure, perverted or simply imperfect and inferior in the being is
raised up, perhaps brought to its acme, dealt with, corrected, ex¬
hausted, shown its own disastrous results, compelled to call for
its own cessation or transformation or expelled as worthless or
incorrigible from the nature. This cannot be a smooth and even
process; alternations there are of day and night, illumination
and darkness, calm and construction or battle and upheaval, the
presence of the growing Divine Consciousness and its absence,
heights of hope and abysses of despair, the clasp of the Beloved
and the anguish of its absence, the overwhelming invasion, the
compelling deceit, the fierce opposition, the disabling mockery
of hostile Powers or the help and comfort and communion of the
Gods and the Divine Messengers. A great and long revolution
and churning of the ocean of Life with strong emergences of its
nectar and its poison is enforced till all is ready and the increasing
Descent finds a being, a nature prepared and conditioned for
its complete rule and its all-encompassing presence. But if the
equality and the psychic light and will are already there, then this
process, though it cannot be dispensed with, can still be much
lightened and facilitated: it will be rid of its worst dangers; an
inner calm, happiness, confidence will support the steps through
all the difficulties and trials of the transformation and the grow¬
ing Force profiting by the full assent of the nature will rapidly
diminish and eliminate the power of the opposing forces. A sure
guidance and protection will be present throughout, sometimes
A sure
guidance and protection will be present throughout, sometimes
The Ascent of the Sacrifice -2
181
standing in front, sometimes working behind the veil, and the
power of the end will be already there even in the beginning and
in the long middle stages of the great endeavour. For at all times
the seeker will be aware of the Divine Guide and Protector or the
working of the supreme Mother-Force; he will know that all is
done for the best, the progress assured, the victory inevitable. In
either case the process is the same and unavoidable, a taking up
of the whole nature, of the whole life, of the internal and of the
external, to reveal and handle and transform its forces and their
movements under the pressure of a diviner Life from above, until
all here has been possessed by greater spiritual powers and made
an instrumentation of a spiritual action and a divine purpose.
In this process and at an early stage of it it becomes evident
that what we know of ourselves, our present conscious existence,
is only a representative formation, a superficial activity, a chang¬
ing external result of a vast mass of concealed existence. Our
visible life and the actions of that life are no more than a series
of significant expressions, but that which it tries to express is
not on the surface; our existence is something much larger than
this apparent frontal being which we suppose ourselves to be
and which we offer to the world around us. This frontal and
external being is a confused amalgam of mind-formations, life-
movements, physical functionings of which even an exhaustive
analysis into its component parts and machinery fails to reveal
the whole secret. It is only when we go behind, below, above into
the hidden stretches of our being that we can know it; the most
thorough and acute surface scrutiny and manipulation cannot
give us the true understanding or the completely effective control
of our life, its purposes, its activities; that inability indeed is the
cause of the failure of reason, morality and every other surface
action to control and deliver and perfect the life of the human
race. For below even our most obscure physical consciousness is
a subconscious being in which as in a covering and supporting
soil are all manner of hidden seeds that sprout up, unaccountably
to us, on our surface and into which we are constantly throwing
fresh seeds that prolong our past and will influence our future, —
a subconscious being, obscure, small in its motions, capriciously
182
The Yoga of Divine Works
and almost fantastically subrational, but of an immense potency
for the earth-life. Again behind our mind, our life, our conscious
physical there is a larger subliminal consciousness, — there are
inner mental, inner vital, inner more subtle physical reaches
supported by an inmost psychic existence which is the animating
soul of all the rest; and in these hidden reaches too lie a mass
of numerous pre-existent personalities which supply the mate¬
rial, the motive-forces, the impulsions of our developing surface
existence. For in each one of us here there may be one central
person, but also a multitude of subordinate personalities created
by the past history of its manifestation or by expressions of it on
these inner planes which support its present play in this external
material cosmos. And while on our surface we are cut off from
all around us except through an exterior mind and sense contact
which delivers but little of us to our world or of our world to
us, in these inner reaches the barrier between us and the rest
of existence is thin and easily broken; there we can feel at once
— not merely infer from their results, but feel directly — the
action of the secret world-forces, mind-forces, life-forces, subtle
physical forces that constitute universal and individual existence;
we shall even be able, if we will but train ourselves to it, to lay
our hands on these world-forces that throw themselves on us or
surround us and more and more to control or at least strongly
modify their action on us and others, their formations, their very
movements. Yet again, above our human mind are still greater
reaches superconscient to it and from there secretly descend
influences, powers, touches which are the original determinants
of things here and, if they were called down in their fullness,
could altogether alter the whole make and economy of life in the
material universe. It is all this latent experience and knowledge
that the Divine Force working upon us by our opening to it in
the integral Yoga, progressively reveals to us, uses and works out
the consequences as means and steps towards a transformation
of our whole being and nature. Our life is thenceforth no longer
a little rolling wave on the surface, but interpenetrant if not
coincident with the cosmic life. Our spirit, our self rises not
only into an inner identity with some wide cosmic Self but into
The Ascent of the Sacrifice -2
183
some contact with that which is beyond, though aware of and
dominant over the action of the universe.
Our spirit, our self rises not
only into an inner identity with some wide cosmic Self but into
The Ascent of the Sacrifice -2
183
some contact with that which is beyond, though aware of and
dominant over the action of the universe.
It is thus by an integralisation of our divided being that
the Divine Shakti in the Yoga will proceed to its object; for
liberation, perfection, mastery are dependent on this integralisa-
tion, since the little wave on the surface cannot control its own
movement, much less have any true control over the vast life
around it. The Shakti, the power of the Infinite and the Eternal
descends within us, works, breaks up our present psychological
formations, shatters every wall, widens, liberates, presents us
with always newer and greater powers of vision, ideation, per¬
ception and newer and greater life-motives, enlarges and new-
models increasingly the soul and its instruments, confronts us
with every imperfection in order to convict and destroy it, opens
to a greater perfection, does in a brief period the work of many
lives or ages so that new births and new vistas open constantly
within us. Expansive in her action, she frees the consciousness
from confinement in the body; it can go out in trance or sleep or
even waking and enter into worlds or other regions of this world
and act there or carry back its experience. It spreads out, feeling
the body only as a small part of itself, and begins to contain
what before contained it; it achieves the cosmic consciousness
and extends itself to be commensurate with the universe. It be¬
gins to know inwardly and directly and not merely by external
observation and contact the forces at play in the world, feels
their movement, distinguishes their functioning and can operate
immediately upon them as the scientist operates upon physical
forces, accept their action and results in our mind, life, body
or reject them or modify, change, reshape, create immense new
powers and movements in place of the old small functionings
of the nature. We begin to perceive the working of the forces
of universal Mind and to know how our thoughts are created
by that working, separate from within the truth and falsehood
of our perceptions, enlarge their field, extend and illumine their
significance, become master of our own minds and active to
shape the movements of Mind in the world around us. We be¬
gin to perceive the flow and surge of the universal life-forces.
184
The Yoga of Divine Works
We be¬
gin to perceive the flow and surge of the universal life-forces.
184
The Yoga of Divine Works
detect the origin and law of our feelings, emotions, sensations,
passions, are free to accept, reject, new-create, open to wider,
rise to higher planes of Life-Power. We begin to perceive too
the key to the enigma of Matter, follow the interplay of Mind
and Life and Consciousness upon it, discover more and more its
instrumental and resultant function and detect ultimately the last
secret of Matter as a form not merely of Energy but of involved
and arrested or unstably fixed and restricted consciousness and
begin to see too the possibility of its liberation and plasticity
of response to higher Powers, its possibilities for the conscious
and no longer the more than half-inconscient incarnation and
self-expression of the Spirit. All this and more becomes more
and more possible as the working of the Divine Shakti increases
in us and, against much resistance or labour to respond of our
obscure consciousness, through much struggle and movement
of progress and regression and renewed progress necessitated
by the work of intensive transformation of a half-inconscient
into a conscious substance, moves to a greater purity, truth,
height, range. All depends on the psychic awakening in us, the
completeness of our response to her and our growing surrender.
But all this can only constitute a greater inner life with
a greater possibility of the outer action and is a transitional
achievement; the full transformation can come only by the as¬
cent of the sacrifice to its farthest heights and its action upon life
with the power and light and beatitude of the divine supramental
Gnosis. For then alone all the forces that are divided and express
themselves imperfectly in life and its works are raised to their
original unity, harmony, single truth, authentic absoluteness and
entire significance. There Knowledge and Will are one. Love and
Force a single movement; the opposites that afflict us here are
resolved into their reconciled unity: good develops its absolute
and evil divesting itself of its error returns to the good that
was behind it; sin and virtue vanish in a divine purity and an
infallible truth-movement; the dubious evanescence of pleasure
disappears in a Bliss that is the play of an eternal and happy
spiritual certitude, and pain in perishing discovers the touch of
an Ananda which was betrayed by some dark perversion and
The Ascent of the Sacrifice -2
185
incapacity of the will of the Inconscient to receive it. These
things, to the Mind an imagination or a mystery, become evi¬
dent and capable of experience as the consciousness rises out of
limited embodied Matter-mind to the freedom and fullness of
the higher and higher ranges of the super-intelligence; but they
can become entirely true and normal only when the supramental
becomes the law of the nature.
It is therefore on the accomplishment of this ascent and
on the possibility of a full dynamism from these highest levels
descending into earth-consciousness that is dependent the jus¬
tification of Life, its salvation, its transformation into a Divine
Life in a transfigured terrestrial Nature.
The nature of the integral Yoga so conceived, so conditioned,
progressing by these spiritual means, turning upon this integral
transformation of the nature, determines of itself its answer to
the question of the ordinary activities of life and their place in
the Yoga.
There is not and cannot be here any ascetic or contemplative
or mystic abandonment of works and life altogether, any gospel
of an absorbed meditation and inactivity, any cutting away or
condemnation of the Life-Force and its activities, any rejection
of the manifestation in the earth-nature. It may be necessary for
the seeker at any period to withdraw into himself, to remain
plunged in his inner being, to shut out from him the noise and
turmoil of the life of the Ignorance until a certain inner change
has been accomplished or something achieved without which a
further effective action on life has become difficult or impossible.
But this can only be a period or an episode, a temporary necessity
or a preparatory spiritual manoeuvre; it cannot be the rule of
his Yoga or its principle.
A splitting up of the activities of human existence on a
religious or an ethical basis or both together, a restriction to
the works of worship only or to the works of philanthropy and
beneficence only would be contrary to the spirit of the integral
186
The Yoga of Divine Works
Yoga. Any merely mental rule or merely mental acceptance or
repudiation is alien to the purpose and method of its discipline.
All must be taken to a spiritual height and placed upon a spiritual
basis; the presence of an inner spiritual change and an outer
transformation must be enforced upon the whole of life and not
merely on a part of life; all must be accepted that is helpful
towards this change or admits it, all must be rejected that is
incapable or inapt or refuses to submit itself to the transforming
movement. There must be no attachment to any form of things
or of life, any object, any activity; all must be renounced if need
be, all must be admitted that the Divine chooses as its material
for the divine life. But what accepts or rejects must be neither
mind nor open or camouflaged vital will of desire nor ethical
sense, but the insistence of the psychic being, the command
of the Divine Guide of the Yoga, the vision of the higher Self
or Spirit, the illumined guidance of the Master. The way of the
spirit is not a mental way; a mental rule or mental consciousness
cannot be its determinant or its leader.
Equally, a combination or a compromise between two or¬
ders of consciousness, the spiritual and the mental or the spir¬
itual and the vital or a mere sublimation from within of Life
outwardly unchanged cannot be the law or the aim of the Yoga.
All life must be taken up but all life must be transformed; all
must become a part, a form, an adequate expression of a spiritual
being in the supramental nature. This is the height and crowning
movement of a spiritual evolution in the material world, and as
the change from the vital animal to mental man made life an¬
other thing altogether in basic consciousness, scope, significance,
so this change from the materialised mental being to the spiritual
and supramental being using but not dominated by matter must
take up life and make it another thing altogether than the flawed,
imperfect limited human, quite other in its basic consciousness,
scope, significance. All forms of life activity that cannot bear the
change must disappear, all that can bear it will survive and enter
into the kingdom of the spirit. A divine Force is at work and
will choose at each moment what has to be done or has not to
be done, what has to be momentarily or permanently taken up.
The Ascent of the Sacrifice -2
187
A divine Force is at work and
will choose at each moment what has to be done or has not to
be done, what has to be momentarily or permanently taken up.
The Ascent of the Sacrifice -2
187
momentarily or permanently abandoned. For provided we do
not substitute for that our desire or our ego, and to that end the
soul must be always awake, always on guard, alive to the divine
guidance, resistant to the undivine misleading from within or
without us, that Force is sufficient and alone competent and she
will lead us to the fulfilment along ways and by means too large,
too inward, too complex for the mind to follow, much less to
dictate. It is an arduous and difficult and dangerous way, but
there is none other.
Two rules alone there are that will diminish the difficulty
and obviate the danger. One must reject all that comes from the
ego, from vital desire, from the mere mind and its presumptuous
reasoning incompetence, all that ministers to these agents of the
Ignorance. One must learn to hear and follow the voice of the in¬
most soul, the direction of the Guru, the command of the Master,
the working of the Divine Mother. Whoever clings to the desires
and weaknesses of the flesh, the cravings and passions of the
vital in its turbulent ignorance, the dictates of his personal mind
unsilenced and unillumined by a greater knowledge, cannot find
the true inner law and is heaping obstacles in the way of the
divine fulfilment. Whoever is able to detect and renounce those
obscuring agencies and to discern and follow the true Guide
within and without will discover the spiritual law and reach the
goal of the Yoga.
A radical and total change of consciousness is not only the
whole meaning but, in an increasing force and by progressive
stages, the whole method of the integral Yoga.
Chapter VII
Standards of Conduct and
Spiritual Freedom
A radical and total change of consciousness is not only the
whole meaning but, in an increasing force and by progressive
stages, the whole method of the integral Yoga.
Chapter VII
Standards of Conduct and
Spiritual Freedom
The knowledge on which the doer of works in Yoga
has to found all his action and development has for the
keystone of its structure a more and more concrete per¬
ception of unity, the living sense of an all-pervading oneness;
he moves in the increasing consciousness of all existence as an
indivisible whole: all work too is part of this divine indivisible
whole. His personal action and its results can no longer be or
seem a separate movement mainly or entirely determined by
the egoistic “free” will of an individual, himself separate in the
mass. Our works are part of an indivisible cosmic action; they
are put or, more accurately, put themselves into their place in
the whole out of which they arise and their outcome is deter¬
mined by forces that overpass us. That world action in its vast
totality and in every petty detail is the indivisible movement
of the One who manifests himself progressively in the cosmos.
Man too becomes progressively conscious of the truth of himself
and the truth of things in proportion as he awakens to this
One within him and outside him and to the occult, miraculous
and significant process of its forces in the motion of Nature.
This action, this movement, is not confined even in ourselves
and those around us to the little fragmentary portion of the
cosmic activities of which we in our superficial consciousness
are aware; it is supported by an immense underlying environing
existence subliminal to our minds or subconscious, and it is
attracted by an immense transcending existence which is super¬
conscious to our nature. Our action arises, as we ourselves have
emerged, out of a universality of which we are not aware; we
give it a shape by our personal temperament, personal mind
and will of thought or force of impulse or desire; but the true
Standards of Conduct and Spiritual Freedom
189
truth of things, the true law of action exceeds these personal
and human formations. Every standpoint, every man-made rule
of action which ignores the indivisible totality of the cosmic
movement, whatever its utility in external practice, is to the
eye of spiritual Truth an imperfect view and a law of the Igno¬
rance.
Every standpoint, every man-made rule
of action which ignores the indivisible totality of the cosmic
movement, whatever its utility in external practice, is to the
eye of spiritual Truth an imperfect view and a law of the Igno¬
rance.
Even when we have arrived at some glimpse of this idea or
succeeded in fixing it in our consciousness as a knowledge of
the mind and a consequent attitude of the soul, it is difficult for
us in our outward parts and active nature to square accounts
between this universal standpoint and the claims of our personal
opinion, our personal will, our personal emotion and desire. We
are forced still to go on dealing with this indivisible movement
as if it were a mass of impersonal material out of which we,
the ego, the person, have to carve something according to our
own will and mental fantasy by a personal struggle and effort.
This is man’s normal attitude towards his environment, actually
false because our ego and its will are creations and puppets of the
cosmic forces and it is only when we withdraw from ego into the
consciousness of the divine Knowledge- Will of the Eternal who
acts in them that we can be by a sort of deputation from above
their master. And yet is this personal position the right attitude
for man so long as he cherishes his individuality and has not
yet fully developed it; for without this view-point and motive-
force he cannot grow in his ego, cannot sufficiently develop and
differentiate himself out of the subconscious or half-conscious
universal mass-existence.
But the hold of this ego-consciousness upon our whole habit
of existence is difficult to shake off when we have no longer need
of the separative, the individualistic and aggressive stage of de¬
velopment, when we would proceed forward from this necessity
of littleness in the child-soul to unity and universality, to the
cosmic consciousness and beyond, to our transcendent spirit-
stature. It is indispensable to recognise clearly, not only in our
mode of thought but in our way of feeling, sensing, doing, that
this movement, this universal action is not a helpless impersonal
wave of being which lends itself to the will of any ego according
190
The Yoga of Divine Works
to that ego’s strength and insistence. It is the movement of a
cosmic Being who is the Knower of his field, the steps of a Di¬
vinity who is the Master of his own progressive force of action.
As the movement is one and indivisible, so he who is present
in the movement is one, sole and indivisible. Not only all result
is determined by him, but all initiation, action and process are
dependent on the motion of his cosmic force and only belong
secondarily and in their form to the creature.
But what then must be the spiritual position of the personal
worker? What is his true relation in dynamic Nature to this
one cosmic Being and this one total movement? He is a centre
only — a centre of differentiation of the one personal conscious¬
ness, a centre of determination of the one total movement; his
personality reflects in a wave of persistent individuality the one
universal Person, the Transcendent, the Eternal. In the Ignorance
it is always a broken and distorted reflection because the crest of
the wave which is our conscious waking self throws back only
an imperfect and falsified similitude of the divine Spirit. All our
opinions, standards, formations, principles are only attempts
to represent in this broken, reflecting and distorting mirror
something of the universal and progressive total action and its
many-sided movement towards some ultimate self-revelation
of the Divine. Our mind represents it as best it can with a
narrow approximation that becomes less and less inadequate
in proportion as its thought grows in wideness and light and
power; but it is always an approximation and not even a true
partial figure. The Divine Will acts through the aeons to reveal
progressively not only in the unity of the cosmos, not only in the
collectivity of living and thinking creatures, but in the soul of
each individual something of its divine Mystery and the hidden
truth of the Infinite. Therefore there is in the cosmos, in the
collectivity, in the individual, a rooted instinct or belief in its
own perfectibility, a constant drive towards an ever increasing
and more adequate and more harmonious self-development
nearer to the secret truth of things. This effort is represented
to the constructing mind of man by standards of knowledge,
feeling, character, aesthesis and action, — rules, ideals, norms
Standards of Conduct and Spiritual Freedom
191
and laws that he essays to turn into universal dharmas.
This effort is represented
to the constructing mind of man by standards of knowledge,
feeling, character, aesthesis and action, — rules, ideals, norms
Standards of Conduct and Spiritual Freedom
191
and laws that he essays to turn into universal dharmas.
If we are to be free in the spirit, if we are to be subject only to
the supreme Truth, we must discard the idea that our mental
or moral laws are binding on the Infinite or that there can be
anything sacrosanct, absolute or eternal even in the highest of
our existing standards of conduct. To form higher and higher
temporary standards as long as they are needed is to serve the
Divine in his world march; to erect rigidly an absolute standard
is to attempt the erection of a barrier against the eternal waters
in their onflow. Once the nature-bound soul realises this truth, it
is delivered from the duality of good and evil. For good is all that
helps the individual and the world towards their divine fullness,
and evil is all that retards or breaks up that increasing perfection.
But since the perfection is progressive, evolutive in Time, good
and evil are also shifting quantities and change from time to
time their meaning and value. This thing which is evil now and
in its present shape must be abandoned was once helpful and
necessary to the general and individual progress. That other
thing which we now regard as evil may well become in another
form and arrangement an element in some future perfection.
And on the spiritual level we transcend even this distinction;
for we discover the purpose and divine utility of all these things
that we call good and evil. Then have we to reject the falsehood
in them and all that is distorted, ignorant and obscure in that
which is called good no less than in that which is called evil. For
we have then to accept only the true and the divine, but to make
no other distinction in the eternal processes.
To those who can act only on a rigid standard, to those who
can feel only the human and not the divine values, this truth may
seem to be a dangerous concession which is likely to destroy the
very foundation of morality, confuse all conduct and establish
only chaos. Certainly, if the choice must be between an eternal
and unchanging ethics and no ethics at all, it would have that
result for man in his ignorance. But even on the human level.
192
The Yoga of Divine Works
Certainly, if the choice must be between an eternal
and unchanging ethics and no ethics at all, it would have that
result for man in his ignorance. But even on the human level.
192
The Yoga of Divine Works
if we have light enough and flexibility enough to recognise that
a standard of conduct may be temporary and yet necessary for
its time and to observe it faithfully until it can be replaced by a
better, then we suffer no such loss, but lose only the fanaticism
of an imperfect and intolerant virtue. In its place we gain open¬
ness and a power of continual moral progression, charity, the
capacity to enter into an understanding sympathy with all this
world of struggling and stumbling creatures and by that charity
a better right and a greater strength to help it upon its way. In the
end where the human closes and the divine commences, where
the mental disappears into the supramental consciousness and
the finite precipitates itself into the infinite, all evil disappears
into a transcendent divine Good which becomes universal on
every plane of consciousness that it touches.
This, then, stands fixed for us that all standards by which
we may seek to govern our conduct are only our temporary,
imperfect and evolutive attempts to represent to ourselves our
stumbling mental progress in the universal self-realisation to¬
wards which Nature moves. But the divine manifestation cannot
be bound by our little rules and fragile sanctities; for the con¬
sciousness behind it is too vast for these things. Once we have
grasped this fact, disconcerting enough to the absolutism of our
reason, we shall better be able to put in their right place in regard
to each other the successive standards that govern the different
stages in the growth of the individual and the collective march
of mankind. At the most general of them we may cast a passing
glance. For we have to see how they stand in relation to that
other standardless spiritual and supramental mode of working
for which Yoga seeks and to which it moves by the surrender of
the individual to the divine Will and, more effectively, through
his ascent by this surrender to the greater consciousness in which
a certain identity with the dynamic Eternal becomes possible.
There are four main standards of human conduct that make an
ascending scale. The first is personal need, preference and desire;
Standards of Conduct and Spiritual Freedom
193
the second is the law and good of the collectivity; the third is an
ideal ethic; the last is the highest divine law of the nature.
The first is personal need, preference and desire;
Standards of Conduct and Spiritual Freedom
193
the second is the law and good of the collectivity; the third is an
ideal ethic; the last is the highest divine law of the nature.
Man starts on the long career of his evolution with only
the first two of these four to enlighten and lead him; for they
constitute the law of his animal and vital existence and it is as
the vital and physical animal man that he begins his progress.
The true business of man upon earth is to express in the type
of humanity a growing image of the Divine; whether knowingly
or unknowingly, it is to this end that Nature is working in him
under the thick veil of her inner and outer processes. But the
material or animal man is ignorant of the inner aim of life; he
knows only its needs and its desires and he has necessarily no
other guide to what is required of him than his own perception of
need and his own stirrings and pointings of desire. To satisfy his
physical and vital demands and necessities before all things else
and, in the next rank, whatever emotional or mental cravings or
imaginations or dynamic notions rise in him must be the first nat¬
ural rule of his conduct. The sole balancing or overpowering law
that can modify or contradict this pressing natural claim is the
demand put on him by the ideas, needs and desires of his family,
community or tribe, the herd, the pack of which he is a member.
If man could live to himself, — and this he could only do
if the development of the individual were the sole object of
the Divine in the world, — this second law would not at all
need to come into operation. But all existence proceeds by the
mutual action and reaction of the whole and the parts, the need
for each other of the constituents and the thing constituted, the
interdependence of the group and the individuals of the group. In
the language of Indian philosophy the Divine manifests himself
always in the double form of the separative and the collective
being, vyasti, samasti. Man, pressing after the growth of his
separate individuality and its fullness and freedom, is unable
to satisfy even his own personal needs and desires except in
conjunction with other men; he is a whole in himself and yet
incomplete without others. This obligation englobes his personal
law of conduct in a group-law which arises from the formation
of a lasting group-entity with a collective mind and life of its
194
The Yoga of Divine Works
This obligation englobes his personal
law of conduct in a group-law which arises from the formation
of a lasting group-entity with a collective mind and life of its
194
The Yoga of Divine Works
own to which his own embodied mind and life are subordinated
as a transitory unit. And yet is there something in him immortal
and free, not bound to this group-body which outlasts his own
embodied existence but cannot outlast or claim to chain by its
law his eternal spirit.
In itself this seemingly larger and overriding law is no more
than an extension of the vital and animal principle that governs
the individual elementary man; it is the law of the pack or herd.
The individual identifies partially his life with the life of a certain
number of other individuals with whom he is associated by birth,
choice or circumstance. And since the existence of the group is
necessary for his own existence and satisfaction, in time, if not
from the first, its preservation, the fulfilment of its needs and
the satisfaction of its collective notions, desires, habits of living,
without which it would not hold together, must come to take
a primary place. The satisfaction of personal idea and feeling,
need and desire, propensity and habit has to be constantly sub¬
ordinated, by the necessity of the situation and not from any
moral or altruistic motive, to the satisfaction of the ideas and
feelings, needs and desires, propensities and habits, not of this or
that other individual or number of individuals, but of the society
as a whole. This social need is the obscure matrix of morality
and of man’s ethical impulse.
It is not actually known that in any primitive times man lived
to himself or with only his mate as do some of the animals. All
record of him shows him to us as a social animal, not an isolated
body and spirit. The law of the pack has always overridden his
individual law of self-development; he seems always to have
been born, to have lived, to have been formed as a unit in a
mass. But logically and naturally from the psychological view¬
point the law of personal need and desire is primary, the social
law comes in as a secondary and usurping power. Man has in
him two distinct master impulses, the individualistic and the
communal, a personal life and a social life, a personal motive of
conduct and a social motive of conduct. The possibility of their
opposition and the attempt to find their equation lie at the very
roots of human civilisation and persist in other figures when he
Standards of Conduct and Spiritual Freedom
195
The possibility of their
opposition and the attempt to find their equation lie at the very
roots of human civilisation and persist in other figures when he
Standards of Conduct and Spiritual Freedom
195
has passed beyond the vital animal into a highly individualised
mental and spiritual progress.
The existence of a social law external to the individual is
at different times a considerable advantage and a heavy dis¬
advantage to the development of the divine in man. It is an
advantage at first when man is crude and incapable of self-
control and self-finding, because it erects a power other than
that of his personal egoism through which that egoism may
be induced or compelled to moderate its savage demands, to
discipline its irrational and often violent movements and even
to lose itself sometimes in a larger and less personal egoism.
It is a disadvantage to the adult spirit ready to transcend the
human formula because it is an external standard which seeks
to impose itself on him from outside, and the condition of his
perfection is that he shall grow from within and in an increasing
freedom, not by the suppression but by the transcendence of his
perfected individuality, not any longer by a law imposed on him
that trains and disciplines his members but by the soul from
within breaking through all previous forms to possess with its
light and transmute his members.
In the conflict of the claims of society with the claims of the in¬
dividual two ideal and absolute solutions confront one another.
There is the demand of the group that the individual should
subordinate himself more or less completely or even lose his
independent existence in the community, — the smaller must be
immolated or self-offered to the larger unit. He must accept the
need of the society as his own need, the desire of the society as
his own desire; he must live not for himself but for the tribe, clan,
commune or nation of which he is a member. The ideal and abso¬
lute solution from the individual’s standpoint would be a society
that existed not for itself, for its all-overriding collective purpose,
but for the good of the individual and his fulfilment, for the
greater and more perfect life of all its members. Representing as
far as possible his best self and helping him to realise it, it would
196
The Yoga of Divine Works
Representing as
far as possible his best self and helping him to realise it, it would
196
The Yoga of Divine Works
respect the freedom of each of its members and maintain itself
not by law and force but by the free and spontaneous consent
of its constituent persons. An ideal society of either kind does
not exist anywhere and would be most difficult to create, more
difficult still to keep in precarious existence so long as individual
man clings to his egoism as the primary motive of existence.
A general but not complete domination of the society over the
individual is the easier way and it is the system that Nature from
the first instinctively adopts and keeps in equilibrium by rigorous
law, compelling custom and a careful indoctrination of the still
subservient and ill-developed intelligence of the human creature.
In primitive societies the individual life is submitted to rigid
and immobile communal custom and rule; this is the ancient
and would-be eternal law of the human pack that tries always
to masquerade as the everlasting decree of the Imperishable, esa
dharmah sandtanah. And the ideal is not dead in the human
mind; the most recent trend of human progress is to establish an
enlarged and sumptuous edition of this ancient turn of collective
living towards the enslavement of the human spirit. There is
here a serious danger to the integral development of a greater
truth upon earth and a greater life. For the desires and free
seekings of the individual, however egoistic, however false or
perverted they may be in their immediate form, contain in their
obscure shell the seed of a development necessary to the whole;
his searchings and stumblings have behind them a force that has
to be kept and transmuted into the image of the divine ideal.
That force needs to be enlightened and trained but must not
be suppressed or harnessed exclusively to society’s heavy cart¬
wheels. Individualism is as necessary to the final perfection as the
power behind the group-spirit; the stifling of the individual may
well be the stifling of the god in man. And in the present balance
of humanity there is seldom any real danger of exaggerated
individualism breaking up the social integer. There is continually
a danger that the exaggerated pressure of the social mass by its
heavy unenlightened mechanical weight may suppress or unduly
discourage the free development of the individual spirit. For
man in the individual can be more easily enlightened, conscious.
Standards of Conduct and Spiritual Freedom 197
For
man in the individual can be more easily enlightened, conscious.
Standards of Conduct and Spiritual Freedom 197
open to clear influences; man in the mass is still obscure, half¬
conscious, ruled by universal forces that escape its mastery and
its knowledge.
Against this danger of suppression and immobilisation Na¬
ture in the individual reacts. It may react by an isolated resistance
ranging from the instinctive and brutal revolt of the criminal to
the complete negation of the solitary and ascetic. It may react by
the assertion of an individualistic trend in the social idea, may
impose it on the mass consciousness and establish a compromise
between the individual and the social demand. But a compromise
is not a solution; it only salves over the difficulty and in the end
increases the complexity of the problem and multiplies its issues.
A new principle has to be called in other and higher than the
two conflicting instincts and powerful at once to override and
to reconcile them. Above the natural individual law which sets
up as our one standard of conduct the satisfaction of our indi¬
vidual needs, preferences and desires and the natural communal
law which sets up as a superior standard the satisfaction of the
needs, preferences and desires of the community as a whole,
there had to arise the notion of an ideal moral law which is
not the satisfaction of need and desire, but controls and even
coerces or annuls them in the interests of an ideal order that is
not animal, not vital and physical, but mental, a creation of the
mind’s seeking for light and knowledge and right rule and right
movement and true order. The moment this notion becomes
powerful in man, he begins to escape from the engrossing vital
and material into the mental life; he climbs from the first to
the second degree of the threefold ascent of Nature. His needs
and desires themselves are touched with a more elevated light
of purpose and the mental need, the aesthetic, intellectual and
emotional desire begin to predominate over the demand of the
physical and vital nature.
The natural law of conduct proceeds from a conflict to an equi¬
librium of forces, impulsions and desires; the higher ethical law
198
The Yoga of Divine Works
The natural law of conduct proceeds from a conflict to an equi¬
librium of forces, impulsions and desires; the higher ethical law
198
The Yoga of Divine Works
proceeds by the development of the mental and moral nature
towards a fixed internal standard or else a self-formed ideal of
absolute qualities, — justice, righteousness, love, right reason,
right power, beauty, light. It is therefore essentially an individual
standard; it is not a creation of the mass mind. The thinker is
the individual; it is he who calls out and throws into forms that
which would otherwise remain subconscious in the amorphous
human whole. The moral striver is also the individual; self-
discipline, not under the yoke of an outer law, but in obedience
to an internal light, is essentially an individual effort. But by
positing his personal standard as the translation of an absolute
moral ideal the thinker imposes it, not on himself alone, but on
all the individuals whom his thought can reach and penetrate.
And as the mass of individuals come more and more to accept
it in idea if only in an imperfect practice or no practice, society
also is compelled to obey the new orientation. It absorbs the
ideative influence and tries, not with any striking success, to
mould its institutions into new forms touched by these higher
ideals. But always its instinct is to translate them into binding
law, into pattern forms, into mechanic custom, into an external
social compulsion upon its living units.
For, long after the individual has become partially free,
a moral organism capable of conscious growth, aware of an
inward life, eager for spiritual progress, society continues to
be external in its methods, a material and economic organism,
mechanical, more intent upon status and self-preservation than
on growth and self-perfection. The greatest present triumph of
the thinking and progressive individual over the instinctive and
static society has been the power he has acquired by his thought-
will to compel it to think also, to open itself to the idea of social
justice and righteousness, communal sympathy and mutual com¬
passion, to feel after the rule of reason rather than blind custom
as the test of its institutions and to look on the mental and moral
assent of its individuals as at least one essential element in the
validity of its laws. Ideally at least, to consider light rather than
force as its sanction, moral development and not vengeance or
restraint as the object even of its penal action, is becoming just
Standards of Conduct and Spiritual Freedom
199
Ideally at least, to consider light rather than
force as its sanction, moral development and not vengeance or
restraint as the object even of its penal action, is becoming just
Standards of Conduct and Spiritual Freedom
199
possible to the communal mind. The greatest future triumph
of the thinker will come when he can persuade the individual
integer and the collective whole to rest their life-relation and its
union and stability upon a free and harmonious consent and self¬
adaptation, and shape and govern the external by the internal
truth rather than to constrain the inner spirit by the tyranny of
the external form and structure.
But even this success that he has gained is rather a thing in
potentiality than in actual accomplishment. There is always a
disharmony and a discord between the moral law in the individ¬
ual and the law of his needs and desires, between the moral law
proposed to society and the physical and vital needs, desires,
customs, prejudices, interests and passions of the caste, the clan,
the religious community, the society, the nation. The moralist
erects in vain his absolute ethical standard and calls upon all
to be faithful to it without regard to consequences. To him the
needs and desires of the individual are invalid if they are in
conflict with the moral law, and the social law has no claims
upon him if it is opposed to his sense of right and denied by his
conscience. This is his absolute solution for the individual that
he shall cherish no desires and claims that are not consistent
with love, truth and justice. He demands from the community
or nation that it shall hold all things cheap, even its safety and
its most pressing interests, in comparison with truth, justice,
humanity and the highest good of the peoples.
No individual rises to these heights except in intense mo¬
ments, no society yet created satisfies this ideal. And in the
present state of morality and of human development none per¬
haps can or ought to satisfy it. Nature will not allow it. Nature
knows that it should not be. The first reason is that our moral
ideals are themselves for the most part ill-evolved, ignorant and
arbitrary, mental constructions rather than transcriptions of the
eternal truths of the spirit. Authoritative and dogmatic, they
assert certain absolute standards in theory, but in practice every
existing system of ethics proves either in application unworkable
or is in fact a constant coming short of the absolute standard to
which the ideal pretends. If our ethical system is a compromise
200
If our ethical system is a compromise
200
The Yoga of Divine Works
or a makeshift, it gives at once a principle of justification to the
further sterilising compromises which society and the individual
hasten to make with it. And if it insists on absolute love, justice,
right with an uncompromising insistence, it soars above the head
of human possibility and is professed with lip homage but ig¬
nored in practice. Even it is found that it ignores other elements
in humanity which equally insist on survival but refuse to come
within the moral formula. For just as the individual law of desire
contains within it invaluable elements of the infinite whole which
have to be protected against the tyranny of the absorbing social
idea, the innate impulses too both of individual and of collective
man contain in them invaluable elements which escape the limits
of any ethical formula yet discovered and are yet necessary to
the fullness and harmony of an eventual divine perfection.
Moreover, absolute love, absolute justice, absolute right rea¬
son in their present application by a bewildered and imperfect
humanity come easily to be conflicting principles. Justice often
demands what love abhors. Right reason dispassionately con¬
sidering the facts of nature and human relations in search of a
satisfying norm or rule is unable to admit without modification
either any reign of absolute justice or any reign of absolute
love. And in fact man’s absolute justice easily turns out to be in
practice a sovereign injustice; for his mind, one-sided and rigid in
its constructions, puts forward a one-sided partial and rigorous
scheme or figure and claims for it totality and absoluteness and
an application that ignores the subtler truth of things and the
plasticity of life. All our standards turned into action either
waver on a flux of compromises or err by this partiality and
unelastic structure. Humanity sways from one orientation to
another; the race moves upon a zigzag path led by conflicting
claims and, on the whole, works out instinctively what Nature
intends, but with much waste and suffering, rather than either
what it desires or what it holds to be right or what the highest
light from above demands from the embodied spirit.
Standards of Conduct and Spiritual Freedom 201
Standards of Conduct and Spiritual Freedom 201
The fact is that when we have reached the cult of absolute eth¬
ical qualities and erected the categorical imperative of an ideal
law, we have not come to the end of our search or touched
the truth that delivers. There is, no doubt, something here that
helps us to rise beyond limitation by the physical and vital man
in us, an insistence that overpasses the individual and collective
needs and desires of a humanity still bound to the living mud
of Matter in which it took its roots, an aspiration that helps to
develop the mental and moral being in us: this new sublimating
element has been therefore an acquisition of great importance;
its workings have marked a considerable step forward in the
difficult evolution of terrestrial Nature. And behind the inade¬
quacy of these ethical conceptions something too is concealed
that does attach to a supreme Truth; there is here the glimmer
of a light and power that are part of a yet unreached divine
Nature. But the mental idea of these things is not that light and
the moral formulation of them is not that power. These are only
representative constructions of the mind that cannot embody
the divine spirit which they vainly endeavour to imprison in
their categorical formulas. Beyond the mental and moral being
in us is a greater divine being that is spiritual and supramental;
for it is only through a large spiritual plane where the mind’s
formulas dissolve in a white flame of direct inner experience
that we can reach beyond mind and pass from its constructions
to the vastness and freedom of the supramental realities. There
alone can we touch the harmony of the divine powers that are
poorly mispresented to our mind or framed into a false figure
by the conflicting or wavering elements of the moral law. There
alone the unification of the transformed vital and physical and
the illumined mental man becomes possible in that supramental
Spirit which is at once the secret source and goal of our mind
and life and body. There alone is there any possibility of an
absolute justice, love and right — far other than that which we
imagine — at one with each other in the light of a supreme divine
knowledge. There alone can there be a reconciliation of the
conflict between our members.
In other words there is, above society’s external law and
202
The Yoga of Divine Works
There alone can there be a reconciliation of the
conflict between our members.
In other words there is, above society’s external law and
202
The Yoga of Divine Works
man’s moral law and beyond them, though feebly and ignorantly
aimed at by something within them, a larger truth of a vast
unbound consciousness, a law divine towards which both these
blind and gross formulations are progressive faltering steps that
try to escape from the natural law of the animal to a more exalted
light or universal rule. That divine standard, since the godhead
in us is our spirit moving towards its own concealed perfection,
must be a supreme spiritual law and truth of our nature. Again,
as we are embodied beings in the world with a common existence
and nature and yet individual souls capable of direct touch with
the Transcendent, this supreme truth of ourselves must have
a double character. It must be a law and truth that discovers
the perfect movement, harmony, rhythm of a great spiritualised
collective life and determines perfectly our relations with each
being and all beings in Nature’s varied oneness. It must be at the
same time a law and truth that discovers to us at each moment
the rhythm and exact steps of the direct expression of the Divine
in the soul, mind, life, body of the individual creature.^ And we
find in experience that this supreme light and force of action
in its highest expression is at once an imperative law and an
absolute freedom. It is an imperative law because it governs by
immutable Truth our every inner and outer movement. And yet
at each moment and in each movement the absolute freedom of
the Supreme handles the perfect plasticity of our conscious and
liberated nature.
The ethical idealist tries to discover this supreme law in his
own moral data, in the inferior powers and factors that belong
to the mental and ethical formula. And to sustain and organise
them he selects a fundamental principle of conduct essentially
unsound and constructed by the intellect — utility, hedonism,
reason, intuitive conscience or any other generalised standard.
All such efforts are foredoomed to failure. Our inner nature is
the progressive expression of the eternal Spirit and too com¬
plex a power to be tied down by a single dominant mental or
^ Therefore the Gita defines “dharma”, an expression which means more than either
religion or morality, as action controlled by our essential manner of self-being.
Standards of Conduct and Spiritual Freedom 203
Standards of Conduct and Spiritual Freedom 203
moral principle. Only the supramental consciousness can reveal
to its differing and conflicting forces their spiritual truth and
harmonise their divergences.
The later religions endeavour to fix the type of a supreme
truth of conduct, erect a system and declare God’s law through
the mouth of Avatar or prophet. These systems, more powerful
and dynamic than the dry ethical idea, are yet for the most part
no more than idealistic glorifications of the moral principle sanc¬
tified by religious emotion and the label of a superhuman origin.
Some, like the extreme Christian ethic, are rejected by Nature
because they insist unworkably on an impracticable absolute
rule. Others prove in the end to be evolutionary compromises
and become obsolete in the march of Time. The true divine law,
unlike these mental counterfeits, cannot be a system of rigid
ethical determinations that press into their cast-iron moulds all
our life-movements. The Law divine is truth of life and truth of
the spirit and must take up with a free living plasticity and inspire
with the direct touch of its eternal light each step of our action
and all the complexity of our life issues. It must act not as a rule
and formula but as an enveloping and penetrating conscious
presence that determines all our thoughts, activities, feelings,
impulsions of will by its infallible power and knowledge.
The older religions erected their rule of the wise, their dicta
of Mann or Confucius, a complex Shastra in which they at¬
tempted to combine the social rule and moral law with the
declaration of certain eternal principles of our highest nature in
some kind of uniting amalgam. All three were treated on the
same ground as equally the expression of everlasting verities,
sandtana dharma. But two of these elements are evolutionary
and valid for a time, mental constructions, human readings
of the will of the Eternal; the third, attached and subdued to
certain social and moral formulas, had to share the fortunes
of its forms. Either the Shastra grows obsolete and has to be
progressively changed or finally cast away or else it stands as a
rigid barrier to the self-development of the individual and the
race. The Shastra erects a collective and external standard; it
ignores the inner nature of the individual, the indeterminable
204
The Yoga of Divine Works
The Shastra erects a collective and external standard; it
ignores the inner nature of the individual, the indeterminable
204
The Yoga of Divine Works
elements of a secret spiritual force within him. But the nature of
the individual will not be ignored; its demand is inexorable. The
unrestrained indulgence of his outer impulses leads to anarchy
and dissolution, but the suppression and coercion of his soul’s
freedom by a fixed and mechanical rule spells stagnation or an
inner death. Not this coercion or determination from outside,
but the free discovery of his highest spirit and the truth of an
eternal movement is the supreme thing that he has to discover.
The higher ethical law is discovered by the individual in his
mind and will and psychic sense and then extended to the race.
The supreme law also must be discovered by the individual in
his spirit. Then only, through a spiritual influence and not by the
mental idea, can it be extended to others. A moral law can be
imposed as a rule or an ideal on numbers of men who have not
attained that level of consciousness or that fineness of mind and
will and psychic sense in which it can become a reality to them
and a living force. As an ideal it can be revered without any need
of practice. As a rule it can be observed in its outsides even if the
inner sense is missed altogether. The supramental and spiritual
life cannot be mechanised in this way, it cannot be turned into
a mental ideal or an external rule. It has its own great lines, but
these must be made real, must be the workings of an active Power
felt in the individual’s consciousness and the transcriptions of an
eternal Truth powerful to transform mind, life and body. And
because it is thus real, effective, imperative, the generalisation
of the supramental consciousness and the spiritual life is the
sole force that can lead to individual and collective perfection
in earth’s highest creatures. Only by our coming into constant
touch with the divine Consciousness and its absolute Truth can
some form of the conscious Divine, the dynamic Absolute, take
up our earth-existence and transform its strife, stumbling, suf¬
ferings and falsities into an image of the supreme Light, Power
and Ananda.
The culmination of the soul’s constant touch with the
Supreme is that self-giving which we call surrender to the divine
Will and immergence of the separated ego in the One who is
all. A vast universality of soul and an intense unity with all is
Standards of Conduct and Spiritual Freedom 205
A vast universality of soul and an intense unity with all is
Standards of Conduct and Spiritual Freedom 205
the base and fixed condition of the supramental consciousness
and spiritual life. In that universality and unity alone can we
find the supreme law of the divine manifestation in the life of
the embodied spirit; in that alone can we discover the supreme
motion and right play of our individual nature. In that alone
can all these lower discords resolve themselves into a victorious
harmony of the true relations between manifested beings who
are portions of the one Godhead and children of one universal
Mother.
All conduct and action are part of the movement of a Power, a
Force infinite and divine in its origin and secret sense and will
even though the forms of it we see seem inconscient or ignorant,
material, vital, mental, finite, which is working to bring out pro¬
gressively something of the Divine and Infinite in the obscurity
of the individual and collective nature. This power is leading
towards the Light, but still through the Ignorance. It leads man
first through his needs and desires; it guides him next through
enlarged needs and desires modified and enlightened by a mental
and moral ideal. It is preparing to lead him to a spiritual real¬
isation that overrides these things and yet fulfils and reconciles
them in all that is divinely true in their spirit and purpose. It
transforms the needs and desires into a divine Will and Ananda.
It transforms the mental and moral aspiration into the powers
of Truth and Perfection that are beyond them. It substitutes for
the divided straining of the individual nature, for the passion
and strife of the separate ego, the calm, profound, harmonious
and happy law of the universalised person within us, the central
being, the spirit that is a portion of the supreme Spirit. This true
Person in us, because it is universal, does not seek its separate
gratification but only asks in its outward expression in Nature its
growth to its real stature, the expression of its inner divine self,
that transcendent spiritual power and presence within it which
is one with all and in sympathy with each thing and creature
and with all the collective personalities and powers of the divine
206
The Yoga of Divine Works
existence, and yet it transcends them and is not bound by the
egoism of any creature or collectivity or limited by the ignorant
controls of their lower nature. This is the high realisation in front
of all our seeking and striving, and it gives the sure promise of
a perfect reconciliation and transmutation of all the elements
of our nature. A pure, total and flawless action is possible only
when that is effected and we have reached the height of this
secret Godhead within us.
The perfect supramental action will not follow any single
principle or limited rule. It is not likely to satisfy the standard
either of the individual egoist or of any organised group-mind.
It will conform to the demand neither of the positive practical
man of the world nor of the formal moralist nor of the pa¬
triot nor of the sentimental philanthropist nor of the idealising
philosopher. It will proceed by a spontaneous outflowing from
the summits in the totality of an illumined and uplifted being,
will and knowledge and not by the selected, calculated and stan¬
dardised action which is all that the intellectual reason or ethical
will can achieve. Its sole aim will be the expression of the divine
in us and the keeping together of the world and its progress
towards the Manifestation that is to be. This even will not be
so much an aim and purpose as a spontaneous law of the being
and an intuitive determination of the action by the Light of the
divine Truth and its automatic influence. It will proceed like the
action of Nature from a total will and knowledge behind her,
but a will and knowledge enlightened in a conscious supreme
Nature and no longer obscure in this ignorant Prakriti. It will
be an action not bound by the dualities but full and large in
the spirit’s impartial joy of existence. The happy and inspired
movement of a divine Power and Wisdom guiding and impelling
us will replace the perplexities and stumblings of the suffering
and ignorant ego.
If by some miracle of divine intervention all mankind at
once could be raised to this level, we should have something on
earth like the Golden Age of the traditions, Satya Yuga, the Age
of Truth or true existence. For the sign of the Satya Yuga is that
the Law is spontaneous and conscious in each creature and does
Standards of Conduct and Spiritual Freedom 207
For the sign of the Satya Yuga is that
the Law is spontaneous and conscious in each creature and does
Standards of Conduct and Spiritual Freedom 207
its own works in a perfect harmony and freedom. Unity and
universality, not separative division, would be the foundation of
the consciousness of the race; love would be absolute; equality
would be consistent with hierarchy and perfect in difference;
absolute justice would be secured by the spontaneous action of
the being in harmony with the truth of things and the truth of
himself and others and therefore sure of true and right result;
right reason, no longer mental but supramental, would be sat¬
isfied not by the observation of artificial standards but by the
free automatic perception of right relations and their inevitable
execution in the act. The quarrel between the individual and so¬
ciety or disastrous struggle between one community and another
could not exist: the cosmic consciousness imbedded in embodied
beings would assure a harmonious diversity in oneness.
In the actual state of humanity, it is the individual who must
climb to this height as a pioneer and precursor. His isolation
will necessarily give a determination and a form to his outward
activities that must be quite other than those of a consciously
divine collective action. The inner state, the root of his acts, will
be the same; but the acts themselves may well be very different
from what they would be on an earth liberated from ignorance.
Nevertheless his consciousness and the divine mechanism of
his conduct, if such a word can be used of so free a thing,
would be such as has been described, free from that subjection
to vital impurity and desire and wrong impulse which we call
sin, unbound by that rule of prescribed moral formulas which
we call virtue, spontaneously sure and pure and perfect in a
greater consciousness than the mind’s, governed in all its steps
by the light and truth of the Spirit. But if a collectivity or group
could be formed of those who had reached the supramental
perfection, there indeed some divine creation could take shape;
a new earth could descend that would be a new heaven, a world
of supramental light could be created here amidst the receding
darkness of this terrestrial ignorance.
Chapter VIII
The Supreme Will
Chapter VIII
The Supreme Will
IN THE light of this progressive manifestation of the Spirit,
first apparently bound in the Ignorance, then free in the
power and wisdom of the Infinite, we can better understand
the great and crowning injunction of the Gita to the Karma-
yogin, “Abandoning all dharmas, all principles and laws and
rules of conduct, take refuge in me alone.” All standards and
rules are temporary constructions founded upon the needs of the
ego in its transition from Matter to Spirit. These makeshifts have
a relative imperativeness so long as we rest satisfied in the stages
of transition, content with the physical and vital life, attached to
the mental movement, or even fixed in the ranges of the mental
plane that are touched by the spiritual lustres. But beyond is
the unwalled wideness of a supramental infinite consciousness
and there all temporary structures cease. It is not possible to
enter utterly into the spiritual truth of the Eternal and Infinite
if we have not the faith and courage to trust ourselves into the
hands of the Eord of all things and the Eriend of all creatures
and leave utterly behind us our mental limits and measures. At
one moment we must plunge without hesitation, reserve, fear or
scruple into the ocean of the free, the infinite, the Absolute. After
the Eaw, Eiberty; after the personal, after the general, after the
universal standards there is something greater, the impersonal
plasticity, the divine freedom, the transcendent force and the
supernal impulse. After the strait path of the ascent the wide
plateaus on the summit.
There are three stages of the ascent, — at the bottom the
bodily life enslaved to the pressure of necessity and desire, in the
middle the mental, higher emotional and psychic rule that feels
after greater interests, aspirations, experiences, at the summits
first a deeper psychic and spiritual state and then a supramental
eternal consciousness in which all our aspirations and seekings
The Supreme Will
209
discover their own intimate significance. In the bodily life first
desire and need and then the practical good of the individual
and the society are the governing consideration, the dominant
force. In the mental life ideas and ideals rule, ideas that are half-
lights wearing the garb of Truth, ideals formed by the mind as a
result of a growing but still imperfect intuition and experience.
Whenever the mental life prevails and the bodily diminishes
its brute insistence, man the mental being feels pushed by the
urge of mental Nature to mould in the sense of the idea or the
ideal the life of the individual, and in the end even the vaguer
more complex life of the society is forced to undergo this subtle
process. In the spiritual life, or when a higher power than Mind
has manifested and taken possession of the nature, these limited
motive-forces recede, dwindle, tend to disappear. The spiritual or
supramental Self, the Divine Being, the supreme and immanent
Reality, must be alone the Lord within us and shape freely our
final development according to the highest, widest, most inte¬
gral expression possible of the law of our nature. In the end that
nature acts in the perfect Truth and its spontaneous freedom; for
it obeys only the luminous power of the Eternal. The individual
has nothing further to gain, no desire to fulfil; he has become
a portion of the impersonality or the universal personality of
the Eternal. No other object than the manifestation and play
of the Divine Spirit in life and the maintenance and conduct of
the world in its march towards the divine goal can move him to
action. Mental ideas, opinions, constructions are his no more;
for his mind has fallen into silence, it is only a channel for the
Eight and Truth of the divine knowledge. Ideals are too narrow
for the vastness of his spirit; it is the ocean of the Infinite that
flows through him and moves him for ever.
Whoever sincerely enters the path of works, must leave behind
him the stage in which need and desire are the first law of our
acts. Eor whatever desires still trouble his being, he must, if he
accepts the high aim of Yoga, put them away from him into the
210
The Yoga of Divine Works
Eor whatever desires still trouble his being, he must, if he
accepts the high aim of Yoga, put them away from him into the
210
The Yoga of Divine Works
hands of the Lord within us. The supreme Power will deal with
them for the good of the sadhaka and for the good of all. In ef¬
fect, we find that once this surrender is done, — always provided
the rejection is sincere, — egoistic indulgence of desire may for
some time recur under the continued impulse of past nature but
only in order to exhaust its acquired momentum and to teach
the embodied being in his most unteachable part, his nervous,
vital, emotional nature, by the reactions of desire, by its grief
and unrest bitterly contrasted with calm periods of the higher
peace or marvellous movements of divine Ananda, that egoistic
desire is not a law for the soul that seeks liberation or aspires to
its own original god-nature. Afterwards the element of desire in
those impulsions will be thrown away or persistently eliminated
by a constant denying and transforming pressure. Only the pure
force of action in them {pravrtti) justified by an equal delight
in all work and result that is inspired or imposed from above
will be preserved in the happy harmony of a final perfection.
To act, to enjoy is the normal law and right of the nervous
being; but to choose by personal desire its action and enjoyment
is only its ignorant will, not its right. Alone the supreme and
universal Will must choose; action must change into a dynamic
movement of that Will; enjoyment must be replaced by the play
of a pure spiritual Ananda. All personal will is either a temporary
delegation from on high or a usurpation by the ignorant Asura.
The social law, that second term of our progress, is a means
to which the ego is subjected in order that it may learn discipline
by subordination to a wider collective ego. This law may be quite
empty of any moral content and may express only the needs or
the practical good of the society as each society conceives it.
Or it may express those needs and that good, but modified and
coloured and supplemented by a higher moral or ideal law. It
is binding on the developing but not yet perfectly developed
individual in the shape of social duty, family obligation, com¬
munal or national demand, so long as it is not in conflict with
his growing sense of the higher Right. But the sadhaka of the
Karmayoga will abandon this also to the Lord of works. After he
has made this surrender, his social impulses and judgments will.
The Supreme Will
211
But the sadhaka of the
Karmayoga will abandon this also to the Lord of works. After he
has made this surrender, his social impulses and judgments will.
The Supreme Will
211
like his desires, only be used for their exhaustion or, it may be, so
far as they are still necessary for a time to enable him to identify
his lower mental nature with mankind in general or with any
grouping of mankind in its works and hopes and aspirations.
But after that brief time is over, they will be withdrawn and a
divine government will alone abide. He will be identified with
the Divine and with others only through the divine consciousness
and not through the mental nature.
For, even after he is free, the sadhaka will be in the world and
to be in the world is to remain in works. But to remain in works
without desire is to act for the good of the world in general or
for the kind or the race or for some new creation to be evolved
on the earth or some work imposed by the Divine Will within
him. And this must be done either in the framework provided by
the environment or the grouping in which he is born or placed
or else in one which is chosen or created for him by a divine
direction. Therefore in our perfection there must be nothing
left in the mental being which conflicts with or prevents our
sympathy and free self-identification with the kind, the group
or whatever collective expression of the Divine he is meant to
lead, help or serve. But in the end it must become a free self-
identification through identity with the Divine and not a mental
bond or moral tie of union or a vital association dominated
by any kind of personal, social, national, communal or credal
egoism. If any social law is obeyed, it will not be from physical
necessity or from the sense of personal or general interest or
for expediency or because of the pressure of the environment
or from any sense of duty, but solely for the sake of the Lord
of works and because it is felt or known to be the Divine Will
that the social law or rule or relation as it stands can still be
kept as a figure of the inner life and the minds of men must
not be disturbed by its infringement. If, on the other hand, the
social law, rule or relation is disregarded, that too will not be for
the indulgence of desire, personal will or personal opinion, but
because a greater rule is felt that expresses the law of the Spirit
or because it is known that there must be in the march of the
divine All-Will a movement towards the changing, exceeding or
212
The Yoga of Divine Works
abolition of existing laws and forms for the sake of a freer larger
life necessary to the world’s progress.
There is still left the moral law or the ideal and these, even to
many who think themselves free, appear for ever sacred and in¬
tangible. But the sadhaka, his gaze turned always to the heights,
will abandon them to Him whom all ideals seek imperfectly and
fragmentarily to express; all moral qualities are only a poor and
rigid travesty of his spontaneous and illimitable perfection. The
bondage to sin and evil passes away with the passing of nervous
desire; for it belongs to the quality of vital passion, impulsion
or drive of propensity in us {rajoguna) and is extinguished with
the transformation of that mode of Nature. But neither must
the aspirant remain subject to the gilded or golden chain of a
conventional or a habitual or a mentally ordered or even a high
or clear sattwic virtue. That will be replaced by something pro¬
founder and more essential than the minor inadequate thing that
men call virtue. The original sense of the word was manhood
and this is a much larger and deeper thing than the moral mind
and its structures. The culmination of Karmayoga is a yet higher
and deeper state that may perhaps be called “soulhood”, — for
the soul is greater than the man; a free soulhood spontaneously
welling out in works of a supreme Truth and Love will replace
human virtue. But this supreme Truth cannot be forced to inhabit
the petty edifices of the practical reason or even confined in the
more dignified constructions of the larger ideative reason that
imposes its representations as if they were pure truth on the lim¬
ited human intelligence. This supreme Love will not necessarily
be consistent, much less will it be synonymous, with the partial
and feeble, ignorant and emotion-ridden movements of human
attraction, sympathy and pity. The petty law cannot bind the
vaster movement; the mind’s partial attainment cannot dictate
its terms to the soul’s supreme fulfilment.
At first, the higher Love and Truth will fulfil its movement
in the sadhaka according to the essential law or way of his own
nature. For that is the special aspect of the divine Nature, the
particular power of the supreme Shakti, out of which his soul has
emerged into the Play, not limited indeed by the forms of this law
The Supreme Will
213
For that is the special aspect of the divine Nature, the
particular power of the supreme Shakti, out of which his soul has
emerged into the Play, not limited indeed by the forms of this law
The Supreme Will
213
or way, for the soul is infinite. But still its stuff of nature bears
that stamp, evolves fluently along those lines or turns around
the spiral curves of that dominating influence. He will manifest
the divine Truth-movement according to the temperament of the
sage or the lion-like fighter or the lover and enjoyer or the worker
and servant or in any combination of essential attributes (gunas)
that may constitute the form given to his being by its own inner
urge. It is this self-nature playing freely in his acts which men
will see in him and not a conduct cut, chalked out, artificially
regulated, by any lesser rule or by any law from outside.
But there is a yet higher attainment, there is an infinity
[dnantya) in which even this last limitation is exceeded, because
the nature is utterly fulfilled and its boundaries vanish. There
the soul lives without any boundaries; for it uses all forms and
moulds according to the divine Will in it, but it is not restrained,
it is not tied down, it is not imprisoned in any power or form
that it uses. This is the summit of the path of works and this
the utter liberty of the soul in its actions. In reality, it has there
no actions; for all its activities are a rhythm of the Supreme and
sovereignly proceed from That alone like a spontaneous music
out of the Infinite.
The total surrender, then, of all our actions to a supreme and
universal Will, an unconditioned and standardless surrender of
all works to the government of something eternal within us
which will replace the ordinary working of the ego-nature, is
the way and end of Karmayoga. But what is this divine supreme
Will and how can it be recognised by our deluded instruments
and our blind prisoned intelligence?
Ordinarily, we conceive of ourselves as a separate “I” in the
universe that governs a separate body and mental and moral
nature, chooses in full liberty its own self-determined actions
and is independent and therefore sole master of its works and
responsible. It is not easy for the ordinary mind, the mind that
has not thought nor looked deeply into its own constitution and
214
The Yoga of Divine Works
It is not easy for the ordinary mind, the mind that
has not thought nor looked deeply into its own constitution and
214
The Yoga of Divine Works
constituents, it is difficult even for minds that have thought but
have no spiritual vision and experience, to imagine how there
can be anything else in us truer, deeper and more powerful than
this apparent “I” and its empire. But the very first step towards
self-knowledge as towards the true knowledge of phenomena is
to get behind the apparent truth of things and find the real but
masked, essential and dynamic truth which their appearances
cover.
This ego or “I” is not a lasting truth, much less our es¬
sential part; it is only a formation of Nature, a mental form
of thought-centralisation in the perceiving and discriminating
mind, a vital form of the centralisation of feeling and sensation
in our parts of life, a form of physical conscious reception cen¬
tralising substance and function of substance in our bodies. All
that we internally are is not ego, but consciousness, soul or spirit.
All that we externally and superficially are and do is not ego
but Nature. An executive cosmic force shapes us and dictates
through our temperament and environment and mentality so
shaped, through our individualised formulation of the cosmic
energies, our actions and their results. Truly, we do not think,
will or act but thought occurs in us, will occurs in us, impulse
and act occur in us; our ego-sense gathers around itself, refers
to itself all this flow of natural activities. It is cosmic Force,
it is Nature that forms the thought, imposes the will, imparts
the impulse. Our body, mind and ego are a wave of that sea
of force in action and do not govern it, but by it are governed
and directed. The sadhaka in his progress towards truth and
self-knowledge must come to a point where the soul opens its
eyes of vision and recognises this truth of ego and this truth
of works. He gives up the idea of a mental, vital, physical “I”
that acts or governs action; he recognises that Prakriti, Force of
cosmic nature following her fixed modes, is the one and only
worker in him and in all things and creatures.
But what has fixed the modes of Nature? Or who has
originated and governs the movements of Force? There is a Con¬
sciousness — or a Conscient — behind that is the lord, witness,
knower, enjoyer, upholder and source of sanction for her works;
The Supreme Will
215
Or who has
originated and governs the movements of Force? There is a Con¬
sciousness — or a Conscient — behind that is the lord, witness,
knower, enjoyer, upholder and source of sanction for her works;
The Supreme Will
215
this consciousness is Soul or Purusha. Prakriti shapes the action
in us; Purusha in her or behind her witnesses, assents, bears and
upholds it. Prakriti forms the thought in our minds; Purusha in
her or behind her knows the thought and the truth in it. Prakriti
determines the result of the action; Purusha in her or behind
her enjoys or suffers the consequence. Prakriti forms mind and
body, labours over them, develops them; Purusha upholds the
formation and evolution and sanctions each step of her works.
Prakriti applies the Will-force which works in things and men;
Purusha sets that Will-force to work by his vision of that which
should be done. This Purusha is not the surface ego, but a silent
Self, a source of Power, an originator and receiver of Knowledge
behind the ego. Our mental “I” is only a false reflection of this
Self, this Power, this Knowledge. This Purusha or supporting
Consciousness is therefore the cause, recipient and support of all
Nature’s works, but he is not himself the doer. Prakriti, Nature-
Force, in front and Shakti, Conscious-Force, Soul-Force behind
her, — for these two are the inner and outer faces of the univer¬
sal Mother, — account for all that is done in the universe. The
universal Mother, Prakriti-Shakti, is the one and only worker.
The
universal Mother, Prakriti-Shakti, is the one and only worker.
Purusha-Prakriti, Consciousness-Force, Soul supporting
Nature, — for the two even in their separation are one and
inseparable, — are at once a universal and a transcendent Power.
But there is something in the individual too which is not the
mental ego, something that is one in essence with this greater
reality: it is a pure reflection or portion of the one Purusha;
it is the Soul Person or the embodied being, the individual
self, Jivatman; it is the Self that seems to limit its power and
knowledge so as to support an individual play of transcendent
and universal Nature. In deepest reality the infinitely One is also
infinitely multiple; we are not only a reflection or portion of
That but we are That; our spiritual individuality — unlike our
ego — does not preclude our universality and transcendence.
But at present the soul or self in us intent on individualisation
in Nature allows itself to be confused with the idea of the ego;
it has to get rid of this ignorance, it has to know itself as a
reflection or portion or being of the supreme and universal Self
216
The Yoga of Divine Works
and solely a centre of its consciousness in the world-action. But
this Jiva Purusha too is not the doer of works any more than
the ego or the supporting consciousness of the Witness and
Knower. Again and always it is the transcendent and universal
Shakti who is the sole doer. But behind her is the one Supreme
who manifests through her as the dual power, Purusha-Prakriti,
Ishwara-Shakti.^ The Supreme becomes dynamic as the Shakti
and is by her the sole originator and Master of works in the
universe.
But behind her is the one Supreme
who manifests through her as the dual power, Purusha-Prakriti,
Ishwara-Shakti.^ The Supreme becomes dynamic as the Shakti
and is by her the sole originator and Master of works in the
universe.
If this is the truth of works, the first thing the sadhaka has to
do is to recoil from the egoistic forms of activity and get rid
of the sense of an “I” that acts. He has to see and feel that
everything happens in him by the plastic conscious or subcon¬
scious or sometimes superconscious automatism of his mental
and bodily instruments moved by the forces of spiritual, mental,
vital and physical Nature. There is a personality on his surface
that chooses and wills, submits and struggles, tries to make
good in Nature or prevail over Nature, but this personality
is itself a construction of Nature and so dominated, driven,
determined by her that it cannot be free. It is a formation or
expression of the Self in her, — it is a self of Nature rather than
a self of Self, his natural and processive, not his spiritual and
permanent being, a temporary constructed personality, not the
^ Ishwara-Shakti is not quite the same as Purusha-Prakriti; for Purusha and Prakriti
are separate powers, but Ishwara and Shakti contain each other. Ishwara is Purusha
who contains Prakriti and rules by the power of the Shakti within him. Shakti is Prakriti
ensouled by Purusha and acts by the will of the Ishwara which is her own will and whose
presence in her movement she carries always with her. The Purusha-Prakriti realisation
is of the first utility to the seeker on the Way of Works; for it is the separation of the
conscient being and the Energy and the subjection of the being to the mechanism of the
Energy that are the efficient cause of our ignorance and imperfection; by this realisation
the being can liberate himself from the mechanical action of the nature and become
free and arrive at a first spiritual control over the nature. Ishwara-Shakti stands behind
the relation of Purusha-Prakriti and its ignorant action and turns it to an evolutionary
purpose. The Ishwara-Shakti realisation can bring participation in a higher dynamism
and a divine working and a total unity and harmony of the being in a spiritual nature.
The Supreme Will
217
The Ishwara-Shakti realisation can bring participation in a higher dynamism
and a divine working and a total unity and harmony of the being in a spiritual nature.
The Supreme Will
217
true immortal Person. It is that Person that he must become. He
must succeed in being inwardly quiescent, detach himself as the
observer from the outer active personality and learn the play
of the cosmic forces in him by standing back from all blinding
absorption in its turns and movements. Thus calm, detached, a
student of himself and a witness of his nature, he realises that
he is the individual soul who observes the works of Nature,
accepts tranquilly her results and sanctions or withholds his
sanction from the impulse to her acts. At present this soul or
Purusha is little more than an acquiescent spectator, influencing
perhaps the action and development of the being by the pressure
of its veiled consciousness, but for the most part delegating its
powers or a fragment of them to the outer personality, — in
fact to Nature, for this outer self is not lord but subject to her,
anlsa\ but, once unveiled, it can make its sanction or refusal
effective, become the master of the action, dictate sovereignly a
change of Nature. Even if for a long time, as the result of fixed
association and past storage of energy, the habitual movement
takes place independent of the Purusha’s assent and even if the
sanctioned movement is persistently refused by Nature for want
of past habit, still he will discover that in the end his assent
or refusal prevails, — slowly with much resistance or quickly
with a rapid accommodation of her means and tendencies she
modifies herself and her workings in the direction indicated by
his inner sight or volition. Thus he learns in place of mental
control or egoistic will an inner spiritual control which makes
him master of the Nature-forces that work in him and not their
unconscious instrument or mechanic slave. Above and around
him is the Shakti, the universal Mother and from her he can
get all his inmost soul needs and wills if only he has a true
knowledge of her ways and a true surrender to the divine Will
in her. Finally, he becomes aware of that highest dynamic Self
within him and within Nature which is the source of all his
seeing and knowing, the source of the sanction, the source of
the acceptance, the source of the rejection. This is the Lord, the
Supreme, the One-in-all, Ishwara-Shakti, of whom his soul is a
portion, a being of that Being and a power of that Power. The
218
The Yoga of Divine Works
This is the Lord, the
Supreme, the One-in-all, Ishwara-Shakti, of whom his soul is a
portion, a being of that Being and a power of that Power. The
218
The Yoga of Divine Works
rest of our progress depends on our knowledge of the ways in
which the Lord of works manifests his Will in the world and
in us and executes them through the transcendent and universal
Shakti.
The Lord sees in his omniscience the thing that has to be
done. This seeing is his Will, it is a form of creative Power, and
that which he sees the all-conscious Mother, one with him, takes
into her dynamic self and embodies, and executive Nature-Force
carries it out as the mechanism of their omnipotent omniscience.
But this vision of what is to be and therefore of what is to be
done arises out of the very being, pours directly out of the con¬
sciousness and delight of existence of the Lord, spontaneously,
like light from the Sun. It is not our mortal attempt to see, our
difficult arrival at truth of action and motive or just demand of
Nature. When the individual soul is entirely at one in its being
and knowledge with the Lord and directly in touch with the
original Shakti, the transcendent Mother, the supreme Will can
then arise in us too in the high divine manner as a thing that must
be and is achieved by the spontaneous action of Nature. There
is then no desire, no responsibility, no reaction; all takes place in
the peace, calm, light, power of the supporting and enveloping
and inhabiting Divine.
But even before that highest approach to identity is achieved,
something of the supreme Will can manifest in us as an imper¬
ative impulsion, a God-driven action; we then act by a sponta¬
neous self-determining Force but a fuller knowledge of meaning
and aim arises only afterwards. Or the impulse to action may
come as an inspiration or intuition, but rather in the heart and
body than in the mind; here an effective sight enters in but the
complete and exact knowledge is still deferred and comes, if at
all, later. But the divine Will may descend too as a luminous
single command or a total perception or a continuous current of
perception of what is to be done into the will or into the thought
or as a direction from above spontaneously fulfilled by the lower
members. When the Yoga is imperfect, only some actions can
be done in this way, or else a general action may so proceed but
only during periods of exaltation and illumination. When the
The Supreme Will
219
When the Yoga is imperfect, only some actions can
be done in this way, or else a general action may so proceed but
only during periods of exaltation and illumination. When the
The Supreme Will
219
Yoga is perfect, all action becomes of this character. We may
indeed distinguish three stages of a growing progress by which,
first, the personal will is occasionally or frequently enlightened
or moved by a supreme Will or conscious Force beyond it, then
constantly replaced and, last, identified and merged in that divine
Power-action. The first is the stage when we are still governed by
the intellect, heart and senses; these have to seek or wait for the
divine inspiration and guidance and do not always find or receive
it. The second is the stage when human intelligence is more and
more replaced by a high illumined or intuitive spiritualised mind,
the external human heart by the inner psychic heart, the senses
by a purified and selfless vital force. The third is the stage when
we rise even above spiritualised mind to the supramental levels.
In all three stages the fundamental character of the liberated
action is the same, a spontaneous working of Prakriti no longer
through or for the ego but at the will and for the enjoyment of
the supreme Purusha. At a higher level this becomes the Truth
of the absolute and universal Supreme expressed through the
individual soul and worked out consciously through the nature,
— no longer through a half-perception and a diminished or dis¬
torted effectuation by the stumbling, ignorant and all-deforming
energy of lower nature in us but by the all-wise transcendent and
universal Mother.
The Lord has veiled himself and his absolute wisdom and
eternal consciousness in ignorant Nature-Force and suffers her
to drive the individual being, with its complicity, as the ego;
this lower action of Nature continues to prevail, often even in
spite of man’s half-lit imperfect efforts at a nobler motive and
a purer self-knowledge. Our human effort at perfection fails, or
progresses very incompletely, owing to the force of Nature’s past
actions in us, her past formations, her long-rooted associations;
it turns towards a true and high-climbing success only when
a greater Knowledge and Power than our own breaks through
the lid of our ignorance and guides or takes up our personal
will. For our human will is a misled and wandering ray that
has parted from the supreme Puissance. The period of slow
emergence out of this lower working into a higher light and
220
The Yoga of Divine Works
For our human will is a misled and wandering ray that
has parted from the supreme Puissance. The period of slow
emergence out of this lower working into a higher light and
220
The Yoga of Divine Works
purer force is the valley of the shadow of death for the striver
after perfection; it is a dreadful passage full of trials, sufferings,
sorrows, obscurations, stumblings, errors, pitfalls. To abridge
and alleviate this ordeal or to penetrate it with the divine delight
faith is necessary, an increasing surrender of the mind to the
knowledge that imposes itself from within and, above all, a
true aspiration and a right and unfaltering and sincere practice.
“Practise unfalteringly,” says the Gita, “with a heart free from
despondency,” the Yoga; for even though in the earlier stage of
the path we drink deep of the bitter poison of internal discord
and suffering, the last taste of this cup is the sweetness of the
nectar of immortality and the honey-wine of an eternal Ananda.
Chapter IX
Equality and the Annihilation of Ego
An entire self-consecration, a complete equality, an un¬
sparing 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. Eife 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.
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 Eord 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. Eor so long as we work with attachment to the
result, the sacrifice is offered not to the Divine, but to our ego.
222
The Yoga of Divine Works
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 attach¬
ment to the idea and sense of ourselves as the doer has to be
Equality and the Annihilation of Ego
223
relinquished; 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 ourself, 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
224
The Yoga of Divine Works
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
224
The Yoga of Divine Works
shall have equality of soul towards the ugly and the beautiful, the
maimed and the perfect, the noble and the vulgar, the 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 neces¬
sary 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
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
Equality and the Annihilation of Ego
225
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.
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 intens-
est 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.
226
The Yoga of Divine Works
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.
226
The Yoga of Divine Works
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
spiritual 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.
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 in¬
difference in which the soul becomes free from exultation and
depression and escapes from the snare of the eagerness of joy as
Equality and the Annihilation of Ego
227
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 indifference must not settle into an inert turning away from
action and experience; it must not be an aversion born of weari¬
ness, 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;^ 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
1
For strength is then crowned by a happy mastery, peace
deepens into bliss, the possession of the divine calm is uplifted
1
udasina.
228
The Yoga of Divine Works
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 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
Equality and the Annihilation of Ego
229
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
Equality and the Annihilation of Ego
229
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 Consciousness 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.^
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
Ford 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 Ford 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
^ amsah sandtanah, para prakrtir jivabhutd.
230
The Yoga of Divine Works
A great sincerity is asked
for and has to be imposed not only on the conscious mind but
^ amsah sandtanah, para prakrtir jivabhutd.
230
The Yoga of Divine Works
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
himself 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
Equality and the Annihilation of Ego
231
The first part of this discipline and change can be firmly
Equality and the Annihilation of Ego
231
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, 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 Na¬
ture 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.
Chapter X
The Three Modes of Nature
Chapter X
The Three Modes of Nature
To TRANSCEND the natural action of the lower Prakriti
is indispensable to the soul, if it is to be free in its self and
free in its works. Harmonious subjection to this actual
universal Nature, a condition of good and perfect work for the
natural instruments, is not an ideal for the soul, which should
rather be subject to God and his Shakti, but master of its own
nature. As agent or as channel of the Supreme Will it must
determine by its vision and sanction or refusal the use that shall
be made of the storage of energy, the conditions of environ¬
ment, the rhythm of combined movement which are provided
by Prakriti for the labour of the natural instruments, mind, life
and body. But this inferior Nature can only be mastered if she
is surmounted and used from above. And this can only be done
by a transcendence of her forces, qualities and modes of ac¬
tion; otherwise we are subject to her conditions and helplessly
dominated by her, not free in the spirit.
The idea of the three essential modes of Nature is a creation
of the ancient Indian thinkers and its truth is not at once obvious,
because it was the result of long psychological experiment and
profound internal experience. Therefore without a long inner
experience, without intimate self-observation and intuitive per¬
ception of the Nature-forces it is difficult to grasp accurately
or firmly utilise. Still certain broad indications may help the
seeker on the Way of Works to understand, analyse and control
by his assent or refusal the combinations of his own nature.
These modes are termed in the Indian books qualities, gunas, and
are given the names sattva, rajas, tamas. Sattwa is the force of
equilibrium and translates in quality as good and harmony and
happiness and light; rajas is the force of kinesis and translates
in quality as struggle and effort, passion and action; tamas is
the force of inconscience and inertia and translates in quality
The Three Modes of Nature
233
as obscurity and incapacity and inaction. Ordinarily used for
psychological self-analysis, these distinctions are valid also in
physical Nature. Each thing and every existence in the lower
Prakriti contains them and its process and dynamic form are the
result of the interaction of these qualitative powers.
Each thing and every existence in the lower
Prakriti contains them and its process and dynamic form are the
result of the interaction of these qualitative powers.
Every form of things, whether animate or inanimate, is a
constantly maintained poise of natural forces in motion and
is subject to an unending stream of helpful, disturbing or dis¬
integrating contacts from other combinations of forces that
surround it. Our own nature of mind, life and body is noth¬
ing else than such a formative combination and poise. In the
reception of the environing contacts and the reaction to them
the three modes determine the temper of the recipient and the
character of the response. Inert and inapt, he may suffer them
without any responsive reaction, any motion of self-defence or
any capacity of assimilation and adjustment; this is the mode of
tamas, the way of inertia. The stigmata of tamas are blindness
and unconsciousness and incapacity and unintelligence, sloth
and indolence and inactivity and mechanical routine and the
mind’s torpor and the life’s sleep and the soul’s slumber. Its
effect, if uncorrected by other elements, can be nothing but dis¬
integration of the form or the poise of the nature without any
new creation or new equilibrium or force of kinetic progress.
At the heart of this inert impotence is the principle of ignorance
and an inability or slothful unwillingness to comprehend, seize
and manage the stimulating or assailing contact, the suggestion
of environing forces and their urge towards fresh experience.
On the other hand, the recipient of Nature’s contacts,
touched and stimulated, solicited or assailed by her forces, may
react to the pressure or against it. She allows, encourages, impels
him to strive, to resist, to attempt, to dominate or engross his
environment, to assert his will, to fight and create and conquer.
This is the mode of rajas, the way of passion and action and the
thirst of desire. Struggle and change and new creation, victory
and defeat and joy and suffering and hope and disappointment
are its children and build the many-coloured house of life in
which it takes its pleasure. But its knowledge is an imperfect
234
The Yoga of Divine Works
But its knowledge is an imperfect
234
The Yoga of Divine Works
or a false knowledge and brings with it ignorant effort, error,
a constant misadjustment, pain of attachment, disappointed
desire, grief of loss and failure. The gift of rajas is kinetic
force, energy, activity, the power that creates and acts and can
overcome; but it moves in the wrong lights or the half-lights
of the Ignorance and it is perverted by the touch of the Asura,
Rakshasa and Pishacha. The arrogant ignorance of the human
mind and its self-satisfied perversions and presumptuous errors,
the pride and vanity and ambition, the cruelty and tyranny
and beast wrath and violence, the selfishness and baseness and
hypocrisy and treachery and vile meanness, the lust and greed
and rapacity, the jealousy, envy and bottomless ingratitude
that disfigure the earth-nature are the natural children of this
indispensable but strong and dangerous turn of Nature.
But the embodied being is not limited to these two modes
of Prakriti; there is a better and more enlightened way in which
he can deal with surrounding impacts and the stream of the
world-forces. There is possible a reception and reaction with
clear comprehension, poise and balance. This way of natural
being has the power that, because it understands, sympathises;
it fathoms and controls and develops Nature’s urge and her
ways: it has an intelligence that penetrates her processes and
her significances and can assimilate and utilise; there is a lucid
response that is not overpowered but adjusts, corrects, adapts,
harmonises, elicits the best in all things. This is the mode of
sattwa, the turn of Nature that is full of light and poise, directed
to good, to knowledge, to delight and beauty, to happiness, right
understanding, right equilibrium, right order: its temperament
is the opulence of a bright clearness of knowledge and a lucent
warmth of sympathy and closeness. A fineness and enlighten¬
ment, a governed energy, an accomplished harmony and poise
of the whole being is the consummate achievement of the sattwic
nature.
No existence is cast entirely in the single mould of any of
these three modes of the cosmic Force; all three are present
in everyone and everywhere. There is a constant combining
and separation of their shifting relations and interpenetrating
The Three Modes of Nature
235
There is a constant combining
and separation of their shifting relations and interpenetrating
The Three Modes of Nature
235
influences, often a conflict, a wrestling of forces, a struggle to
dominate each other. All have in great or in small extent or
degree, even if sometimes in a hardly appreciable minimum,
their sattwic states and clear tracts or inchoate tendencies of
light, clarity and happiness, fine adaptation and sympathy with
the environment, intelligence, poise, right mind, right will and
feeling, right impulse, virtue, order. All have their rajasic moods
and impulses and turbid parts of desire and passion and struggle,
perversion and falsehood and error, unbalanced joy and sorrow,
aggressive push to work and eager creation and strong or bold
or fiery or fierce reactions to the pressure of the environment and
to life’s assaults and offers. All have their tamasic states and con¬
stant obscure parts, their moments or points of unconsciousness,
their long habit or their temporary velleities of weak resignation
or dull acceptance, their constitutional feeblenesses or move¬
ments of fatigue, negligence and indolence and their lapses into
ignorance and incapacity, depression and fear and cowardly re¬
coil or submission to the environment and to the pressure of men
and events and forces. Each one of us is sattwic in some direc¬
tions of his energy of Nature or in some parts of his mind or char¬
acter, in others rajasic, tamasic in others. According as one or
other of the modes usually dominates his general temperament
and type of mind and turn of action, it is said of him that he is
the sattwic, the rajasic or the tamasic man; but few are always of
one kind and none is entire in his kind. The wise are not always
or wholly wise, the intelligent are intelligent only in patches;
the saint suppresses in himself many unsaintly movements and
the evil are not entirely evil: the dullest has his unexpressed
or unused and undeveloped capacities, the most timorous his
moments or his way of courage, the helpless and the weakling a
latent part of strength in his nature. The dominant gunas are not
the essential soul-type of the embodied being but only the index
of the formation he has made for this life or during his present
existence and at a given moment of his evolution in Time.
236
The Yoga of Divine Works
The dominant gunas are not
the essential soul-type of the embodied being but only the index
of the formation he has made for this life or during his present
existence and at a given moment of his evolution in Time.
236
The Yoga of Divine Works
When the sadhaka has once stood back from the action of
Prakriti within him or upon him and, not interfering, not
amending or inhibiting, not choosing or deciding, allowed its
play and analysed and watched the process, he soon discovers
that her modes are self-dependent and work as a machine once
put in action works by its own structure and propelling forces.
The force and the propulsion come from Prakriti and not from
the creature. Then he realises how mistaken was his impression
that his mind was the doer of his works; his mind was only a
small part of him and a creation and engine of Nature. Nature
was acting all the while in her own modes moving the three
general qualities about as a girl might play with her puppets.
His ego was all along a tool and plaything; his character and
intelligence, his moral qualities and mental powers, his creations
and works and exploits, his anger and forbearance, his cruelty
and mercy, his love and his hatred, his sin and his virtue, his
light and his darkness, his passion of joy and his anguish of
sorrow were the play of Nature to which the soul, attracted,
won and subjected, lent its passive concurrence. And yet the
determinism of Nature or Force is not all; the soul has a word
to say in the matter, — but the secret soul, the Purusha, not the
mind or the ego, since these are not independent entities, they
are parts of Nature. For the soul’s sanction is needed for the
play and by an inner silent will as the lord and giver of the
sanction it can determine the principle of the play and intervene
in its combinations, although the execution in thought and will
and act and impulse must still be Nature’s part and privilege.
The Purusha can dictate a harmony for Nature to execute, not
by interfering in her functions but by a conscious regard on
her which she transmutes at once or after much difficulty into
translating idea and dynamic impetus and significant figure.
An escape from the action of the two inferior gunas is very
evidently indispensable if we are to transmute our present na¬
ture into a power and form of the divine consciousness and
an instrument of its forces. Tamas obscures and prevents the
light of the divine knowledge from penetrating into the dark
and dull corners of our nature. Tamas incapacitates and takes
Tamas obscures and prevents the
light of the divine knowledge from penetrating into the dark
and dull corners of our nature. Tamas incapacitates and takes
The Three Modes of Nature
237
away the power to respond to divine impulse and the energy to
change and the will to progress and make ourselves plastic to
a greater Shakti. Rajas perverts knowledge, makes our reason
the accomplice of falsehood and the abettor of every wrong
movement, disturbs and twists our life-force and its impulses,
oversets the balance and health of the body. Rajas captures all
high-born ideas and high-seated movements and turns them to
a false and egoistic use; even divine Truth and divine influences,
when they descend into the earthly plane, cannot escape this
misuse and seizure. Tamas unenlightened and rajas unconverted,
no divine change or divine life is possible.
An exclusive resort to sattwa would seem to be the way of
escape: but there is this difficulty that no one of the qualities
can prevail by itself against its two companions and rivals. If,
envisaging the quality of desire and passion as the cause of dis¬
turbance, suffering, sin and sorrow, we strain and labour to quell
and subdue it, rajas sinks but tamas rises. For, the principle of
activity dulled, inertia takes its place. A quiet peace, happiness,
knowledge, love, right sentiment can be founded by the principle
of light, but, if rajas is absent or completely suppressed, the quiet
in the soul tends to become a tranquillity of inaction, not the
firm ground of a dynamic change. Ineffectively right-thinking,
right-doing, good, mild and even, the nature may become in its
dynamic parts sattwa-tamasic, neutral, pale-tinted, uncreative or
emptied of power. Mental and moral obscurity may be absent,
but so are the intense springs of action, and this is a hampering
limitation and another kind of incompetence. For tamas is a
double principle; it contradicts rajas by inertia, it contradicts
sattwa by narrowness, obscurity and ignorance and, if either is
depressed, it pours in to occupy its place.
If we call in rajas again to correct this error and bid it ally
itself to sattwa and by their united agency endeavour to get rid of
the dark principle, we find that we have elevated our action, but
that there is again subjection to rajasic eagerness, passion, dis¬
appointment, suffering, anger. These movements may be more
exalted in their scope and spirit and action than before, but
they are not the peace, the freedom, the power, the self-mastery
238
The Yoga of Divine Works
These movements may be more
exalted in their scope and spirit and action than before, but
they are not the peace, the freedom, the power, the self-mastery
238
The Yoga of Divine Works
at which we long to arrive. Wherever desire and ego harbour,
passion and disturbance harbour with them and share their life.
And if we seek a compromise between the three modes, sattwa
leading, the others subordinate, still we have only arrived at a
more temperate action of the play of Nature. A new poise has
been reached, but a spiritual freedom and mastery are not in
sight or else are still only a far-off prospect.
A radically different movement has to draw us back from the
gunas and lift us above them. The error that accepts the action
of the modes of Nature must cease; for as long as it is accepted,
the soul is involved in their operations and subjected to their
law. Sattwa must be transcended as well as rajas and tamas; the
golden chain must be broken no less than the leaden fetters and
the bond-ornaments of a mixed alloy. The Gita prescribes to this
end a new method of self-discipline. It is to stand back in oneself
from the action of the modes and observe this unsteady flux as
the Witness seated above the surge of the forces of Nature. He
is one who watches but is impartial and indifferent, aloof from
them on their own level and in his native posture high above
them. As they rise and fall in their waves, the Witness looks,
observes, but neither accepts nor for the moment interferes with
their course. First there must be the freedom of the impersonal
Witness; afterwards there can be the control of the Master, the
Ishwara.
The initial advantage of this process of detachment is that one
begins to understand one’s own nature and all Nature. The de¬
tached Witness is able to see entirely without the least blinding
by egoism the play of her modes of the Ignorance and to pursue it
into all its ramifications, coverings and subtleties — for it is full
of camouflage and disguise and snare and treachery and ruse.
Instructed by long experience, conscious of all act and condition
as their interaction, made wise of their processes, he cannot any
longer be overcome by their assaults, surprised in their nets or
deceived by their disguises. At the same time he perceives the ego
The Three Modes of Nature
239
At the same time he perceives the ego
The Three Modes of Nature
239
to be nothing better than a device and the sustaining knot of their
interaction and, perceiving it, he is delivered from the illusion of
the lower egoistic Nature. He escapes from the sattwic egoism of
the altruist and the saint and the thinker; he shakes off from its
control on his life-impulses the rajasic egoism of the self-seeker
and ceases to be the laborious caterer of self-interest and the
pampered prisoner or toiling galley-slave of passion and desire;
he slays with the light of knowledge the tamasic egoism of the ig¬
norant or passive being, dull, unintelligent, attached to the com¬
mon round of human life. Thus convinced and conscious of the
essential vice of the ego-sense in all our personal action, he seeks
no longer to find a means of self-correction and self-liberation
in the rajasic or sattwic ego but looks above, beyond the instru¬
ments and the working of Nature, to the Master of works alone
and his supreme Shakti, the supreme Prakriti. There alone all
the being is pure and free and the rule of a divine Truth possible.
In this progression the first step is a certain detached su¬
periority to the three modes of Nature. The soul is inwardly
separated and free from the lower Prakriti, not involved in its
coils, indifferent and glad above it. Nature continues to act in
the triple round of her ancient habits, — desire, grief and joy
attack the heart, the instruments fall into inaction and obscurity
and weariness, light and peace come back into the heart and
mind and body; but the soul stands unchanged and untouched
by these changes. Observing and unmoved by the grief and
desire of the lower members, smiling at their joys and their
strainings, regarding and unoverpowered by the failing and the
darknesses of the thought and the wildness or the weaknesses of
the heart and nerves, uncompelled and unattached to the mind’s
illuminations and its relief and sense of ease or of power in the
return of light and gladness, it throws itself into none of these
things, but waits unmoved for the intimations of a higher Will
and the intuitions of a greater luminous knowledge. Thus doing
always, it becomes eventually free even in its nature parts from
the strife of the three modes and their insufficient values and im¬
prisoning limits. For now this lower Prakriti feels progressively
a compulsion from a higher Shakti. The old habits to which it
240
The Yoga of Divine Works
For now this lower Prakriti feels progressively
a compulsion from a higher Shakti. The old habits to which it
240
The Yoga of Divine Works
clung receive no further sanction and begin steadily to lose their
frequency and force of recurrence. At last it understands that
it is called to a higher action and a better state and, however
slowly, however reluctantly, with whatever initial or prolonged
ill-will and stumbling ignorance, it submits, turns and prepares
itself for the change.
The static freedom of the soul, no longer witness only and
knower, is crowned by a dynamic transformation of the nature.
The constant mixture, the uneven operation of the three modes
acting upon each other in our three instruments ceases from its
normal confused, troubled and improper action and movement.
Another action becomes possible, commences, grows, culmi¬
nates, a working more truly right, more luminous, natural and
normal to the deepest divine interplay of Purusha and Prakrit!
although supernatural and supernormal to our present imper¬
fect nature. The body conditioning the physical mind insists
no longer on its tamasic inertia that repeats always the same
ignorant movement: it becomes a passive field and instrument
of a greater force and light, it responds to every demand of
the spirit’s force, holds and supports every variety and intensity
of new divine experience. Our kinetic and dynamic vital parts,
our nervous and emotional and sensational and volitional be¬
ing, expand in power and admit a tireless action and a blissful
enjoyment of experience, but learn at the same time to stand
on a foundation of wide self-possessed and self-poised calm,
sublime in force, divine in rest, neither exulting and excited nor
tortured by sorrow and pain, neither harried by desire and im¬
portunate impulses nor dulled by incapacity and indolence. The
intelligence, the thinking, understanding and reflective mind,
renounces its sattwic limitations and opens to an essential light
and peace. An infinite knowledge offers to us its splendid ranges,
a knowledge not made up of mental constructions, not bound by
opinion and idea or dependent on a stumbling uncertain logic
and the petty support of the senses, but self-sure, authentic,
all-penetrating, all-comprehending; a boundless bliss and peace,
not dependent on deliverance from the hampered strenuousness
of creative energy and dynamic action, not constituted by a
The Three Modes of Nature
241
few limited felicities but self-existent and all-including, pour
into ever-enlarging fields and through ever-widening and always
more numerous channels to possess the nature. A higher force,
bliss and knowledge from a source beyond mind and life and
body seize on them to remould in a diviner image.
Here the disharmonies of the triple mode of our inferior
existence are overpassed and there begins a greater triple mode
of a divine Nature. There is no obscurity of tamas or inertia.
Tamas is replaced by a divine peace and tranquil eternal re¬
pose out of which is released from a supreme matrix of calm
concentration the play of action and knowledge. There is no
rajasic kinesis, no desire, no joyful and sorrowful striving of
action, creation and possession, no fruitful chaos of troubled
impulse. Rajas is replaced by a self-possessed power and illim¬
itable act of force, that even in its most violent intensities does
not shake the immovable poise of the soul or stain the vast and
profound heavens and luminous abysses of its peace. There is no
constructing light of mind casting about to seize and imprison
the Truth, no insecure or inactive ease. Sattwa is replaced by
an illumination and a spiritual bliss identical with the depth
and infinite existence of the soul and instinct with a direct and
authentic knowledge that springs straight from the veiled glories
of the secret Omniscience.
This is the greater consciousness into which our inferior
consciousness has to be transformed, this nature of the Ignorance
with its unquiet unbalanced activity of the three modes changed
into this greater luminous supernature. At first we become free
from the three gunas, detached, untroubled, nistraigunya-, but
this is the recovery of the native state of the soul, the self, the
spirit free and watching in its motionless calm the motion of
Prakriti in her force of the Ignorance. If on this basis the nature,
the motion of Prakriti, is also to become free, it must be by a
quiescence of action in a luminous peace and silence in which all
necessary movements are done without any conscious reaction
or participation or initiation of action by the mind or by the life-
being, without any ripple of thought or eddy of the vital parts:
it must be done under the impulsion, by the initiation, by the
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The Yoga of Divine Works
working of an impersonal cosmic or a transcendent Force. A
cosmic Mind, Life, Substance must act, or a pure transcendent
Self-Power and Bliss other than our own personal being or its
building of Nature. This is a state of freedom which can come
in the Yoga of works through renunciation of ego and desire
and personal initiation and the surrender of the being to the
cosmic Self or to the universal Shakti; it can come in the Yoga of
knowledge by the cessation of thought, the silence of the mind,
the opening of the whole being to the cosmic Consciousness, to
the cosmic Self, the cosmic Dynamis or to the supreme Reality;
it can come in the Yoga of devotion by the surrender of the
heart and the whole nature into the hands of the All-Blissful as
the adored Master of our existence. But the culminating change
intervenes by a more positive and dynamic transcendence: there
is a transference or transmutation into a superior spiritual sta¬
tus, trigundUta, in which we participate in a greater spiritual
dynamisation; for the three lower unequal modes pass into an
equal triune mode of eternal calm, light and force, the repose,
kinesis, illumination of the divine Nature.
This supreme harmony cannot come except by the cessa¬
tion of egoistic will and choice and act and the quiescence of
our limited intelligence. The individual ego must cease to strive,
the mind fall silent, the desire-will learn not to initiate. Our
personality must join its source and all thought and initiation
come from above. The secret Master of our activities will be
slowly unveiled to us and from the security of the supreme Will
and Knowledge give the sanction to the Divine Shakti who will
do all works in us with a purified and exalted nature for her
instrument; the individual centre of personality will be only the
upholder of her works here, their recipient and channel, the
reflector of her power and luminous participator in her light,
joy and force. Acting it will not act and no reaction of the lower
Prakrit! will touch it. The transcendence of the three modes of
Nature is the first condition, their transformation the decisive
step of this change by which the Way of Works climbs out of
the pit of narrowness of our darkened human nature into the
unwalled wideness of the Truth and Light above us.
Chapter XI
The Master of the Work
Chapter XI
The Master of the Work
The master and Mover of our works is the One, the
Universal and Supreme, the Eternal and Infinite. He is
the transcendent unknown or unknowable Absolute, the
unexpressed and unmanifested Ineffable above us; but he is also
the Self of all beings, the Master of all worlds, transcending
all worlds, the Light and the Guide, the All-Beautiful and All-
Blissful, the Beloved and the Lover. He is the Cosmic Spirit and
all-creating Energy around us; he is the Immanent within us. All
that is is he, and he is the More than all that is, and we ourselves,
though we know it not, are being of his being, force of his force,
conscious with a consciousness derived from his; even our mortal
existence is made out of his substance and there is an immortal
within us that is a spark of the Light and Bliss that are for ever.
No matter whether by knowledge, works, love or any other
means, to become aware of this truth of our being, to realise it,
to make it effective here or elsewhere is the object of all Yoga.
But the passage is long and the labour arduous before we can
look on him with eyes that see true, and still longer and more
arduous must be our endeavour if we would rebuild ourselves in
his true image. The Master of the work does not reveal himself
at once to the seeker. Always it is his Power that acts behind
the veil, but it is manifest only when we renounce the egoism of
the worker, and its direct movement increases in proportion as
that renunciation becomes more and more complete. Only when
our surrender to his Divine Shakti is absolute, shall we have the
right to live in his absolute presence. And only then can we see
our work throw itself naturally, completely and simply into the
mould of the Divine Will.
244
The Yoga of Divine Works
And only then can we see
our work throw itself naturally, completely and simply into the
mould of the Divine Will.
244
The Yoga of Divine Works
There must, therefore, be stages and gradations in our ap¬
proach to this perfection, as there are in the progress towards
all other perfection on any plane of Nature. The vision of the
full glory may come to us before, suddenly or slowly, once or
often, but until the foundation is complete, it is a summary and
concentrated, not a durable and all-enveloping experience, not
a lasting presence. The amplitudes, the infinite contents of the
Divine Revelation come afterwards and unroll gradually their
power and their significance. Or, even, the steady vision can be
there on the summits of our nature, but the perfect response of
the lower members comes only by degrees. In all Yoga the first
requisites are faith and patience. The ardours of the heart and
the violences of the eager will that seek to take the kingdom of
heaven by storm can have miserable reactions if they disdain
to support their vehemence on these humbler and quieter auxil¬
iaries. And in the long and difficult integral Yoga there must be
an integral faith and an unshakable patience.
It is difficult to acquire or to practise this faith and steadfast¬
ness on the rough and narrow path of Yoga because of the im¬
patience of both heart and mind and the eager but soon faltering
will of our rajasic nature. The vital nature of man hungers always
for the fruit of its labour and, if the fruit appears to be denied or
long delayed, he loses faith in the ideal and in the guidance. For
his mind judges always by the appearance of things, since that is
the first ingrained habit of the intellectual reason in which he so
inordinately trusts. Nothing is easier for us than to accuse God
in our hearts when we suffer long or stumble in the darkness
or to abjure the ideal that we have set before us. For we say, “I
have trusted to the Highest and I am betrayed into suffering and
sin and error.” Or else, “I have staked my whole life on an idea
which the stern facts of experience contradict and discourage. It
would have been better to be as other men are who accept their
limitations and walk on the firm ground of normal experience. ”
In such moments — and they are sometimes frequent and long —
all the higher experience is forgotten and the heart concentrates
itself in its own bitterness. It is in these dark passages that it is
possible to fall for good or to turn back from the divine labour.
The Master of the Work
It is in these dark passages that it is
possible to fall for good or to turn back from the divine labour.
The Master of the Work
245
If one has walked long and steadily in the path, the faith
of the heart will remain under the fiercest adverse pressure;
even if it is concealed or apparently overborne, it will take the
first opportunity to re-emerge. For something higher than either
heart or intellect upholds it in spite of the worst stumblings and
through the most prolonged failure. But even to the experienced
sadhaka such falterings or overcloudings bring a retardation of
his progress and they are exceedingly dangerous to the novice.
It is therefore necessary from the beginning to understand and
accept the arduous difficulty of the path and to feel the need of
a faith which to the intellect may seem blind, but yet is wiser
than our reasoning intelligence. For this faith is a support from
above; it is the brilliant shadow thrown by a secret light that
exceeds the intellect and its data; it is the heart of a hidden
knowledge that is not at the mercy of immediate appearances.
Our faith, persevering, will be justified in its works and will be
lifted and transfigured at last into the self-revelation of a divine
knowledge. Always we must adhere to the injunction of the
Gita, “Yoga must be continually applied with a heart free from
despondent sinking.” Always we must repeat to the doubting
intellect the promise of the Master, “I will surely deliver thee
from all sin and evil; do not grieve.” At the end, the flick erings
of faith will cease; for we shall see his face and feel always the
Divine Presence.
The Master of our works respects our nature even when he is
transforming it; he works always through the nature and not
by any arbitrary caprice. This imperfect nature of ours contains
the materials of our perfection, but inchoate, distorted, mis¬
placed, thrown together in disorder or a poor imperfect order.
All this material has to be patiently perfected, purified, reor¬
ganised, new-moulded and transformed, not hacked and hewn
and slain or mutilated, not obliterated by simple coercion and
denial. This world and we who live in it are his creation and
manifestation, and he deals with it and us in a way our narrow
246
The Yoga of Divine Works
This world and we who live in it are his creation and
manifestation, and he deals with it and us in a way our narrow
246
The Yoga of Divine Works
and ignorant mind cannot understand unless it falls silent and
opens to a divine knowledge. In our errors is the substance
of a truth which labours to reveal its meaning to our groping
intelligence. The human intellect cuts out the error and the truth
with it and replaces it by another half-truth half-error; but the
Divine Wisdom suffers our mistakes to continue until we are
able to arrive at the truth hidden and protected under every false
cover. Our sins are the misdirected steps of a seeking Power that
aims, not at sin, but at perfection, at something that we might
call a divine virtue. Often they are the veils of a quality that
has to be transformed and delivered out of this ugly disguise:
otherwise, in the perfect providence of things, they would not
have been suffered to exist or to continue. The Master of our
works is neither a blunderer nor an indifferent witness nor a
dallier with the luxury of unneeded evils. He is wiser than our
reason and wiser than our virtue.
Our nature is not only mistaken in will and ignorant in
knowledge but weak in power; but the Divine Force is there and
will lead us if we trust in it and it will use our deficiencies and
our powers for the divine purpose. If we fail in our immediate
aim, it is because he has intended the failure; often our failure or
ill-result is the right road to a truer issue than an immediate and
complete success would have put in our reach. If we suffer, it is
because something in us has to be prepared for a rarer possibility
of delight. If we stumble, it is to learn in the end the secret of
a more perfect walking. Let us not be in too furious a haste to
acquire even peace, purity and perfection. Peace must be ours,
but not the peace of an empty or devastated nature or of slain or
mutilated capacities incapable of unrest because we have made
them incapable of intensity and fire and force. Purity must be
our aim, but not the purity of a void or of a bleak and rigid
coldness. Perfection is demanded of us, but not the perfection
that can exist only by confining its scope within narrow limits
or putting an arbitrary full stop to the ever self-extending scroll
of the Infinite. Our object is to change into the divine nature,
but the divine nature is not a mental or moral but a spiritual
condition, difficult to achieve, difficult even to conceive by our
The Master of the Work
247
Our object is to change into the divine nature,
but the divine nature is not a mental or moral but a spiritual
condition, difficult to achieve, difficult even to conceive by our
The Master of the Work
247
intelligence. The Master of our work and our Yoga knows the
thing to be done, and we must allow him to do it in us by his
own means and in his own manner.
The movement of the Ignorance is egoistic at its core and
nothing is more difficult for us than to get rid of egoism while
yet we admit personality and adhere to action in the half-light
and half-force of our unfinished nature. It is easier to starve the
ego by renouncing the impulse to act or to kill it by cutting away
from us all movement of personality. It is easier to exalt it into
self-forgetfulness immersed in a trance of peace or an ecstasy of
divine Love. But our more difficult problem is to liberate the true
Person and attain to a divine manhood which shall be the pure
vessel of a divine force and the perfect instrument of a divine
action. Step after step has to be firmly taken; difficulty after
difficulty has to be entirely experienced and entirely mastered.
Only the Divine Wisdom and Power can do this for us and it will
do all if we yield to it in an entire faith and follow and assent to
its workings with a constant courage and patience.
Only the Divine Wisdom and Power can do this for us and it will
do all if we yield to it in an entire faith and follow and assent to
its workings with a constant courage and patience.
The first step on this long path is to consecrate all our
works as a sacrifice to the Divine in us and in the world; this is
an attitude of the mind and heart, not too difficult to initiate,
but very difficult to make absolutely sincere and all-pervasive.
The second step is to renounce attachment to the fruit of our
works; for the only true, inevitable and utterly desirable fruit of
sacrifice — the one thing needful — is the Divine Presence and
the Divine Consciousness and Power in us, and if that is gained,
all else will be added. This is a transformation of the egoistic
will in our vital being, our desire-soul and desire-nature, and
it is far more difficult than the other. The third step is to get
rid of the central egoism and even the ego-sense of the worker.
That is the most difficult transformation of all and it cannot be
perfectly done if the first two steps have not been taken; but
these first steps too cannot be completed unless the third comes
in to crown the movement and, by the extinction of egoism,
eradicates the very origin of desire. Only when the small ego-
sense is rooted out from the nature can the seeker know his true
person that stands above as a portion and power of the Divine
248
The Yoga of Divine Works
and renounce all motive-force other than the will of the Divine
Shakti.
There are gradations in this last integralising movement; for it
cannot be done at once or without long approaches that bring
it progressively nearer and make it at last possible. The first
attitude to be taken is to cease to regard ourselves as the worker
and firmly to realise that we are only one instrument of the
cosmic Force. At first it is not the one Force but many cosmic
forces that seem to move us; but these may be turned into feeders
of the ego and this vision liberates the mind but not the rest of
the nature. Even when we become aware of all as the working of
one cosmic Force and of the Divine behind it, that too need not
liberate. If the egoism of the worker disappears, the egoism of
the instrument may replace it or else prolong it in a disguise. The
life of the world has been full of instances of egoism of this kind
and it can be more engrossing and enormous than any other;
there is the same danger in Yoga. A man becomes a leader of
men or eminent in a large or lesser circle and feels himself full of
a power that he knows to be beyond his own ego-force; he may
be aware of a Fate acting through him or a Will mysterious and
unfathomable or a Light within of great brilliance. There are
extraordinary results of his thoughts, his actions or his creative
genius. He effects some tremendous destruction that clears the
path for humanity or some great construction that becomes its
momentary resting-place. He is a scourge or he is a bringer of
light and healing, a creator of beauty or a messenger of knowl¬
edge. Or, if his work and its effects are on a lesser scale and have
a limited field, still they are attended by the strong sense that he is
an instrument and chosen for his mission or his labour. Men who
have this destiny and these powers come easily to believe and
declare themselves to be mere instruments in the hand of God
or of Fate: but even in the declaration we can see that there can
intrude or take refuge an intenser and more exaggerated egoism
than ordinary men have the courage to assert or the strength to
The Master of the Work
249
house within them. And often if men of this kind speak of God,
it is to erect an image of him which is really nothing but a huge
shadow of themselves or their own nature, a sustaining Deific
Essence of their own type of will and thought and quality and
force. This magnified image of their ego is the Master whom
they serve. This happens only too often in Yoga to strong but
crude vital natures or minds too easily exalted when they allow
ambition, pride or the desire of greatness to enter into their
spiritual seeking and vitiate its purity of motive; a magnified
ego stands between them and their true being and grasps for its
own personal purpose the strength from a greater unseen Power,
divine or undivine, acting through them of which they become
vaguely or intensely aware. An intellectual perception or vital
sense of a Force greater than ours and of ourselves as moved by
it is not sufficient to liberate from the ego.
This perception, this sense of a greater Power in us or above
and moving us, is not a hallucination or a megalomania. Those
who thus feel and see have a larger sight than ordinary men and
have advanced a step beyond the limited physical intelligence,
but theirs is not the plenary vision or the direct experience. For,
because they are not clear in mind and aware in the soul, because
their awakening is more in the vital parts than into the spiritual
substance of Self, they cannot be the conscious instruments of
the Divine or come face to face with the Master, but are used
through their fallible and imperfect nature. The most they see of
the Divinity is a Fate or a cosmic Force or else they give his name
to a limited Godhead or, worse, to a Titanic or demoniac Power
that veils him. Even certain religious founders have erected the
image of the God of a sect or a national God or a Power of
terror and punishment or a Numen of sattwic love and mercy
and virtue and seem not to have seen the One and Eternal. The
Divine accepts the image they make of him and does his work in
them through that medium, but, since the one Force is felt and
acts in their imperfect nature but more intensely than in others,
the motive principle of egoism too can be more intense in them
than in others. An exalted rajasic or sattwic ego still holds them
and stands between them and the integral Truth. Even this is
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The Yoga of Divine Works
An exalted rajasic or sattwic ego still holds them
and stands between them and the integral Truth. Even this is
250
The Yoga of Divine Works
something, a beginning, although far from the true and perfect
experience. A much worse thing may befall those who break
something of the human bonds but have not purity and have
not the knowledge, for they may become instruments, but not
of the Divine; too often, using his name, they serve unconsciously
his Masks and black Contraries, the Powers of Darkness.
Our nature must house the cosmic Force but not in its lower
aspect or in its rajasic or sattwic movement; it must serve the
universal Will, but in the light of a greater liberating knowledge.
There must be no egoism of any kind in the attitude of the
instrument, even when we are fully conscious of the greatness
of the Force within us. Every man is knowingly or unknowingly
the instrument of a universal Power and, apart from the inner
Presence, there is no such essential difference between one action
and another, one kind of instrumentation and another as would
warrant the folly of an egoistic pride. The difference between
knowledge and ignorance is a grace of the Spirit; the breath
of divine Power blows where it lists and fills today one and
tomorrow another with the word or the puissance. If the potter
shapes one pot more perfectly than another, the merit lies not
in the vessel but the maker. The attitude of our mind must not
be “This is my strength” or “Behold God’s power in me”, but
rather “A Divine Power works in this mind and body and it
is the same that works in all men and in the animal, in the
plant and in the metal, in conscious and living things and in
things apparently inconscient and inanimate.” This large view
of the One working in all and of the whole world as the equal
instrument of a divine action and gradual self-expression, if it
becomes our entire experience, will help to eliminate all rajasic
egoism out of us and even the sattwic ego-sense will begin to
pass away from our nature.
The elimination of this form of ego leads straight towards
the true instrumental action which is the essence of a perfect
Karmayoga. For while we cherish the instrumental ego, we may
pretend to ourselves that we are conscious instruments of the
Divine, but in reality we are trying to make of the Divine Shakti
an instrument of our own desires or our egoistic purpose. And
The Master of the Work
251
And
The Master of the Work
251
even if the ego is subjected but not eliminated, we may indeed
be engines of the Divine Work, but we shall be imperfect tools
and deflect or impair the working by our mental errors, our vital
distortions or the obstinate incapacities of our physical nature.
If this ego disappears, then we can truly become, not only pure
instruments consciously consenting to every turn of the divine
Hand that moves us, but aware of our true nature, conscious
portions of the one Eternal and Infinite put out in herself for her
works by the supreme Shakti.
There is another greater step to be taken after the surrender
of our instrumental ego to the Divine Shakti. It is not enough
to know her as the one Cosmic Force that moves us and all
creatures on the planes of mind, life and matter; for this is the
lower Nature and, although the Divine Knowledge, Light, Power
are there concealed and at work in this Ignorance and can break
partly its veil and manifest something of their true character or
descend from above and uplift these inferior workings, yet, even
if we realise the One in a spiritualised mind, a spiritualised life-
movement, a spiritualised body-consciousness, an imperfection
remains in the dynamic parts. There is a stumbling response to
the Supreme Power, a veil over the face of the Divine, a constant
mixture of the Ignorance. It is only when we open to the Divine
Shakti in the truth of her Force which transcends this lower
Prakrit! that we can be perfect instruments of her power and
knowledge.
Not only liberation but perfection must be the aim of the
Karmayoga. The Divine works through our nature and accord¬
ing to our nature; if our nature is imperfect, the work also will
be imperfect, mixed, inadequate. Even it may be marred by gross
errors, falsehoods, moral weaknesses, diverting influences. The
work of the Divine will be done in us even then, but according
to our weakness, not according to the strength and purity of
its source. If ours were not an integral Yoga, if we sought only
the liberation of the self within us or the motionless existence
252
The Yoga of Divine Works
If ours were not an integral Yoga, if we sought only
the liberation of the self within us or the motionless existence
252
The Yoga of Divine Works
of Purusha separated from Prakriti, this dynamic imperfection
might not matter. Calm, untroubled, not depressed, not elated,
refusing to accept the perfection or imperfection, fault or merit,
sin or virtue as ours, perceiving that it is the modes of Na¬
ture working in the field of her modes that make this mixture,
we could withdraw into the silence of the spirit and, pure,
untouched, witness only the workings of Prakriti. But in an
integral realisation this can only be a step on the way, not our
last resting-place. For we aim at the divine realisation not only in
the immobility of the Spirit, but also in the movement of Nature.
And this cannot be altogether until we can feel the presence and
power of the Divine in every step, motion, figure of our activities,
in every turn of our will, in every thought, feeling and impulse.
No doubt, we can feel that in essence even in the nature of the
Ignorance, but it is the divine Power and Presence in a disguise,
a diminution, an inferior figure. Ours is a greater demand, that
our nature shall be a power of the Divine in the Truth of the
Divine, in the Light, in the force of the eternal self-conscient
Will, in the wideness of the sempiternal Knowledge.
After the removal of the veil of ego, the removal of the
veil of Nature and her inferior modes that govern our mind,
life and body. As soon as the limits of the ego begin to fade,
we see how that veil is constituted and detect the action of
cosmic Nature in us, and in or behind cosmic Nature we sense
the presence of the cosmic Self and the dynamis of the world-
pervading Ishwara. The Master of the instrument stands behind
all this working, and even within the working there is his touch
and the drive of a great guiding or disposing Influence. It is
no longer ego or ego-force that we serve; we obey the World-
Master and his evolutionary impulse. At each step we can say
in the language of the Sanskrit verse, “Even as I am appointed
by Thee seated in my heart, so, O Lord, I act.” But still this
action may be of two very different kinds, one only illumined,
the other transformed and uplifted into a greater supernature.
For we may keep on in the way of action upheld and followed
by our nature when by her and her illusion of egoism we were
“turned as if mounted on a machine,” but now with a perfect
The Master of the Work
253
For we may keep on in the way of action upheld and followed
by our nature when by her and her illusion of egoism we were
“turned as if mounted on a machine,” but now with a perfect
The Master of the Work
253
understanding of the mechanism and its utilisation for his world
purposes by the Master of works whom we feel behind it. This
is indeed as far as even many great Yogis have reached on the
levels of spiritualised mind; but it need not be so always, for
there is a greater supramental possibility. It is possible to rise
beyond spiritualised mind and to act spontaneously in the liv¬
ing presence of the original divine Truth-Force of the Supreme
Mother. Our motion one with her motion and merged in it, our
will one with her will, our energy absolved in her energy, we shall
feel her working through us as the Divine manifest in a supreme
Wisdom-Power, and we shall be aware of the transformed mind,
life and body only as the channels of a supreme Light and Force
beyond them, infallible in its steps because transcendent and
total in its knowledge. Of this Light and Force we shall not only
be the recipients, channels, instruments, but become a part of it
in a supreme uplifted abiding experience.
Already, before we reach this last perfection, we can have
the union with the Divine in works in its extreme wideness, if
not yet on its most luminous heights; for we perceive no longer
merely Nature or the modes of Nature, but become conscious,
in our physical movements, in our nervous and vital reactions,
in our mental workings, of a Force greater than body, mind and
life which takes hold of our limited instruments and drives all
their motion. There is no longer the sense of ourselves moving,
thinking or feeling but of that moving, feeling and thinking in
us. This force that we feel is the universal Force of the Divine,
which, veiled or unveiled, acting directly or permitting the use of
its powers by beings in the cosmos, is the one Energy that alone
exists and alone makes universal or individual action possible.
For this force is the Divine itself in the body of its power; all
is that, power of act, power of thought and knowledge, power
of mastery and enjoyment, power of love. Conscious always
and in everything, in ourselves and in others, of the Master of
Works possessing, inhabiting, enjoying through this Force that is
himself, becoming through it all existences and all happenings,
we shall have arrived at the divine union through works and
achieved by that fulfilment in works all that others have gained
254
The Yoga of Divine Works
through absolute devotion or through pure knowledge. But there
is still another step that calls us, an ascent out of this cosmic
identity into the identity of the Divine Transcendence.
The Master of our works and our being is not merely a
Godhead here within us, nor is he merely a cosmic Spirit or
some kind of universal Power. The world and the Divine are
not one and the same thing, as a certain kind of pantheistic
thinking would like to believe. The world is an emanation; it
depends upon something that manifests in it but is not limited
by it: the Divine is not here alone; there is a Beyond, an eternal
Transcendence. The individual being also in its spiritual part is
not a formation in the cosmic existence — our ego, our mind, our
life, our body are that; but the immutable spirit, the imperishable
soul in us has come out of the Transcendence.
A Transcendent who is beyond all world and all Nature and
yet possesses the world and its nature, who has descended with
something of himself into it and is shaping it into that which as
yet it is not, is the Source of our being, the Source of our works
and their Master. But the seat of the Transcendent Consciousness
is above in an absoluteness of divine Existence — and there too
is the absolute Power, Truth, Bliss of the Eternal — of which
our mentality can form no conception and of which even our
greatest spiritual experience is only a diminished reflection in
the spiritualised mind and heart, a faint shadow, a thin derivate.
Yet proceeding from it there is a sort of golden corona of Eight,
Power, Bliss and Truth — a divine Truth-Consciousness as the
ancient mystics called it, a Supermind, a Gnosis, with which
this world of a lesser consciousness proceeding by Ignorance is
in secret relation and which alone maintains it and prevents it
from falling into a disintegrated chaos. The powers we are now
satisfied to call gnosis, intuition or illumination are only fainter
lights of which that is the full and flaming source, and between
the highest human intelligence and it there lie many levels of
ascending consciousness, highest mental or overmental, which
The Master of the Work
255
we would have to conquer before we arrived there or could
bring down its greatness and glory here. Yet, however difficult,
that ascent, that victory is the destiny of the human spirit and
that luminous descent or bringing down of the divine Truth is
the inevitable term of the troubled evolution of the earth-nature;
that intended consummation is its raison d’etre, our culminating
state and the explanation of our terrestrial existence. For though
the transcendental Divine is already here as the Purushottama in
the secret heart of our mystery, he is veiled by many coats and
disguises of his magic world-wide Yoga-Maya; it is only by the
ascent and victory of the Soul here in the body that the disguises
can fall away and the dynamis of the supreme Truth replace
this tangled weft of half-truth that becomes creative error, this
emergent Knowledge that is converted by its plunge into the
inconscience of Matter and its slow partial return towards itself
into an effective Ignorance.
For here in the world, though the Gnosis is there secretly
behind existence, what acts is not the Gnosis but a magic of
Knowledge-Ignorance, an incalculable yet apparently mechan¬
ical Overmind Maya. The Divine appears to us here in one
view as an equal, inactive and impersonal Witness Spirit, an
immobile consenting Purusha not bound by quality or Space or
Time, whose support or sanction is given impartially to the play
of all action and energies which the transcendent Will has once
permitted and authorised to fulfil themselves in the cosmos. This
Witness Spirit, this immobile Self in things, seems to will nothing
and determine nothing; yet we become aware that his very pas¬
sivity, his silent presence compels all things to travel even in their
ignorance towards a divine goal and attracts through division to¬
wards a yet unrealised oneness. Yet no supreme infallible Divine
Will seems to be there, only a widely deployed Cosmic Energy
or a mechanical executive Process, Prakriti. This is one side of
the cosmic Self; the other presents itself as a universal Divine,
one in being, multiple in personality and power, who conveys
to us, when we enter into the consciousness of his universal
forces, a sense of infinite quality and will and act and world¬
wide knowledge and a one yet innumerable delight; for through
256
The Yoga of Divine Works
him we become one with all existences not only in their essence
but in their play of action, see ourself in all and all in ourself,
perceive all knowledge and thought and feeling as motions of
the one Mind and Heart, all energy and action as kinetics of
the one Will in power, all Matter and form as particles of the
one Body, all personalities as projections of the one Person, all
egos as deformations of the one and sole real “I” in existence.
In him we no longer stand separate, but lose our active ego in
the universal movement, even as by the Witness who is without
qualities and for ever unattached and unentangled, we lose our
static ego in the universal peace.
And yet there remains a contradiction between these two
terms, the aloof divine Silence and the all-embracing divine
Action, which we may heal in ourselves in a certain manner,
in a certain high degree which seems to us complete, yet is not
complete because it cannot altogether transform and conquer.
A universal Peace, Light, Power, Bliss is ours, but its effective
expression is not that of the Truth-Consciousness, the divine
Gnosis, but still, though wonderfully freed, uplifted and illu¬
mined, supports only the present self-expression of the Cosmic
Spirit and does not transform, as would a transcendental De¬
scent, the ambiguous symbols and veiled mysteries of a world
of Ignorance. Ourselves are free, but the earth-consciousness
remains in bondage; only a further transcendental ascent and
descent can entirely heal the contradiction and transform and
deliver.
For there is yet a third intensely close and personal aspect
of the Master of Works which is a key to his sublimest hid¬
den mystery and ecstasy; for he detaches from the secret of the
hidden Transcendence and the ambiguous display of the cosmic
Movement an individual Power of the Divine that can mediate
between the two and bridge our passage from the one to the
other. In this aspect the transcendent and universal person of
the Divine conforms itself to our individualised personality and
accepts a personal relation with us, at once identified with us
as our supreme Self and yet close and different as our Master,
Friend, Lover, Teacher, our Father and our Mother, our Playmate
The Master of the Work
257
in the great world-game who has disguised himself throughout
as friend and enemy, helper and opponent and, in all relations
and in all workings that affect us, has led our steps towards
our perfection and our release. It is through this more personal
manifestation that we are admitted to some possibility of the
complete transcendental experience; for in him we meet the One
not merely in a liberated calm and peace, not merely with a
passive or active submission in our works or through the mys¬
tery of union with a universal Knowledge and Power filling and
guiding us, but with an ecstasy of divine Love and divine Delight
that shoots up beyond silent Witness and active World-Power
to some positive divination of a greater beatific secret. For it
is not so much knowledge leading to some ineffable Absolute,
not so much works lifting us beyond world-process to the orig¬
inating supreme Knower and Master, but rather this thing most
intimate to us, yet at present most obscure, which keeps for us
wrapped in its passionate veil the deep and rapturous secret of
the transcendent Godhead and some absolute positiveness of its
perfect Being, its all-concentrating Bliss, its mystic Ananda.
But the individual relation with the Divine does not always
or from the beginning bring into force a widest enlargement
or a highest self-exceeding. At first this Godhead close to our
being or immanent within us can be felt fully only in the scope
of our personal nature and experience, a Leader and Master, a
Guide and Teacher, a Friend and Lover, or else a spirit, power or
presence, constituting and uplifting our upward and enlarging
movement by the force of his intimate reality inhabiting the
heart or presiding over our nature from above even our highest
intelligence. It is our personal evolution that is his preoccupa¬
tion, a personal relation with him that is our joy and fulfilment,
the building of our nature into his divine image that is our self¬
finding and perfection. The outside world seems to exist only as
a field for this growth and a provider of materials or of helping
and opposing forces for its successive stages. Our works done
in that world are his works, but even when they serve some
temporary universal end, their main purpose for us is to make
outwardly dynamic or give inward power to our relations with
258
The Yoga of Divine Works
Our works done
in that world are his works, but even when they serve some
temporary universal end, their main purpose for us is to make
outwardly dynamic or give inward power to our relations with
258
The Yoga of Divine Works
this immanent Divine. Many seekers ask for no more or see the
continuation and fulfilment of this spiritual flowering only in
heavens beyond; the union is consummated and made perpetual
in an eternal dwelling-place of his perfection, joy and beauty. But
this is not enough for the integral seeker; however intense and
beautiful, a personal isolated achievement cannot be his sole aim
or his entire experience. A time must come when the personal
opens out into the universal; our very individuality, spiritual,
mental, vital, physical even, becomes universalised: it is seen as a
power of his universal force and cosmic spirit, or else it contains
the universe in that ineffable wideness which comes to the indi¬
vidual consciousness when it breaks its bonds and flows upward
towards the Transcendent and on every side into the Infinite.
In a Yoga lived entirely on the spiritualised mental plane it is
possible and even usual for these three fundamental aspects of
the Divine — the Individual or Immanent, the Cosmic and the
Transcendent — to stand out as separate realisations. Each by
itself then appears sufficient to satisfy the yearning of the seeker.
Alone with the personal Divine in the inner heart’s illumined
secret chamber, he can build his being into the Beloved’s image
and ascend out of fallen Nature to dwell with him in some
heaven of the Spirit. Absolved in the cosmic wideness, released
from ego, his personality reduced to a point of working of the
universal Force, himself calm, liberated, deathless in universal¬
ity, motionless in the Witness Self even while outspread without
limit in unending Space and Time, he can enjoy in the world the
freedom of the Timeless. One-pointed towards some ineffable
Transcendence, casting away his personality, shedding from him
the labour and trouble of the universal Dynamis, he can escape
into an inexpressible Nirvana, annul all things in an intolerant
exaltation of flight into the Incommunicable.
But none of these achievements is enough for one who seeks
the wide completeness of an integral Yoga. An individual sal¬
vation is not enough for him; for he finds himself opening to
The Master of the Work
259
But none of these achievements is enough for one who seeks
the wide completeness of an integral Yoga. An individual sal¬
vation is not enough for him; for he finds himself opening to
The Master of the Work
259
a cosmic consciousness which far exceeds by its breadth and
vastness the narrower intensity of a limited individual fulfilment,
and its call is imperative; driven by that immense compulsion, he
must break through all separative boundaries, spread himself in
world-Nature, contain the universe. Above too, there is urgent
upon him a dynamic realisation pressing from the Supreme upon
this world of beings, and only some encompassing and exceeding
of the cosmic consciousness can release into manifestation here
that yet unlavished splendour. But the cosmic consciousness too
is not sufficient; for it is not all the Divine Reality, not inte¬
gral. There is a divine secret behind personality that he must
discover; there, waiting in it to be delivered here into Time,
stands the mystery of the embodiment of the Transcendence. In
the cosmic consciousness there remains at the end a hiatus, an
unequal equation of a highest Knowledge that can liberate but
not effectuate with a Power seeming to use a limited Knowledge
or masking itself with a surface Ignorance that can create but
creates imperfection or a perfection transient, limited and in
fetters. On one side there is a free undynamic Witness and on the
other side a bound Executrix of action who has not been given
all the means of action. The reconciliation of these companions
and opposites seems to be reserved, postponed, held back in
an Unmanifest still beyond us. But, again, a mere escape into
some absolute Transcendence leaves personality unfulfilled and
the universal action inconclusive and cannot satisfy the integral
seeker. He feels that the Truth that is for ever is a Power that
creates as well as a stable Existence; it is not a Power solely of
illusory or ignorant manifestation. The eternal Truth can mani¬
fest its truths in Time; it can create in Knowledge and not only
in Inconscience and Ignorance. A divine Descent no less than
an ascent to the Divine is possible; there is a prospect of the
bringing down of a future perfection and a present deliverance.
As his knowledge widens, it becomes for him more and more
evident that it was this for which the Master of Works cast down
the soul within him here as a spark of his fire into the darkness,
that it might grow there into a centre of the Eight that is for ever.
The Transcendent, the Universal, the Individual are three
260
The Yoga of Divine Works
powers overarching, underlying and penetrating the whole man¬
ifestation; this is the first of the Trinities. In the unfolding of
consciousness also, these are the three fundamental terms and
none of them can be neglected if we would have the experience
of the whole Truth of existence. Out of the individual we wake
into a vaster freer cosmic consciousness; but out of the universal
too with its complex of forms and powers we must emerge by
a still greater self-exceeding into a consciousness without limits
that is founded on the Absolute. And yet in this ascension we do
not really abolish but take up and transfigure what we seem to
leave; for there is a height where the three live eternally in each
other, on that height they are blissfully joined in a nodus of their
harmonised oneness. But that summit is above the highest and
largest spiritualised mentality, even if some reflection of it can
be experienced there; mind, to attain to it, to live there, must
exceed itself and be transformed into a supramental gnostic light,
power and substance. In this lower diminished consciousness a
harmony can indeed be attempted, but it must always remain
imperfect; a coordination is possible, not a simultaneous fused
fulfilment. An ascent out of the mind is, for any greater real¬
isation, imperative. Or else, there must be, with the ascent or
consequent to it, a dynamic descent of the self-existent Truth
that exists always uplifted in its own light above Mind, eternal,
prior to the manifestation of Life and Matter.
For Mind is Maya, sat-asat: there is a field of embrace of
the true and the false, the existent and the non-existent, and it
is in that ambiguous field that Mind seems to reign; but even
in its own reign it is in truth a diminished consciousness, it is
not part of the original and supremely originating power of the
Eternal. Even if Mind is able to reflect some image of essential
Truth in its substance, yet the dynamic force and action of Truth
appears in it always broken and divided. All Mind can do is to
piece together the fragments or deduce a unity; truth of Mind is
only a half-truth or a portion of a puzzle. Mental knowledge is
always relative, partial and inconclusive, and its outgoing action
and creation come out still more confused in its steps or precise
only in narrow limits and by imperfect piecings together. Even
The Master of the Work
261
Mental knowledge is
always relative, partial and inconclusive, and its outgoing action
and creation come out still more confused in its steps or precise
only in narrow limits and by imperfect piecings together. Even
The Master of the Work
261
in this diminished consciousness the Divine manifests as a Spirit
in Mind, just as he moves as a Spirit in Life or dwells still more
obscurely as a Spirit in Matter; but not here is his full dynamic
revelation, not here the perfect identities of the Eternal. Only
when we cross the border into a larger luminous consciousness
and self-aware substance where divine Truth is a native and not a
stranger, will there be revealed to us the Master of our existence
in the imperishable integral truth of his being and his powers
and his workings. Only there, too, will his works in us assume
the flawless movement of his unfailing supramental purpose.
But that is the end of a long and difficult journey, and the Master
of works does not wait till then to meet the seeker on the path
of Yoga and put his secret or half-shown Hand upon him and
upon his life and actions. Already he was there in the world as
the Originator and Receiver of works behind the dense veils of
the Inconscient, disguised in force of Life, visible to the Mind
through symbol godheads and figures. It may well be in these
disguises that he first meets the soul destined to the way of
the integral Yoga. Or even, wearing still vaguer masks, he may
be conceived by us as an Ideal or mentalised as an abstract
Power of Love, Good, Beauty or Knowledge; or, as we turn our
feet towards the Way, he may come to us veiled as the call of
Humanity or a Will in things that drives towards the deliverance
of the world from the grasp of Darkness and Lalsehood and
Death and Suffering — the great quaternary of the Ignorance.
Then, after we have entered the path, he envelops us with his
wide and mighty liberating Impersonality or moves near to us
with the face and form of a personal Godhead. In and around
us we feel a Power that upholds and protects and cherishes; we
hear a Voice that guides; a conscious Will greater than ourselves
rules us; an imperative Lorce moves our thought and actions
and our very body; an ever-widening Consciousness assimilates
ours, a living Light of Knowledge lights all within, or a Beatitude
invades us; a Mightiness presses from above, concrete, massive
262
The Yoga of Divine Works
and overpowering, and penetrates and pours itself into the very
stuff of our nature; a Peace sits there, a Light, a Bliss, a Strength, a
Greatness. Or there are relations, personal, intimate as life itself,
sweet as love, encompassing like the sky, deep like deep waters.
A Friend walks at our side; a Lover is with us in our heart’s
secrecy; a Master of the Work and the Ordeal points our way; a
Creator of things uses us as his instrument; we are in the arms
of the eternal Mother. All these more seizable aspects in which
the Ineffable meets us are truths and not mere helpful symbols
or useful imaginations; but as we progress, their first imperfect
formulations in our experience yield to a larger vision of the
one Truth that is behind them. At each step their mere mental
masks are shed and they acquire a larger, a profounder, a more
intimate significance. At last on the supramental borders all these
Godheads combine their forces and, without at all ceasing to be,
coalesce together. On this path the Divine Aspects are not re¬
vealed in order to be cast away; they are not temporary spiritual
conveniences or compromises with an illusory Consciousness or
dream-figures mysteriously cast upon us by the incommunicable
superconscience of the Absolute; on the contrary, their power
increases and their absoluteness reveals itself as they draw near
to the Truth from which they issue.
For that now superconscient Transcendence is a Power as
well as an Existence. The supramental Transcendence is not a
vacant Wonder, but an Inexpressible which contains for ever
all essential things that have issued from it; it holds them there
in their supreme everlasting reality and their own characteris¬
tic absolutes. The diminution, division, degradation that create
here the sense of an unsatisfactory puzzle, a mystery of Maya,
themselves diminish and fall from us in our ascension, and the
Divine Powers assume their real forms and appear more and
more as the terms of a Truth in process of realisation here. A
soul of the Divine is here slowly awaking out of its involution
and concealment in the material Inconscience. The Master of
our works is not a Master of illusions, but a supreme Reality
who is working out his self-expressive realities delivered slowly
from the cocoons of the Ignorance in which for the purposes
The Master of the Work
263
The Master of
our works is not a Master of illusions, but a supreme Reality
who is working out his self-expressive realities delivered slowly
from the cocoons of the Ignorance in which for the purposes
The Master of the Work
263
of an evolutionary manifestation they were allowed for a while
to slumber. For the supramental Transcendence is not a thing
absolutely apart and unconnected with our present existence. It
is a greater Light out of which all this has come for the adventure
of the Soul lapsing into the Inconscience and emerging out of
it, and, while that adventure proceeds, it waits superconscient
above our minds till it can become conscious in us. Hereafter
it will unveil itself and by the unveiling reveal to us all the
significance of our own being and our works; for it will disclose
the Divine whose fuller manifestation in the world will release
and accomplish that covert significance.
In that disclosure the Transcendent Divine will be more
and more made known to us as the Supreme Existence and
the Perfect Source of all that we are; but equally we shall see
him as a Master of works and creation prepared to pour out
more and more of himself into the field of his manifestation.
The cosmic consciousness and its action will appear no longer
as a huge regulated Chance, but as a field of the manifestation;
there the Divine is seen as a presiding and pervading Cosmic
Spirit who receives all out of the Transcendence and develops
what descends into forms that are now an opaque disguise or
a baffling half-disguise, but destined to be a transparent revela¬
tion. The individual consciousness will recover its true sense and
action; for it is the form of a Soul sent out from the Supreme
and, in spite of all appearances, a nucleus or nebula in which the
Divine Mother-Force is at work for the victorious embodiment
of the timeless and formless Divine in Time and Matter. This will
reveal itself slowly to our vision and experience as the will of the
Master of works and as their own ultimate significance, which
alone gives to world-creation and to our own action in the world
a light and a meaning. To recognise that and to strive towards
its effectuation is the whole burden of the Way of Divine Works
in the integral Yoga.
Chapter XII
The Divine Work
To recognise that and to strive towards
its effectuation is the whole burden of the Way of Divine Works
in the integral Yoga.
Chapter XII
The Divine Work
ONE QUESTION remains for the seeker upon the way
of works, when his quest is or seems to have come to its
natural end, — whether any work or what work is left
for the soul after liberation and to what purpose? Equality has
been seated in the nature or governs the whole nature; there has
been achieved a radical deliverance from the ego-idea, from the
pervading ego-sense, from all feelings and impulsions of the ego
and its self-will and desires. The entire self-consecration has been
made not only in thought and heart but in all the complexities
of the being. A complete purity or transcendence of the three
gunas has been harmoniously established. The soul has seen the
Master of its works and lives in his presence or is consciously
contained in his being or is unified with him or feels him in
the heart or above and obeys his dictates. It has known its true
being and cast away the veil of the Ignorance. What work then
remains for the worker in man and with what motive, to what
end, in what spirit will it be done?
There is one answer with which we are very familiar in India;
no work at all remains, for the rest is quiescence. When the
soul can live in the eternal presence of the Supreme or when
it is unified with the Absolute, the object of our existence in
the world, if it can be said to have an object, at once ceases.
Man, released from the curse of self-division and the curse of
Ignorance, is released too from that other affliction, the curse of
works. All action would then be a derogation from the supreme
state and a return into the Ignorance. This attitude towards life
is supported by an idea founded on the error of the vital nature
to which action is dictated only by one or all of three inferior
The Divine Work
265
This attitude towards life
is supported by an idea founded on the error of the vital nature
to which action is dictated only by one or all of three inferior
The Divine Work
265
motives, necessity, restless instinct and impulse or desire. The
instinct or impulse quiescent, desire extinguished, what place is
there for works? Some mechanical necessity might remain but
no other, and even that would cease for ever with the fall of
the body. But after all, even so, while life remains, action is
unavoidable. Mere thinking or, in the absence of thought, mere
living is itself an act and a cause of many effects. All existence
in the world is work, force, potency, and has a dynamic effect in
the whole by its mere presence, even the inertia of the clod, even
the silence of the immobile Buddha on the verge of Nirvana.
There is the question only of the manner of the action, the
instruments that are used or that act of themselves, and the spirit
and knowledge of the worker. For in reality, no man works, but
Nature works through him for the self-expression of a Power
within that proceeds from the Infinite. To know that and live
in the presence and in the being of the Master of Nature, free
from desire and the illusion of personal impulsion, is the one
thing needful. That and not the bodily cessation of action is
the true release; for the bondage of works at once ceases. A
man might sit still and motionless for ever and yet be as much
bound to the Ignorance as the animal or the insect. But if he can
make this greater consciousness dynamic within him, then all
the work of all the worlds could pass through him and yet he
would remain at rest, absolute in calm and peace, free from all
bondage. Action in the world is given us first as a means for our
self-development and self-fulfilment; but even if we reached a
last possible divine self-completeness, it would still remain as a
means for the fulfilment of the divine intention in the world and
of the larger universal self of which each being is a portion — a
portion that has come down with it from the Transcendence.
In a certain sense, when his Yoga has reached a certain cul¬
mination, works cease for a man; for he has no further personal
necessity of works, no sense of works being done by him; but
there is no need to flee from action or to take refuge in a blissful
inertia. For now he acts as the Divine Existence acts without
any binding necessity and without any compelling ignorance.
Even in doing works he does not work at all; he undertakes
266
For now he acts as the Divine Existence acts without
any binding necessity and without any compelling ignorance.
Even in doing works he does not work at all; he undertakes
266
The Yoga of Divine Works
no personal initiative. It is the Divine Shakti that works in him
through his nature; his action develops through the spontaneity
of a supreme Force by which his instruments are possessed, of
which he is a part, with whose will his will is identical and his
power is her power. The spirit within him contains, supports
and watches this action; it presides over it in knowledge but is
not glued or clamped to the work by attachment or need, is not
bound by desire of its fruit, is not enslaved to any movement or
impulse.
It is a common error to suppose that action is impossible
or at least meaningless without desire. If desire ceases, we are
told, action also must cease. But this, like other too simply com¬
prehensive generalisations, is more attractive to the cutting and
defining mind than true. The major part of the work done in
the universe is accomplished without any interference of de¬
sire; it proceeds by the calm necessity and spontaneous law of
Nature. Even man constantly does work of various kinds by a
spontaneous impulse, intuition, instinct or acts in obedience to
a natural necessity and law of forces without either mental plan¬
ning or the urge of a conscious vital volition or emotional desire.
Often enough his act is contrary to his intention or his desire; it
proceeds out of him in subjection to a need or compulsion, in
submission to an impulse, in obedience to a force in him that
pushes for self-expression or in conscious pursuance of a higher
principle. Desire is an additional lure to which Nature has given
a great part in the life of animated beings in order to produce a
certain kind of rajasic action necessary for her intermediate ends;
but it is not her sole or even her chief engine. It has its great use
while it endures: it helps us to rise out of inertia, it contradicts
many tamasic forces which would otherwise inhibit action. But
the seeker who has advanced far on the way of works has passed
beyond this intermediate stage in which desire is a helpful engine.
Its push is no longer indispensable for his action, but is rather
a terrible hindrance and source of stumbling, inefficiency and
failure. Others are obliged to obey a personal choice or motive,
but he has to learn to act with an impersonal or a universal
mind or as a part or an instrument of an infinite Person. A
The Divine Work
Others are obliged to obey a personal choice or motive,
but he has to learn to act with an impersonal or a universal
mind or as a part or an instrument of an infinite Person. A
The Divine Work
267
calm indifference, a joyful impartiality or a blissful response to
a divine Force, whatever its dictate, is the condition of his doing
any effective work or undertaking any worth-while action. Not
desire, not attachment must drive him, but a Will that stirs in
a divine peace, a Knowledge that moves from the transcendent
Light, a glad Impulse that is a force from the supreme Ananda.
In an advanced stage of the Yoga it is indifferent to the seeker,
in the sense of any personal preference, what action he shall
do or not do; even whether he shall act or not, is not decided
by his personal choice or pleasure. Always he is moved to do
whatever is in consonance with the Truth or whatever the Divine
demands through his nature. A false conclusion is sometimes
drawn from this that the spiritual man, accepting the position
in which Fate or God or his past Karma has placed him, content
to work in the field and cadre of the family, clan, caste, nation,
occupation which are his by birth and circumstance, will not
and even perhaps ought not to make any movement to exceed
them or to pursue any great mundane end. Since he has really
no work to do, since he has only to use works, no matter what
works, as long as he is in the body in order to arrive at libera¬
tion or, having arrived, only to obey the supreme Will and do
whatever it dictates, the actual field given him is sufficient for
the purpose. Once free, he has only to continue working in the
sphere assigned to him by Fate and circumstances till the great
hour arrives when he can at last disappear into the Infinite. To
insist on any particular end or to work for some great mundane
object is to fall into the illusion of works; it is to entertain the
error that terrestrial life has an intelligible intention and contains
objects worthy of pursuit. The great theory of Illusion, which is
a practical denial of the Divine in the world, even when in idea
it acknowledges the Presence, is once more before us. But the
Divine is here in the world, — not only in status but in dynamis,
not only as a spiritual self and presence but as power, force,
energy, — and therefore a divine work in the world is possible.
268
The Yoga of Divine Works
But the
Divine is here in the world, — not only in status but in dynamis,
not only as a spiritual self and presence but as power, force,
energy, — and therefore a divine work in the world is possible.
268
The Yoga of Divine Works
There is no narrow principle, no field of cabined action
that can be imposed on the Karmayogin as his rule or his
province. This much is true that every kind of works, whether
small to man’s imagination or great, petty in scope or wide, can
be equally used in the progress towards liberation or for self-
discipline. This much is also true that after liberation a man
may dwell in any sphere of life and in any kind of action and
fulfil there his existence in the Divine. According as he is moved
by the Spirit, he may remain in the sphere assigned to him by
birth and circumstances or break that framework and go forth
to an untrammelled action which shall be the fitting body of
his greatened consciousness and higher knowledge. To the out¬
ward eyes of men the inner liberation may make no apparent
difference in his outward acts; or, on the contrary, the freedom
and infinity within may translate itself into an outward dynamic
working so large and new that all regards are drawn by this novel
force. If such be the intention of the Supreme within him, the
liberated soul may be content with a subtle and limited action
within the old human surroundings which will in no way seek
to change their outward appearance. But it may too be called
to a work which will not only alter the forms and sphere of its
own external life but, leaving nothing around it unchanged or
unaffected, create a new world or a new order.
A prevalent idea would persuade us that the sole aim of libera¬
tion is to secure for the individual soul freedom from physical
rebirth in the unstable life of the universe. If this freedom is once
assured, there is no further work for it in life here or elsewhere or
only that which the continued existence of the body demands or
the unfulfilled effects of past lives necessitate. This little, rapidly
exhausted or consumed by the fire of Yoga, will cease with the
departure of the released soul from the body. The aim of escape
from rebirth, now long fixed in the Indian mentality as the high¬
est object of the soul, has replaced the enjoyment of a heaven
beyond fixed in the mentality of the devout by many religions
The Divine Work
269
The aim of escape
from rebirth, now long fixed in the Indian mentality as the high¬
est object of the soul, has replaced the enjoyment of a heaven
beyond fixed in the mentality of the devout by many religions
The Divine Work
269
as their divine lure. Indian religion also upheld that earlier and
lower call when the gross external interpretation of the Vedic
hymns was the dominant creed, and the dualists in later India
also have kept that as part of their supreme spiritual motive.
Undoubtedly a release from the limitations of the mind and body
into an eternal peace, rest, silence of the Spirit, makes a higher
appeal than the offer of a heaven of mental joys or eternised
physical pleasures, but this too after all is a lure; its insistence
on the mind’s world-weariness, the life-being’s shrinking from
the adventure of birth, strikes a chord of weakness and cannot be
the supreme motive. The desire of personal salvation, however
high its form, is an outcome of ego; it rests on the idea of our
own individuality and its desire for its personal good or welfare,
its longing for a release from suffering or its cry for the extinction
of the trouble of becoming and makes that the supreme aim of
our existence. To rise beyond the desire of personal salvation is
necessary for the complete rejection of this basis of ego. If we
seek the Divine, it should be for the sake of the Divine and for
nothing else, because that is the supreme call of our being, the
deepest truth of the spirit. The pursuit of liberation, of the soul’s
freedom, of the realisation of our true and highest self, of union
with the Divine, is justified only because it is the highest law of
our nature, because it is the attraction of that which is lower
in us to that which is highest, because it is the Divine Will in
us. That is its sufficient justification and its one truest reason;
all other motives are excrescences, minor or incidental truths
or useful lures which the soul must abandon, the moment their
utility has passed and the state of oneness with the Supreme and
with all beings has become our normal consciousness and the
bliss of that state our spiritual atmosphere.
Often, we see this desire of personal salvation overcome by
another attraction which also belongs to the higher turn of our
nature and which indicates the essential character of the action
the liberated soul must pursue. It is that which is implied in the
great legend of the Amitabha Buddha who turned away when
his spirit was on the threshold of Nirvana and took the vow
never to cross it while a single being remained in the sorrow
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The Yoga of Divine Works
and the Ignorance. It is that which underlies the sublime verse
of the Bhagavata Purana, “I desire not the supreme state with
all its eight siddhis nor the cessation of rebirth; may I assume
the sorrow of all creatures who suffer and enter into them so
that they may be made free from grief.” It is that which inspires
a remarkable passage in a letter of Swami Vivekananda. “I have
lost all wish for my salvation,” wrote the great Vedantin, “may I
be born again and again and suffer thousands of miseries so that
I may worship the only God that exists, the only God I believe in,
the sum-total of all souls, — and above all, my God the wicked,
my God the miserable, my God the poor of all races, of all species
is the special object of my worship. He who is the high and low,
the saint and the sinner, the god and the worm. Him worship,
the visible, the knowable, the real, the omnipresent; break all
other idols. In whom there is neither past life nor future birth,
nor death nor going nor coming, in whom we always have been
and always will be one. Him worship; break all other idols.”
In whom there is neither past life nor future birth,
nor death nor going nor coming, in whom we always have been
and always will be one. Him worship; break all other idols.”
The last two sentences contain indeed the whole gist of the
matter. The true salvation or the true freedom from the chain of
rebirth is not the rejection of terrestrial life or the individual’s
escape by a spiritual self-annihilation, even as the true renuncia¬
tion is not the mere physical abandonment of family and society;
it is the inner identification with the Divine in whom there is no
limitation of past life and future birth but instead the eternal
existence of the unborn Soul. He who is free inwardly, even
doing actions, does nothing at all, says the Gita; for it is Nature
that works in him under the control of the Lord of Nature.
Equally, even if he assumes a hundred times the body, he is free
from any chain of birth or mechanical wheel of existence since
he lives in the unborn and undying spirit and not in the life of
the body. Therefore attachment to the escape from rebirth is one
of the idols which, whoever keeps, the sadhaka of the integral
Yoga must break and cast away from him. For his Yoga is not
limited to the realisation of the Transcendent beyond all world
by the individual soul; it embraces also the realisation of the
Universal, “the sum-total of all souls”, and cannot therefore be
confined to the movement of a personal salvation and escape.
The Divine Work
271
Even in his transcendence of cosmic limitations he is still one
with all in God; a divine work remains for him in the universe.
The Divine Work
271
Even in his transcendence of cosmic limitations he is still one
with all in God; a divine work remains for him in the universe.
That work cannot be fixed by any mind-made rule or human
standard; for his consciousness has moved away from human
law and limits and passed into the divine liberty, away from
government by the external and transient into the self-rule of
the inner and eternal, away from the binding forms of the finite
into the free self-determination of the Infinite. “Howsoever he
lives and acts,” says the Gita, “he lives and acts in Me.” The rules
which the intellect of men lays down cannot apply to the liber¬
ated soul, — by the external criteria and tests which their mental
associations and prejudgments prescribe, such a one cannot be
judged; he is outside the narrow jurisdiction of these fallible tri¬
bunals. It is immaterial whether he wears the garb of the ascetic
or lives the full life of the householder; whether he spends his
days in what men call holy works or in the many-sided activities
of the world; whether he devotes himself to the direct leading
of men to the Light like Buddha, Christ or Shankara or governs
kingdoms like Janaka or stands before men like Sri Krishna as a
politician or a leader of armies; what he eats or drinks; what are
his habits or his pursuits; whether he fails or succeeds; whether
his work be one of construction or of destruction; whether he
supports or restores an old order or labours to replace it by
a new; whether his associates are those whom men delight to
honour or those whom their sense of superior righteousness out-
castes and reprobates; whether his life and deeds are approved
by his contemporaries or he is condemned as a misleader of men
and a fomenter of religious, moral or social heresies. He is not
governed by the judgments of men or the laws laid down by the
ignorant; he obeys an inner voice and is moved by an unseen
Power. His real life is within and this is its description that he
lives, moves and acts in God, in the Divine, in the Infinite.
But if his action is governed by no external rule, one rule it
will observe that is not external; it will be dictated by no personal
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The Yoga of Divine Works
But if his action is governed by no external rule, one rule it
will observe that is not external; it will be dictated by no personal
272
The Yoga of Divine Works
desire or aim, but will be a part of a conscious and eventually a
well-ordered because self-ordered divine working in the world.
The Gita declares that the action of the liberated man must be
directed not by desire, but towards the keeping together of the
world, its government, guidance, impulsion, maintenance in the
path appointed to it. This injunction has been interpreted in the
sense that the world being an illusion in which most men must be
kept, since they are unfit for liberation, he must so act outwardly
as to cherish in them an attachment to their customary works
laid down for them by the social law. If so, it would be a poor
and petty rule and every noble heart would reject it to follow
rather the divine vow of Amitabha Buddha, the sublime prayer
of the Bhagavata, the passionate aspiration of Vivekananda. But
if we accept rather the view that the world is a divinely guided
movement of Nature emerging in man towards God and that this
is the work in which the Lord of the Gita declares that he is ever
occupied although he himself has nothing ungained that he has
yet to win, then a deep and true sense will appear for this great in¬
junction. To participate in that divine work, to live for God in the
world will be the rule of the Karmayogin; to live for God in the
world and therefore so to act that the Divine may more and more
manifest himself and the world go forward by whatever way of
its obscure pilgrimage and move nearer to the divine ideal.
How he shall do this, in what particular way, can be decided
by no general rule. It must develop or define itself from within;
the decision lies between God and our self, the Supreme Self
and the individual self that is the instrument of the work; even
before liberation, it is from the inner self, as soon as we become
conscious of it, that there rises the sanction, the spiritually de¬
termined choice. It is altogether from within that must come the
knowledge of the work that has to be done. There is no particular
work, no law or form or outwardly fixed or invariable way of
works which can be said to be that of the liberated being. The
phrase used in the Gita to express this work that has to be done
has indeed been interpreted in the sense that we must do our
duty without regard to the fruit. But this is a conception born
of European culture which is ethical rather than spiritual and
The Divine Work
273
But this is a conception born
of European culture which is ethical rather than spiritual and
The Divine Work
273
external rather than inwardly profound in its concepts. No such
general thing as duty exists; we have only duties, often in conflict
with each other, and these are determined by our environment,
our social relations, our external status in life. They are of great
value in training the immature moral nature and setting up a
standard which discourages the action of selfish desire. It has
already been said that so long as the seeker has no inner light,
he must govern himself by the best light he has, and duty, a
principle, a cause are among the standards he may temporarily
erect and observe. But for all that, duties are external things, not
stuff of the soul and cannot be the ultimate standard of action in
this path. It is the duty of the soldier to fight when called upon,
even to fire upon his own kith and kin; but such a standard
or any akin to it cannot be imposed on the liberated man. On
the other hand, to love or have compassion, to obey the highest
truth of our being, to follow the command of the Divine are not
duties; these things are a law of the nature as it rises towards
the Divine, an outflowing of action from a soul-state, a high
reality of the spirit. The action of the liberated doer of works
must be even such an outflowing from the soul; it must come to
him or out of him as a natural result of his spiritual union with
the Divine and not be formed by an edifying construction of the
mental thought and will, the practical reason or the social sense.
In the ordinary life a personal, social or traditional constructed
rule, standard or ideal is the guide; once the spiritual journey has
begun, this must be replaced by an inner and outer rule or way of
living necessary for our self-discipline, liberation and perfection,
a way of living proper to the path we follow or enjoined by the
spiritual guide and master, the Guru, or else dictated by a Guide
within us. But in the last state of the soul’s infinity and freedom
all outward standards are replaced or laid aside and there is left
only a spontaneous and integral obedience to the Divine with
whom we are in union and an action spontaneously fulfilling the
integral spiritual truth of our being and nature.
274
The Yoga of Divine Works
274
The Yoga of Divine Works
It is this deeper sense in which we must accept the dictum of the
Gita that action determined and governed by the nature must be
our law of works. It is not, certainly, the superficial temperament
or the character or habitual impulses that are meant, but in the
literal sense of the Sanskrit word our “own being”, our essential
nature, the divine stuff of our souls. Whatever springs from this
root or flows from these sources is profound, essential, right;
the rest — opinions, impulses, habits, desires — may be merely
surface formations or casual vagaries of the being or impositions
from outside. They shift and change, but this remains constant.
It is not the executive forms taken by Nature in us that are
ourselves or the abidingly constant and expressive shape of
ourselves; it is the spiritual being in us — and this includes the
soul-becoming of it — that persists through time in the universe.
We cannot, however, easily distinguish this true inner law
of our being; it is kept screened from us so long as the heart
and intellect remain unpurified from egoism: till then we follow
superficial and impermanent ideas, impulses, desires, sugges¬
tions and impositions of all kinds from our environment or work
out formations of our temporary mental, vital, physical person¬
ality — that passing experimental and structural self which has
been made for us by an interaction between our being and the
pressure of a lower cosmic Nature. In proportion as we are
purified, the true being within declares itself more clearly; our
will is less entangled in suggestions from outside or shut up in
our own superficial mental constructions. Egoism renounced,
the nature purified, action will come from the soul’s dictates,
from the depths or the heights of the spirit, or it will be openly
governed by the Lord who was all the time seated secretly within
our hearts. The supreme and final word of the Gita for the Yogin
is that he should leave all conventional formulas of belief and
action, all fixed and external rules of conduct, all constructions
of the outward or surface Nature, dharmas, and take refuge in
the Divine alone. Free from desire and attachment, one with
all beings, living in the infinite Truth and Purity and acting out
of the profoundest deeps of his inner consciousness, governed
by his immortal, divine and highest Self, all his works will be
The Divine Work
275
Free from desire and attachment, one with
all beings, living in the infinite Truth and Purity and acting out
of the profoundest deeps of his inner consciousness, governed
by his immortal, divine and highest Self, all his works will be
The Divine Work
275
directed by the Power within through that essential spirit and
nature in us which, knowing, warring, working, loving, serving,
is always divine, towards the fulfilment of God in the world, an
expression of the Eternal in Time.
A divine action arising spontaneously, freely, infallibly from
the light and force of our spiritual self in union with the Divine
is the last state of this integral Yoga of Works. The truest reason
why we must seek liberation is not to be delivered, individu¬
ally, from the sorrow of the world, though that deliverance too
will be given to us, but that we may be one with the Divine,
the Supreme, the Eternal. The truest reason why we must seek
perfection, a supreme status, purity, knowledge, strength, love,
capacity, is not that personally we may enjoy the divine Nature
or be even as the gods, though that enjoyment too will be ours,
but because this liberation and perfection are the divine Will in
us, the highest truth of our self in Nature, the always intended
goal of a progressive manifestation in the universe. The divine
Nature, free and perfect and blissful, must be manifested in the
individual in order that it may manifest in the world. Even in the
Ignorance the individual lives really in the universal and for the
universal Purpose, for in the very act of pursuing the purposes
and desires of his ego, he is forced by Nature to contribute by
his egoistic action to her work and purpose in the worlds; but
it is without conscious intention, imperfectly done, and his con¬
tribution is to her half-evolved and half-conscient, her imperfect
and crude movement. To escape from ego and be united with
the Divine is at once the liberation and the consummation of
his individuality; so liberated, purified, perfected, the individual
— the divine soul — lives consciously and entirely, as was from
the first intended, in and for the cosmic and transcendent Divine
and for his Will in the universe.
In the Way of Knowledge we may arrive at a point where
we can leap out of personality and universe, escape from all
thought and will and works and all way of Nature and, absorbed
and taken up into Eternity, plunge into the Transcendence; that,
though not obligatory on the God-knower, may be the soul’s
decision, the turn pursued by the self within us. In the Way of
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The Yoga of Divine Works
Devotion we may reach through an intensity of adoration and
joy union with the supreme All-Beloved and remain eternally in
the ecstasy of his presence, absorbed in him alone, intimately
in one world of bliss with him; that then may be our being’s
impulsion, its spiritual choice. But in the Way of Works another
prospect opens; for travelling on that path, we can enter into
liberation and perfection by becoming of one law and power of
nature with the Eternal; we are identified with him in our will
and dynamic self as much as in our spiritual status; a divine way
of works is the natural outcome of this union, a divine living in a
spiritual freedom the body of its self-expression. In the Integral
Yoga these three lines of approach give up their exclusions,
meet and coalesce or spring out of each other; liberated from
the mind’s veil over the self, we live in the Transcendence, enter
by the adoration of the heart into the oneness of a supreme love
and bliss, and all our forces of being uplifted into the one Force,
our will and works surrendered into the one Will and Power,
assume the dynamic perfection of the divine Nature.
Appendix
to Part I
The following chapter was left unfinished. It was not
included in the edition of The Synthesis of Yoga, Part I,
that was published during Sri Aurobindo’s lifetime.
Chapter XIII
The Supermind and the
Yoga of Works
Appendix
to Part I
The following chapter was left unfinished. It was not
included in the edition of The Synthesis of Yoga, Part I,
that was published during Sri Aurobindo’s lifetime.
Chapter XIII
The Supermind and the
Yoga of Works
An integral Yoga includes as a vital and indispensable
element in its total and ultimate aim the conversion of the
whole being into a higher spiritual consciousness and a
larger divine existence. Our parts of will and action, our parts of
knowledge, our thinking being, our emotional being, our being
of life, all our self and nature must seek the Divine, enter into
the Infinite, unite with the Eternal. But man’s present nature is
limited, divided, unequal, — it is easiest for him to concentrate
in the strongest part of his being and follow a definite line of
progress proper to his nature: only rare individuals have the
strength to take a large immediate plunge straight into the sea
of the Divine Infinity. Some therefore must choose as a starting-
point a concentration in thought or contemplation or the mind’s
one-pointedness to find the eternal reality of the Self in them;
others can more easily withdraw into the heart to meet there the
Divine, the Eternal: yet others are predominantly dynamic and
active; for these it is best to centre themselves in the will and en¬
large their being through works. United with the Self and source
of all by their surrender of their will into its infinity, guided in
their works by the secret Divinity within or surrendered to the
Lord of the cosmic action as the master and mover of all their
energies of thought, feeling, act, becoming by this enlargement
of being selfless and universal, they can reach by works some first
fullness of a spiritual status. But the path, whatever its point of
starting, must debouch into a vaster dominion; it must proceed
in the end through a totality of integrated knowledge, emotion,
will of dynamic action, perfection of the being and the entire
nature. In the supramental consciousness, on the level of the
supramental existence this integration becomes consummate;
280
The Yoga of Divine Works
In the supramental consciousness, on the level of the
supramental existence this integration becomes consummate;
280
The Yoga of Divine Works
there knowledge, will, emotion, the perfection of the self and
the dynamic nature rise each to its absolute of itself and all to
their perfect harmony and fusion with each other, to a divine
integrality, a divine perfection. For the supermind is a Truth-
Consciousness in which the Divine Reality, fully manifested, no
longer works with the instrumentation of the Ignorance; a truth
of status of being which is absolute becomes dynamic in a truth
of energy and activity of the being which is self-existent and
perfect. Every movement there is a movement of the self-aware
truth of Divine Being and every part is in entire harmony with
the whole. Even the most limited and finite action is in the Truth-
Consciousness a movement of the Eternal and Infinite and par¬
takes of the inherent absoluteness and perfection of the Eternal
and Infinite. An ascent into the supramental Truth not only raises
our spiritual and essential consciousness to that height but brings
about a descent of this Light and Truth into all our being and all
our parts of nature. All then becomes part of the Divine Truth, an
element and means of the supreme union and oneness; this ascent
and descent must be therefore an ultimate aim of this Yoga.
A union with the Divine Reality of our being and all being
is the one essential object of the Yoga. It is necessary to keep this
in mind; we must remember that our Yoga is not undertaken for
the sake of the acquisition of supermind itself but for the sake
of the Divine; we seek the supermind not for its own joy and
greatness but to make the union absolute and complete, to feel
it, possess it, dynamise it in every possible way of our being, in
its highest intensities and largest widenesses and in every range
and turn and nook and recess of our nature. It is a mistake to
think, as many are apt to think, that the object of a supramental
Yoga is to arrive at a mighty magnificence of supermanhood,
a divine power and greatness, the self-fulfilment of a magnified
individual personality. This is a false and disastrous conception,
— disastrous because it is likely to raise the pride, vanity and am¬
bition of the rajasic vital mind in us and that, if not overpassed
and overcome, must lead to spiritual downfall, false because it is
an egoistic conception and the first condition of the supramental
change is to get rid of ego. It is most dangerous for the active and
It is most dangerous for the active and
The Supermind and the Yoga of Works
281
dynamic nature of the man of will and works which can easily
be led away by the pursuit of power. Power comes inevitably by
the supramental change, it is a necessary condition for a perfect
action: but it is the Divine Shakti that comes and takes up the
nature and the life, the power of the One acting through the
spiritual individual; it is not an aggrandisement of the personal
force, not the last crowning fulfilment of the separative mental
and vital ego. Self-fulfilment is a result of the Yoga, but its
aim is not the greatness of the individual. The sole aim is a
spiritual perfection, a finding of the true self and a union with
the Divine by putting on the divine consciousness and nature.^
All the rest is constituent detail and attendant circumstance.
Ego-centric impulses, ambition, desire of power and greatness,
motives of self-assertion are foreign to this greater consciousness
and would be an insuperable bar against any possibility of even
a distant approach towards the supramental change. One must
lose one’s little lower self to find the greater self. Union with
the Divine must be the master motive; even the discovery of
the truth of one’s own being and of all being, life in that truth
and its greater consciousness, perfection of the nature are only
the natural results of that movement. Indispensable conditions
of its entire consummation, they are part of the central aim
only because they are a necessary development and a major
consequence.
It must also be kept in mind that the supramental change is
difficult, distant, an ultimate stage; it must be regarded as the end
of a far-off vista; it cannot be and must not be turned into a first
aim, a constantly envisaged goal or an immediate objective. For
it can only come into the view of possibility after much arduous
self-conquest and self-exceeding, at the end of many long and
trying stages of a difficult self-evolution of the nature. One must
first acquire an inner Yogic consciousness and replace by it our
ordinary view of things, natural movements, motives of life; one
must revolutionise the whole present build of our being. Next,
we have to go still deeper, discover our veiled psychic entity and
^ sadharmya mukti.
282
The Yoga of Divine Works
Next,
we have to go still deeper, discover our veiled psychic entity and
^ sadharmya mukti.
282
The Yoga of Divine Works
in its light and under its government psychicise our inner and
outer parts, turn mind-nature, life-nature, body-nature and all
our mental, vital, physical action and states and movements
into a conscious instrumentation of the soul. Afterwards or
concurrently we have to spiritualise the being in its entirety by
a descent of a divine Light, Force, Purity, Knowledge, freedom
and wideness. It is necessary to break down the limits of the per¬
sonal mind, life and physicality, dissolve the ego, enter into the
cosmic consciousness, realise the self, acquire a spiritualised and
universalised mind and heart, life-force, physical consciousness.
Then only the passage into supramental consciousness begins to
become possible, and even then there is a difficult ascent to make
each stage of which is a separate arduous achievement. Yoga is
a rapid and concentrated conscious evolution of the being, but
however rapid, even though it may effect in a single life what in
an unassisted Nature might take centuries and millenniums or
many hundreds of lives, still all evolution must move by stages;
even the greatest rapidity and concentration of the movement
cannot swallow up all the stages or reverse natural process and
bring the end near to the beginning. A hasty and ignorant mind,
a too eager force easily forget this necessity; they rush forward
to make the supermind an immediate aim and expect to pull it
down with a pitchfork from its highest heights in the Infinite.
This is not only an absurd expectation but full of danger. For the
vital desire may very well bring in an action of dark or vehement
vital powers which hold out before it a promise of immediate
fulfilment of its impossible longing; the consequence is likely to
be a plunge into many kinds of self-deception, a yielding to the
falsehoods and temptations of the forces of darkness, a hunt
for supernormal powers, a turning away from the Divine to the
Asuric nature, a fatal self-inflation into an unnatural unhuman
and undivine bigness of magnified ego. If the being is small, the
nature weak and incapable, there is not this large-scale disaster;
but a loss of balance, a mental unhinging and fall into unrea¬
son or a vital unhinging and consequent moral aberration or a
deviation into some kind of morbid abnormality of the nature
may be the untoward consequence. This is not a Yoga in which
The Supermind and the Yoga of Works
283
This is not a Yoga in which
The Supermind and the Yoga of Works
283
abnormality of any kind, even if it be an exalted abnormality,
can be admitted as a way to self-fulfilment or spiritual realisa¬
tion. Even when one enters into supernormal and suprarational
experience, there should be no disturbance of the poise which
must be kept firm from the summit of the consciousness to its
base; the experiencing consciousness must preserve a calm bal¬
ance, an unfailing clarity and order in its observation, a sort of
sublimated commonsense, an unfailing power of self-criticism,
right discrimination, coordination and firm vision of things; a
sane grasp on facts and a high spiritualised positivism must
always be there. It is not by becoming irrational or infrarational
that one can go beyond ordinary nature into supernature; it
should be done by passing through reason to a greater light of
superreason. This superreason descends into reason and takes it
up into higher levels even while breaking its limitations; reason
is not lost but changes and becomes its own true unlimited self,
a coordinating power of the supernature.
Another error that has to be guarded against is also one to
which our mentality is easily prone; it is to take some higher
intermediate consciousness or even any kind of supernormal
consciousness for the supermind. To reach supermind it is not
enough to go above the ordinary movements of the human mind;
it is not enough to receive a greater light, a greater power, a
greater joy or to develop capacities of knowledge, sight, effective
will that surpass the normal range of the human being. All light is
not the light of the spirit, still less is all light the light of the super¬
mind; the mind, the vital, the physical itself have lights of their
own, as yet hidden, which can be very inspiring, exalting, in¬
formative, powerfully executive. A breaking out into the cosmic
consciousness may also bring in an immense enlargement of the
consciousness and power. An opening into the inner mind, inner
vital, inner physical, any range of the subliminal consciousness,
can liberate an activity of abnormal or supernormal powers of
knowledge, action or experience which the uninstructed mind
can easily mistake for spiritual revelations, inspirations, intu¬
itions. An opening upward into the greater ranges of the higher
mental being can bring down much light and force creating
284
The Yoga of Divine Works
An opening upward into the greater ranges of the higher
mental being can bring down much light and force creating
284
The Yoga of Divine Works
an intense activity of the intuitivised mind and life-power or an
ascent into these ranges can bring a true but still incomplete light
easily exposed to mixture, a light which is spiritual in its source
though it does not always remain spiritual in its active character
when it comes down into the lower nature. But none of these
things is the supramental light, the supramental power; that can
only be seen and grasped when we have reached the summits of
mental being, entered into overmind and stand on the borders
of an upper, a greater hemisphere of spiritual existence. There
the ignorance, the inconscience, the original blank Nescience
slowly awaking towards a half-knowledge, which are the basis
of material Nature and which surround, penetrate and power¬
fully limit all our powers of mind and life, cease altogether; for an
unmixed and unmodified Truth-consciousness is there the sub¬
stance of all the being, its pure spiritual texture. To imagine that
we have reached such a condition when we are still moving in
the dynamics of the Ignorance, though it may be an enlightened
or illumined Ignorance, is to lay ourselves open either to a dis¬
astrous misleading or to an arrest of the evolution of the being.
For if it is some inferior state that we thus mistake for the super¬
mind, it lays us open to all the dangers we have seen to attend a
presumptuous egoistic haste in our demand for achievement. If
it is one of the higher states that we presume to be the highest,
we may, though we achieve much, yet fall short of the greater,
more perfect goal of our being; for we shall remain content with
an approximation and the supreme transformation will escape
us. Even the achievement of a complete inner liberation and a
high spiritual consciousness is not that supreme transformation;
for we may have that achievement, a status perfect in itself, in
essence, and still our dynamic parts may in their instrumenta¬
tion belong to an enlightened spiritualised mind and may be in
consequence, like all mind, defective even in its greater power
and knowledge, still subject to a partial or local obscuration or
a limitation by the original circumscribing nescience.
Part II
The Yoga of Integral Knowledg
Chapter I
The Object of Knowledge
Part II
The Yoga of Integral Knowledg
Chapter I
The Object of Knowledge
All spiritual seeking moves towards an object of
Knowledge to which men ordinarily do not turn the
eye of the mind, to someone or something Eternal,
Infinite, Absolute that is not the temporal things or forces of
which we are sensible, although he or it may be in them or
behind them or their source or creator. It aims at a state of
knowledge by which we can touch, enter or know by identity
this Eternal, Infinite and Absolute, a consciousness other than
our ordinary consciousness of ideas and forms and things, a
Knowledge that is not what we call knowledge but something
self-existent, everlasting, infinite. And although it may or even
necessarily must, since man is a mental creature, start from our
ordinary instruments of knowledge, yet it must as necessarily go
beyond them and use supra-sensuous and supramental means
and faculties, for it is in search of something that is itself supra-
sensuous and supramental and beyond the grasp of the mind
and senses, even if through mind and sense there can come a
first glimpse of it or a reflected image.
The traditional systems, whatever their other differences,
all proceed on the belief or the perception that the Eternal and
Absolute can only be or at least can only inhabit a pure tran¬
scendent state of non-cosmic existence or else a non-existence.
All cosmic existence or all that we call existence is a state of
ignorance. Even the highest individual perfection, even the most
blissful cosmic condition is no better than a supreme ignorance.
All that is individual, all that is cosmic has to be austerely
renounced by the seeker of the absolute Truth. The supreme
quiescent Self or else the absolute Nihil is the sole Truth, the
only object of spiritual knowledge. The state of knowledge, the
consciousness other than this temporal that we must attain is
Nirvana, an extinction of ego, a cessation of all mental, vital
288
The Yoga of Integral Knowledge
The state of knowledge, the
consciousness other than this temporal that we must attain is
Nirvana, an extinction of ego, a cessation of all mental, vital
288
The Yoga of Integral Knowledge
and physical activities, of all activities whatsoever, a supreme
illumined quiescence, the pure bliss of an impersonal tranquil¬
lity self-absorbed and ineffable. The means are meditation, a
concentration excluding all things else, a total loss of the mind
in its object. Action is permissible only in the first stages of
the search in order to purify the seeker and make him morally
and temperamentally a fit vessel for the knowledge. Even this
action must either be confined to the performance of the rites
of worship and the prescribed duties of life rigorously ordained
by the Hindu Shastra or, as in the Buddhistic discipline, must
be guided along the eightfold path to the supreme practice of
the works of compassion which lead towards the practical an¬
nihilation of self in the good of others. In the end, in any severe
and pure Jnanayoga, all works must be abandoned for an entire
quiescence. Action may prepare salvation; it cannot give it. Any
continued adherence to action is incompatible with the highest
progress and may be an insuperable obstacle to the attainment
of the spiritual goal. The supreme state of quiescence is the very
opposite of action and cannot be attained by those who persist
in works. And even devotion, love, worship are disciplines for
the unripe soul, are at best the best methods of the Ignorance.
For they are offered to something other, higher and greater than
ourselves; but in the supreme knowledge there can be no such
thing, since there is either only one self or no self at all and
therefore either no one to do the worship and offer the love
and devotion or no one to receive it. Even thought-activity must
disappear in the sole consciousness of identity or of nothingness
and by its own quiescence bring about the quiescence of the
whole nature. The absolute Identical alone must remain or else
the eternal Nihil.
This pure Jnanayoga comes by the intellect, although it
ends in the transcendence of the intellect and its workings. The
thinker in us separates himself from all the rest of what we
phenomenally are, rejects the heart, draws back from the life
and the senses, separates from the body that he may arrive at his
own exclusive fulfilment in that which is beyond even himself
and his function. There is a truth that underlies, as there is
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A page of the “The Yoga Integral Knowledge”
as revised by Sri Aurobindo during the 1930s
The Object of Knowledge
289
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A page of the “The Yoga Integral Knowledge”
as revised by Sri Aurobindo during the 1930s
The Object of Knowledge
289
an experience that seems to justify this attitude. There is an
Essence that is in its nature a quiescence, a supreme of Silence in
the Being that is beyond its own developments and mutations,
immutable and therefore superior to all activities of which it is
at most a Witness. And in the hierarchy of our psychological
functions the Thought is in a way nearest to this Self, nearest
at least to its aspect of the all-conscious knower who regards
all activities but can stand back from them all. The heart, will
and other powers in us are fundamentally active, turn naturally
towards action, find through it their fulfilment, — although they
also may automatically arrive at a certain quiescence by fullness
of satisfaction in their activities or else by a reverse process of
exhaustion through perpetual disappointment and dissatisfac¬
tion. The thought too is an active power, but is more capable of
arriving at quiescence by its own conscious choice and will. The
thought is more easily content with the illumined intellectual
perception of this silent Witness Self that is higher than all our
activities and, that immobile Spirit once seen, is ready, deeming
its mission of truth-finding accomplished, to fall at rest and
become itself immobile. For in its most characteristic movement
it is itself apt to be a disinterested witness, judge, observer of
things more than an eager participant and passionate labourer in
the work and can arrive very readily at a spiritual or philosophic
calm and detached aloofness. And since men are mental beings,
thought, if not truly their best and highest, is at least their most
constant, normal and effective means for enlightening their ig¬
norance. Armed with its functions of gathering and reflection,
meditation, fixed contemplation, the absorbed dwelling of the
mind on its object, sravana, manana, nididhyasana, it stands at
our tops as an indispensable aid to our realisation of that which
we pursue, and it is not surprising that it should claim to be the
leader of the journey and the only available guide or at least the
direct and innermost door of the temple.
In reality, thought is only a scout and pioneer; it can guide
but not command or effectuate. The leader of the journey, the
captain of the march, the first and most ancient priest of our
sacrifice is the Will. This Will is not the wish of the heart or
290
The Yoga of Integral Knowledge
the demand or preference of the mind to which we often give
the name. It is that inmost, dominant and often veiled conscious
force of our being and of all being, Tapas, Shakti, Sraddha, that
sovereignly determines our orientation and of which the intellect
and the heart are more or less blind and automatic servants and
instruments. The Self that is quiescent, at rest, vacant of things
and happenings is a support and background to existence, a
silent channel or a hypostasis of something Supreme: it is not
itself the one entirely real existence, not itself the Supreme. The
Eternal, the Supreme is the Lord and the all-originating Spirit.
Superior to all activities and not bound by any of them, it is
the source, sanction, material, efficient power, master of all ac¬
tivities. All activities proceed from this supreme Self and are
determined by it; all are its operations, processes of its own
conscious force and not of something alien to Self, some power
other than the Spirit. In these activities is expressed the conscious
Will or Shakti of the Spirit moved to manifest its being in infinite
ways, a Will or Power not ignorant but at one with its own
self-knowledge and its knowledge of all that it is put out to
express. And of this Power a secret spiritual will and soul-faith
in us, the dominant hidden force of our nature, is the individual
instrument, more nearly in communication with the Supreme,
a surer guide and enlightener, could we once get at it and hold
it, because profounder and more intimately near to the Identical
and Absolute than the surface activities of our thought powers.
To know that will in ourselves and in the universe and follow it
to its divine finalities, whatever these may be, must surely be the
highest way and truest culmination for knowledge as for works,
for the seeker in life and for the seeker in Yoga.
To know that will in ourselves and in the universe and follow it
to its divine finalities, whatever these may be, must surely be the
highest way and truest culmination for knowledge as for works,
for the seeker in life and for the seeker in Yoga.
The thought, since it is not the highest or strongest part
of Nature, not even the sole or deepest index to Truth, ought
not to follow its own exclusive satisfaction or take that for the
sign of its attainment to the supreme Knowledge. It is here as
the guide, up to a certain point, of the heart, the life and the
other members, but it cannot be a substitute for them; it has to
see not only what is its own ultimate satisfaction but whether
there is not an ultimate satisfaction intended also for these other
The Object of Knowledge
291
members. An exclusive path of abstract thought would be jus¬
tified, only if the object of the Supreme Will in the universe
has been nothing more than a descent into the activity of the
ignorance operated by the mind as blinding instrument and
jailor through false idea and sensation and an ascent into the
quiescence of knowledge equally operated by the mind through
correct thought as enlightening instrument and saviour. But the
chances are that there is an aim in the world less absurd and
aimless, an impulse towards the Absolute less dry and abstract,
a truth of the world more large and complex, a more richly
infinite height of the Infinite. Certainly, an abstract logic must
always arrive, as the old systems arrived, at an infinite empty
Negation or an infinite equally vacant Affirmation; for, abstract
it moves towards an absolute abstraction and these are the only
two abstractions that are absolutely absolute. But a concrete ever
deepening wisdom waiting on more and more riches of infinite
experience and not the confident abstract logic of the narrow
and incompetent human mind is likely to be the key to a divine
suprahuman knowledge. The heart, the will, the life and even the
body, no less than the thought, are forms of a divine Conscious-
Being and indices of great significance. These too have powers
by which the soul can return to its complete self-awareness or
means by which it can enjoy it. The object of the Supreme Will
may well be a culmination in which the whole being is intended
to receive its divine satisfaction, the heights enlightening the
depths, the material Inconscient revealed to itself as the Divine
by the touch of the supreme Superconscience.
The traditional Way of Knowledge proceeds by elimina¬
tion and rejects successively the body, the life, the senses, the
heart, the very thought in order to merge into the quiescent Self
or supreme Nihil or indefinite Absolute. The way of integral
knowledge supposes that we are intended to arrive at an inte¬
gral self-fulfilment and the only thing that is to be eliminated is
our own unconsciousness, the Ignorance and the results of the
Ignorance. Eliminate the falsity of the being which figures as the
ego; then our true being can manifest in us. Eliminate the falsity
of the life which figures as mere vital craving and the mechanical
292
The Yoga of Integral Knowledge
round of our corporeal existence; our true life in the power of
the Godhead and the joy of the Infinite will appear. Eliminate
the falsity of the senses with their subjection to material shows
and to dual sensations; there is a greater sense in us that can
open through these to the Divine in things and divinely reply
to it. Eliminate the falsity of the heart with its turbid passions
and desires and its dual emotions; a deeper heart in us can open
with its divine love for all creatures and its infinite passion and
yearning for the responses of the Infinite. Eliminate the falsity of
the thought with its imperfect mental constructions, its arrogant
assertions and denials, its limited and exclusive concentrations;
a greater faculty of knowledge is behind that can open to the
true Truth of God and the soul and Nature and the universe.
An integral self-fulfilment, — an absolute, a culmination for the
experiences of the heart, for its instinct of love, joy, devotion
and worship; an absolute, a culmination for the senses, for their
pursuit of divine beauty and good and delight in the forms of
things; an absolute, a culmination for the life, for its pursuit
of works, of divine power, mastery and perfection; an absolute,
a culmination beyond its own limits for the thought, for its
hunger after truth and light and divine wisdom and knowledge.
Not something quite other than themselves from which they
are all cast away is the end of these things in our nature, but
something supreme in which they at once transcend themselves
and find their own absolutes and infinitudes, their harmonies
beyond measure.
Behind the traditional way of Knowledge, justifying its
thought-process of elimination and withdrawal, stands an
overmastering spiritual experience. Deep, intense, convincing,
common to all who have overstepped a certain limit of the active
mind-belt into horizonless inner space, this is the great experi¬
ence of liberation, the consciousness of something within us that
is behind and outside of the universe and all its forms, interests,
aims, events and happenings, calm, untouched, unconcerned,
illimitable, immobile, free, the uplook to something above us
indescribable and unseizable into which by abolition of our
personality we can enter, the presence of an omnipresent eternal
The Object of Knowledge
293
witness Purusha, the sense of an Infinity or a Timelessness that
looks down on us from an august negation of all our existence
and is alone the one thing Real. This experience is the highest
sublimation of spiritualised mind looking resolutely beyond
its own existence. No one who has not passed through this
liberation can be entirely free from the mind and its meshes, but
one is not compelled to linger in this experience for ever. Great
as it is, it is only the Mind’s overwhelming experience of what
is beyond itself and all it can conceive. It is a supreme negative
experience, but beyond it is all the tremendous light of an
infinite Consciousness, an illimitable Knowledge, an affirmative
absolute Presence.
It is a supreme negative
experience, but beyond it is all the tremendous light of an
infinite Consciousness, an illimitable Knowledge, an affirmative
absolute Presence.
The object of spiritual knowledge is the Supreme, the Divine,
the Infinite and Absolute. This Supreme has its relations to our
individual being and its relations to the universe and it tran¬
scends both the soul and the universe. Neither the universe nor
the individual are what they seem to be, for the report of them
which our mind and our senses give us is, so long as they are
unenlightened by a faculty of higher supramental and suprasen-
suous knowledge, a false report, an imperfect construction, an
attenuated and erroneous figure. And yet that which the uni¬
verse and the individual seem to be is still a figure of what they
really are, a figure that points beyond itself to the reality behind
it. Truth proceeds by a correction of the values our mind and
senses give us, and first by the action of a higher intelligence that
enlightens and sets right as far as may be the conclusions of the
ignorant sense-mind and limited physical intelligence; that is the
method of all human knowledge and science. But beyond it there
is a knowledge, a Truth-consciousness, that exceeds our intellect
and brings us into the true light of which it is a refracted ray.
There the abstract terms of the pure reason and the construc¬
tions of the mind disappear or are converted into concrete soul-
vision and the tremendous actuality of spiritual experience. This
knowledge can turn away to the absolute Eternal and lose vision
of the soul and the universe; but it can too see this existence
from that Eternal. When that is done, we find that the ignorance
of the mind and the senses and all the apparent futilities of
294
The Yoga of Integral Knowledge
When that is done, we find that the ignorance
of the mind and the senses and all the apparent futilities of
294
The Yoga of Integral Knowledge
human life were not a useless excursion of the conscious being,
an otiose blunder. Here they were planned as a rough ground
for the self-expression of the Soul that comes from the Infinite,
a material foundation for its self-unfolding and self-possessing
in the terms of the universe. It is true that in themselves they
and all that is here have no significance and to build separate
significances for them is to live in an illusion, Maya; but they
have a supreme significance in the Supreme, an absolute Power
in the Absolute and it is that that assigns to them and refers to
that Truth their present relative values. This is the all-uniting
experience that is the foundation of the deepest integral and
most intimate self-knowledge and world-knowledge.
In relation to the individual the Supreme is our own true and
highest self, that which ultimately we are in our essence, that of
which we are in our manifested nature. A spiritual knowledge,
moved to arrive at the true Self in us, must reject, as the tradi¬
tional way of knowledge rejects, all misleading appearances. It
must discover that the body is not our self, our foundation of
existence; it is a sensible form of the Infinite. The experience of
Matter as the world’s sole foundation and the physical brain and
nerves and cells and molecules as the one truth of all things in
us, the ponderous inadequate basis of materialism, is a delusion,
a half-view taken for the whole, the dark bottom or shadow
of things misconceived as the luminous substance, the effective
figure of zero for the Integer. The materialist idea mistakes a
creation for the creative Power, a means of expression for That
which is expressed and expresses. Matter and our physical brain
and nerves and body are the field and foundation for one action
of a vital force that serves to connect the Self with the form of its
works and maintains them by its direct dynamis. The material
movements are an exterior notation by which the soul represents
its perceptions of certain truths of the Infinite and makes them
effective in the terms of Substance. These things are a language,
a notation, a hieroglyphic, a system of symbols, not themselves
the deepest truest sense of the things they intimate.
Neither is the Life ourself, the vitality, the energy which
plays in the brain, nerves and body; it is a power and not the
The Object of Knowledge
295
Neither is the Life ourself, the vitality, the energy which
plays in the brain, nerves and body; it is a power and not the
The Object of Knowledge
295
whole power of the Infinite. The experience of a life-force in-
strumentalising Matter as the foundation, source and true sum
of all things, the vibrating unsteady basis of vitalism, is a delu¬
sion, a half-view taken for the whole, a tide on a near shore
misconceived as all the ocean and its waters. The vitalist idea
takes something powerful but outward for the essence. Life-
force is the dynamisation of a consciousness which exceeds it.
That consciousness is felt and acts but does not become valid to
us in intelligence until we arrive at the higher term of Mind, our
present summit. Mind is here apparently a creation of Life, but
it is really the ulterior — not the ultimate — sense of Life itself
and what is behind it and a more conscious formulation of its
secret; Mind is an expression not of Life, but of that of which
Life itself is a less luminous expression.
And yet Mind also, our mentality, our thinking, understand¬
ing part, is not our Self, is not That, not the end or the beginning;
it is a half-light thrown from the Infinite. The experience of
mind as the creator of forms and things and of these forms
and things existing in the Mind only, the thin subtle basis of
idealism, is also a delusion, a half-view taken for the whole,
a pale refracted light idealised as the burning body of the Sun
and its splendour. This idealist vision also does not arrive at the
essence of being, does not even touch it but only an inferior mode
of Nature. Mind is the dubious outer penumbra of a conscious
existence which is not limited by mentality but exceeds it. The
method of the traditional way of knowledge, eliminating all
these things, arrives at the conception and realisation of a pure
conscious existence, self-aware, self-blissful, unconditioned by
mind and life and body and to its ultimate positive experience
that is Atman, the Self, the original and essential nature of our
existence. Here at last there is something centrally true, but in
its haste to arrive at it this knowledge assumes that there is
nothing between the thinking mind and the Highest, buddheh
paratas tu sah, and, shutting its eyes in Samadhi, tries to rush
through all that actually intervenes without even seeing these
great and luminous kingdoms of the Spirit. Perhaps it arrives at
its object, but only to fall asleep in the Infinite. Or, if it remains
296
The Yoga of Integral Knowledge
Perhaps it arrives at
its object, but only to fall asleep in the Infinite. Or, if it remains
296
The Yoga of Integral Knowledge
awake, it is in the highest experience of the Supreme into which
the self-annulling Mind can enter, but not in the supreme of the
Supreme, Paratpara. The Mind can only be aware of the Self in
a mentalised spiritual thinness, only of the mind-reflected Sach-
chidananda. The highest truth, the integral self-knowledge is not
to be gained by this self-blinded leap into the Absolute but by
a patient transit beyond the mind into the Truth-consciousness
where the Infinite can be known, felt, seen, experienced in all the
fullness of its unending riches. And there we discover this Self
that we are to be not only a static tenuous vacant Atman but
a great dynamic Spirit individual, universal and transcendent.
That Self and Spirit cannot be expressed by the mind’s abstract
generalisations; all the inspired descriptions of the seers and
mystics cannot exhaust its contents and its splendours.
In relation to the universe the Supreme is Brahman, the one
Reality which is not only the spiritual material and conscious
substance of all the ideas and forces and forms of the universe,
but their origin, support and possessor, the cosmic and supracos-
mic Spirit. All the last terms to which we can reduce the universe.
Force and Matter, Name and Form, Purusha and Prakriti, are
still not entirely that which the universe really is, either in itself
or its nature. As all that we are is the play and form, the mental,
psychic, vital and physical expression of a supreme Self uncon¬
ditioned by mind and life and body, the universe too is the play
and form and cosmic soul-expression and nature-expression of a
supreme Existence which is unconditioned by force and matter,
unconditioned by idea and name and form, unconditioned by the
fundamental distinction of Purusha and Prakriti. Our supreme
Self and the supreme Existence which has become the universe
are one Spirit, one self and one existence. The individual is in
nature one expression of the universal Being, in spirit an ema¬
nation of the Transcendence. For if he finds his self, he finds too
that his own true self is not this natural personality, this created
individuality, but is a universal being in its relations with others
and with Nature and in its upward term a portion or the living
front of a supreme transcendental Spirit.
This supreme Existence is not conditioned by the individual
The Object of Knowledge
297
This supreme Existence is not conditioned by the individual
The Object of Knowledge
297
or by the universe. A spiritual knowledge can therefore surpass
or even eliminate these two powers of the Spirit and arrive at the
conception of something utterly Transcendent, something that
is unnameable and mentally unknowable, a sheer Absolute. The
traditional way of knowledge eliminates individual and universe.
The Absolute it seeks after is featureless, indefinable, relation¬
less, not this, not that, neti neti. And yet we can say of it that
it is One, that it is Infinite, that it is ineffable Bliss, Conscious¬
ness, Existence. Although unknowable to the mind, yet through
our individual being and through the names and forms of the
universe we can approach the realisation of the supreme Self
that is Brahman, and by the realisation of the self we come to
a certain realisation also of this utter Absolute of which our
true self is the essential form in our consciousness {svarupa).
These are the devices the human mind is compelled to use if it
is to form to itself any conception at all of a transcendent and
unconditioned Absolute. The system of negation is indispens¬
able to it in order to get rid of its own definitions and limited
experience; it is obliged to escape through a vague Indefinite into
the Infinite. For it lives in a closed prison of constructions and
representations that are necessary for its action but are not the
self-existent truth either of Matter or Life or Mind or Spirit. But
if we can once cross beyond the Mind’s frontier twilight into the
vast plane of supramental Knowledge, these devices cease to be
indispensable. Supermind has quite another, a positive and direct
and living experience of the supreme Infinite. The Absolute is
beyond personality and beyond impersonality, and yet it is both
the Impersonal and the supreme Person and all persons. The
Absolute is beyond the distinction of unity and multiplicity, and
yet it is the One and the innumerable Many in all the universes.
It is beyond all limitation by quality and yet it is not limited
by a qualitiless void but is too all infinite qualities. It is the
individual soul and all souls and none of them; it is the formless
Brahman and the universe. It is the cosmic and the supracos-
mic Spirit, the supreme Lord, the supreme Self, the supreme
Purusha and supreme Shakti, the Ever Unborn who is endlessly
born, the Infinite who is innumerably finite, the multitudinous
298
The Yoga of Integral Knowledge
It is the cosmic and the supracos-
mic Spirit, the supreme Lord, the supreme Self, the supreme
Purusha and supreme Shakti, the Ever Unborn who is endlessly
born, the Infinite who is innumerably finite, the multitudinous
298
The Yoga of Integral Knowledge
One, the complex Simple, the many-sided Single, the Word of
the Silence Ineffable, the impersonal omnipresent Person, the
Mystery translucent in highest consciousness to its own spirit,
but to a lesser consciousness veiled in its own exceeding light
and impenetrable for ever. These things are to the dimensional
mind irreconcilable opposites, but to the constant vision and
experience of the supramental Truth-consciousness they are so
simply and inevitably the intrinsic nature of each other that even
to think of them as contraries is an unimaginable violence. The
walls constructed by the measuring and separating Intellect have
disappeared and the Truth in its simplicity and beauty appears
and reduces all to terms of its harmony and unity and light.
Dimensions and distinctions remain but as figures for use, not a
separative prison for the self-forgetting Spirit.
The consciousness of the transcendent Absolute with its
consequence in individual and universe is the last, the eternal
knowledge. Our minds may deal with it on various lines, may
build upon it conflicting philosophies, may limit, modify, over¬
stress, understress sides of the knowledge, deduce from it truth
or error; but our intellectual variations and imperfect statements
make no difference to the ultimate fact that if we push thought
and experience to their end, this is the knowledge in which they
terminate. The object of a Yoga of spiritual knowledge can be
nothing else than this eternal Reality, this Self, this Brahman,
this Transcendent that dwells over all and in all and is manifest
yet concealed in the individual, manifest yet disguised in the
universe.
The culmination of the path of knowledge need not neces¬
sarily entail extinction of our world-existence. For the Supreme
to whom we assimilate ourselves, the Absolute and Transcen¬
dent into whom we enter has always the complete and ultimate
consciousness for which we are seeking and yet he supports by
it his play in the world. Neither are we compelled to believe that
our world-existence ends because by attaining to knowledge its
object or consummation is fulfilled and therefore there is nothing
more for us here afterwards. For what we gain at first with its
release and immeasurable silence and quietude is only the eternal
The Object of Knowledge
299
For what we gain at first with its
release and immeasurable silence and quietude is only the eternal
The Object of Knowledge
299
self-realisation by the individual in the essence of his conscious
being; there will still remain on that foundation, unannulled
by the silence, one with the release and freedom, the infinitely
proceeding self-fulfilment of Brahman, its dynamic divine man¬
ifestation in the individual and by his presence, example and
action in others and in the universe at large, — the work which
the Great Ones remain to do. Our dynamic self-fulfilment cannot
be worked out so long as we remain in the egoistic consciousness,
in the mind’s candle-lit darkness, in the bondage. Our present
limited consciousness can only be a field of preparation, it can
consummate nothing; for all that it manifests is marred through
and through by an ego-ridden ignorance and error. The true and
divine self-fulfilment of Brahman in the manifestation is only
possible on the foundation of the Brahman-consciousness and
therefore through the acceptance of life by the liberated soul,
the Jivanmukta.
This is the integral knowledge; for we know that everywhere
and in all conditions all to the eye that sees is One, to a divine
experience all is one block of the Divine. It is only the mind
which for the temporary convenience of its own thought and
aspiration seeks to cut an artificial line of rigid division, a fiction
of perpetual incompatibility between one aspect and another of
the eternal oneness. The liberated knower lives and acts in the
world not less than the bound soul and ignorant mind but more,
doing all actions, sarvakrt, only with a true knowledge and a
greater conscient power. And by so doing he does not forfeit the
supreme unity nor fall from the supreme consciousness and the
highest knowledge. For the Supreme, however hidden now to
us, is here in the world no less than he could be in the most utter
and ineffable self-extinction, the most intolerant Nirvana.
Chapter II
The Status of Knowledge
For the Supreme, however hidden now to
us, is here in the world no less than he could be in the most utter
and ineffable self-extinction, the most intolerant Nirvana.
Chapter II
The Status of Knowledge
The self, the Divine, the Supreme Reality, the All, the
Transcendent, — the One in all these aspects is then the
object of Yogic knowledge. Ordinary objects, the external
appearances of life and matter, the psychology of our thoughts
and actions, the perception of the forces of the apparent world
can be part of this knowledge, but only in so far as it is part of
the manifestation of the One. It becomes at once evident that
the knowledge for which Yoga strives must be different from
what men ordinarily understand by the word. For we mean
ordinarily by knowledge an intellectual appreciation of the facts
of life, mind and matter and the laws that govern them. This is
a knowledge founded upon our sense-perception and upon rea¬
soning from our sense-perceptions and it is undertaken partly for
the pure satisfaction of the intellect, partly for practical efficiency
and the added power which knowledge gives in managing our
lives and the lives of others, in utilising for human ends the overt
or secret forces of Nature and in helping or hurting, in saving
and ennobling or in oppressing and destroying our fellow-men.
Yoga, indeed, is commensurate with all life and can include all
these subjects and objects. There is even a Yoga^ which can be
used for self-indulgence as well as for self-conquest, for hurting
others as well as for their salvation. But “all life” includes not
only, not even mainly life as humanity now leads it. It envisages
rather and regards as its one true object a higher truly con¬
scious existence which our half-conscious humanity does not
yet possess and can only arrive at by a self-exceeding spiritual
ascension. It is this greater consciousness and higher existence
^ Yoga develops power, it develops it even when we do not desire or consciously aim
at it; and power is always a double-edged weapon which can be used to hurt or destroy
as well as to help and save. Be it also noted that all destruction is not evil.
The Status of Knowledge
301
which is the peculiar and appropriate object of Yogic discipline.
Be it also noted that all destruction is not evil.
The Status of Knowledge
301
which is the peculiar and appropriate object of Yogic discipline.
This greater consciousness, this higher existence are not an
enlightened or illumined mentality supported by a greater dy¬
namic energy or supporting a purer moral life and character.
Their superiority to the ordinary human consciousness is not in
degree but in kind and essence. There is a change not merely
of the surface or instrumental manner of our being but of its
very foundation and dynamic principle. Yogic knowledge seeks
to enter into a secret consciousness beyond mind which is only
occultly here, concealed at the basis of all existence. For it is that
consciousness alone that truly knows and only by its possession
can we possess God and rightly know the world and its real
nature and secret forces. All this world visible or sensible to us
and all too in it that is not visible is merely the phenomenal
expression of something beyond the mind and the senses. The
knowledge which the senses and intellectual reasoning from the
data of the senses can bring us, is not true knowledge; it is a
science of appearances. And even appearances cannot be prop¬
erly known unless we know first the Reality of which they are
images. This Reality is their self and there is one self of all; when
that is seized, all other things can then be known in their truth
and no longer as now only in their appearance.
It is evident that however much we may analyse the physical
and sensible, we cannot by that means arrive at the knowledge
of the Self or of ourselves or of that which we call God. The
telescope, the microscope, the scalpel, the retort and alembic
cannot go beyond the physical, although they may arrive at
subtler and subtler truths about the physical. If then we confine
ourselves to what the senses and their physical aids reveal to
us and refuse from the beginning to admit any other reality or
any other means of knowledge, we are obliged to conclude that
nothing is real except the physical and that there is no Self in
us or in the universe, no God within and without, no ourselves
even except this aggregate of brain, nerves and body. But this we
are only obliged to conclude because we have assumed it firmly
from the beginning and therefore cannot but circle round to our
original assumption.
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The Yoga of Integral Knowledge
But this we
are only obliged to conclude because we have assumed it firmly
from the beginning and therefore cannot but circle round to our
original assumption.
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The Yoga of Integral Knowledge
If, then, there is a Self, a Reality not obvious to the senses,
it must be by other means than those of physical Science that it
is to be sought and known. The intellect is not that means. Un¬
doubtedly there are a number of suprasensuous truths at which
the intellect is able to arrive in its own manner and which it is
able to perceive and state as intellectual conceptions. The very
idea of Force for instance on which Science so much insists, is
a conception, a truth at which the intellect alone can arrive by
going beyond its data; for we do not sense this universal force
but only its results, and the force itself we infer as a necessary
cause of these results. So also the intellect by following a certain
line of rigorous analysis can arrive at the intellectual conception
and the intellectual conviction of the Self and this conviction
can be very real, very luminous, very potent as the beginning
of other and greater things. Still, in itself intellectual analysis
can only lead to an arrangement of clear conceptions, perhaps
to a right arrangement of true conceptions; but this is not the
knowledge aimed at by Yoga. For it is not in itself an effective
knowledge. A man may be perfect in it and yet be precisely what
he was before except in the mere fact of the greater intellectual
illumination. The change of our being at which Yoga aims, may
not at all take place.
A man may be perfect in it and yet be precisely what
he was before except in the mere fact of the greater intellectual
illumination. The change of our being at which Yoga aims, may
not at all take place.
It is true that intellectual deliberation and right discrimina¬
tion are an important part of the Yoga of knowledge; but their
object is rather to remove a difficulty than to arrive at the final
and positive result of this path. Our ordinary intellectual notions
are a stumbling-block in the way of knowledge; for they are
governed by the error of the senses and they found themselves
on the notion that matter and body are the reality, that life
and force are the reality, that passion and emotion, thought and
sense are the reality; and with these things we identify ourselves,
and because we identify ourselves with these things we cannot
get back to the real self. Therefore, it is necessary for the seeker
of knowledge to remove this stumbling-block and to get right
notions about himself and the world; for how shall we pursue by
knowledge the real self if we have no notion of what it is and are
on the contrary burdened with ideas quite opposite to the truth?
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303
Therefore right thought is a necessary preliminary, and once
the habit of right thought is established, free from sense-error
and desire and old association and intellectual prejudgment, the
understanding becomes purified and offers no serious obstacle
to the farther process of knowledge. Still, right thought only be¬
comes effective when in the purified understanding it is followed
by other operations, by vision, by experience, by realisation.
Still, right thought only be¬
comes effective when in the purified understanding it is followed
by other operations, by vision, by experience, by realisation.
What are these operations? They are not mere psychological
self-analysis and self-observation. Such analysis, such observa¬
tion are, like the process of right thought, of immense value and
practically indispensable. They may even, if rightly pursued, lead
to a right thought of considerable power and effectivity. Like
intellectual discrimination by the process of meditative thought
they will have an effect of purification; they will lead to self-
knowledge of a certain kind and to the setting right of the
disorders of the soul and the heart and even of the disorders of
the understanding. Self-knowledge of all kinds is on the straight
path to the knowledge of the real Self. The Upanishad tells us
that the Self-existent has so set the doors of the soul that they
turn outwards and most men look outward into the appearances
of things; only the rare soul that is ripe for a calm thought and
steady wisdom turns its eye inward, sees the Self and attains to
immortality. To this turning of the eye inward psychological self¬
observation and analysis is a great and effective introduction. We
can look into the inward of ourselves more easily than we can
look into the inward of things external to us because there, in
things outside us, we are in the first place embarrassed by the
form and secondly we have no natural previous experience of
that in them which is other than their physical substance. A
purified or tranquillised mind may reflect or a powerful concen¬
tration may discover God in the world, the Self in Nature even
before it is realised in ourselves, but this is rare and difficult.^
And it is only in ourselves that we can observe and know the
2
In one respect, however, it is easier, because in external things we are not so much
hampered by the sense of the limited ego as in ourselves; one obstacle to the realisation
of God is therefore removed.
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The Yoga of Integral Knowledge
process of the Self in its becoming and follow the process by
which it draws back into self-being. Therefore the ancient coun¬
sel, know thyself, will always stand as the first word that directs
us towards the knowledge. Still, psychological self-knowledge
is only the experience of the modes of the Self, it is not the
realisation of the Self in its pure being.
Still, psychological self-knowledge
is only the experience of the modes of the Self, it is not the
realisation of the Self in its pure being.
The status of knowledge, then, which Yoga envisages is
not merely an intellectual conception or clear discrimination
of the truth, nor is it an enlightened psychological experience
of the modes of our being. It is a “realisation”, in the full
sense of the word; it is the making real to ourselves and in
ourselves of the Self, the transcendent and universal Divine, and
it is the subsequent impossibility of viewing the modes of being
except in the light of that Self and in their true aspect as its
flux of becoming under the psychical and physical conditions of
our world-existence. This realisation consists of three successive
movements, internal vision, complete internal experience and
identity.
This internal vision, drsti, the power so highly valued by
the ancient sages, the power which made a man a Rishi or Kavi
and no longer a mere thinker, is a sort of light in the soul by
which things unseen become as evident and real to it — to the
soul and not merely to the intellect — as do things seen to the
physical eye. In the physical world there are always two forms of
knowledge, the direct and the indirect, pratyaksa, of that which
is present to the eyes, and paroksa, of that which is remote from
and beyond our vision. When the object is beyond our vision,
we are necessarily obliged to arrive at an idea of it by inference,
imagination, analogy, by hearing the descriptions of others who
have seen it or by studying pictorial or other representations of
it if these are available. By putting together all these aids we can
indeed arrive at a more or less adequate idea or suggestive image
of the object, but we do not realise the thing itself; it is not yet
to us the grasped reality, but only our conceptual representation
of a reality. But once we have seen it with the eyes, — for no
other sense is adequate, — we possess, we realise; it is there
secure in our satisfied being, part of ourselves in knowledge.
The Status of Knowledge
305
But once we have seen it with the eyes, — for no
other sense is adequate, — we possess, we realise; it is there
secure in our satisfied being, part of ourselves in knowledge.
The Status of Knowledge
305
Precisely the same rule holds good of psychical things and of
the Self. We may hear clear and luminous teachings about the
Self from philosophers or teachers or from ancient writings; we
may by thought, inference, imagination, analogy or by any other
available means attempt to form a mental figure or conception
of it; we may hold firmly that conception in our mind and fix it
by an entire and exclusive concentration;^ but we have not yet
realised it, we have not seen God. It is only when after long and
persistent concentration or by other means the veil of the mind
is rent or swept aside, only when a flood of light breaks over the
awakened mentality, jyotirmaya brahman, and conception gives
place to a knowledge-vision in which the Self is as present, real,
concrete as a physical object to the physical eye, that we possess
in knowledge; for we have seen. After that revelation, whatever
fadings of the light, whatever periods of darkness may afflict
the soul, it can never irretrievably lose what it has once held.
The experience is inevitably renewed and must become more
frequent till it is constant; when and how soon depends on the
devotion and persistence with which we insist on the path and
besiege by our will or our love the hidden Deity.
This inner vision is one form of psychological experience;
but the inner experience is not confined to that seeing; vision
only opens, it does not embrace. Just as the eye, though it is
alone adequate to bring the first sense of realisation, has to call
in the aid of experience by the touch and other organs of sense
before there is an embracing knowledge, so the vision of the self
ought to be completed by an experience of it in all our members.
Our whole being ought to demand God and not only our illu¬
mined eye of knowledge. For since each principle in us is only
a manifestation of the Self, each can get back to its reality and
have the experience of it. We can have a mental experience of the
Self and seize as concrete realities all those apparently abstract
things that to the mind constitute existence — consciousness,
force, delight and their manifold forms and workings: thus the
^ This is the idea of the triple operation of Jnanayoga, sravana, manana, nididhyasana,
hearing, thinking or mentalising and fixing in concentration.
306
The Yoga of Integral Knowledge
306
The Yoga of Integral Knowledge
mind is satisfied of God. We can have an emotional experience
of the Self through Love and through emotional delight, love
and delight of the Self in us, of the Self in the universal and
of the Self in all with whom we have relations: thus the heart
is satisfied of God. We can have an aesthetic experience of the
Self in beauty, a delight-perception and taste of the absolute
reality all-beautiful in everything whether created by ourselves
or Nature in its appeal to the aesthetic mind and the senses; thus
the sense is satisfied of God. We can have even the vital, nervous
experience and practically the physical sense of the Self in all life
and formation and in all workings of powers, forces, energies
that operate through us or others or in the world: thus the life
and the body are satisfied of God.
All this knowledge and experience are primary means of
arriving at and of possessing identity. It is our self that we see and
experience and therefore vision and experience are incomplete
unless they culminate in identity, unless we are able to live in all
our being the supreme Vedantic knowledge. He am I. We must
not only see God and embrace Him, but become that Reality. We
must become one with the Self in its transcendence of all form
and manifestation by the resolution, the sublimation, the escape
from itself of ego and all its belongings into That from which
they proceed, as well as become the Self in all its manifested
existences and becomings, one with it in the infinite existence,
consciousness, peace, delight by which it reveals itself in us and
one with it in the action, formation, play of self-conception with
which it garbs itself in the world.
It is difficult for the modern mind to understand how we can
do more than conceive intellectually of the Self or of God; but it
may borrow some shadow of this vision, experience and becom¬
ing from that inner awakening to Nature which a great English
poet has made a reality to the European imagination. If we read
the poems in which Wordsworth expressed his realisation of
Nature, we may acquire some distant idea of what realisation is.
Eor, first, we see that he had the vision of something in the world
which is the very Self of all things that it contains, a conscious
force and presence other than its forms, yet cause of its forms
The Status of Knowledge
307
Eor, first, we see that he had the vision of something in the world
which is the very Self of all things that it contains, a conscious
force and presence other than its forms, yet cause of its forms
The Status of Knowledge
307
and manifested in them. We perceive that he had not only the
vision of this and the joy and peace and universality which its
presence brings, but the very sense of it, mental, aesthetic, vital,
physical; not only this sense and vision of it in its own being
but in the nearest flower and simplest man and the immobile
rock; and, finally, that he even occasionally attained to that
unity, that becoming the object of his meditation, one phase
of which is powerfully and profoundly expressed in the poem
“A slumber did my spirit seal,” where he describes himself as
become one in his being with earth, “rolled round in its diurnal
course with rocks and stones and trees.” Exalt this realisation
to a profounder Self than physical Nature and we have the
elements of the Yogic knowledge. But all this experience is only
the vestibule to that suprasensuous, supramental realisation of
the Transcendent who is beyond all His aspects, and the final
summit of knowledge can only be attained by entering into the
superconscient and there merging all other experience into a
supernal unity with the Ineffable. That is the culmination of all
divine knowing; that also is the source of all divine delight and
divine living.
That status of knowledge is then the aim of this path and
indeed of all paths when pursued to their end, to which in¬
tellectual discrimination and conception and all concentration
and psychological self-knowledge and all seeking by the heart
through love and by the senses through beauty and by the will
through power and works and by the soul through peace and
joy are only keys, avenues, first approaches and beginnings of
the ascent which we have to use and to follow till the wide and
infinite levels are attained and the divine doors swing open into
the infinite Light.
Chapter III
The Purified Understanding
Chapter III
The Purified Understanding
The description of the status of knowledge to which
we aspire, determines the means of knowledge which we
shall use. That status of knowledge may be summed up
as a supramental realisation which is prepared by mental rep¬
resentations through various mental principles in us and once
attained again reflects itself more perfectly in all the members
of the being. It is a re-seeing and therefore a remoulding of
our whole existence in the light of the Divine and One and
Eternal free from subjection to the appearances of things and
the externalities of our superficial being.
Such a passage from the human to the divine, from the
divided and discordant to the One, from the phenomenon
to the eternal Truth, such an entire rebirth or new birth of
the soul must necessarily involve two stages, one of prepa¬
ration in which the soul and its instruments must become
fit and another of actual illumination and realisation in the
prepared soul through its fit instruments. There is indeed no
rigid line of demarcation in sequence of Time between these
two stages; rather they are necessary to each other and con¬
tinue simultaneously. Eor in proportion as the soul becomes
fit it increases in illumination and rises to higher and higher,
completer and completer realisations, and in proportion as
these illuminations and these realisations increase, becomes
fit and its instruments more adequate to their task: there are
soul-seasons of unillumined preparation and soul-seasons of
illumined growth and culminating soul-moments more or less
prolonged of illumined possession, moments that are transient
like the flash of the lightning, yet change the whole spiritual
future, moments also that extend over many human hours,
days, weeks in a constant light or blaze of the Sun of Truth.
And through all these the soul once turned Godwards grows
The Purified Understanding
309
towards the permanence and perfection of its new birth and real
existence.
And through all these the soul once turned Godwards grows
The Purified Understanding
309
towards the permanence and perfection of its new birth and real
existence.
The first necessity of preparation is the purifying of all the
members of our being; especially, for the path of knowledge, the
purification of the understanding, the key that shall open the
door of Truth; and a purified understanding is hardly possible
without the purification of the other members. An unpurified
heart, an unpurified sense, an unpurified life confuse the un¬
derstanding, disturb its data, distort its conclusions, darken its
seeing, misapply its knowledge; an unpurified physical system
clogs or chokes up its action. There must be an integral purity.
Here also there is an interdependence; for the purification of
each member of our being profits by the clarifying of every
other, the progressive tranquillisation of the emotional heart
helping for instance the purification of the understanding while
equally a purified understanding imposes calm and light on the
turbid and darkened workings of the yet impure emotions. It
may even be said that while each member of our being has
its own proper principles of purification, yet it is the purified
understanding that in man is the most potent cleanser of his
turbid and disordered being and most sovereignly imposes their
right working on his other members. Knowledge, says the Gita,
is the sovereign purity; light is the source of all clearness and
harmony even as the darkness of ignorance is the cause of all
our stumblings. Love, for example, is the purifier of the heart
and by reducing all our emotions into terms of divine love the
heart is perfected and fulfilled; yet love itself needs to be clarified
by divine knowledge. The heart’s love of God may be blind,
narrow and ignorant and lead to fanaticism and obscurantism;
it may, even when otherwise pure, limit our perfection by refus¬
ing to see Him except in a limited personality and by recoiling
from the true and infinite vision. The heart’s love of man may
equally lead to distortions and exaggerations in feeling, action
and knowledge which have to be corrected and prevented by the
purification of the understanding.
We must, however, consider deeply and clearly what we
mean by the understanding and by its purification. We use the
310
The Yoga of Integral Knowledge
We must, however, consider deeply and clearly what we
mean by the understanding and by its purification. We use the
310
The Yoga of Integral Knowledge
word as the nearest equivalent we can get in the English tongue
to the Sanskrit philosophical term buddhi; therefore we exclude
from it the action of the sense mind which merely consists of
the recording of perceptions of all kinds without distinction
whether they be right or wrong, true or mere illusory phenom¬
ena, penetrating or superficial. We exclude that mass of confused
conception which is merely a rendering of these perceptions and
is equally void of the higher principle of judgment and dis¬
crimination. Nor can we include that constant leaping current
of habitual thought which does duty for understanding in the
mind of the average unthinking man, but is only a constant
repetition of habitual associations, desires, prejudices, prejudg¬
ments, received or inherited preferences, even though it may
constantly enrich itself by a fresh stock of concepts streaming
in from the environment and admitted without the challenge of
the sovereign discriminating reason. Undoubtedly this is a sort
of understanding which has been very useful in the development
of man from the animal; but it is only one remove above the
animal mind; it is a half-animal reason subservient to habit, to
desire and the senses and is of no avail in the search whether
for scientific or philosophical or spiritual knowledge. We have
to go beyond it; its purification can only be effected either by
dismissing or silencing it altogether or by transmuting it into the
true understanding.
By the understanding we mean that which at once perceives,
judges and discriminates, the true reason of the human being
not subservient to the senses, to desire or to the blind force of
habit, but working in its own right for mastery, for knowledge.
Certainly, the reason of man as he is at present does not even at
its best act entirely in this free and sovereign fashion; but so far as
it fails, it fails because it is still mixed with the lower half-animal
action, because it is impure and constantly hampered and pulled
down from its characteristic action. In its purity it should not
be involved in these lower movements, but stand back from the
object, and observe disinterestedly, put it in its right place in the
whole by force of comparison, contrast, analogy, reason from
its rightly observed data by deduction, induction, inference and
The Purified Understanding
311
holding all its gains in memory and supplementing them by a
chastened and rightly-guided imagination view all in the light of
a trained and disciplined judgment. Such is the pure intellectual
understanding of which disinterested observation, judgment and
reasoning are the law and characterising action.
But the term buddhi is also used in another and profounder
sense. The intellectual understanding is only the lower buddhi;
there is another and a higher buddhi which is not intelligence
but vision, is not understanding but rather an over-standing^ in
knowledge, and does not seek knowledge and attain it in subjec¬
tion to the data it observes but possesses already the truth and
brings it out in the terms of a revelatory and intuitional thought.
The nearest the human mind usually gets to this truth-conscious
knowledge is that imperfect action of illumined finding which
occurs when there is a great stress of thought and the intellect
electrified by constant discharges from behind the veil and yield¬
ing to a higher enthusiasm admits a considerable instreaming
from the intuitive and inspired faculty of knowledge. For there
is an intuitive mind in man which serves as a recipient and
channel for these instreamings from a supramental faculty. But
the action of intuition and inspiration in us is imperfect in kind
as well as intermittent in action; ordinarily, it comes in response
to a claim from the labouring and struggling heart or intellect
and, even before its givings enter the conscious mind, they are
already affected by the thought or aspiration which went up to
meet them, are no longer pure but altered to the needs of the
heart or intellect; and after they enter the conscious mind, they
are immediately seized upon by the intellectual understanding
and dissipated or broken up so as to fit in with our imperfect
intellectual knowledge, or by the heart and remoulded to suit
our blind or half-blind emotional longings and preferences, or
even by the lower cravings and distorted to the vehement uses
of our hungers and passions.
If this higher buddhi could act pure of the interference of
^ The Divine Being is described as the adhyaksa, he who seated over all in the supreme
ether over-sees things, views and controls them from above.
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The Yoga of Integral Knowledge
If this higher buddhi could act pure of the interference of
^ The Divine Being is described as the adhyaksa, he who seated over all in the supreme
ether over-sees things, views and controls them from above.
312
The Yoga of Integral Knowledge
these lower members, it would give pure forms of the truth;
observation would be dominated or replaced by a vision which
could see without subservient dependence on the testimony of
the sense-mind and senses; imagination would give place to the
self-assured inspiration of the truth, reasoning to the sponta¬
neous discernment of relations and conclusion from reasoning to
an intuition containing in itself those relations and not building
laboriously upon them, judgment to a thought-vision in whose
light the truth would stand revealed without the mask which
it now wears and which our intellectual judgment has to pene¬
trate; while memory too would take upon itself that larger sense
given to it in Greek thought and be no longer a paltry selection
from the store gained by the individual in his present life, but
rather the all-recording knowledge which secretly holds and con¬
stantly gives from itself everything that we now seem painfully
to acquire but really in this sense remember, a knowledge which
includes the future^ no less than the past. Certainly, we are
intended to grow in our receptivity to this higher faculty of
truth-conscious knowledge, but its full and unveiled use is as yet
the privilege of the gods and beyond our present human stature.
We see then what we mean precisely by the understanding
and by that higher faculty which we may call for the sake of
convenience the ideal faculty and which stands to the developed
intellect much in the same relation as that intellect stands to the
half-animal reason of the undeveloped man. It becomes evident
also what is the nature of the purification which is necessary be¬
fore the understanding can fulfil rightly its part in the attainment
of right knowledge. All impurity is a confusion of working, a
departure from the dharma, the just and inherently right action
of things which in that right action are pure and helpful to our
perfection and this departure is usually the result of an ignorant
confusion^ of dharmas in which the function lends itself to the
demand of other tendencies than those which are properly its
own.
^ In this sense the power of prophecy has been aptly called a memory of the future.
^ sankara.
The Purified Understanding
313
^ In this sense the power of prophecy has been aptly called a memory of the future.
^ sankara.
The Purified Understanding
313
The first cause of impurity in the understanding is the inter-
miscence of desire in the thinking functions, and desire itself is
an impurity of the Will involved in the vital and emotional parts
of our being. When the vital and emotional desires interfere
with the pure will-to-know, the thought-function becomes sub¬
servient to them, pursues ends other than those proper to itself
and its perceptions are clogged and deranged. The understanding
must lift itself beyond the siege of desire and emotion and, in
order that it may have perfect immunity, it must get the vital
parts and the emotions themselves purified. The will to enjoy
is proper to the vital being but not the choice or the reaching
after the enjoyment which must be determined and acquired
by higher functions; therefore the vital being must be trained
to accept whatever gain or enjoyment comes to it in the right
functioning of the life in obedience to the working of the divine
Will and to rid itself of craving and attachment. Similarly the
heart must be freed from subjection to the cravings of the life-
principle and the senses and thus rid itself of the false emotions of
fear, wrath, hatred, lust, etc. which constitute the chief impurity
of the heart. The will to love is proper to the heart, but here
also the choice and reaching after love have to be foregone
or tranquillised and the heart taught to love with depth and
intensity indeed, but with a calm depth and a settled and equal,
not a troubled and disordered intensity. The tranquillisation and
mastery"* of these members is a first condition for the immunity
of the understanding from error, ignorance and perversion. This
purification spells an entire equality of the nervous being and
the heart; equality, therefore, even as it was the first word of the
path of works, so also is the first word of the path of knowledge.
The second cause of impurity in the understanding is the
illusion of the senses and the intermiscence of the sense-mind
in the thinking functions. No knowledge can be true knowledge
which subjects itself to the senses or uses them otherwise than as
first indices whose data have constantly to be corrected and over¬
passed. The beginning of Science is the examination of the truths
4
sama and dama.
314
The Yoga of Integral Knowledge
The beginning of Science is the examination of the truths
4
sama and dama.
314
The Yoga of Integral Knowledge
of the world-force that underlie its apparent workings such as
our senses represent them to be; the beginning of philosophy
is the examination of the principles of things which the senses
mistranslate to us; the beginning of spiritual knowledge is the
refusal to accept the limitations of the sense-life or to take the
visible and sensible as anything more than phenomenon of the
Reality.
Equally must the sense-mind be stilled and taught to leave
the function of thought to the mind that judges and understands.
When the understanding in us stands back from the action of
the sense-mind and repels its intermiscence, the latter detaches
itself from the understanding and can be watched in its separate
action. It then reveals itself as a constantly swirling and eddy¬
ing undercurrent of habitual concepts, associations, perceptions,
desires without any real sequence, order or principle of light. It
is a constant repetition in a circle unintelligent and unfruitful.
Ordinarily the human understanding accepts this undercurrent
and tries to reduce it to a partial order and sequence; but by
so doing it becomes itself subject to it and partakes of that
disorder, restlessness, unintelligent subjection to habit and blind
purposeless repetition which makes the ordinary human reason
a misleading, limited and even frivolous and futile instrument.
There is nothing to be done with this fickle, restless, violent and
disturbing factor but to get rid of it whether by detaching it
and then reducing it to stillness or by giving a concentration and
singleness to the thought by which it will of itself reject this alien
and confusing element.
A third cause of impurity has its source in the understanding
itself and consists in an improper action of the will to know. That
will is proper to the understanding, but here again choice and
unequal reaching after knowledge clog and distort. They lead
to a partiality and attachment which makes the intellect cling
to certain ideas and opinions with a more or less obstinate will
to ignore the truth in other ideas and opinions, cling to certain
fragments of a truth and shy against the admission of other
parts which are yet necessary to its fullness, cling to certain
predilections of knowledge and repel all knowledge that does not
The Purified Understanding
315
agree with the personal temperament of thought which has been
acquired by the past of the thinker. The remedy lies in a perfect
equality of the mind, in the cultivation of an entire intellectual
rectitude and in the perfection of mental disinterestedness. The
purified understanding as it will not lend itself to any desire
or craving, so will not lend itself either to any predilection or
distaste for any particular idea or truth, and will refuse to be
attached even to those ideas of which it is the most certain or
to lay on them such an undue stress as is likely to disturb the
balance of truth and depreciate the values of other elements of
a complete and perfect knowledge.
An understanding thus purified would be a perfectly flexi¬
ble, entire and faultless instrument of intellectual thought and
being free from the inferior sources of obstruction and distortion
would be capable of as true and complete a perception of the
truths of the Self and the universe as the intellect can attain.
But for real knowledge something more is necessary, since real
knowledge is by our very definition of it supra-intellectual. In
order that the understanding may not interfere with our attain¬
ment to real knowledge, we have to reach to that something
more and cultivate a power exceedingly difficult for the active
intellectual thinker and distasteful to his proclivities, the power
of intellectual passivity. The object served is double and therefore
two different kinds of passivity have to be acquired.
In the first place we have seen that intellectual thought is
in itself inadequate and is not the highest thinking; the highest
is that which comes through the intuitive mind and from the
supramental faculty. So long as we are dominated by the in¬
tellectual habit and by the lower workings, the intuitive mind
can only send its messages to us subconsciously and subject to
a distortion more or less entire before it reaches the conscious
mind; or if it works consciously, then only with an inadequate
rarity and a great imperfection in its functioning. In order to
strengthen the higher knowledge-faculty in us we have to effect
the same separation between the intuitive and intellectual ele¬
ments of our thought as we have already effected between the
understanding and the sense-mind; and this is no easy task, for
316
The Yoga of Integral Knowledge
not only do our intuitions come to us incrusted in the intellectual
action, but there are a great number of mental workings which
masquerade and ape the appearances of the higher faculty. The
remedy is to train first the intellect to recognise the true intuition,
to distinguish it from the false and then to accustom it, when it
arrives at an intellectual perception or conclusion, to attach no
final value to it, but rather look upward, refer all to the divine
principle and wait in as complete a silence as it can command
for the light from above. In this way it is possible to transmute
a great part of our intellectual thinking into the luminous truth¬
conscious vision, — the ideal would be a complete transition, —
or at least to increase greatly the frequency, purity and conscious
force of the ideal knowledge working behind the intellect. The
latter must learn to be subject and passive to the ideal faculty.
But for the knowledge of the Self it is necessary to have
the power of a complete intellectual passivity, the power of dis¬
missing all thought, the power of the mind to think not at all
which the Gita in one passage enjoins. This is a hard saying for
the occidental mind to which thought is the highest thing and
which will be apt to mistake the power of the mind not to think,
its complete silence for the incapacity of thought. But this power
of silence is a capacity and not an incapacity, a power and not a
weakness. It is a profound and pregnant stillness. Only when the
mind is thus entirely still, like clear, motionless and level water,
in a perfect purity and peace of the whole being and the soul
transcends thought, can the Self which exceeds and originates all
activities and becomings, the Silence from which all words are
born, the Absolute of which all relativities are partial reflections
manifest itself in the pure essence of our being. In a complete
silence only is the Silence heard; in a pure peace only is its Being
revealed. Therefore to us the name of That is the Silence and the
Peace.
Chapter IV
Concentration
In a complete
silence only is the Silence heard; in a pure peace only is its Being
revealed. Therefore to us the name of That is the Silence and the
Peace.
Chapter IV
Concentration
Along with purity and as a help to bring it about,
concentration. Purity and concentration are indeed two
aspects, feminine and masculine, passive and active, of
the same status of being; purity is the condition in which concen¬
tration becomes entire, rightly effective, omnipotent; by concen¬
tration purity does its works and without it would only lead to a
state of peaceful quiescence and eternal repose. Their opposites
are also closely connected; for we have seen that impurity is
a confusion of dharmas, a lax, mixed and mutually entangled
action of the different parts of the being; and this confusion pro¬
ceeds from an absence of right concentration of its knowledge on
its energies in the embodied Soul. The fault of our nature is first
an inert subjection to the impacts of things^ as they come in upon
the mind pell-mell without order or control and then a haphaz¬
ard imperfect concentration managed fitfully, irregularly with a
more or less chance emphasis on this or on that object according
as they happen to interest, not the higher soul or the judging
and discerning intellect, but the restless, leaping, fickle, easily
tired, easily distracted lower mind which is the chief enemy of
our progress. In such a condition purity, the right working of the
functions, the clear, unstained and luminous order of the being is
an impossibility; the various workings, given over to the chances
of the environment and external influences, must necessarily
run into each other and clog, divert, distract, pervert. Equally,
without purity the complete, equal, flexible concentration of the
being in right thought, right will, right feeling or secure status
of spiritual experience is not possible. Therefore the two must
proceed together, each helping the victory of the other, until
we arrive at that eternal calm from which may proceed some
^ bdhyasparsa.
318
The Yoga of Integral Knowledge
partial image in the human being of the eternal, omnipotent and
omniscient activity.
318
The Yoga of Integral Knowledge
partial image in the human being of the eternal, omnipotent and
omniscient activity.
But in the path of knowledge as it is practised in India
concentration is used in a special and more limited sense. It
means that removal of the thought from all distracting activities
of the mind and that concentration of it on the idea of the One by
which the soul rises out of the phenomenal into the one Reality. It
is by the thought that we dissipate ourselves in the phenomenal;
it is by the gathering back of the thought into itself that we
must draw ourselves back into the real. Concentration has three
powers by which this aim can be effected. By concentration on
anything whatsoever we are able to know that thing, to make
it deliver up its concealed secrets; we must use this power to
know not things, but the one Thing-in-itself. By concentration
again the whole will can be gathered up for the acquisition
of that which is still ungrasped, still beyond us; this power, if
it is sufficiently trained, sufficiently single-minded, sufficiently
sincere, sure of itself, faithful to itself alone, absolute in faith,
we can use for the acquisition of any object whatsoever; but
we ought to use it not for the acquisition of the many objects
which the world offers to us, but to grasp spiritually that one
object worthy of pursuit which is also the one subject worthy of
knowledge. By concentration of our whole being on one status
of itself, we can become whatever we choose; we can become,
for instance, even if we were before a mass of weaknesses and
fears, a mass instead of strength and courage, or we can become
all a great purity, holiness and peace or a single universal soul of
Love; but we ought, it is said, to use this power to become not
even these things, high as they may be in comparison with what
we now are, but rather to become that which is above all things
and free from all action and attributes, the pure and absolute
Being. All else, all other concentration can only be valuable for
preparation, for previous steps, for a gradual training of the
dissolute and self-dissipating thought, will and being towards
their grand and unique object.
This use of concentration implies like every other a previous
purification; it implies also in the end a renunciation, a cessation
Concentration
319
This use of concentration implies like every other a previous
purification; it implies also in the end a renunciation, a cessation
Concentration
319
and lastly an ascent into the absolute and transcendent state of
Samadhi from which if it culminates, if it endures, there is,
except perhaps for one soul out of many thousands, no return.
For by that we go to the “supreme state of the Eternal whence
souls revert not” into the cyclic action of Nature;^ and it is
into this Samadhi that the Yogin who aims at release from the
world seeks to pass away at the time of leaving his body. We
see this succession in the discipline of the Rajayoga. For first the
Rajayogin must arrive at a certain moral and spiritual purity; he
must get rid of the lower or downward activities of his mind,
but afterwards he must stop all its activities and concentrate
himself in the one idea that leads from activity to the quiescence
of status. The Rajayogic concentration has several stages, that
in which the object is seized, that in which it is held, that in
which the mind is lost in the status which the object repre¬
sents or to which the concentration leads, and only the last is
termed Samadhi in the Rajayoga although the word is capable,
as in the Gita, of a much wider sense. But in the Rajayogic
Samadhi there are different grades of status, — that in which
the mind, though lost to outward objects, still muses, thinks,
perceives in the world of thought, that in which the mind is still
capable of primary thought-formations and that in which, all
out-darting of the mind even within itself having ceased, the soul
rises beyond thought into the silence of the Incommunicable and
Ineffable. In all Yoga there are indeed many preparatory objects
of thought-concentration, forms, verbal formulas of thought,
significant names, all of which are supports^ to the mind in
this movement, all of which have to be used and transcended;
the highest support according to the Upanishads is the mystic
syllable AUM, whose three letters represent the Brahman or
Supreme Self in its three degrees of status, the Waking Soul, the
Dream Soul and the Sleep Soul, and the whole potent sound
rises towards that which is beyond status as beyond activity."^
yato naiva nivartante tad dhama paramam mama.
^ Mandukya Upanishad.
3
avalambana.
320
The Yoga of Integral Knowledge
For of all Yoga of knowledge the final goal is the Transcen¬
dent.
^ Mandukya Upanishad.
3
avalambana.
320
The Yoga of Integral Knowledge
For of all Yoga of knowledge the final goal is the Transcen¬
dent.
We have, however, conceived as the aim of an integral Yoga
something more complex and less exclusive — less exclusively
positive of the highest condition of the soul, less exclusively
negative of its divine radiations. We must aim indeed at the
Highest, the Source of all, the Transcendent but not to the ex¬
clusion of that which it transcends, rather as the source of an
established experience and supreme state of the soul which shall
transform all other states and remould our consciousness of the
world into the form of its secret Truth. We do not seek to excise
from our being all consciousness of the universe, but to realise
God, Truth and Self in the universe as well as transcendent of it.
We shall seek therefore not only the Ineffable, but also His mani¬
festation as infinite being, consciousness and bliss embracing the
universe and at play in it. For that triune infinity is His supreme
manifestation and that we shall aspire to know, to share in and
to become; and since we seek to realise this Trinity not only in
itself but in its cosmic play, we shall aspire also to knowledge
of and participation in the universal divine Truth, Knowledge,
Will, Love which are His secondary manifestation. His divine
becoming. With this too we shall aspire to identify ourselves,
towards this too we shall strive to rise and, when the period
of effort is passed, allow it by our renunciation of all egoism
to draw us up into itself in our being and to descend into us
and embrace us in all our becoming. This not only as a means
of approach and passage to His supreme transcendence, but as
the condition, even when we possess and are possessed by the
Transcendent, of a divine life in the manifestation of the cosmos.
In order that we may do this, the terms concentration and
Samadhi must assume for us a richer and profound meaning.
All our concentration is merely an image of the divine Tapas by
which the Self dwells gathered in itself, by which it manifests
within itself, by which it maintains and possesses its manifes¬
tation, by which it draws back from all manifestation into its
supreme oneness. Being dwelling in consciousness upon itself
for bliss, this is the divine Tapas; and a Knowledge-Will dwelling
Concentration
321
Being dwelling in consciousness upon itself
for bliss, this is the divine Tapas; and a Knowledge-Will dwelling
Concentration
321
in force of consciousness on itself and its manifestations is the
essence of the divine concentration, the Yoga of the Lord of
Yoga. Given the self-differentiation of the Divine in which we
dwell, concentration is the means by which the individual soul
identifies itself with and enters into any form, state or psycholog¬
ical self-manifestation (bhdva) of the Self. To use this means for
unification with the Divine is the condition for the attainment
of divine knowledge and the principle of all Yoga of knowledge.
This concentration proceeds by the Idea, using thought,
form and name as keys which yield up to the concentrating mind
the Truth that lies concealed behind all thought, form and name;
for it is through the Idea that the mental being rises beyond all
expression to that which is expressed, to that of which the Idea
itself is only the instrument. By concentration upon the Idea the
mental existence which at present we are breaks open the barrier
of our mentality and arrives at the state of consciousness, the
state of being, the state of power of conscious-being and bliss of
conscious-being to which the Idea corresponds and of which it is
the symbol, movement and rhythm. Concentration by the Idea
is, then, only a means, a key to open to us the superconscient
planes of our existence; a certain self-gathered state of our whole
existence lifted into that superconscient truth, unity and infinity
of self-aware, self-blissful existence is the aim and culmination;
and that is the meaning we shall give to the term Samadhi. Not
merely a state withdrawn from all consciousness of the outward,
withdrawn even from all consciousness of the inward into that
which exists beyond both whether as seed of both or transcen¬
dent even of their seed-state; but a settled existence in the One
and Infinite, united and identified with it, and this status to re¬
main whether we abide in the waking condition in which we are
conscious of the forms of things or we withdraw into the inward
activity which dwells in the play of the principles of things, the
play of their names and typal forms or we soar to the condition
of static inwardness where we arrive at the principles themselves
and at the principle of all principles, the seed of name and form.^
^ The Waking, Dream and Sleep states of the soul.
322
The Yoga of Integral Knowledge
322
The Yoga of Integral Knowledge
For the soul that has arrived at the essential Samadhi and is set¬
tled in it {samadhistha) in the sense the Gita attaches to the word,
has that which is fundamental to all experience and cannot fall
from it by any experience however distracting to one who has
not yet ascended the summit. It can embrace all in the scope of
its being without being bound by any or deluded or limited.
When we arrive at this state, all our being and consciousness
being concentrated, the necessity of concentration in the Idea
ceases. For there in that supramental state the whole position of
things is reversed. The mind is a thing that dwells in diffusion,
in succession; it can only concentrate on one thing at a time
and when not concentrated runs from one thing to another very
much at random. Therefore it has to concentrate on a single
idea, a single subject of meditation, a single object of contem¬
plation, a single object of will in order to possess or master it,
and this it must do to at least the temporary exclusion of all
others. But that which is beyond the mind and into which we
seek to rise is superior to the running process of the thought,
superior to the division of ideas. The Divine is centred in itself
and when it throws out ideas and activities does not divide itself
or imprison itself in them, but holds them and their movement
in its infinity; undivided, its whole self is behind each Idea and
each movement and at the same time behind all of them together.
Held by it, each spontaneously works itself out, not through a
separate act of will, but by the general force of consciousness
behind it; if to us there seems to be a concentration of divine Will
and Knowledge in each, it is a multiple and equal and not an
exclusive concentration, and the reality of it is rather a free and
spontaneous working in a self-gathered unity and infinity. The
soul which has risen to the divine Samadhi participates in the
measure of its attainment in this reversed condition of things, —
the true condition, for that which is the reverse of our mentality
is the truth. It is for this reason that, as is said in the ancient
books, the man who has arrived at Self-possession attains spon¬
taneously without the need of concentration in thought and
effort the knowledge or the result which the Idea or the Will in
him moves out to embrace.
Concentration
323
Concentration
323
To arrive then at this settled divine status must be the object
of our concentration. The first step in concentration must be
always to accustom the discursive mind to a settled unwavering
pursuit of a single course of connected thought on a single sub¬
ject and this it must do un distracted by all lures and alien calls
on its attention. Such concentration is common enough in our
ordinary life, but it becomes more difficult when we have to do
it inwardly without any outward object or action on which to
keep the mind; yet this inward concentration is what the seeker
of knowledge must effect.*’ Nor must it be merely the consec¬
utive thought of the intellectual thinker, whose only object is
to conceive and intellectually link together his conceptions. It is
not, except perhaps at first, a process of reasoning that is wanted
so much as a dwelling so far as possible on the fruitful essence
of the idea which by the insistence of the soul’s will upon it must
yield up all the facets of its truth. Thus if it be the divine Love
that is the subject of concentration, it is on the essence of the
idea of God as Love that the mind should concentrate in such
a way that the various manifestation of the divine Love should
arise luminously, not only to the thought, but in the heart and
being and vision of the sadhaka. The thought may come first and
the experience afterwards, but equally the experience may come
first and the knowledge arise out of the experience. Afterwards
the thing attained has to be dwelt on and more and more held
till it becomes a constant experience and finally the dharma or
law of the being.
This is the process of concentrated meditation; but a more
strenuous method is the fixing of the whole mind in concen¬
tration on the essence of the idea only, so as to reach not the
thought-knowledge or the psychological experience of the sub¬
ject, but the very essence of the thing behind the idea. In this
process thought ceases and passes into the absorbed or ecstatic
contemplation of the object or by a merging into it in an inner
Samadhi. If this be the process followed, then subsequently the
® In the elementary stages of internal debate and judgment, vitarka and vicara, for the
correction of false ideas and arrival at the intellectual truth.
324
The Yoga of Integral Knowledge
If this be the process followed, then subsequently the
® In the elementary stages of internal debate and judgment, vitarka and vicara, for the
correction of false ideas and arrival at the intellectual truth.
324
The Yoga of Integral Knowledge
state into which we rise must still be called down to take pos¬
session of the lower being, to shed its light, power and bliss on
our ordinary consciousness. For otherwise we may possess it, as
many do, in the elevated condition or in the inward Samadhi,
but we shall lose our hold of it when we awake or descend into
the contacts of the world; and this truncated possession is not
the aim of an integral Yoga.
A third process is neither at first to concentrate in a strenu¬
ous meditation on the one subject nor in a strenuous contempla¬
tion of the one object of thought-vision, but first to still the mind
altogether. This may be done by various ways; one is to stand
back from the mental action altogether not participating in but
simply watching it until, tired of its unsanctioned leaping and
running, it falls into an increasing and finally an absolute quiet.
Another is to reject the thought-suggestions, to cast them away
from the mind whenever they come and firmly hold to the peace
of the being which really and always exists behind the trouble
and riot of the mind. When this secret peace is unveiled, a great
calm settles on the being and there comes usually with it the
perception and experience of the all-pervading silent Brahman,
everything else at first seeming to be mere form and eidolon.
On the basis of this calm everything else may be built up in the
knowledge and experience no longer of the external phenomena
of things but of the deeper truth of the divine manifestation.
Ordinarily, once this state is obtained, strenuous concentra¬
tion will be found no longer necessary. A free concentration of
wilF using thought merely for suggestion and the giving of light
to the lower members will take its place. This Will will then
insist on the physical being, the vital existence, the heart and the
mind remoulding themselves in the forms of the Divine which
reveal themselves out of the silent Brahman. By swifter or slower
degrees according to the previous preparation and purification
of the members, they will be obliged with more or less struggle
to obey the law of the will and its thought-suggestion, so that
^ This subject will be dealt with more in detail when we come to the Yoga of
self-perfection.
Concentration
325
Concentration
325
eventually the knowledge of the Divine takes possession of our
consciousness on all its planes and the image of the Divine is
formed in our human existence even as it was done by the old
Vedic Sadhakas. For the integral Yoga this is the most direct and
powerful discipline.
Chapter V
Renunciation
IF DISCIPLINE of all the members of our being by purifica¬
tion and concentration may be described as the right arm of
the body of Yoga, renunciation is its left arm. By discipline
or positive practice we confirm in ourselves the truth of things,
truth of being, truth of knowledge, truth of love, truth of works
and replace with these the falsehoods that have overgrown and
perverted our nature; by renunciation we seize upon the false¬
hoods, pluck up their roots and cast them out of our way so that
they shall no longer hamper by their persistence, their resistance
or their recurrence the happy and harmonious growth of our
divine living. Renunciation is an indispensable instrument of
our perfection.
How far shall this renunciation go? what shall be its nature?
and in what way shall it be applied? There is an established
tradition long favoured by great religious teachings and by men
of profound spiritual experience that renunciation must not only
be complete as a discipline but definite and final as an end and
that it shall fall nothing short of the renunciation of life itself
and of our mundane existence. Many causes have contributed
to the growth of this pure, lofty and august tradition. There is
first the profounder cause of the radical opposition between the
sullied and imperfect nature of life in the world as it now is
in the present stage of our human evolution and the nature of
spiritual living; and this opposition has led to the entire rejection
of world-existence as a lie, an insanity of the soul, a troubled and
unhappy dream or at best a flawed, specious and almost worth¬
less good or to its characterisation as a kingdom of the world,
the flesh and the devil, and therefore for the divinely led and
divinely attracted soul only a place of ordeal and preparation
or at best a play of the All-existence, a game of cross-purposes
which He tires of and abandons. A second cause is the soul’s
Renunciation
327
A second cause is the soul’s
Renunciation
327
hunger for personal salvation, for escape into some farther or
farthest height of unalloyed bliss and peace untroubled by the
labour and the struggle; or else it is its unwillingness to return
from the ecstasy of the divine embrace into the lower field of
work and service. But there are other slighter causes inciden¬
tal to spiritual experience, — strong feeling and practical proof
of the great difficulty, which we willingly exaggerate into an
impossibility, of combining the life of works and action with
spiritual peace and the life of realisation; or else the joy which
the mind comes to take in the mere act and state of renunciation,
— as it comes indeed to take joy in anything that it has attained
or to which it has inured itself, — and the sense of peace and
deliverance which is gained by indifference to the world and to
the objects of man’s desire. Lowest causes of all are the weakness
that shrinks from the struggle, the disgust and disappointment
of the soul baffled by the great cosmic labour, the selfishness that
cares not what becomes of those left behind us so long as we
personally can be free from the monstrous ever-circling wheel of
death and rebirth, the indifference to the cry that rises up from
a labouring humanity.
For the sadhaka of an integral Yoga none of these reasons
are valid. With weakness and selfishness, however spiritual in
their guise or trend, he can have no dealings; a divine strength
and courage and a divine compassion and helpfulness are the
very stuff of that which he would be, they are that very nature
of the Divine which he would take upon himself as a robe of
spiritual light and beauty. The revolvings of the great wheel bring
to him no sense of terror or giddiness; he rises above it in his soul
and knows from above their divine law and their divine purpose.
The difficulty of harmonising the divine life with human living,
of being in God and yet living in man is the very difficulty that he
is set here to solve and not to shun. He has learned that the joy,
the peace and the deliverance are an imperfect crown and no real
possession if they do not form a state secure in itself, inalienable
to the soul, not dependent on aloofness and inaction but firm
in the storm and the race and the battle, unsullied whether by
the joy of the world or by its suffering. The ecstasy of the divine
328
The Yoga of Integral Knowledge
The ecstasy of the divine
328
The Yoga of Integral Knowledge
embrace will not abandon him because he obeys the impulse of
divine love for God in humanity; or if it seems to draw back
from him for a while, he knows by experience that it is to try
and test him still farther so that some imperfection in his own
way of meeting it may fall away from him. Personal salvation he
does not seek except as a necessity for the human fulfilment and
because he who is himself in bonds cannot easily free others, —
though to God nothing is impossible; for a heaven of personal
joys he has no hankerings even as a hell of personal sufferings
has for him no terrors. If there is an opposition between the
spiritual life and that of the world, it is that gulf which he is
here to bridge, that opposition which he is here to change into
a harmony. If the world is ruled by the flesh and the devil, all
the more reason that the children of Immortality should be here
to conquer it for God and the Spirit. If life is an insanity, then
there are so many million souls to whom there must be brought
the light of divine reason; if a dream, yet is it real within itself to
so many dreamers who must be brought either to dream nobler
dreams or to awaken; or if a lie, then the truth has to be given to
the deluded. Nor, if it be said that only by the luminous example
of escape from the world can we help the world, shall we accept
that dogma, since the contrary example of great Avataras is there
to show that not only by rejecting the life of the world as it is can
we help, but also and more by accepting and uplifting it. And
if it is a play of the All-Existence, then we may well consent to
play out our part in it with grace and courage, well take delight
in the game along with our divine Playmate.
But, most of all, the view we have taken of the world forbids
the renunciation of world-existence so long as we can be any¬
thing to God and man in their working-out of its purposes.
We regard the world not as an invention of the devil or a
self-delusion of the soul, but as a manifestation of the Divine,
although as yet a partial because a progressive and evolutionary
manifestation. Therefore for us renunciation of life cannot be the
goal of life nor rejection of the world the object for which the
world was created. We seek to realise our unity with God, but for
us that realisation involves a complete and absolute recognition
Renunciation
329
We seek to realise our unity with God, but for
us that realisation involves a complete and absolute recognition
Renunciation
329
of our unity with man and we cannot cut the two asunder. To
use Christian language, the Son of God is also the Son of Man
and both elements are necessary to the complete Christhood; or
to use an Indian form of thought, the divine Narayana of whom
the universe is only one ray is revealed and fulfilled in man; the
complete man is Nara-Narayana and in that completeness he
symbolises the supreme mystery of existence.
Therefore renunciation must be for us merely an instru¬
ment and not an object; nor can it be the only or the chief
instrument since our object is the fulfilment of the Divine in
the human being, a positive aim which cannot be reached by
negative means. The negative means can only be for the removal
of that which stands in the way of the positive fulfilment. It must
be a renunciation, a complete renunciation of all that is other
than and opposed to the divine self-fulfilment and a progressive
renunciation of all that is a lesser or only a partial achievement.
We shall have no attachment to our life in the world; if that
attachment exists, we must renounce it and renounce utterly;
but neither shall we have any attachment to the escape from
the world, to salvation, to the great self-annihilation; if that
attachment exists, that also we must renounce and renounce it
utterly.
Again our renunciation must obviously be an inward renun¬
ciation; especially and above all, a renunciation of attachment
and the craving of desire in the senses and the heart, of self-will
in the thought and action and of egoism in the centre of the con¬
sciousness. For these things are the three knots by which we are
bound to our lower nature and if we can renounce these utterly,
there is nothing else that can bind us. Therefore attachment and
desire must be utterly cast out; there is nothing in the world to
which we must be attached, not wealth nor poverty, nor joy nor
suffering, nor life nor death, nor greatness nor littleness, nor
vice nor virtue, nor friend, nor wife, nor children, nor country,
nor our work and mission, nor heaven nor earth, nor all that
is within them or beyond them. And this does not mean that
there is nothing at all that we shall love, nothing in which we
shall take delight; for attachment is egoism in love and not love
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The Yoga of Integral Knowledge
And this does not mean that
there is nothing at all that we shall love, nothing in which we
shall take delight; for attachment is egoism in love and not love
330
The Yoga of Integral Knowledge
itself, desire is limitation and insecurity in a hunger for pleasure
and satisfaction and not the seeking after the divine delight in
things. A universal love we must have, calm and yet eternally
intense beyond the brief vehemence of the most violent passion;
a delight in things rooted in a delight in God that does not adhere
to their forms but to that which they conceal in themselves and
that embraces the universe without being caught in its meshes.^
Self-will in thought and action has, we have already seen,
to be quite renounced if we would be perfect in the way of
divine works; it has equally to be renounced if we are to be
perfect in divine knowledge. This self-will means an egoism in
the mind which attaches itself to its preferences, its habits, its
past or present formations of thought and view and will because
it regards them as itself or its own, weaves around them the
delicate threads of “Tness” and “my-ness” and lives in them
like a spider in its web. It hates to be disturbed, as a spider hates
attack on its web, and feels foreign and unhappy if transplanted
to fresh view-points and formations as a spider feels foreign
in another web than its own. This attachment must be entirely
excised from the mind. Not only must we give up the ordinary
attitude to the world and life to which the unawakened mind
clings as its natural element; but we must not remain bound
in any mental construction of our own or in any intellectual
thought-system or arrangement of religious dogmas or logical
conclusions; we must not only cut asunder the snare of the mind
and the senses, but flee also beyond the snare of the thinker, the
snare of the theologian and the church-builder, the meshes of
the Word and the bondage of the Idea. All these are within us
waiting to wall in the spirit with forms; but we must always go
beyond, always renounce the lesser for the greater, the finite for
the Infinite; we must be prepared to proceed from illumination to
illumination, from experience to experience, from soul-state to
soul-state so as to reach the utmost transcendence of the Divine
and its utmost universality. Nor must we attach ourselves even
^ Nirlipta. The divine Ananda in things is niskdma and nirlipta, free from desire and
therefore not attached.
Renunciation
331
Nor must we attach ourselves even
^ Nirlipta. The divine Ananda in things is niskdma and nirlipta, free from desire and
therefore not attached.
Renunciation
331
to the truths we hold most securely, for they are but forms and
expressions of the Ineffable who refuses to limit himself to any
form or expression; always we must keep ourselves open to the
higher Word from above that does not confine itself to its own
sense and the light of the Thought that carries in it its own
opposites.
But the centre of all resistance is egoism and this we must
pursue into every covert and disguise and drag it out and slay
it; for its disguises are endless and it will cling to every shred of
possible self-concealment. Altruism and indifference are often
its most effective disguises; so draped, it will riot boldly in the
very face of the divine spies who are missioned to hunt it out.
Here the formula of the supreme knowledge comes to our help;
we have nothing to do in our essential standpoint with these
distinctions, for there is no I nor thou, but only one divine
Self equal in all embodiments, equal in the individual and the
group, and to realise that, to express that, to serve that, to fulfil
that is all that matters. Self-satisfaction and altruism, enjoyment
and indifference are not the essential thing. If the realisation,
fulfilment, service of the one Self demands from us an action
that seems to others self-service or self-assertion in the egoistic
sense or seems egoistic enjoyment and self-indulgence, that ac¬
tion we must do; we must be governed by the guide within rather
than by the opinions of men. The influence of the environment
works often with great subtlety; we prefer and put on almost
unconsciously the garb which will look best in the eye that
regards us from outside and we allow a veil to drop over the eye
within; we are impelled to drape ourselves in the vow of poverty,
or in the garb of service, or in outward proofs of indifference
and renunciation and a spotless sainthood because that is what
tradition and opinion demand of us and so we can make best
an impression on our environment. But all this is vanity and
delusion. We may be called upon to assume these things, for
that may be the uniform of our service; but equally it may not.
The eye of man outside matters nothing; the eye within is all.
We see in the teaching of the Gita how subtle a thing is the
freedom from egoism which is demanded. Arjuna is driven to
332
The Yoga of Integral Knowledge
The eye of man outside matters nothing; the eye within is all.
We see in the teaching of the Gita how subtle a thing is the
freedom from egoism which is demanded. Arjuna is driven to
332
The Yoga of Integral Knowledge
fight by the egoism of strength, the egoism of the Kshatriya; he
is turned from the battle by the contrary egoism of weakness,
the shrinking, the spirit of disgust, the false pity that overcomes
the mind, the nervous being and the senses, — not that divine
compassion which strengthens the arm and clarifies the knowl¬
edge. But this weakness comes garbed as renunciation, as virtue:
“Better the life of the beggar than to taste these blood-stained
enjoyments; I desire not the rule of all the earth, no, nor the
kingdom of the gods.” How foolish of the Teacher, we might
say, not to confirm this mood, to lose this sublime chance of
adding one more great soul to the army of Sannyasins, one more
shining example before the world of a holy renunciation. But the
Guide sees otherwise, the Guide who is not to be deceived by
words; “This is weakness and delusion and egoism that speak
in thee. Behold the Self, open thy eyes to the knowledge, purify
thy soul of egoism.” And afterwards? “Fight, conquer, enjoy
a wealthy kingdom.” Or to take another example from ancient
Indian tradition. It was egoism, it would seem, that drove Rama,
the Avatara, to raise an army and destroy a nation in order to
recover his wife from the King of Lanka. But would it have been
a lesser egoism to drape himself in indifference and misusing the
formal terms of the knowledge to say, “I have no wife, no enemy,
no desire; these are illusions of the senses; let me cultivate the
Brahman-knowledge and let Ravana do what he will with the
daughter of Janaka” ?
The criterion is within, as the Gita insists. It is to have
the soul free from craving and attachment, but free from the
attachment to inaction as well as from the egoistic impulse to
action, free from attachment to the forms of virtue as well as
from the attraction to sin. It is to be rid of “Tness” and “my-
ness” so as to live in the one Self and act in the one Self; to
reject the egoism of refusing to work through the individual
centre of the universal Being as well as the egoism of serving the
individual mind and life and body to the exclusion of others. To
live in the Self is not to dwell for oneself alone in the Infinite
immersed and oblivious of all things in that ocean of impersonal
self-delight; but it is to live as the Self and in the Self equal in this
To
live in the Self is not to dwell for oneself alone in the Infinite
immersed and oblivious of all things in that ocean of impersonal
self-delight; but it is to live as the Self and in the Self equal in this
Renunciation
333
embodiment and all embodiments and beyond all embodiments.
This is the integral knowledge.
It will be seen that the scope we give to the idea of
renunciation is different from the meaning currently attached
to it. Currently its meaning is self-denial, inhibition of pleasure,
rejection of the objects of pleasure. Self-denial is a necessary
discipline for the soul of man, because his heart is ignorantly
attached; inhibition of pleasure is necessary because his sense is
caught and clogged in the mud-honey of sensuous satisfactions;
rejection of the objects of pleasure is imposed because the
mind fixes on the object and will not leave it to go beyond it
and within itself. If the mind of man were not thus ignorant,
attached, bound even in its restless inconstancy, deluded by the
forms of things, renunciation would not have been needed; the
soul could have travelled on the path of delight, from the lesser
to the greater, from joy to diviner joy. At present that is not
practicable. It must give up from within everything to which
it is attached in order that it may gain that which they are in
their reality. The external renunciation is not the essential, but
even that is necessary for a time, indispensable in many things
and sometimes useful in all; we may even say that a complete
external renunciation is a stage through which the soul must
pass at some period of its progress, — though always it should
be without those self-willed violences and fierce self-torturings
which are an offence to the Divine seated within us. But in the
end this renunciation or self-denial is always an instrument and
the period for its use passes. The rejection of the object ceases to
be necessary when the object can no longer ensnare us because
what the soul enjoys is no longer the object as an object but the
Divine which it expresses; the inhibition of pleasure is no longer
needed when the soul no longer seeks pleasure but possesses the
delight of the Divine in all things equally without the need of
a personal or physical possession of the thing itself; self-denial
loses its field when the soul no longer claims anything, but obeys
consciously the will of the one Self in all beings. It is then that we
are freed from the Law and released into the liberty of the Spirit.
It is then that we
are freed from the Law and released into the liberty of the Spirit.
We must be prepared to leave behind on the path not only
334
The Yoga of Integral Knowledge
that which we stigmatise as evil, but that which seems to us to
be good, yet is not the one good. There are things which were
beneficial, helpful, which seemed perhaps at one time the one
thing desirable, and yet once their work is done, once they are
attained, they become obstacles and even hostile forces when we
are called to advance beyond them. There are desirable states of
the soul which it is dangerous to rest in after they have been mas¬
tered, because then we do not march on to the wider kingdoms
of God beyond. Even divine realisations must not be clung to,
if they are not the divine realisation in its utter essentiality and
completeness. We must rest at nothing less than the All, nothing
short of the utter transcendence. And if we can thus be free in
the spirit, we shall find out all the wonder of God’s workings; we
shall find that in inwardly renouncing everything we have lost
nothing. “By all this abandoned thou shalt come to enjoy the
All.” For everything is kept for us and restored to us but with
a wonderful change and transfiguration into the All- Good and
the All-Beautiful, the All-Light and the All-Delight of Him who
is for ever pure and infinite and the mystery and the miracle that
ceases not through the ages.
Chapter VI
The Synthesis of the Disciplines
of Knowledge
IN THE last chapter we have spoken of renunciation in its
most general scope, even as we spoke of concentration in all
its possibilities; what has been said, applies therefore equally
to the path of Works and the path of Devotion as to the path
of Knowledge; for on all three concentration and renunciation
are needed, though the way and spirit in which they are applied
may vary. But we must now turn more particularly to the actual
steps of the Path of Knowledge on which the double force of
concentration and renunciation must aid us to advance. Practi¬
cally, this path is a reascent up the great ladder of being down
which the soul has descended into the material existence.
Practi¬
cally, this path is a reascent up the great ladder of being down
which the soul has descended into the material existence.
The central aim of Knowledge is the recovery of the Self, of
our true self-existence, and this aim presupposes the admission
that our present mode of being is not our true self-existence. No
doubt, we have rejected the trenchant solutions which cut the
knot of the riddle of the universe; we recognise it neither as a
fiction of material appearance created by Force, nor as an unre¬
ality set up by the Mind, nor as a bundle of sensations, ideas and
results of idea and sensation with a great Void or a great blissful
Zero behind it to strive towards as our true truth of eternal non¬
existence. We accept the Self as a reality and the universe as a
reality of the Self, a reality of its consciousness and not of mere
material force and formation, but none the less or rather all the
more for that reason a reality. Still, though the universe is a fact
and not a fiction, a fact of the divine and universal and not a
fiction of the individual self, our state of existence here is a state
of ignorance, not the true truth of our being. We conceive of
ourselves falsely, we see ourselves as we are not; we live in a
false relation with our environment, because we know neither
336
The Yoga of Integral Knowledge
the universe nor ourselves for what they really are but with an
imperfect view founded on a temporary fiction which the Soul
and Nature have established between themselves for the conve¬
nience of the evolving ego. And this falsity is the root of a general
perversion, confusion and suffering which besiege at every step
both our internal life and our relations with our environment.
Our personal life and our communal life, our commerce with
ourselves and our commerce with our fellows are founded on a
falsity and are therefore false in their recognised principles and
methods, although through all this error a growing truth contin¬
ually seeks to express itself. Hence the supreme importance to
man of Knowledge, not what is called the practical knowledge
of life, but of the profoundest knowledge of the Self and Nature^
on which alone a true practice of life can be founded.
Hence the supreme importance to
man of Knowledge, not what is called the practical knowledge
of life, but of the profoundest knowledge of the Self and Nature^
on which alone a true practice of life can be founded.
The error proceeds from a false identification. Nature has
created within her material unity separate-seeming bodies which
the Soul manifested in material Nature enfolds, inhabits, pos¬
sesses, uses; the Soul forgetting itself experiences only this single
knot in Matter and says “I am this body.” It thinks of itself as
the body, suffers with the body, enjoys with the body, is born
with the body, is dissolved with the body; or so at least it views
its self-existence. Again, Nature has created within her unity
of universal life separate-seeming currents of life which form
themselves into a whorl of vitality around and in each body, and
the Soul manifested in vital Nature seizes on and is seized by
that current, is imprisoned momentarily in that little whirling
vortex of life. The Soul, still forgetting itself, says “I am this
life”; it thinks of itself as the life, craves with its cravings or
desires, wallows in its pleasures, bleeds with its wounds, rushes
or stumbles with its movements. If it is still mainly governed
by the body-sense, it identifies its own existence with that of
the whorl and thinks “When this whorl is dissipated by the
dissolution of the body round which it has formed itself, then
1 shall be no more.” If it has been able to sense the current
of life which has formed the vortex, it thinks of itself as that
^ dtmajndna and tattvajhdna.
The Synthesis of the Disciplines of Knowledge 337
current and says “I am this stream of life; I have entered upon
the possession of this body, I shall leave it and enter upon the
possession of other bodies: I am an immortal life revolving in a
cycle of constant rebirth.”
But again Nature has created within her mental unity,
formed in the universal Mind separate-seeming dynamos as it
were of mentality, constant centres for the generation, distri¬
bution and reabsorption of mental force and mental activities,
stations as it were in a system of mental telegraphy where
messages are conceived, written, sent, received, deciphered,
and these messages and these activities are of many kinds,
sensational, emotional, perceptual, conceptual, intuitional, all
of which the Soul manifested in mental Nature accepts, uses for
its outlook on the world and seems to itself to project and to
receive their shocks, to suffer or to master their consequences.
Nature instals the base of these dynamos in the material bodies
she has formed, makes these bodies the ground for her stations
and connects the mental with the material by a nerve-system
full of the movement of vital currents through which the mind
becomes conscious of the material world and, so far as it
chooses, of the vital world of Nature. Otherwise the mind
would be conscious of the mental world first and chiefly and
would only indirectly glimpse the material. As it is, its attention
is fixed on the body and the material world in which it has
been installed and it is aware of the rest of existence only dimly,
indirectly or subconsciously in that vast remainder of itself with
regard to which superficially it has become irresponsive and
oblivious.
The Soul identifies itself with this mental dynamo or station
and says “I am this mind.” And since the mind is absorbed in the
bodily life, it thinks “I am a mind in a living body” or, still more
commonly, “I am a body which lives and thinks.” It identifies
itself with the thoughts, emotions, sensations of the embodied
mind and imagines that because when the body is dissolved all
this will dissolve, itself also will cease to exist. Or if it becomes
conscious of the current of persistence of mental personality, it
thinks of itself as a mental soul occupying the body whether
338
The Yoga of Integral Knowledge
Or if it becomes
conscious of the current of persistence of mental personality, it
thinks of itself as a mental soul occupying the body whether
338
The Yoga of Integral Knowledge
once or repeatedly and returning from earthly living to mental
worlds beyond; the persistence of this mental being mentally
enjoying or suffering sometimes in the body, sometimes on the
mental or vital plane of Nature it calls its immortal existence.
Or else, because the mind is a principle of light and knowledge,
however imperfect, and can have some notion of what is beyond
it, it sees the possibility of a dissolution of the mental being into
that which is beyond, some Void or some eternal Existence, and
it says, “There I, the mental soul, cease to be.” Such dissolution
it dreads or desires, denies or affirms according to its measure of
attachment to or repulsion from this present play of embodied
mind and vitality.
Now, all this is a mixture of truth and falsehood. Mind,
Life, Matter exist and mental, vital, physical individualisation
exists as facts in Nature, but the identification of the soul with
these things is a false identification. Mind, Life and Matter are
ourselves only in this sense that they are principles of being
which the true self has evolved by the meeting and interaction
of Soul and Nature in order to express a form of its one existence
as the Cosmos. Individual mind, life and body are a play of these
principles which is set up in the commerce of Soul and Nature
as a means for the expression of that multiplicity of itself of
which the one Existence is eternally capable and which it holds
eternally involved in its unity. Individual mind, life and body are
forms of ourselves in so far as we are centres of the multiplicity
of the One; universal Mind, Life and Body are also forms of our
self, because we are that One in our being. But the self is more
than universal or individual mind, life and body and when we
limit ourselves by identification with these things, we found our
knowledge on a falsehood, we falsify our determining view and
our practical experience not only of our self-being but of our
cosmic existence and of our individual activities.
The Self is an eternal utter Being and pure existence of which
all these things are becomings. Lrom this knowledge we have to
proceed; this knowledge we have to realise and make it the foun¬
dation of the inner and the outer life of the individual. The Yoga
of Knowledge, starting from this primary truth, has conceived
The Synthesis of the Disciplines of Knowledge 339
The Yoga
of Knowledge, starting from this primary truth, has conceived
The Synthesis of the Disciplines of Knowledge 339
a negative and positive method of discipline by which we shall
get rid of these false identifications and recoil back from them
into true self-knowledge. The negative method is to say always
“I am not the body” so as to contradict and root out the false
idea “I am the body”, to concentrate on this knowledge and by
renunciation of the attachment of the soul to the physical get rid
of the body-sense. We say again “I am not the life” and by con¬
centration on this knowledge and renunciation of attachment to
the vital movements and desires, get rid of the life-sense. We say,
finally, “I am not the mind, the motion, the sense, the thought”
and by concentration on this knowledge and renunciation of the
mental activities, get rid of the mind-sense. When we thus con¬
stantly create a gulf between ourselves and the things with which
we identified ourselves, their veils progressively fall away from
us and the Self begins to be visible to our experience. Of that then
we say “I am That, the pure, the eternal, the self-blissful” and by
concentrating our thought and being upon it we become That
and are able finally to renounce the individual existence and
the Cosmos. Another positive method belonging rather to the
Rajayoga is to concentrate on the thought of the Brahman and
shut out from us all other ideas, so that this dynamo of mind shall
cease to work upon our external or varied internal existence; by
mental cessation the vital and physical play also shall fall to rest
in an eternal samadhi, some inexpressible deepest trance of the
being in which we shall pass into the absolute Existence.
This discipline is evidently a self-centred and exclusive inner
movement which gets rid of the world by denying it in thought
and shutting the eyes of the soul to it in vision. But the universe is
there as a truth in God even though the individual soul may have
shut its eyes to it and the Self is there in the universe really and
not falsely, supporting all that we have rejected, truly immanent
in all things, really embracing the individual in the universal
as well as embracing the universe in that which exceeds and
transcends it. What shall we do with this eternal Self in this
persistent universe which we see encompassing us every time we
come out of the trance of inner meditation? The ascetic Path of
Knowledge has its solution and its discipline for the soul that
340
The Yoga of Integral Knowledge
The ascetic Path of
Knowledge has its solution and its discipline for the soul that
340
The Yoga of Integral Knowledge
looks out on the universe. It is to regard the immanent and
all-encompassing and all-constituting Self in the image of the
ether in which all forms are, which is in all forms, of which
all forms are made. In that ether cosmic Life and Mind move
as the Breath of things, an atmospheric sea in the ethereal, and
constitute from it all these forms; but what they constitute are
merely name and form and not realities; the form of the pot we
see is a form of earth only and goes back into the earth, earth a
form resolvable into the cosmic Life, the cosmic Life a movement
that falls to rest in that silent immutable Ether. Concentrating
on this knowledge, rejecting all phenomenon and appearance,
we come to see the whole as an illusion of name and form in
the ether that is Brahman; it becomes unreal to us; and the
universe becoming unreal the immanence becomes unreal and
there is only the Self upon which our mind has falsely imposed
the name and form of the universe. Thus are we justified in the
withdrawal of the individual self into the Absolute.
Still, the Self goes on with its imperishable aspect of imma¬
nence, its immutable aspect of divine envelopment, its endless
trick of becoming each thing and all things; our detection of the
cheat and our withdrawal do not seem to affect one tittle either
the Self or the universe. Must we not then know also what it is
that thus persists superior to our acceptance and rejection and
too great, too eternal to be affected by it? Here too there must
be some invincible reality at work and the integrality of Knowl¬
edge demands that we shall see and realise it; otherwise it may
prove that our own knowledge and not the Lord in the universe
was the cheat and the illusion. Therefore we must concentrate
again and see and realise also this which persists so sovereignly
and must know the Self as no other than the Supreme Soul
which is the Lord of Nature, the upholder of cosmic existence
by whose sanction it proceeds, whose will compels its multitudi¬
nous actions and determines its perpetual cycles. And we must
yet concentrate once again and see and realise and must know
the Self as the one Existence who is both the Soul of all and the
Nature of all, at once Purusha and Prakrit! and so able both to
express himself in all these forms of things and to be all these
The Synthesis of the Disciplines of Knowledge 341
and so able both to
express himself in all these forms of things and to be all these
The Synthesis of the Disciplines of Knowledge 341
formations. Otherwise we have excluded what the Self does not
exclude and made a wilful choice in our knowledge.
The old ascetic Path of Knowledge admitted the unity of
things and the concentration on all these aspects of the one
Existence, but it made a distinction and a hierarchy. The Self
that becomes all these forms of things is the Virat or universal
Soul; the Self that creates all these forms is Hiranyagarbha, the
luminous or creatively perceptive Soul; the Self that contains
all these things involved in it is Prajna, the conscious Cause
or originally determining Soul; beyond all these is the Abso¬
lute who permits all this unreality, but has no dealings with
it. Into That we must withdraw and have no farther dealings
with the universe, since Knowledge means the final Knowledge,
and therefore these lesser realisations must fall away from us
or be lost in That. But evidently from our point of view these
are practical distinctions made by the mind which have a value
for certain purposes, but no ultimate value. Our view of the
world insists on unity; the universal Self is not different from
the perceptive and creative, nor the perceptive from the causal,
nor the causal from the Absolute, but it is one “Self-being which
has become all becomings”, and which is not any other than the
Lord who manifests Himself as all these individual existences
nor the Lord any other than the sole-existing Brahman who
verily is all this that we can see, sense, live or mentalise. That
Self, Lord, Brahman we would know that we may realise our
unity with it and with all that it manifests and in that unity we
would live. Lor we demand of knowledge that it shall unite; the
knowledge that divides must always be a partial knowing good
for certain practical purposes; the knowledge that unites is the
knowledge.
Therefore our integral Yoga will take up these various dis¬
ciplines and concentrations, but harmonise and if possible fuse
them by a synthesis which removes their mutual exclusions. Not
realising the Lord and the All only to reject them for silent Self or
unknowable Absolute as would an exclusively transcendental,
nor living for the Lord alone or in the All alone as would an
exclusively theistic or an exclusively pantheistic Yoga, the seeker
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The Yoga of Integral Knowledge
of integral knowledge will limit himself neither in his thought
nor in his practice nor in his realisation by any religious creed or
philosophical dogma. He will seek the Truth of existence in its
completeness. The ancient disciplines he will not reject, for they
rest upon eternal truths, but he will give them an orientation in
conformity with his aim.
We must recognise that our primary aim in knowledge must
be to realise our own supreme Self more than that Self in others
or as the Lord of Nature or as the All; for that is the pressing
need of the individual, to arrive at the highest truth of his own
being, to set right its disorders, confusions, false identifications,
to arrive at its right concentration and purity and to know and
mount to its source. But we do this not in order to disappear into
its source, but so that our whole existence and all the members
of this inner kingdom may find their right basis, may live in our
highest self, live for our highest self only and obey no other law
than that which proceeds from our highest self and is given to
our purified being without any falsification in the transmitting
mentality. And if we do this rightly we shall discover that in
finding this supreme Self we have found the one Self in all, the
one Lord of our nature and of all Nature, the All of ourselves
who is the All of the universe. For this that we see in ourselves
we must necessarily see everywhere, since that is the truth of
His unity. By discovering and using rightly the Truth of our
being the barrier between our individuality and the universe
will necessarily be forced open and cast away and the Truth
that we realise in our own being cannot fail to realise itself to
us in the universality which will then be our self. Realising in
ourselves the “I am He” of the Vedanta, we cannot but realise in
looking upon all around us the identical knowledge on its other
side, “Thou art That.” We have only to see how practically
the discipline must be conducted in order that we may arrive
successfully at this great unification.
Chapter VII
The Release from Subjection
to the Body
Chapter VII
The Release from Subjection
to the Body
OUR FIRST step in this path of knowledge, having once
determined in our intellect that what seems is not the
Truth, that the self is not the body or life or mind, since
these are only its forms, must be to set right our mind in its
practical relation with the life and the body so that it may arrive
at its own right relation with the Self. This it is easiest to do
by a device with which we are already familiar, since it played
a great part in our view of the Yoga of Works; it is to create a
separation between the Prakriti and the Purusha. The Purusha,
the soul that knows and commands has got himself involved
in the workings of his executive conscious force, so that he
mistakes this physical working of it which we call the body for
himself; he forgets his own nature as the soul that knows and
commands; he believes his mind and soul to be subject to the
law and working of the body; he forgets that he is so much else
besides that is greater than the physical form; he forgets that the
mind is really greater than Matter and ought not to submit to
its obscurations, reactions, habit of inertia, habit of incapacity;
he forgets that he is more even than the mind, a Power which
can raise the mental being above itself; that he is the Master, the
Transcendent and it is not fit the Master should be enslaved to
his own workings, the Transcendent imprisoned in a form which
exists only as a trifle in its own being. All this forgetfulness has
to be cured by the Purusha remembering his own true nature
and first by his remembering that the body is only a working
and only one working of Prakriti.
We say then to the mind “This is a working of Prakriti,
this is neither thyself nor myself; stand back from it.” We shall
find, if we try, that the mind has this power of detachment and
344
The Yoga of Integral Knowledge
We say then to the mind “This is a working of Prakriti,
this is neither thyself nor myself; stand back from it.” We shall
find, if we try, that the mind has this power of detachment and
344
The Yoga of Integral Knowledge
can stand back from the body not only in idea, but in act and
as it were physically or rather vitally. This detachment of the
mind must be strengthened by a certain attitude of indifference
to the things of the body; we must not care essentially about
its sleep or its waking, its movement or its rest, its pain or
its pleasure, its health or ill-health, its vigour or its fatigue, its
comfort or its discomfort, or what it eats or drinks. This does
not mean that we shall not keep the body in right order so
far as we can; we have not to fall into violent asceticisms or a
positive neglect of the physical frame. But we have not either
to be affected in mind by hunger or thirst or discomfort or ill-
health or attach the importance which the physical and vital
man attaches to the things of the body, or indeed any but a quite
subordinate and purely instrumental importance. Nor must this
instrumental importance be allowed to assume the proportions
of a necessity; we must not for instance imagine that the purity of
the mind depends on the things we eat or drink, although during
a certain stage restrictions in eating and drinking are useful to
our inner progress; nor on the other hand must we continue to
think that the dependence of the mind or even of the life on food
and drink is anything more than a habit, a customary relation
which Nature has set up between these principles. As a matter
of fact the food we take can be reduced by contrary habit and
new relation to a minimum without the mental or vital vigour
being in any way reduced; even on the contrary with a judicious
development they can be trained to a greater potentiality of
vigour by learning to rely on the secret fountains of mental and
vital energy with which they are connected more than upon the
minor aid of physical aliments. This aspect of self-discipline is
however more important in the Yoga of self-perfection than here;
for our present purpose the important point is the renunciation
by the mind of attachment to or dependence on the things of the
body.
Thus disciplined the mind will gradually learn to take up
towards the body the true attitude of the Purusha. First of all,
it will know the mental Purusha as the upholder of the body
and not in any way the body itself; for it is quite other than
Thus disciplined the mind will gradually learn to take up
towards the body the true attitude of the Purusha. First of all,
it will know the mental Purusha as the upholder of the body
and not in any way the body itself; for it is quite other than
The Release from Subjection to the Body
345
the physical existence which it upholds by the mind through
the agency of the vital force. This will come to be so much the
normal attitude of the whole being to the physical frame that the
latter will feel to us as if something external and detachable like
the dress we wear or an instrument we happen to be carrying in
our hand. We may even come to feel that the body is in a certain
sense non-existent except as a sort of partial expression of our
vital force and of our mentality. These experiences are signs that
the mind is coming to a right poise regarding the body, that it
is exchanging the false view-point of the mentality obsessed and
captured by physical sensation for the view-point of the true
truth of things.
Secondly, with regard to the movements and experiences
of the body the mind will come to know the Purusha seated
within it as, first, the witness or observer of the movements and,
secondly, the knower or perceiver of the experiences. It will cease
to consider in thought or feel in sensation these movements and
experiences as its own but rather consider and feel them as not
its own, as operations of Nature governed by the qualities of
Nature and their interaction upon each other. This detachment
can be made so normal and carried so far that there will be a
kind of division between the mind and the body and the former
will observe and experience the hunger, thirst, pain, fatigue,
depression, etc. of the physical being as if they were experiences
of some other person with whom it has so close a rapport as to
be aware of all that is going on within him. This division is a
great means, a great step towards mastery; for the mind comes to
observe these things first without being overpowered and finally
without being at all affected by them, dispassionately, with clear
understanding but with perfect detachment. This is the initial
liberation of the mental being from servitude to the body; for
by right knowledge put steadily into practice liberation comes
inevitably.
Finally, the mind will come to know the Purusha in the
mind as the master of Nature whose sanction is necessary to
her movements. It will find that as the giver of the sanction
he can withdraw the original fiat from the previous habits of
346
Finally, the mind will come to know the Purusha in the
mind as the master of Nature whose sanction is necessary to
her movements. It will find that as the giver of the sanction
he can withdraw the original fiat from the previous habits of
346
The Yoga of Integral Knowledge
Nature and that eventually the habit will cease or change in the
direction indicated by the will of the Purusha; not at once, for
the old sanction persists as an obstinate consequence of the past
Karma of Nature until that is exhausted, and a good deal also
depends on the force of the habit and the idea of fundamental
necessity which the mind had previously attached to it; but if it
is not one of the fundamental habits Nature has established for
the relation of the mind, life and body and if the old sanction
is not renewed by the mind or the habit willingly indulged,
then eventually the change will come. Even the habit of hunger
and thirst can be minimised, inhibited, put away; the habit of
disease can be similarly minimised and gradually eliminated and
in the meantime the power of the mind to set right the disorders
of the body whether by conscious manipulation of vital force
or by simple mental fiat will immensely increase. By a similar
process the habit by which the bodily nature associates certain
forms and degrees of activity with strain, fatigue, incapacity can
be rectified and the power, freedom, swiftness, effectiveness of
the work whether physical or mental which can be done with
this bodily instrument marvellously increased, doubled, tripled,
decupled.
This side of the method belongs properly to the Yoga of
self-perfection; but it is as well to speak briefly of these things
here both because we thereby lay a basis for what we shall have
to say of self-perfection, which is a part of the integral Yoga,
and because we have to correct the false notions popularised
by materialistic Science. According to this Science the normal
mental and physical states and the relations between mind and
body actually established by our past evolution are the right,
natural and healthy conditions and anything other, anything
opposite to them is either morbid and wrong or a hallucination,
self-deception and insanity. Needless to say, this conservative
principle is entirely ignored by Science itself when it so diligently
and successfully improves on the normal operations of physical
Nature for the greater mastery of Nature by man. Suffice it to
say here once for all that a change of mental and physical state
and of relations between the mind and body which increases the
The Release from Subjection to the Body
347
purity and freedom of the being, brings a clear joy and peace and
multiplies the power of the mind over itself and over the physical
functions, brings about in a word man’s greater mastery of his
own nature, is obviously not morbid and cannot be considered
a hallucination or self-deception since its effects are patent and
positive. In fact, it is simply a willed advance of Nature in her
evolution of the individual, an evolution which she will carry
out in any case but in which she chooses to utilise the human
will as her chief agent, because her essential aim is to lead the
Purusha to conscious mastery over herself.
This being said, we must add that in the movement of the
path of knowledge perfection of the mind and body are no
consideration at all or only secondary considerations. The one
thing necessary is to rise out of Nature to the Self by either the
most swift or the most thorough and effective method possible;
and the method we are describing, though not the swiftest, is
the most thorough-going in its effectivity. And here there arises
the question of physical action or inaction. It is ordinarily con¬
sidered that the Yogin should draw away from action as much
as possible and especially that too much action is a hindrance
because it draws off the energies outward. To a certain extent
this is true; and we must note farther that when the mental
Purusha takes up the attitude of mere witness and observer, a
tendency to silence, solitude, physical calm and bodily inaction
grows upon the being. So long as this is not associated with
inertia, incapacity or unwillingness to act, in a word, with the
growth of the tamasic quality, all this is to the good. The power
to do nothing, which is quite different from indolence, incapac¬
ity or aversion to action and attachment to inaction, is a great
power and a great mastery; the power to rest absolutely from
action is as necessary for the Jnanayogin as the power to cease
absolutely from thought, as the power to remain indefinitely in
sheer solitude and silence and as the power of immovable calm.
Whoever is not willing to embrace these states is not yet fit for
the path that leads towards the highest knowledge; whoever is
unable to draw towards them, is as yet unfit for its acquisition.
At the same time it must be added that the power is enough;
348
The Yoga of Integral Knowledge
At the same time it must be added that the power is enough;
348
The Yoga of Integral Knowledge
the abstention from all physical action is not indispensable, the
aversion to action mental or corporeal is not desirable. The
seeker of the integral state of knowledge must be free from at¬
tachment to action and equally free from attachment to inaction.
Especially must any tendency to mere inertia of mind or vitality
or body be surmounted, and if that habit is found growing on
the nature, the will of the Purusha must be used to dismiss it.
Eventually, a state arrives when the life and the body perform as
mere instruments the will of the Purusha in the mind without any
strain or attachment, without their putting themselves into the
action with that inferior, eager and often feverish energy which
is the nature of their ordinary working; they come to work as
forces of Nature work without the fret and toil and reaction
characteristic of life in the body when it is not yet master of
the physical. When we attain to this perfection, then action and
inaction become immaterial, since neither interferes with the
freedom of the soul or draws it away from its urge towards the
Self or its poise in the Self. But this state of perfection arrives
later in the Yoga and till then the law of moderation laid down
by the Gita is the best for us; too much mental or physical action
then is not good since excess draws away too much energy and
reacts unfavourably upon the spiritual condition; too little also
is not good since defect leads to a habit of inaction and even
to an incapacity which has afterwards to be surmounted with
difficulty. Still, periods of absolute calm, solitude and cessation
from works are highly desirable and should be secured as often
as possible for that recession of the soul into itself which is
indispensable to knowledge.
While dealing thus with the body we have necessarily to
deal also with the Prana or life-energy. Eor practical purposes
we have to make a distinction between the life-energy as it acts
in the body, the physical Prana, and the life-energy as it acts
in support of the mental activities, the psychical Prana. Eor we
lead always a double life, mental and physical, and the same life-
energy acts differently and assumes a different aspect according
as it lends itself to one or the other. In the body it produces
those reactions of hunger, thirst, fatigue, health, disease, physical
The Release from Subjection to the Body
349
In the body it produces
those reactions of hunger, thirst, fatigue, health, disease, physical
The Release from Subjection to the Body
349
vigour, etc. which are the vital experiences of the physical frame.
For the gross body of man is not like the stone or the earth;
it is a combination of two sheaths, the vital and the “food”
sheath and its life is a constant interaction of these two. Still
the life-energy and the physical frame are two different things
and in the withdrawal of the mind from the absorbing sense of
the body we become increasingly sensible of the Prana and its
action in the corporeal instrument and can observe and more
and more control its operations. Practically, in drawing back
from the body we draw back from the physical life-energy also,
even while we distinguish the two and feel the latter nearer to
us than the mere physical instrument. The entire conquest of the
body comes in fact by the conquest of the physical life-energy.
Along with the attachment to the body and its works the
attachment to life in the body is overcome. For when we feel
the physical being to be not ourselves, but only a dress or an
instrument, the repulsion to the death of the body which is so
strong and vehement an instinct of the vital man must necessarily
weaken and can be thrown away. Thrown away it must be and
entirely. The fear of death and the aversion to bodily cessation
are the stigma left by his animal origin on the human being.
That brand must be utterly effaced.
Chapter VIII
The Release from the Heart
and the Mind
Thrown away it must be and
entirely. The fear of death and the aversion to bodily cessation
are the stigma left by his animal origin on the human being.
That brand must be utterly effaced.
Chapter VIII
The Release from the Heart
and the Mind
But the ascending soul has to separate itself not only
from the life in the body but from the action of the
life-energy in the mind; it has to make the mind say as
the representative of the Purusha “I am not the Life; the Life
is not the self of the Purusha, it is only a working and only
one working of Prakriti.” The characteristics of Life are action
and movement, a reaching out to absorb and assimilate what is
external to the individual and a principle of satisfaction or dis¬
satisfaction in what it seizes upon or what comes to it, which is
associated with the all-pervading phenomenon of attraction and
repulsion. These three things are everywhere in Nature because
Life is everywhere in Nature. But in us mental beings they are
all given a mental value according to the mind which perceives
and accepts them. They take the form of action, of desire and of
liking and disliking, pleasure and pain. The Prana is everywhere
in us supporting not only the action of our body, but of our
sense-mind, our emotional mind, our thought-mind; and bring¬
ing its own law or dharma into all these, it confuses, it limits, it
throws into discord their right action and creates that impurity
of misplacement and that tangled confusion which is the whole
evil of our psychological existence. In that confusion one law
seems to reign, the law of desire. As the universal Divine Being,
all-embracing and all-possessing, acts, moves, enjoys purely for
the satisfaction of divine Delight, so the individual life acts,
moves, enjoys and suffers predominantly for the satisfaction of
desire. Therefore the psychic life-energy presents itself to our
experience as a sort of desire-mind, which we have to conquer
if we mean to get back to our true self.
Desire is at once the motive of our actions, our lever of
The Release from the Heart and the Mind
351
Desire is at once the motive of our actions, our lever of
The Release from the Heart and the Mind
351
accomplishment and the bane of our existence. If our sense-
mind, emotional mind, thought-mind could act free from the
intrusions and importations of the life-energy, if that energy
could be made to obey their right action instead of imposing its
own yoke on our existence, all human problems would move
harmoniously to their right solution. The proper function of the
life-energy is to do what it is bidden by the divine principle in us,
to reach to and enjoy what is given to it by that indwelling Divine
and not to desire at all. The proper function of the sense-mind
is to lie open passively, luminously to the contacts of Life and
transmit their sensations and the rasa or right taste and principle
of delight in them to the higher function; but interfered with by
the attractions and repulsions, the acceptances and refusals, the
satisfactions and dissatisfactions, the capacities and incapacities
of the life-energy in the body it is, to begin with, limited in its
scope and, secondly, forced in these limits to associate itself with
all these discords of the life in Matter. It becomes an instrument
for pleasure and pain instead of for delight of existence.
Similarly the emotional mind compelled to take note of all
these discords and subject itself to their emotional reactions be¬
comes a hurtling field of joy and grief, love and hatred, wrath,
fear, struggle, aspiration, disgust, likes, dislikes, indifferences,
content, discontent, hopes, disappointments, gratitude, revenge
and all the stupendous play of passion which is the drama of life
in the world. This chaos we call our soul. But the real soul, the
real psychic entity which for the most part we see little of and
only a small minority in mankind has developed, is an instru¬
ment of pure love, joy and the luminous reaching out to fusion
and unity with God and our fellow-creatures. This psychic entity
is covered up by the play of the mentalised Prana or desire-mind
which we mistake for the soul; the emotional mind is unable to
mirror the real soul in us, the Divine in our hearts, and is obliged
instead to mirror the desire-mind.
So too the proper function of the thought-mind is to observe,
understand, judge with a dispassionate delight in knowledge and
open itself to messages and illuminations playing upon all that
it observes and upon all that is yet hidden from it but must
352
The Yoga of Integral Knowledge
progressively be revealed, messages and illuminations that se¬
cretly flash down to us from the divine Oracle concealed in light
above our mentality whether they seem to descend through the
intuitive mind or arise from the seeing heart. But this it cannot
do rightly because it is pinned to the limitations of the life-energy
in the senses, to the discords of sensation and emotion, and to
its own limitations of intellectual preference, inertia, straining,
self-will which are the form taken in it by the interference of
this desire-mind, this psychic Prana. As is said in the Upani-
shads, our whole mind-consciousness is shot through with the
threads and currents of this Prana, this Life-energy that strives
and limits, grasps and misses, desires and suffers, and only by its
purification can we know and possess our real and eternal self.
It is true that the root of all this evil is the ego-sense and
that the seat of the conscious ego-sense is the mind itself; but in
reality the conscious mind only reflects an ego already created in
the subconscious mind in things, the dumb soul in the stone and
the plant which is present in all body and life and only Anally
delivered into voicefulness and wakefulness but not originally
created by the conscious mind. And in this upward procession it
is the life-energy which has become the obstinate knot of the ego,
it is the desire-mind which refuses to relax the knot even when
the intellect and the heart have discovered the cause of their ills
and would be glad enough to remove it; for the Prana in them
is the Animal who revolts and who obscures and deceives their
knowledge and coerces their will by his refusal.
Therefore the mental Purusha has to separate himself from
association and self-identification with this desire-mind. He has
to say “I am not this thing that struggles and suffers, grieves
and rejoices, loves and hates, hopes and is baffled, is angry and
afraid and cheerful and depressed, a thing of vital moods and
emotional passions. All these are merely workings and habits of
Prakriti in the sensational and emotional mind.” The mind then
draws back from its emotions and becomes with these, as with
the bodily movements and experiences, the observer or witness.
There is again an inner cleavage. There is this emotional mind in
which these moods and passions continue to occur according to
The Release from the Heart and the Mind
3 S3
There is again an inner cleavage. There is this emotional mind in
which these moods and passions continue to occur according to
The Release from the Heart and the Mind
3 S3
the habit of the modes of Nature and there is the observing mind
which sees them, studies and understands but is detached from
them. It observes them as if in a sort of action and play on a
mental stage of personages other than itself, at first with interest
and a habit of relapse into identification, then with entire calm
and detachment, and, finally, attaining not only to calm but to
the pure delight of its own silent existence, with a smile at their
unreality as at the imaginary joys and sorrows of a child who
is playing and loses himself in the play. Secondly, it becomes
aware of itself as master of the sanction who by his withdrawal
of sanction can make this play to cease. When the sanction
is withdrawn, another significant phenomenon takes place; the
emotional mind becomes normally calm and pure and free from
these reactions, and even when they come, they no longer rise
from within but seem to fall on it as impressions from outside to
which its fibres are still able to respond; but this habit of response
dies away and the emotional mind is in time entirely liberated
from the passions which it has renounced. Hope and fear, joy
and grief, liking and disliking, attraction and repulsion, content
and discontent, gladness and depression, horror and wrath and
fear and disgust and shame and the passions of love and hatred
fall away from the liberated psychic being.
What takes their place? It may be, if we will, an entire calm,
silence and indifference. But although this is a stage through
which the soul has usually to pass, it is not the final aim we
have placed before us. Therefore the Purusha becomes also the
master who wills and whose will it is to replace wrong by right
enjoyment of the psychic existence. What he wills. Nature ex¬
ecutes. What was fabric-stuff of desire and passion, is turned
into reality of pure, equal and calmly intense love and joy and
oneness. The real soul emerges and takes the place left vacant
by the desire-mind. The cleansed and emptied cup is filled with
the wine of divine love and delight and no longer with the sweet
and bitter poison of passion. The passions, even the passion for
good, misrepresent the divine nature. The passion of pity with
its impure elements of physical repulsion and emotional inability
to bear the suffering of others has to be rejected and replaced by
354
The passions, even the passion for
good, misrepresent the divine nature. The passion of pity with
its impure elements of physical repulsion and emotional inability
to bear the suffering of others has to be rejected and replaced by
354
The Yoga of Integral Knowledge
the higher divine compassion which sees, understands, accepts
the burden of others and is strong to help and heal, not with
self-will and revolt against the suffering in the world and with
ignorant accusation of the law of things and their source, but
with light and knowledge and as an instrument of the Divine
in its emergence. So too the love that desires and grasps and
is troubled with joy and shaken with grief must be rejected for
the equal, all-embracing love that is free from these things and
has no dependence upon circumstances and is not modified by
response or absence of response. So we shall deal with all the
movements of the soul; but of these things we shall speak farther
when we consider the Yoga of self-perfection.
As with action and inaction, so it is with this dual possibility
of indifference and calm on the one side and active joy and
love on the other. Equality, not indifference is the basis. Equal
endurance, impartial indifference, calm submission to the causes
of joy and grief without any reaction of either grief or joy are
the preparation and negative basis of equality; but equality is
not fulfilled till it takes its positive form of love and delight.
The sense-mind must find the equal rasa of the All-Beautiful,
the heart the equal love and Ananda for all, the psychic Prana
the enjoyment of this rasa, love and Ananda. This, however, is
the positive perfection that comes by liberation; our first object
on the path of knowledge is rather the liberation that comes by
detachment from the desire-mind and by the renunciation of its
passions.
The desire-mind must also be rejected from the instrument
of thought and this is best done by the detachment of the Pu-
rusha from thought and opinion itself. Of this we have already
had occasion to speak when we considered in what consists
the integral purification of the being. Eor all this movement
of knowledge which we are describing is a method of purifi¬
cation and liberation whereby entire and final self-knowledge
becomes possible, a progressive self-knowledge being itself the
instrument of the purification and liberation. The method with
the thought-mind will be the same as with all the rest of the
being. The Purusha, having used the thought-mind for release
The method with
the thought-mind will be the same as with all the rest of the
being. The Purusha, having used the thought-mind for release
The Release from the Heart and the Mind
355
from identification with the life and body and with the mind
of desire and sensations and emotions, will turn round upon
the thought-mind itself and will say “This too I am not; I am
not the thought or the thinker; all these ideas, opinions, spec¬
ulations, strivings of the intellect, its predilections, preferences,
dogmas, doubts, self-corrections are not myself; all this is only
a working of Prakriti which takes place in the thought-mind.”
Thus a division is created between the mind that thinks and
wills and the mind that observes and the Purusha becomes the
witness only; he sees, he understands the process and laws of his
thought, but detaches himself from it. Then as the master of the
sanction he withdraws his past sanction from the tangle of the
mental undercurrent and the reasoning intellect and causes both
to cease from their importunities. He becomes liberated from
subjection to the thinking mind and capable of the utter silence.
For perfection there is necessary also the resumption by the
Purusha of his position as the lord of his Nature and the will to
replace the mere mental undercurrent and intellect by the truth¬
conscious thought that lightens from above. But the silence is
necessary; in the silence and not in the thought we shall find the
Self, we shall become aware of it, not merely conceive it, and we
shall withdraw out of the mental Purusha into that which is the
source of the mind. But for this withdrawal a final liberation is
needed, the release from the ego-sense in the mind.
Chapter IX
The Release from the Ego
But for this withdrawal a final liberation is
needed, the release from the ego-sense in the mind.
Chapter IX
The Release from the Ego
The formation of a mental and vital ego tied to the
body-sense was the first great labour of the cosmic Life in
its progressive evolution; for this was the means it found
for creating out of matter a conscious individual. The dissolution
of this limiting ego is the one condition, the necessary means for
this very same Life to arrive at its divine fruition: for only so
can the conscious individual find either his transcendent self or
his true Person. This double movement is usually represented as
a fall and a redemption or a creation and a destruction, — the
kindling of a light and its extinction or the formation first of
a smaller temporary and unreal self and a release from it into
our true self’s eternal largeness. For human thought falls apart
towards two opposite extremes: one, mundane and pragmatic,
regards the fulfilment and satisfaction of the mental, vital and
physical ego-sense individual or collective as the object of life
and looks no farther, while the other, spiritual, philosophic or
religious, regards the conquest of the ego in the interests of the
soul, spirit or whatever be the ultimate entity, as the one thing
supremely worth doing. Even in the camp of the ego there are
two divergent attitudes which divide the mundane or materialist
theory of the universe. One tendency of this thought regards the
mental ego as a creation of our mentality which will be dissolved
with the dissolution of mind by the death of the body; the one
abiding truth is eternal Nature working in the race — this or
another — and her purpose should be followed, not ours, — the
fulfilment of the race, the collective ego, and not that of the
individual should be the rule of life. Another trend of thought,
more vitalistic in its tendencies, fixes on the conscious ego as
the supreme achievement of Nature, no matter how transitory,
ennobles it into a human representative of the Will-to-be and
holds up its greatness and satisfaction as the highest aim of our
The Release from the Ego
357
existence. In the more numerous systems that take their stand
on some kind of religious thought or spiritual discipline there is
a corresponding divergence. The Buddhist denies the existence
of a real self or ego, admits no universal or transcendent Being.
The Adwaitin declares the apparently individual soul to be none
other than the supreme Self and Brahman, its individuality an
illusion; the putting off of individual existence is the only true
release. Other systems assert, in flat contradiction of this view,
the eternal persistence of the human soul; a basis of multiple
consciousness in the One or else a dependent but still separate
entity, it is constant, real, imperishable.
Amidst these various and conflicting opinions the seeker of
the Truth has to decide for himself which shall be for him the
Knowledge. But if our aim is a spiritual release or a spiritual
fulfilment, then the exceeding of this little mould of ego is im¬
perative. In human egoism and its satisfaction there can be no
divine culmination and deliverance. A certain purification from
egoism is the condition even of ethical progress and elevation,
for social good and perfection; much more is it indispensable
for inner peace, purity and joy. But a much more radical deliver¬
ance, not only from egoism but from ego-idea and ego-sense, is
needed if our aim is to raise human into divine nature. Experi¬
ence shows that, in proportion as we deliver ourselves from the
limiting mental and vital ego, we command a wider life, a larger
existence, a higher consciousness, a happier soul-state, even a
greater knowledge, power and scope. Even the aim which the
most mundane philosophy pursues, the fulfilment, perfection,
satisfaction of the individual, is best assured not by satisfying
the narrow ego but by finding freedom in a higher and larger
self. There is no happiness in smallness of the being, says the
Scripture, it is with the large being that happiness comes. The ego
is by its nature a smallness of being; it brings contraction of the
consciousness and with the contraction limitation of knowledge,
disabling ignorance, — confinement and a diminution of power
and by that diminution incapacity and weakness, — scission of
oneness and by that scission disharmony and failure of sympathy
and love and understanding, — inhibition or fragmentation of
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The Yoga of Integral Knowledge
delight of being and by that fragmentation pain and sorrow. To
recover what is lost we must break out of the walls of ego. The
ego must either disappear in impersonality or fuse into a larger
I: it must fuse into the wider cosmic “I” which comprehends
all these smaller selves or the transcendent of which even the
cosmic self is a diminished image.
But this cosmic self is spiritual in essence and in experience;
it must not be confused with the collective existence, with any
group soul or the life and body of a human society or even of
all mankind. The subordination of the ego to the progress and
happiness of the human race is now a governing idea in the
world’s thought and ethics; but this is a mental and moral and
not a spiritual ideal. For that progress is a series of constant
mental, vital and physical vicissitudes, it has no firm spiritual
content, and offers no sure standing-ground to the soul of man.
The consciousness of collective humanity is only a larger com¬
prehensive edition or a sum of individual egos. Made of the
same substance, in the same mould of nature, it has not in it any
greater light, any more eternal sense of itself, any purer source
of peace, joy and deliverance. It is rather even more tortured,
troubled and obscured, certainly more vague, confused and un¬
progressive. The individual is in this respect greater than the
mass and cannot be called on to subordinate his more luminous
possibilities to this darker entity. If light, peace, deliverance, a
better state of existence are to come, they must descend into
the soul from something wider than the individual, but also
from something higher than the collective ego. Altruism, phi¬
lanthropy, the service of mankind are in themselves mental or
moral ideals, not laws of the spiritual life. If into the spiritual
aim there enters the impulse to deny the personal self or to serve
humanity or the world at large, it comes not from the ego nor
from the collective sense of the race, but from something more
occult and profound transcendent of both these things; for it
is founded on a sense of the Divine in all and it works not for
the sake of the ego or the race but for the sake of the Divine
and its purpose in the person or group or collective. It is this
transcendent Source which we must seek and serve, this vaster
The Release from the Ego
359
being and consciousness to which the race and the individual
are minor terms of its existence.
It is this
transcendent Source which we must seek and serve, this vaster
The Release from the Ego
359
being and consciousness to which the race and the individual
are minor terms of its existence.
There is indeed a truth behind the pragmatic impulse which
an exclusive one-sided spirituality is apt to ignore or deny or
belittle. It is this that since the individual and the universal are
terms of that higher and vaster Being, their fulfilment must have
some real place in the supreme Existence. There must be behind
them some high purpose in the supreme Wisdom and Knowl¬
edge, some eternal strain in the supreme Delight: they cannot
have been, they were not created in vain. But the perfection
and satisfaction of humanity like the perfection and satisfaction
of the individual, can only be securely compassed and founded
upon a more eternal yet unseized truth and right of things. Minor
terms of some greater Existence, they can fulfil themselves only
when that of which they are the terms is known and possessed.
The greatest service to humanity, the surest foundation for its
true progress, happiness and perfection is to prepare or find
the way by which the individual and the collective man can
transcend the ego and live in its true self, no longer bound
to ignorance, incapacity, disharmony and sorrow. It is by the
pursuit of the eternal and not by living bound in the slow col¬
lective evolution of Nature that we can best assure even that
evolutionary, collective, altruistic aim our modern thought and
idealism have set before us. But it is in itself a secondary aim; to
find, know and possess the Divine existence, consciousness and
nature and to live in it for the Divine is our true aim and the one
perfection to which we must aspire.
It is then in the way of the spiritual philosophies and reli¬
gions, not in that of any earth-bound materialistic doctrine, that
the seeker of the highest knowledge has to walk, even if with
enriched aims and a more comprehensive spiritual purpose. But
how far has he to proceed in the elimination of the ego? In the
ancient way of knowledge we arrive at the elimination of the
ego-sense which attaches itself to the body, to the life, to the
mind and says of all or any of them, “This is I”. Not only do
we, as in the way of works, get rid of the “I” of the worker and
see the Eord alone as the true source of all works and sanction
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The Yoga of Integral Knowledge
Not only do
we, as in the way of works, get rid of the “I” of the worker and
see the Eord alone as the true source of all works and sanction
360
The Yoga of Integral Knowledge
of works and His executive Nature-power or else His supreme
Shakti as the sole agent and worker, — but we get rid also of
the ego-sense which mistakes the instruments or the expressions
of our being for our true self and spirit. But even if all this has
been done, something remains still; there remains a substratum
of all these, a general sense of the separate I. This substratum
ego is something vague, indefinable, elusive; it does not or need
not attach itself to anything in particular as the self; it does not
identify itself with anything collective; it is a sort of fundamental
form or power of the mind which compels the mental being to
feel himself as a perhaps indefinable but still a limited being
which is not mind, life or body, but under which their activities
proceed in Nature. The others were a qualified ego-idea and
ego-sense supporting themselves on the play of the Prakriti; but
this is the pure fundamental ego-power supporting itself on the
consciousness of the mental Purusha. And because it seems to
be above or behind the play and not in it, because it does not say
“I am the mind, life or body,” but “I am a being on whom the
action of mind, life and body depends,” many think themselves
released and mistake this elusive Ego for the One, the Divine,
the true Purusha or at the very least for the true Person within
them, — mistaking the indefinable for the Infinite. But so long as
this fundamental ego-sense remains, there is no absolute release.
The egoistic life, even if diminished in force and intensity, can
still continue well enough with this support. If there is the error
in identification, the ego life may under that pretext get rather
an exaggerated intensity and force. Even if there is no such error,
the ego life may be wider, purer, more flexible and release may
be now much easier to attain and nearer to accomplishment,
but still there is as yet no definitive release. It is imperative to go
farther, to get rid of this indefinable but fundamental ego-sense
also and get back to the Purusha on whom it is supporting itself,
of whom it is a shadow; the shadow has to disappear and by its
disappearance reveal the spirit’s unclouded substance.
That substance is the self of the man called in European
thought the Monad, in Indian philosophy, Jiva or Jivatman, the
living entity, the self of the living creature. This Jiva is not the
The Release from the Ego
361
mental ego-sense constructed by the workings of Nature for
her temporary purpose. It is not a thing bound, as the mental
being, the vital, the physical are bound, by her habits, laws or
processes. The Jiva is a spirit and self, superior to Nature. It is
true that it consents to her acts, reflects her moods and upholds
the triple medium of mind, life and body through which she
casts them upon the soul’s consciousness; but it is itself a living
reflection or a soul-form or a self-creation of the Spirit universal
and transcendent. The One Spirit who has mirrored some of
His modes of being in the world and in the soul, is multiple
in the Jiva. That Spirit is the very Self of our self, the One
and the Highest, the Supreme we have to realise, the infinite
existence into which we have to enter. And so far the teachers
walk in company, all agreeing that this is the supreme object of
knowledge, of works and of devotion, all agreeing that if it is
to be attained, the Jiva must release himself from the ego-sense
which belongs to the lower Nature or Maya. But here they part
company and each goes his own way. The Monist fixes his feet
on the path of an exclusive Knowledge and sets for us as sole
ideal an entire return, loss, immersion or extinction of the Jiva
in the Supreme. The Dualist or the partial Monist turns to the
path of Devotion and directs us to shed indeed the lower ego
and material life, but to see as the highest destiny of the spirit
of man, not the self-annihilation of the Buddhist, not the self¬
immersion of the Adwaitin, not a swallowing up of the many by
the One, but an eternal existence absorbed in the thought, love
and enjoyment of the Supreme, the One, the All-Lover.
For the disciple of an integral Yoga there can be no hesita¬
tion; as a seeker of knowledge it is the integral knowledge and
not anything either half-way and attractive or high-pinnacled
and exclusive he must seek. He must soar to the utmost height,
but also circle and spread to the most all-embracing wide¬
ness, not binding himself to any rigid structure of metaphysical
thought, but free to admit and combine all the soul’s highest
and greatest and fullest and most numerous experiences. If the
highest height of spiritual experience, the sheer summit of all re¬
alisation is the absolute union of the soul with the Transcendent
362
The Yoga of Integral Knowledge
If the
highest height of spiritual experience, the sheer summit of all re¬
alisation is the absolute union of the soul with the Transcendent
362
The Yoga of Integral Knowledge
who exceeds the individual and the universe, the widest scope
of that union is the discovery of that very Transcendent as the
source, support, continent, informing and constituent spirit and
substance of both these manifesting powers of the divine Essence
and the divine Nature. Whatever the path, this must be for him
the goal. The Yoga of Action also is not fulfilled, is not absolute,
is not victoriously complete until the seeker has felt and lives
in his essential and integral oneness with the Supreme. One he
must be with the Divine both in his highest and inmost and
in his widest being and consciousness, in his work, his will,
his power of action, his mind, body, life. Otherwise he is only
released from the illusion of individual works, but not released
from the illusion of separate being and instrumentality. As the
servant and instrument of the Divine he works, but the crown
of his labour and its perfect base or motive is oneness with
that which he serves and fulfils. The Yoga of devotion too is
complete only when the lover and the Beloved are unified and
difference is abolished in the ecstasy of a divine oneness; and
yet in the mystery of this unification there is the sole existence
of the Beloved but no extinction or absorption of the lover. It
is the highest unity which is the express direction of the path of
knowledge, the call to absolute oneness is its impulse, the experi¬
ence of it its magnet, but it is this very highest unity which takes
as its field of manifestation in him the largest possible cosmic
wideness. Obeying the necessity to withdraw successively from
the practical egoism of our triple nature and its fundamental
ego-sense, we come to the realisation of the spirit, the self, lord
of this individual human manifestation, but our knowledge is
not integral if we do not make this self in the individual one
with the cosmic spirit and find their greater reality above in
an inexpressible but not unknowable Transcendence. The Jiva,
possessed of himself, must give himself up into the being of the
Divine. The self of the man must be made one with the Self
of all; the self of the finite individual must pour itself into the
boundless finite and that cosmic spirit too must be exceeded in
the transcendent Infinite.
This cannot be done without an uncompromising abolition
The Release from the Ego
363
This cannot be done without an uncompromising abolition
The Release from the Ego
363
of the ego-sense at its very basis and source. In the path of
Knowledge one attempts this abolition, negatively by a denial
of the reality of the ego, positively by a constant fixing of the
thought upon the idea of the One and the Infinite in itself or the
One and Infinite everywhere. This, if persistently done, changes
in the end the mental outlook on oneself and the whole world
and there is a kind of mental realisation; but afterwards by
degrees or perhaps rapidly and imperatively and almost at the
beginning the mental realisation deepens into spiritual experi¬
ence — a realisation in the very substance of our being. More and
more frequent conditions come of something indefinable and
illimitable, a peace, a silence, a joy, a bliss beyond expression, a
sense of absolute impersonal Power, a pure existence, a pure con¬
sciousness, an all-pervading Presence. The ego persists in itself
or in its habitual movements, but the place of the one becomes
more and more loosened, the others are broken, crushed, more
and more rejected, becoming weak in their intensity, limp or
mechanical in their action. In the end there is a constant giving
up of the whole consciousness into the being of the Supreme.
In the beginning when the restless confusion and obscuring im¬
purity of our outward nature is active, when the mental, vital,
physical ego-sense are still powerful, this new mental outlook,
these experiences may be found difficult in the extreme: but
once that triple egoism is discouraged or moribund and the
instruments of the Spirit are set right and purified, in an entirely
pure, silent, clarified, widened consciousness the purity, infinity,
stillness of the One reflects itself like the sky in a limpid lake.
A meeting or a taking in of the reflected Consciousness by that
which reflects it becomes more and more pressing and possible;
the bridging or abolition of the atmospheric gulf between that
immutable ethereal impersonal vastness and this once mobile
whirl or narrow stream of personal existence is no longer an
arduous improbability and may be even a frequent experience,
if not yet an entirely permanent state. For even before com¬
plete purification, if the strings of the egoistic heart and mind
are already sufficiently frayed and loosened, the Jiva can by
a sudden snapping of the main cords escape, ascending like a
364
The Yoga of Integral Knowledge
For even before com¬
plete purification, if the strings of the egoistic heart and mind
are already sufficiently frayed and loosened, the Jiva can by
a sudden snapping of the main cords escape, ascending like a
364
The Yoga of Integral Knowledge
bird freed into the spaces or widening like a liberated flood into
the One and Infinite. There is first a sudden sense of a cosmic
consciousness, a casting of oneself into the universal; from that
universality one can aspire more easily to the Transcendent.
There is a pushing back and rending or a rushing down of the
walls that imprisoned our conscious being; there is a loss of
all sense of individuality and personality, of all placement in
Space or Time or action and law of Nature; there is no longer an
ego, a person definite and definable, but only consciousness, only
existence, only peace or bliss; one becomes immortality, becomes
eternity, becomes infinity. All that is left of the personal soul is
a hymn of peace and freedom and bliss vibrating somewhere in
the Eternal.
When there is an insufficient purity in the mental being,
the release appears at first to be partial and temporary; the Jiva
seems to descend again into the egoistic life and the higher con¬
sciousness to be withdrawn from him. In reality, what happens
is that a cloud or veil intervenes between the lower nature and
the higher consciousness and the Prakriti resumes for a time its
old habit of working under the pressure but not always with
a knowledge or present memory of that high experience. What
works in it then is a ghost of the old ego supporting a mechanical
repetition of the old habits upon the remnants of confusion and
impurity still left in the system. The cloud intervenes and disap¬
pears, the rhythm of ascent and descent renews itself until the
impurity has been worked out. This period of alternations may
easily be long in the integral Yoga; for there an entire perfection
of the system is required; it must be capable at all times and
in all conditions and all circumstances, whether of action or
inaction, of admitting and then living in the consciousness of
the supreme Truth. Nor is it enough for the sadhaka to have
the utter realisation only in the trance of Samadhi or in a mo¬
tionless quietude, but he must in trance or in waking, in passive
reflection or energy of action be able to remain in the constant
Samadhi of the firmly founded Brahmic consciousness.^ But if
1
Gita.
The Release from the Ego
365
The Release from the Ego
365
or when our conscious being has become sufficiently pure and
clear, then there is a firm station in the higher consciousness.
The impersonalised Jiva, one with the universal or possessed
by the Transcendent, lives high-seated above^ and looks down
undisturbed at whatever remnants of the old working of Nature
may revisit the system. He cannot be moved by the workings
of the three modes of Prakriti in his lower being, nor can he
be shaken from his station by the attacks even of grief and
suffering. And finally, there being no veil between, the higher
peace overpowers the lower disturbance and mobility. There is
a settled silence in which the soul can take sovereign possession
of itself above and below and altogether.
Such possession is not indeed the aim of the traditional
Yoga of knowledge whose object is rather to get away from the
above and the below and the all into the indefinable Absolute.
But whatever the aim, the path of knowledge must lead to one
first result, an absolute quietude; for unless the old action of
Nature in us be entirely quieted, it is difficult if not impossible
to found either any true soul-status or any divine activity. Our
nature acts on a basis of confusion and restless compulsion to
action, the Divine acts freely out of a fathomless calm. Into that
abyss of tranquillity we must plunge and become that, if we are
to annul the hold of this lower nature upon the soul. Therefore
the universalised Jiva first ascends into the Silence; it becomes
vast, tranquil, actionless. What action takes place, whether of
body and these organs or any working whatever, the Jiva sees
but does not take part in, authorise or in any way associate itself
with it. There is action, but no personal actor, no bondage, no
responsibility. If personal action is needed, then the Jiva has to
keep or recover what has been called the form of the ego, a sort
of mental image of an “I” that is the knower, devotee, servant
or instrument, but an image only and not a reality. If even that is
not there, still action can continue by the mere continued force
of Prakriti, without any personal actor, without indeed there
^ Udasina, the word for the spiritual “indifference”, that is to say the unattached
freedom of the soul touched by the supreme knowledge.
366
The Yoga of Integral Knowledge
366
The Yoga of Integral Knowledge
being any sense of an actor at all; for the Self into which the Jiva
has cast its being is the actionless, the fathomlessly still. The
path of works leads to the realisation of the Lord, but here even
the Lord is not known; there is only the silent Self and Prakrit!
doing her works, even, as it seems at first, not with truly living
entities but with names and forms existing in the Self but which
the Self does not admit as real. The soul may go even beyond
this realisation; it may either rise to the Brahman on the other
side of all idea of Self as a Void of everything that is here, a Void
of unnameable peace and extinction of all, even of the Sat, even
of that Existent which is the impersonal basis of individual or
universal personality; or else it may unite with it as an ineffable
“That” of which nothing can be said; for the universe and all
that is does not even exist in That, but appears to the mind
as a dream more unsubstantial than any dream ever seen or
imagined, so that even the word dream seems too positive a
thing to express its entire unreality. These experiences are the
foundation of that lofty Illusionism which takes such firm hold
of the human mind in its highest overleapings of itself.
These ideas of dream and illusion are simply results in our
still existent mentality of the new poise of the Jiva and its denial
of the claim made upon it by its old mental associations and
view of life and existence. In reality, the Prakrit! does not act for
itself or by its own motion, but with the Self as lord; for out of
that Silence wells all this action, that apparent Void looses out
as if into movement all these infinite riches of experience. To this
realisation the sadhaka of the integral Yoga must arrive by the
process that we shall hereafter describe. What then, when he so
resumes his hold upon the universe and views no longer himself
in the world but the cosmos in himself, will be the position of
the Jiva or what will fill in his new consciousness the part of
the ego-sense? There will be no ego-sense even if there is a sort
of individualisation for the purposes of the play of universal
consciousness in an individual mind and frame; and for this
reason that all will be unforgettably the One and every Person
or Purusha will be to him the One in many forms or rather in
many aspects and poises. Brahman acting upon Brahman, one
The Release from the Ego
367
Brahman acting upon Brahman, one
The Release from the Ego
367
Nara-Narayana^ everywhere. In that larger play of the Divine
the joy of the relations of divine love also is possible without the
lapse into the ego-sense, — just as the supreme state of human
love likewise is described as the unity of one soul in two bodies.
The ego-sense is not indispensable to the world-play in which it
is so active and so falsifies the truth of things; the truth is always
the One at work on itself, at play with itself, infinite in unity,
infinite in multiplicity. When the individualised consciousness
rises to and lives in that truth of the cosmic play, then even in
full action, even in possession of the lower being the Jiva remains
still one with the Lord, and there is no bondage and no delusion.
He is in possession of Self and released from the ego.
^ The Divine, Narayana, making itself one with humanity even as the human, Nara
becomes one with the Divine.
Chapter X
The Realisation of the Cosmic Self
OUR FIRST imperative aim when we draw back from
mind, life, body and all else that is not our eternal
being, is to get rid of the false idea of self by which
we identify ourselves with the lower existence and can realise
only our apparent being as perishable or mutable creatures in a
perishable or ever mutable world. We have to know ourselves as
the self, the spirit, the eternal; we have to exist consciously in our
true being. Therefore this must be our primary, if not our first
one and all-absorbing idea and effort in the path of knowledge.
But when we have realised the eternal self that we are, when we
have become that inalienably, we have still a secondary aim, to
establish the true relation between this eternal self that we are
and the mutable existence and mutable world which till now we
had falsely taken for our real being and our sole possible status.
In order that there should be any real relation, it must be
a relation between two realities. Formerly we had thought the
eternal self to be a remote concept far from our mundane exis¬
tence if not an illusion and an unreality, because in the nature
of things we could not conceive of ourselves as anything except
this mind, life, body, changing and moving in the succession of
Time. When we have once got rid of our confinement to this
lower status, we are apt to seize on the other side of the same
erroneous relation between self and world; we tend to regard this
eternity which we increasingly are or in which we live as the sole
reality and begin to look down from it upon the world and man
as a remote illusion and unreality, because that is a status quite
opposite to our new foundation in which we no longer place
our roots of consciousness, from which we have been lifted up
and transfigured and with which we seem to have no longer any
binding link. Especially is this likely to happen if we have made
the finding of the eternal Self not only our primary, but our
The Realisation of the Cosmic Self
369
one and absorbing objective in the withdrawal from the lower
triplicity; for then we are likely to shoot at once from pure mind
to pure spirit without treading the stairs between this middle
and that summit and we tend to fix on our consciousness the
profound sense of a gulf which we cannot bridge and can no
longer cross over again except by a painful fall.
But the self and the world are in an eternal close relation
and there is a connection between them, not a gulf that has to be
overleaped. Spirit and material existence are highest and lowest
rung of an orderly and progressive series. Therefore between the
two there must be a real relation and principle of connection by
which the eternal Brahman is able to be at once pure Spirit and
Self and yet hold in himself the universe of himself; and it must be
possible for the soul that is one with or in union with the Eternal
to adopt the same poise of divine relation in place of our present
ignorant immersion in the world. This principle of connection
is the eternal unity between the Self and all existences; of that
eternal unity the liberated soul must be capable, just as the ever
free and unbound Divine is capable of it, and that we should
realise equally with the pure self-existence at which we have
first to aim. For integral self-possession we must be one not only
with the Self, with God, but with all existences. We must take
back in the right relation and in the poise of an eternal Truth
the world of our manifested existence peopled by our fellow-
beings from which we had drawn back because we were bound
to them in a wrong relation and in the poise of a falsehood
created in Time by the principle of divided consciousness with
all its oppositions, discords and dualities. We have to take back
all things and beings into our new consciousness but as one with
all, not divided from them by an egoistic individuality.
In other words, besides the consciousness of the transcen¬
dent Self pure, self-existent, timeless, spaceless we have to accept
and become the cosmic consciousness, we have to identify our
being with the Infinite who makes himself the base and continent
of the worlds and dwells in all existences. This is the realisation
which the ancient Vedantins spoke of as seeing all existences in
the self and the self in all existences; and in addition they speak
370
The Yoga of Integral Knowledge
This is the realisation
which the ancient Vedantins spoke of as seeing all existences in
the self and the self in all existences; and in addition they speak
370
The Yoga of Integral Knowledge
of the crowning realisation of the man in whom the original
miracle of existence has been repeated, self-being has become all
these existences that belong to the worlds of the becoming/ In
these three terms is expressed, fundamentally, the whole of that
real relation between the self and the world which we have to
substitute for the false relation created by the limiting ego. This
is the new vision and sense of infinite being which we have to
acquire, this the foundation of that unity with all which we have
to establish.
For our real self is not the individual mental being, that is
only a figure, an appearance; our real self is cosmic, infinite,
it is one with all existence and the inhabitant of all existences.
The self behind our mind, life and body is the same as the self
behind the mind, life and body of all our fellow-beings, and
if we come to possess it, we shall naturally, when we turn to
look out again upon them, tend to become one with them in
the common basis of our consciousness. It is true that the mind
opposes any such identification and if we allow it to persist in
its old habits and activities, it will rather strive to bring again
its veil of dissonances over our new realisation and possession
of self than to shape and subject itself to this true and eternal
vision of things. But in the first place, if we have proceeded
rightly on the path of our Yoga, we shall have attained to Self
through a purified mind and heart, and a purified mind is one
that is necessarily passive and open to the knowledge. Secondly,
even the mind in spite of its tendency to limit and divide can be
taught to think in the rhythm of the unifying Truth instead of
the broken terms of the limiting appearance. We must therefore
accustom it by meditation and concentration to cease to think of
things and beings as separately existent in themselves and rather
to think always of the One everywhere and of all things as the
One. Although we have spoken hitherto of the withdrawing
motion of the Jiva as the first necessity of knowledge and as if it
were to be pursued alone and by itself, yet in fact it is better for
the sadhaka of the integral Yoga to unite the two movements. By
^ Isha Upanishad.
The Realisation of the Cosmic Self
371
By
^ Isha Upanishad.
The Realisation of the Cosmic Self
371
one he will find the self within, by the other he will find that self
in all that seems to us at present to be outside us. It is possible
indeed to begin with the latter movement, to realise all things in
this visible and sensible existence as God or Brahman or Virat
Purusha and then to go beyond to all that is behind the Virat.
But this has its inconveniences and it is better, if that be found
possible, to combine the two movements.
This realisation of all things as God or Brahman has, as
we have seen, three aspects of which we can conveniently make
three successive stages of experience. First, there is the Self in
whom all beings exist. The Spirit, the Divine has manifested itself
as infinite self-extended being, self-existent, pure, not subject to
Time and Space, but supporting Time and Space as figures of its
consciousness. It is more than all things and contains them all
within that self-extended being and consciousness, not bound by
anything that it creates, holds or becomes, but free and infinite
and all-blissful. It holds them, in the old image, as the infinite
ether contains in itself all objects. This image of the ethereal
(Akasha) Brahman may indeed be of great practical help to the
sadhaka who finds a difficulty in meditating on what seems to
him at first an abstract and unseizable idea. In the image of
the ether, not physical but an encompassing ether of vast being,
consciousness and bliss, he may seek to see with the mind and
to feel in his mental being this supreme existence and to identify
it in oneness with the self within him. By such meditation the
mind may be brought to a favourable state of predisposition in
which, by the rending or withdrawing of the veil, the supramen-
tal vision may flood the mentality and change entirely all our
seeing. And upon that change of seeing, as it becomes more and
more potent and insistent and occupies all our consciousness,
there will supervene eventually a change of becoming so that
what we see we become. We shall be in our self-consciousness
not so much cosmic as ultra-cosmic, infinite. Mind and life and
body will then be only movements in that infinity which we have
become, and we shall see that what exists is not world at all but
simply this infinity of spirit in which move the mighty cosmic
harmonies of its own images of self-conscious becoming.
372
The Yoga of Integral Knowledge
372
The Yoga of Integral Knowledge
But what then of all these forms and existences that make
up the harmony? Shall they be to us only images, empty name
and form without any informing reality, poor worthless things
in themselves and however grandiose, puissant or beautiful they
once seemed to our mental vision, now to be rejected and held of
no value? Not so; although that would be the first natural result
of a very intense absorption in the infinity of the all-containing
Self to the exclusion of the infinities that it contains. But these
things are not empty, not mere unreal name and form imagined
by a cosmic Mind; they are, as we have said, in their reality self-
conscious becomings of the Self, that is to say, the Self dwells
within all of them even as within us, conscious of them, govern¬
ing their motion, blissful in his habitation as in his embrace of
all that he becomes. As the ether both contains and is as it were
contained in the jar, so this Self both contains and inhabits all
existences, not in a physical but in a spiritual sense, and is their
reality. This indwelling State of the Self we have to realise; we
have to see and ourselves to become in our consciousness the
Self in all existences. We have, putting aside all vain resistance
of the intellect and the mental associations, to know that the
Divine inhabits all these becomings and is their true Self and
conscious Spirit, and not to know it only intellectually but to
know by a self-experience that shall compel into its own diviner
mould all the habits of the mental consciousness.
This Self that we are has finally to become to our self-
consciousness entirely one with all existences in spite of its
exceeding them. We have to see it not only as that which contains
and inhabits all, but that which is all, not only as indwelling
spirit, but also as the name and form, the movement and the
master of the movement, the mind and life and body. It is by this
final realisation that we shall resume entirely in the right poise
and the vision of the Truth all that we drew back from in the
first movement of recoil and withdrawal. The individual mind,
life and body which we recoiled from as not our true being,
we shall recover as a true becoming of the Self, but no longer
in a purely individual narrowness. We shall take up the mind
not as a separate mentality imprisoned in a petty motion, but
The Realisation of the Cosmic Self
373
We shall take up the mind
not as a separate mentality imprisoned in a petty motion, but
The Realisation of the Cosmic Self
373
as a large movement of the universal mind, the life not as an
egoistic activity of vitality and sensation and desire, but as a free
movement of the universal life, the body not as a physical prison
of the soul but as a subordinate instrument and detachable robe,
realising that also as a movement of universal Matter, a cell of
the cosmic Body. We shall come to feel all the consciousness of
the physical world as one with our physical consciousness, feel
all the energies of the cosmic life around as our own energies,
feel all the heart-beats of the great cosmic impulse and seeking
in our heart-beats set to the rhythm of the divine Ananda, feel
all the action of the universal mind flowing into our mentality
and our thought-action flowing out upon it as a wave into that
wide sea. This unity embracing all mind, life and matter in the
light of a supramental Truth and the pulse of a spiritual Bliss
will be to us our internal fulfilment of the Divine in a complete
cosmic consciousness.
But since we must embrace all this in the double term of the
Being and the Becoming, the knowledge that we shall possess
must be complete and integral. It must not stop with the realisa¬
tion of the pure Self and Spirit, but include also all those modes
of the Spirit by which it supports, develops and throws itself
out into its cosmic manifestation. Self-knowledge and world-
knowledge must be made one in the all-ensphering knowledge
of the Brahman.
Chapter XI
The Modes of the Self
Self-knowledge and world-
knowledge must be made one in the all-ensphering knowledge
of the Brahman.
Chapter XI
The Modes of the Self
SINCE the Self which we come to realise by the path of
knowledge is not only the reality which lies behind and
supports the states and movements of our psychological
being, but also that transcendent and universal Existence which
has manifested itself in all the movements of the universal,
the knowledge of the Self includes also the knowledge of the
principles of Being, its fundamental modes and its relations
with the principles of the phenomenal universe. This was what
was meant by the Upanishad when it spoke of the Brahman
as that which being known all is known. ^ It has to be realised
first as the pure principle of Existence, afterwards, says the
Upanishad, its essential modes become clear to the soul which
realises it. We may indeed, before realisation, try to analyse
by the metaphysical reason and even understand intellectually
what Being is and what the world is, but such metaphysical
understanding is not the Knowledge. Moreover, we may have
the realisation in knowledge and vision, but this is incomplete
without realisation in the entire soul-experience and the unity
of all our being with that which we realise.^ It is the science of
Yoga to know and the art of Yoga to be unified with the Highest
so that we may live in the Self and act from that supreme
poise, becoming one not only in the conscious essence but in the
conscious law of our being with the transcendent Divine whom
all things and creatures, whether ignorantly or with partial
knowledge and experience, seek to express through the lower
law of their members. To know the highest Truth and to be in
harmony with it is the condition of right being, to express it in
^ yasmin vijhdte sarvam vijhdtam.
^ This is the distinction made in the Gita between Sankhya and Yoga; both are necessary
to an integral knowledge.
The Modes of the Self
375
all that we are, experience and do is the condition of right living.
^ This is the distinction made in the Gita between Sankhya and Yoga; both are necessary
to an integral knowledge.
The Modes of the Self
375
all that we are, experience and do is the condition of right living.
But rightly to know and express the Highest is not easy for
man the mental being because the highest Truth and therefore
the highest modes of existence are supramental. They repose
on the essential unity of what seem to the intellect and mind
and are to our mental experience of the world opposite poles
of existence and idea and therefore irreconcilable opposites and
contradictions, but to the supramental experience are comple¬
mentary aspects of the same Truth. We have seen this already in
the necessity of realising the Self as at once one and many; for we
have to realise each thing and being as That; we have to realise
the unity of all as That, both in the unity of sum and in the one¬
ness of essence; and we have to realise That as the Transcendent
who is beyond all this unity and this multiplicity which we see
everywhere as the two opposite, yet companion poles of all exis¬
tence. For every individual being is the Self, the Divine in spite of
the outward limitations of the mental and physical form through
which it presents itself at the actual moment, in the actual field of
space, in the actual succession of circumstances that make up the
web of inner state and outward action and event through which
we know the individual. So, equally, every collectivity small or
great is each the Self, the Divine similarly expressing itself in
the conditions of this manifestation. We cannot really know any
individual or any collectivity if we know it only as it appears
inwardly to itself or outwardly to us, but only if we know it as
the Divine, the One, our own Self employing its various essential
modes and its occasional circumstances of self-manifestation.
Until we have transformed the habits of our mentality so that it
shall live entirely in this knowledge reconciling all differences in
the One, we do not live in the real Truth, because we do not live
in the real Unity. The accomplished sense of Unity is not that in
which all are regarded as parts of one whole, waves of one sea,
but that in which each as well as the All is regarded wholly as
the Divine, wholly as our Self in a supreme identity.
And yet, so complex is the Maya of the Infinite, there is
a sense in which the view of all as parts of the whole, waves
of the sea or even as in a sense separate entities becomes a
376
And yet, so complex is the Maya of the Infinite, there is
a sense in which the view of all as parts of the whole, waves
of the sea or even as in a sense separate entities becomes a
376
The Yoga of Integral Knowledge
necessary part of the integral Truth and the integral Knowledge.
For if the Self is always one in all, yet we see that for the pur¬
poses at least of the cyclic manifestation it expresses itself in
perpetual soul-forms which preside over the movements of our
personality through the worlds and the aeons. This persistent
soul-existence is the real Individuality which stands behind the
constant mutations of the thing we call our personality. It is not
a limited ego but a thing in itself infinite; it is in truth the Infinite
itself consenting from one plane of its being to reflect itself in
a perpetual soul-experience. This is the truth which underlies
the Sankhya theory of many Purushas, many essential, infinite,
free and impersonal souls reflecting the movements of a single
cosmic energy. It stands also, in a different way, behind the
very different philosophy of qualified Monism which arose as a
protest against the metaphysical excesses of Buddhistic Nihilism
and illusionist Adwaita. The old semi-Buddhistic, semi-Sankhya
theory which saw only the Quiescent and nothing else in the
world except a constant combination of the five elements and the
three modes of inconscient Energy lighting up their false activity
by the consciousness of the Quiescent in which it is reflected, is
not the whole truth of the Brahman. We are not a mere mass of
changing mind-stuff, life-stuff, body-stuff taking different forms
of mind and life and body from birth to birth, so that at no time
is there any real self or conscious reason of existence behind
all the flux or none except that Quiescent who cares for none
of these things. There is a real and stable power of our being
behind the constant mutation of our mental, vital and physical
personality, and this we have to know and preserve in order that
the Infinite may manifest Himself through it according to His
will in whatever range and for whatever purpose of His eternal
cosmic activity.
And if we regard existence from the standpoint of the pos¬
sible eternal and infinite relations of this One from whom all
things proceed, these Many of whom the One is the essence and
the origin and this Energy, Power, or Nature through which the
relations of the One and the Many are maintained, we shall
see a certain justification even for the dualist philosophies and
The Modes of the Self
377
religions which seem to deny most energetically the unity of
beings and to make an unbridgeable differentiation between the
Lord and His creatures. If in their grosser forms these religions
aim only at the ignorant joys of the lower heavens, yet there is
a far higher and profounder sense in which we may appreciate
the cry of the devotee poet when in a homely and vigorous
metaphor he claimed the right of the soul to enjoy for ever the
ecstasy of its embrace of the Supreme. “I do not want to become
sugar,” he wrote, “I want to eat sugar.” However strongly we
may found ourselves on the essential identity of the one Self
in all, we need not regard that cry as the mere aspiration of
a certain kind of spiritual sensuousness or the rejection by an
attached and ignorant soul of the pure and high austerity of the
supreme Truth. On the contrary, it aims in its positive part at a
deep and mysterious truth of Being which no human language
can utter, of which human reason can give no adequate account,
to which the heart has the key and which no pride of the soul of
knowledge insisting on its own pure austerity can abolish. But
that belongs properly to the summit of the path of Devotion and
there we shall have again to return to it.
The sadhaka of an integral Yoga will take an integral view
of his goal and seek its integral realisation. The Divine has many
essential modes of His eternal self-manifestation, possesses and
finds Himself on many planes and through many poles of His be¬
ing; to each mode its purpose, to each plane or pole its fulfilment
both in the apex and the supreme scope of the eternal Unity. It is
necessarily through the individual Self that we must arrive at the
One, for that is the basis of all our experience. By Knowledge
we arrive at identity with the One; for there is, in spite of the
Dualist, an essential identity by which we can plunge into our
Source and free ourselves from all bondage to individuality and
even from all bondage to universality. Nor is the experience of
that identity a gain for knowledge only or for the pure state of
abstract being. The height of all our action also, we have seen,
is the immersion of ourselves in the Lord through unity with
the divine Will or Conscious-Power by the way of works; the
height of love is the rapturous immersion of ourselves in unity
378
The Yoga of Integral Knowledge
of ecstatic delight with the object of our love and adoration. But
again for divine works in the world the individual Self converts
itself into a centre of consciousness through which the divine
Will, one with the divine Love and Light, pours itself out in
the multiplicity of the universe. We arrive in the same way at
our unity with all our fellow-beings through the identity of this
self with the Supreme and with the self in all others. At the
same time in the action of Nature we preserve by it as soul-
form of the One a differentiation which enables us to preserve
relations of difference in Oneness with other beings and with the
Supreme Himself. The relations will necessarily be very different
in essence and spirit from those which we had when we lived
entirely in the Ignorance and Oneness was a mere name or a
struggling aspiration of imperfect love, sympathy or yearning.
Unity will be the law, difference will be simply for the various
enjoyment of that unity. Neither descending again into that plane
of division which clings to the separation of the ego-sense nor
attached to an exclusive seeking for pure identity which cannot
have to do with any play of difference, we shall embrace and
reconcile the two poles of being where they meet in the infinity
of the Highest.
The Self, even the individual self, is different from our
personality as it is different from our mental ego-sense. Our per¬
sonality is never the same; it is a constant mutation and various
combination. It is not a basic consciousness, but a development
of forms of consciousness, — not a power of being, but a various
play of partial powers of being, — not the enjoyer of the self-
delight of our existence, but a seeking after various notes and
tones of experience which shall more or less render that delight
in the mutability of relations. This also is Purusha and Brahman,
but it is the mutable Purusha, the phenomenon of the Eternal,
not its stable reality. The Gita makes a distinction between three
Purushas who constitute the whole state and action of the divine
Being, the Mutable, the Immutable and the Highest which is
beyond and embraces the other two. That Highest is the Lord
in whom we have to live, the supreme Self in us and in all. The
Immutable is the silent, actionless, equal, unchanging self which
The Modes of the Self
379
That Highest is the Lord
in whom we have to live, the supreme Self in us and in all. The
Immutable is the silent, actionless, equal, unchanging self which
The Modes of the Self
379
we reach when we draw back from activity to passivity, from
the play of consciousness and force and the seeking of delight
to the pure and constant basis of consciousness and force and
delight through which the Highest, free, secure and unattached,
possesses and enjoys the play. The Mutable is the substance and
immediate motive of that changing flux of personality through
which the relations of our cosmic life are made possible. The
mental being fixed in the Mutable moves in its flux and has not
possession of an eternal peace and power and self-delight; the
soul fixed in the Immutable holds all these in itself but cannot
act in the world; but the soul that can live in the Highest enjoys
the eternal peace and power and delight and wideness of being,
is not bound in its self-knowledge and self-power by character
and personality or by forms of its force and habits of its con¬
sciousness and yet uses them all with a large freedom and power
for the self-expression of the Divine in the world. Here again the
change is not any alteration of the essential modes of the Self,
but consists in our emergence into the freedom of the Highest
and the right use of the divine law of our being.
Connected with this triple mode of the Self is that distinc¬
tion which Indian philosophy has drawn between the Qualitied
and the Qualitiless Brahman and European thought has made
between the Personal and the Impersonal God. The Upanishad
indicates clearly enough the relative nature of this opposition,
when it speaks of the Supreme as the “Qualitied who is without
qualities”.^ We have again two essential modes, two fundamen¬
tal aspects, two poles of eternal being, both of them exceeded
in the transcendent divine Reality. They correspond practically
to the Silent and the Active Brahman. For the whole action of
the universe may be regarded from a certain point of view as
the expression and shaping out in various ways of the number¬
less and infinite qualities of the Brahman. His being assumes
by conscious Will all kinds of properties, shapings of the stuff
of conscious being, habits as it were of cosmic character and
power of dynamic self-consciousness, gums, into which all the
^ nirguno gum.
380
The Yoga of Integral Knowledge
380
The Yoga of Integral Knowledge
cosmic action can be resolved. But by none of these nor by all of
them nor by their utmost infinite potentiality is He bound; He
is above all His qualities and on a certain plane of being rests
free from them. The Nirguna or Unqualitied is not incapable
of qualities, rather it is this very Nirguna or No-Quality who
manifests Himself as Saguna, as Ananta-guna, infinite quality,
since He contains all in His absolute capacity of boundlessly
varied self-revelation. He is free from them in the sense of ex¬
ceeding them; and indeed if He were not free from them they
could not be infinite; God would be subject to His qualities,
bound by His nature, Prakriti would be supreme and Purusha its
creation and plaything. The Eternal is bound neither by quality
nor absence of quality, neither by Personality nor by Imperson¬
ality; He is Himself, beyond all our positive and all our negative
definitions.
But if we cannot define the Eternal, we can unify ourselves
with it. It has been said that we can become the Impersonal, but
not the personal God, but this is only true in the sense that no
one can become individually the Eord of all the universes; we can
free ourselves into the existence of the active Brahman as well
as that of the Silence; we can live in both, go back to our being
in both, but each in its proper way, by becoming one with the
Nirguna in our essence and one with the Saguna in the liberty of
our active being, in our nature."^ The Supreme pours Himself out
of an eternal peace, poise and silence into an eternal activity, free
and infinite, freely fixing for itself its self-determinations, using
infinite quality to shape out of it varied combination of quality.
We have to go back to that peace, poise and silence and act out
of it with the divine freedom from the bondage of qualities but
still using qualities even the most opposite largely and flexibly
for the divine work in the world. Only, while the Eord acts out
of the centre of all things, we have to act by transmission of
His will and power and self-knowledge through the individual
centre, the soul-form of Him which we are. The Eord is subject
to nothing; the individual soul-form is subject to its own highest
^ sadharmya-mukti.
The Modes of the Self
381
Self and the greater and more absolute is that subjection, the
greater becomes its sense of absolute force and freedom.
The Eord is subject
to nothing; the individual soul-form is subject to its own highest
^ sadharmya-mukti.
The Modes of the Self
381
Self and the greater and more absolute is that subjection, the
greater becomes its sense of absolute force and freedom.
The distinction between the Personal and the Impersonal
is substantially the same as the Indian distinction, but the as¬
sociations of the English words carry within them a certain
limitation which is foreign to Indian thought. The personal God
of the European religions is a Person in the human sense of the
word, limited by His qualities though otherwise possessed of
omnipotence and omniscience; it answers to the Indian special
conceptions of Shiva or Vishnu or Brahma or of the Divine
Mother of all, Durga or Kali. Each religion really erects a dif¬
ferent personal Deity according to its own heart and thought to
adore and serve. The fierce and inexorable God of Calvin is a
different being from the sweet and loving God of St. Erancis, as
the gracious Vishnu is different from the terrible though always
loving and beneficent Kali who has pity even in her slaying and
saves by her destructions. Shiva, the God of ascetic renuncia¬
tion who destroys all things seems to be a different being from
Vishnu and Brahma, who act by grace, love, preservation of
the creature or for life and creation. It is obvious that such
conceptions can be only in a very partial and relative sense true
descriptions of the infinite and omnipresent Creator and Ruler
of the universe. Nor does Indian religious thought affirm them
as adequate descriptions. The Personal God is not limited by
His qualities. He is Ananta-guna, capable of infinite qualities
and beyond them and lord of them to use them as He will, and
He manifests Himself in various names and forms of His infinite
godhead to satisfy the desire and need of the individual soul
according to its own nature and personality. It is for this reason
that the normal European mind finds it so difficult to understand
Indian religion as distinct from Vedantic or Sankhya philosophy,
because it cannot easily conceive of a personal God with infinite
qualities, a personal God who is not a Person, but the sole real
Person and the source of all personality. Yet that is the only valid
and complete truth of the divine Personality.
The place of the divine Personality in our synthesis will best
be considered when we come to speak of the Yoga of devotion;
382
The Yoga of Integral Knowledge
Yet that is the only valid
and complete truth of the divine Personality.
The place of the divine Personality in our synthesis will best
be considered when we come to speak of the Yoga of devotion;
382
The Yoga of Integral Knowledge
it is enough here to indicate that it has its place and keeps
it in the integral Yoga even when liberation has been attained.
There are practically three grades of the approach to the personal
Deity; the first in which He is conceived with a particular form
or particular qualities as the name and form of the Godhead
which our nature and personality prefers;^ a second in which
He is the one real Person, the All-Personality, the Ananta-guna;
a third in which we get back to the ultimate source of all idea
and fact of personality in that which the Upanishad indicates
by the single word He without fixing any attributes. It is there
that our realisations of the personal and the impersonal Divine
meet and become one in the utter Godhead. For the impersonal
Divine is not ultimately an abstraction or a mere principle or a
mere state or power and degree of being any more than we our¬
selves are really such abstractions. The intellect first approaches
it through such conceptions, but realisation ends by exceeding
them. Through the realisation of higher and higher principles of
being and states of conscious existence we arrive not at the an-
nullation of all in a sort of positive zero or even an inexpressible
state of existence, but at the transcendent Existence itself which
is also the Existent who transcends all definition by personality
and yet is always that which is the essence of personality.
When in That we live and have our being, we can possess
it in both its modes, the Impersonal in a supreme state of being
and consciousness, in an infinite impersonality of self-possessing
power and bliss, the Personal by the divine nature acting through
the individual soul-form and by the relation between that and its
transcendent and universal Self. We may keep even our relation
with the personal Deity in His forms and names; if, for instance,
our work is predominantly a work of Love it is as the Lord of
Love that we can seek to serve and express Him, but we shall
have at the same time an integral realisation of Him in all His
names and forms and qualities and not mistake the front of Him
which is prominent in our attitude to the world for all the infinite
Godhead.
5
ista-devata.
Chapter XII
The Realisation of Sachchidananda
5
ista-devata.
Chapter XII
The Realisation of Sachchidananda
The modes of the Self which we have dealt with in our
last Chapter may seem at first to be of a highly meta¬
physical character, to be intellectual conceptions more fit
for philosophical analysis than for practical realisation. But this
is a false distinction made by the division of our faculties. It
is at least a fundamental principle of the ancient wisdom, the
wisdom of the East on which we are founding ourselves, that
philosophy ought not to be merely a lofty intellectual pastime or
a play of dialectical subtlety or even a pursuit of metaphysical
truth for its own sake, but a discovery by all right means of
the basic truths of all-existence which ought then to become the
guiding principles of our own existence. Sankhya, the abstract
and analytical realisation of truth, is one side of Knowledge.
Yoga, the concrete and synthetic realisation of it in our experi¬
ence, inner state, outer life is the other. Both are means by which
man can escape out of falsehood and ignorance and live in and
by the truth. And since it is always the highest he can know or
be capable of that must be the aim of the thinking man, it is the
highest truth which the soul must seek out by thought and by
life accomplish.
Here lies the whole importance of the part of the Yoga
of Knowledge which we are now considering, the knowledge^
of those essential principles of Being, those essential modes of
self-existence on which the absolute Divine has based its self¬
manifestation. If the truth of our being is an infinite unity in
which alone there is perfect wideness, light, knowledge, power,
bliss, and if all our subjection to darkness, ignorance, weakness,
sorrow, limitation comes of our viewing existence as a clash of
infinitely multiple separate existences, then obviously it is the
^ tattvajiidna.
384
The Yoga of Integral Knowledge
384
The Yoga of Integral Knowledge
most practical and concrete and utilitarian as well as the most
lofty and philosophical wisdom to find a means by which we
can get away from the error and learn to live in the truth. So
also, if that One is in its nature a freedom from bondage to
this play of qualities which constitute our psychology and if
from subjection to that play are born the struggle and discord
in which we live, floundering eternally between the two poles
of good and evil, virtue and sin, satisfaction and failure, joy
and grief, pleasure and pain, then to get beyond the qualities
and take our foundation in the settled peace of that which is
always beyond them is the only practical wisdom. If attachment
to mutable personality is the cause of our self-ignorance, of our
discord and quarrel with ourself and with life and with others,
and if there is an impersonal One in which no such discord and
ignorance and vain and noisy effort exist because it is in eternal
identity and harmony with itself, then to arrive in our souls at
that impersonality and untroubled oneness of being is the one
line and object of human effort to which our reason can consent
to give the name of practicality.
There is such a unity, impersonality, freedom from the play
of qualities which lifts us above the strife and surge of Nature in
her eternal seeking through mind and body for the true key and
secret of all her relations. And it is the ancient highest experience
of mankind that only by arriving there, only by making oneself
impersonal, one, still, self-gathered, superior to the mental and
vital existence in that which is eternally superior to it, can a
settled, because self-existent peace and internal freedom be ac¬
quired. Therefore this is the first, in a sense the characteristic
and essential object of the Yoga of Knowledge. But, as we have
insisted, this, if first, is not all; if the essential, it is not the
complete object. Knowledge is not complete if it merely shows
us how to get away from relations to that which is beyond
relations, from personality to impersonality, from multiplicity
to featureless unity. It must give us also that key, that secret of
the whole play of relations, the whole variation of multiplicity,
the whole clash and interaction of personalities for which cosmic
existence is seeking. And knowledge is still incomplete if it gives
The Realisation of Sachchidananda
385
And knowledge is still incomplete if it gives
The Realisation of Sachchidananda
385
us only an idea and cannot verify it in experience; we seek the
key, the secret in order that we may govern the phenomenon by
the reality it represents, heal its discords by the hidden principle
of concord and unification behind them and arrive from the
converging and diverging effort of the world to the harmony of
its fulfilment. Not merely peace, but fulfilment is what the heart
of the world is seeking and what a perfect and effective self-
knowledge must give to it; peace can only be the eternal support,
the infinite condition, the natural atmosphere of self-fulfilment.
Moreover, the knowledge that finds the true secret of multi¬
plicity, personality, quality, play of relations, must show us some
real oneness in essence of being and intimate unity in power of
being between the impersonal and the source of personality, the
qualitiless and that which expresses itself in qualities, the unity
of existence and its many-featured multiplicity. The knowledge
that leaves a yawning gulf between the two, can be no ulti¬
mate knowledge, however logical it may seem to the analytical
intellect or however satisfactory to a self-dividing experience.
True knowledge must arrive at a oneness which embraces even
though it exceeds the totality of things, not at a oneness which
is incapable of it and rejects it. For there can be no such original
unbridgeable chasm of duality either in the All-existence itself
or between any transcendent Oneness and the All-existent. And
as in knowledge, so in experience and self-fulfilment. The ex¬
perience which finds at the summit of things such an original
unbridgeable chasm between two contrary principles and can
at most succeed in overleaping it so that it has to live in one
or the other, but cannot embrace and unify, is not the ultimate
experience. Whether we seek to know by thought or by the vision
of knowledge which surpasses thought or by that perfect self¬
experience in our own being which is the crown and fulfilment
of realisation by knowledge, we must be able to think out, see,
experience and live the all-satisfying unity. This is what we find in
the conception, vision and experience of the One whose oneness
does not cease or disappear from view by self-expression in the
Many, who is free from bondage to qualities but is yet infinite
quality, who contains and combines all relations, yet is ever
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The Yoga of Integral Knowledge
absolute, who is no one person and yet all persons because He is
all being and the one conscious Being. For the individual centre
we call ourselves, to enter by its consciousness into this Divine
and reproduce its nature in itself is the high and marvellous, yet
perfectly rational and most supremely pragmatic and utilitarian
goal before us. It is the fulfilment of our self-existence and at
the same time the fulfilment of our cosmic existence, of the
individual in himself and of the individual in his relation to the
cosmic Many. Between these two terms there is no irreconcil¬
able opposition: rather, our own self and the self of the cosmos
having been discovered to be one, there must be between them
an intimate unity.
In fact all these opposite terms are merely general conditions
for the manifestation of conscious being in that Transcendent
who is always one not only behind, but within all conditions
however apparently opposite. And the original unifying spirit-
stuff of them all and the one substantial mode of them all is that
which has been described for the convenience of our thought as
the trinity of Sachchidananda. Existence, Consciousness, Bliss,
these are everywhere the three inseparable divine terms. None of
them is really separate, though our mind and our mental experi¬
ence can make not only the distinction, but the separation. Mind
can say and think “I was, but unconscious” — for no being can
say “I am, but unconscious” — and it can think and feel “I am,
but miserable and without any pleasure in existence.” In reality
this is impossible. The existence we really are, the eternal “I
am”, of which it can never be true to say “It was”, is nowhere
and at no time unconscious. What we call unconsciousness is
simply other-consciousness; it is the going in of this surface wave
of our mental awareness of outer objects into our subliminal
self-awareness and into our awareness too of other planes of
existence. We are really no more unconscious when we are asleep
or stunned or drugged or “dead” or in any other state, than when
we are plunged in inner thought oblivious of our physical selves
and our surroundings. For anyone who has advanced even a
little way in Yoga, this is a most elementary proposition and one
which offers no difficulty whatever to the thought because it is
The Realisation of Sachchidananda
387
For anyone who has advanced even a
little way in Yoga, this is a most elementary proposition and one
which offers no difficulty whatever to the thought because it is
The Realisation of Sachchidananda
387
proved at every point by experience. It is more difficult to realise
that existence and undelight of existence cannot go together.
What we call misery, grief, pain, absence of delight is again
merely a surface wave of the delight of existence which takes on
to our mental experience these apparently opposite tints because
of a certain trick of false reception in our divided being — which
is not our existence at all but only a fragmentary formulation or
discoloured spray of conscious-force tossed up by the infinite sea
of our self-existence. In order to realise this we have to get away
from our absorption in these surface habits, these petty tricks of
our mental being, — and when we do get behind and away from
them it is surprising how superficial they are, what ridiculously
weak and little-penetrating pin-pricks they prove to be, — and
we have to realise true existence, and true consciousness, and
true experience of existence and consciousness. Sat, Chit and
Ananda.
Chit, the divine Consciousness, is not our mental self-
awareness; that we shall find to be only a form, a lower and
limited mode or movement. As we progress and awaken to
the soul in us and things, we shall realise that there is a
consciousness also in the plant, in the metal, in the atom,
in electricity, in everything that belongs to physical nature; we
shall find even that it is not really in all respects a lower or more
limited mode than the mental, on the contrary it is in many
“inanimate” forms more intense, rapid, poignant, though less
evolved towards the surface. But this also, this consciousness
of vital and physical Nature is, compared with Chit, a lower
and therefore a limited form, mode and movement. These
lower modes of consciousness are the conscious-stuff of inferior
planes in one indivisible existence. In ourselves also there is
in our subconscious being an action which is precisely that of
the “inanimate” physical Nature whence has been constituted
the basis of our physical being, another which is that of plant-
life, and another which is that of the lower animal creation
around us. All these are so much dominated and conditioned
by the thinking and reasoning conscious-being in us that we
have no real awareness of these lower planes; we are unable to
388
The Yoga of Integral Knowledge
All these are so much dominated and conditioned
by the thinking and reasoning conscious-being in us that we
have no real awareness of these lower planes; we are unable to
388
The Yoga of Integral Knowledge
perceive in their own terms what these parts of us are doing,
and receive it very imperfectly in the terms and values of the
thinking and reasoning mind. Still we know well enough that
there is an animal in us as well as that which is characteristically
human, — something which is a creature of conscious instinct
and impulse, not reflective or rational, as well as that which
turns back in thought and will on its experience, meets it from
above with the light and force of a higher plane and to some
degree controls, uses and modifies it. But the animal in man is
only the head of our subhuman being; below it there is much
that is also sub-animal and merely vital, much that acts by an
instinct and impulse of which the constituting consciousness
is withdrawn behind the surface. Below this sub-animal being,
there is at a further depth the subvital. When we advance in that
ultra-normal self-knowledge and experience which Yoga brings
with it, we become aware that the body too has a consciousness
of its own; it has habits, impulses, instincts, an inert yet effective
will which differs from that of the rest of our being and can
resist it and condition its effectiveness. Much of the struggle in
our being is due to this composite existence and the interaction
of these varied and heterogeneous planes on each other. For man
here is the result of an evolution and contains in himself the
whole of that evolution up from the merely physical and subvital
conscious being to the mental creature which at the top he is.
But this evolution is really a manifestation and just as we
have in us these subnormal selves and subhuman planes, so
are there in us above our mental being supernormal and su¬
perhuman planes. There Chit as the universal conscious-stuff
of existence takes other poises, moves out in other modes, on
other principles and by other faculties of action. There is above
the mind, as the old Vedic sages discovered, a Truth-plane, a
plane of self-luminous, self-effective Idea, which can be turned
in light and force upon our mind, reason, sentiments, impulses,
sensations and use and control them in the sense of the real
Truth of things just as we turn our mental reason and will
upon our sense-experience and animal nature to use and control
them in the sense of our rational and moral perceptions. There
There
The Realisation of Sachchidananda
389
there is no seeking, but rather natural possession; no conflict
or separation between will and reason, instinct and impulse,
desire and experience, idea and reality, but all are in harmony,
concomitant, mutually effective, unified in their origin, in their
development and in their effectuation. But beyond this plane
and attainable through it are others in which the very Chit
itself becomes revealed. Chit the elemental origin and primal
completeness of all this varied consciousness which is here used
for various formation and experience. There will and knowledge
and sensation and all the rest of our faculties, powers, modes
of experience are not merely harmonious, concomitant, unified,
but are one being of consciousness and power of consciousness.
It is this Chit which modifies itself so as to become on the Truth-
plane the supermind, on the mental plane the mental reason,
will, emotion, sensation, on the lower planes the vital or physical
instincts, impulses, habits of an obscure force not in superficially
conscious possession of itself. All is Chit because all is Sat; all is
various movement of the original Consciousness because all is
various movement of the original Being.
When we find, see or know Chit, we find also that its essence
is Ananda or delight of self-existence. To possess self is to possess
self- bliss; not to possess self is to be in more or less obscure search
of the delight of existence. Chit eternally possesses its self-bliss;
and since Chit is the universal conscious-stuff of being, conscious
universal being is also in possession of conscious self-bliss, mas¬
ter of the universal delight of existence. The Divine whether it
manifests itself in All-Quality or in No-Quality, in Personality
or Impersonality, in the One absorbing the Many or in the One
manifesting its essential multiplicity, is always in possession of
self-bliss and all-bliss because it is always Sachchidananda. For
us also to know and possess our true Self in the essential and
the universal is to discover the essential and the universal delight
of existence, self-bliss and all-bliss. For the universal is only the
pouring out of the essential existence, consciousness and delight;
and wherever and in whatever form that manifests as existence,
there the essential consciousness must be and therefore there
must be an essential delight.
390
The Yoga of Integral Knowledge
390
The Yoga of Integral Knowledge
The individual soul does not possess this true nature of
itself or realise this true nature of its experience, because it
separates itself both from the essential and the universal and
identifies itself with the separate accidents, with the unessential
form and mode and with the separate aspect and vehicle. Thus
it takes its mind, body, life-stream for its essential self. It tries
to assert these for their own sake against the universal, against
that of which the universal is the manifestation. It is right in
trying to assert and fulfil itself in the universal for the sake of
something greater and beyond, but wrong in attempting to do so
against the universal and in obedience to a fragmentary aspect
of the universal. This fragmentary aspect or rather collection of
fragmentary experiences it combines around an artificial centre
of mental experience, the mental ego, and calls that itself and it
serves this ego and lives for its sake instead of living for the sake
of that something greater and beyond of which all aspects, even
the widest and most general are partial manifestations. This is
the living in the false and not the true self; this is living for the
sake of and in obedience to the ego and not for the sake of
and in obedience to the Divine. The question how this fall has
come about and for what purpose it has been done, belongs to
the domain of Sankhya rather than of Yoga. We have to seize
on the practical fact that to such self-division is due the self-
limitation by which we have become unable to possess the true
nature of being and experience and are therefore in our mind,
life and body subject to ignorance, incapacity and suffering.
Non-possession of unity is the root cause; to recover unity is the
sovereign means, unity with the universal and with that which
the universal is here to express. We have to realise the true self
of ourselves and of all; and to realise the true self is to realise
Sachchidananda.
Chapter XIII
The Difficulties of the Mental Being
We have to realise the true self
of ourselves and of all; and to realise the true self is to realise
Sachchidananda.
Chapter XIII
The Difficulties of the Mental Being
WE HAVE come to this stage in our development of the
path of Knowledge that we began by affirming the
realisation of our pure self, pure existence above the
terms of mind, life and body, as the first object of this Yoga, but
we now affirm that this is not sufficient and that we must also
realise the Self or Brahman in its essential modes and primarily in
its triune reality as Sachchidananda. Not only pure existence, but
pure consciousness and pure bliss of its being and consciousness
are the reality of the Self and the essence of Brahman.
Eurther, there are two kinds of realisation of Self or Sach¬
chidananda. One is that of the silent passive quietistic, self-
absorbed, self-sufficient existence, consciousness and delight,
one, impersonal, without play of qualities, turned away from
the infinite phenomenon of the universe or viewing it with indif¬
ference and without participation. The other is that of the same
existence, consciousness, delight sovereign, free, lord of things,
acting out of an inalienable calm, pouring itself out in infinite
action and quality out of an eternal self-concentration, the one
supreme Person holding in himself all this play of personality in
a vast equal impersonality, possessing the infinite phenomenon
of the universe without attachment but without any inseparable
aloofness, with a divine mastery and an innumerable radiation of
his eternal luminous self-delight — as a manifestation which he
holds, but by which he is not held, which he governs freely and
by which therefore he is not bound. This is not the personal God
of the religious or the qualified Brahman of the philosophers, but
that in which personal and impersonal, quality and non-quality
are reconciled. It is the Transcendent possessing them both in
His being and employing them both as modes for His manifes¬
tation. This then is the object of realisation for the sadhaka of
the integral Yoga.
392
The Yoga of Integral Knowledge
It is the Transcendent possessing them both in
His being and employing them both as modes for His manifes¬
tation. This then is the object of realisation for the sadhaka of
the integral Yoga.
392
The Yoga of Integral Knowledge
We see at once that from this point of view the realisation
of the pure quiescent self which we gain by withdrawing from
mind, life and body, is for us only the acquisition of the nec¬
essary basis for this greater realisation. Therefore that process
is not sufficient for our Yoga; something else is needed more
embracingly positive. As we drew back from all that consti¬
tutes our apparent self and the phenomenon of the universe
in which it dwells to the self-existent, self-conscious Brahman,
so we must now repossess our mind, life and body with the
all-embracing self-existence, self-consciousness and self-delight
of the Brahman. We must not only have the possession of a
pure self-existence independent of the world-play, but possess
all existence as our own; not only know ourselves as an infinite
unegoistic consciousness beyond all change in Time and Space,
but become one with all the outpouring of consciousness and
its creative force in Time and Space; not only be capable of
a fathomless peace and quiescence, but also of a free and an
infinite delight in universal things. For that and not only pure
calm is Sachchidananda, is the Brahman.
If it were easily possible to elevate ourselves to the supra-
mental plane and, dwelling securely there, realise world and
being, consciousness and action, outgoing and incoming of con¬
scious experience by the power and in the manner of the divine
supramental faculties, this realisation would offer no essential
difficulties. But man is a mental and not yet a supramental being.
It is by the mind therefore that he has to aim at knowledge
and realise his being, with whatever help he can get from the
supramental planes. This character of our actually realised being
and therefore of our Yoga imposes on us certain limitations and
primary difficulties which can only be overcome by divine help
or an arduous practice, and in reality only by the combination
of both these aids. These difficulties in the way of the integral
knowledge, the integral realisation, the integral becoming we
have to state succinctly before we can proceed farther.
Realised mental being and realised spiritual being are re¬
ally two different planes in the arrangement of our existence,
the one superior and divine, the other inferior and human. To
The Difficulties of the Mental Being
393
Realised mental being and realised spiritual being are re¬
ally two different planes in the arrangement of our existence,
the one superior and divine, the other inferior and human. To
The Difficulties of the Mental Being
393
the former belong infinite being, infinite consciousness and will,
infinite bliss and the infinite comprehensive and self-effective
knowledge of supermind, four divine principles; to the latter
belong mental being, vital being, physical being, three human
principles. In their apparent nature the two are opposed; each
is the reverse of the other. The divine is infinite and immortal
being; the human is life limited in time and scope and form, life
that is death attempting to become life that is immortality. The
divine is infinite consciousness transcending and embracing all
that it manifests within it; the human is consciousness rescued
from a sleep of inconscience, subjected to the means it uses,
limited by body and ego and attempting to find its relation to
other consciousnesses, bodies, egos positively by various means
of uniting contact and sympathy, negatively by various means
of hostile contact and antipathy. The divine is inalienable self¬
bliss and inviolable all-bliss; the human is sensation of mind and
body seeking for delight, but finding only pleasure, indifference
and pain. The divine is supramental knowledge comprehending
all and supramental will effecting all; the human is ignorance
reaching out to knowledge by the comprehension of things in
parts and parcels which it has to join clumsily together, and it is
incapacity attempting to acquire force and will through a grad¬
ual extension of power corresponding to its gradual extension
of knowledge; and this extension it can only bring about by a
partial and parcelled exercise of will corresponding to the partial
and parcelled method of its knowledge. The divine founds itself
upon unity and is master of the transcendences and totalities of
things; the human founds itself on separated multiplicity and is
the subject even when the master of their division and fragmen¬
tations and their difficult solderings and unifyings. Between the
two there are for the human being a veil and a lid which prevent
the human not only from attaining but even from knowing the
divine.
When, therefore, the mental being seeks to know the divine,
to realise it, to become it, it has first to lift this lid, to put by this
veil. But when it succeeds in that difficult endeavour, it sees the
divine as something superior to it, distant, high, conceptually.
394
But when it succeeds in that difficult endeavour, it sees the
divine as something superior to it, distant, high, conceptually.
394
The Yoga of Integral Knowledge
vitally, even physically above it, to which it looks up from its
own humble station and to which it has, if at all that be possible,
to rise, or if it be not possible, to call that down to itself, to be
subject to it and to adore. It sees the divine as a superior plane
of being, and then it regards it as a supreme state of existence,
a heaven or a Sat or a Nirvana according to the nature of its
own conception or realisation. Or it sees it as a supreme Being
other than itself or at least other than its own present self, and
then it calls it God under one name or another, and views it as
personal or impersonal, qualitied or without qualities, silent and
indifferent Power or active Lord and Helper, again according to
its own conception or realisation, its vision or understanding
of some side or some aspect of that Being. Or it sees it as a
supreme Reality of which its own imperfect being is a reflec¬
tion or from which it has become detached, and then it calls it
Self or Brahman and qualifies it variously, always according to
its own conception or realisation, — Existence, Non-Existence,
Tao, Nihil, Eorce, Unknowable.
If then we seek mentally to realise Sachchidananda, there is
likely to be this first difficulty that we shall see it as something
above, beyond, around even in a sense, but with a gulf between
that being and our being, an unbridged or even an unbridgeable
chasm. There is this infinite existence; but it is quite other than
the mental being who becomes aware of it, and we cannot either
raise ourselves to it and become it or bring it down to ourselves
so that our own experience of our being and world-being shall
be that of its blissful infinity. There is this great, boundless,
unconditioned consciousness and force; but our consciousness
and force stands apart from it, even if within it, limited, petty,
discouraged, disgusted with itself and the world, but unable to
participate in that higher thing which it has seen. There is this
immeasurable and unstained bliss; but our own being remains
the sport of a lower Nature of pleasure and pain and dull neutral
sensation incapable of its divine delight. There is this perfect
Knowledge and Will; but our own remains always the mental
deformed knowledge and limping will incapable of sharing in or
even being in tune with that nature of Godhead. Or else so long
There is this perfect
Knowledge and Will; but our own remains always the mental
deformed knowledge and limping will incapable of sharing in or
even being in tune with that nature of Godhead. Or else so long
The Difficulties of the Mental Being
395
as we live purely in an ecstatic contemplation of that vision, we
are delivered from ourselves; but the moment we again turn our
consciousness upon our own being, we fall away from it and
it disappears or becomes remote and intangible. The Divinity
leaves us; the Vision vanishes; we are back again in the pettiness
of our mortal existence.
Somehow this chasm has to be bridged. And here there are
two possibilities for the mental being. One possibility is for it
to rise by a great, prolonged, concentrated, all-forgetting effort
out of itself into the Supreme. But in this effort the mind has
to leave its own consciousness, to disappear into another and
temporarily or permanently lose itself, if not quite abolish. It
has to go into the trance of Samadhi. For this reason the Raja
and other systems of Yoga give a supreme importance to the
state of Samadhi or Yogic trance in which the mind withdraws
not only from its ordinary interests and preoccupations, but first
from all consciousness of outward act and sense and being and
then from all consciousness of inward mental activities. In this
its inward-gathered state the mental being may have different
kinds of realisation of the Supreme in itself or in various aspects
or on various levels, but the ideal is to get rid of mind altogether
and, going beyond mental realisation, to enter into the absolute
trance in which all sign of mind or lower existence ceases. But
this is a state of consciousness to which few can attain and from
which not all can return.
It is obvious, since mind-consciousness is the sole waking
state possessed by mental being, that it cannot ordinarily quite
enter into another without leaving behind completely both all
our waking existence and all our inward mind. This is the ne¬
cessity of the Yogic trance. But one cannot continually remain
in this trance; or, even if one could persist in it for an indefi¬
nitely long period, it is always likely to be broken in upon by
any strong or persistent call on the bodily life. And when one
returns to the mental consciousness, one is back again in the
lower being. Therefore it has been said that complete liberation
from the human birth, complete ascension from the life of the
mental being is impossible until the body and the bodily life are
396
Therefore it has been said that complete liberation
from the human birth, complete ascension from the life of the
mental being is impossible until the body and the bodily life are
396
The Yoga of Integral Knowledge
finally cast off. The ideal upheld before the Yogin who follows
this method is to renounce all desire and every least velleity
of the human life, of the mental existence, to detach himself
utterly from the world and, entering more and more frequently
and more and more deeply into the most concentrated state of
Samadhi, finally to leave the body while in that utter in-gathering
of the being so that it may depart into the supreme Existence. It
is also by reason of this apparent incompatibility of mind and
Spirit that so many religions and systems are led to condemn the
world and look forward only to a heaven beyond or else a void
Nirvana or supreme featureless self-existence in the Supreme.
But what under these circumstances is the human mind
which seeks the divine to do with its waking moments? For
if these are subject to all the disabilities of mortal mentality, if
they are open to the attacks of grief, fear, anger, passion, hunger,
greed, desire, it is irrational to suppose that by the mere concen¬
tration of the mental being in the Yogic trance at the moment
of putting off the body, the soul can pass away without return
into the supreme existence. For the man’s normal consciousness
is still subject to what the Buddhists call the chain or the stream
of Karma; it is still creating energies which must continue and
have their effect in a continued life of the mental being which is
creating them. Or, to take another point of view, consciousness
being the determining fact and not the bodily existence which is
only a result, the man still belongs normally to the status of hu¬
man, or at least mental activity and this cannot be abrogated by
the fact of passing out of the physical body; to get rid of mortal
body is not to get rid of mortal mind. Nor is it sufficient to have
a dominant disgust of the world or an anti-vital indifference or
aversion to the material existence; for this too belongs to the
lower mental status and activity. The highest teaching is that
even the desire for liberation with all its mental concomitants
must be surpassed before the soul can be entirely free. Therefore
not only must the mind be able to rise in abnormal states out of
itself into a higher consciousness, but its waking mentality also
must be entirely spiritualised.
Therefore
not only must the mind be able to rise in abnormal states out of
itself into a higher consciousness, but its waking mentality also
must be entirely spiritualised.
This brings into the field the second possibility open to the
The Difficulties of the Mental Being
397
mental being; for if its first possibility is to rise out of itself into
a divine supramental plane of being, the other is to call down
the divine into itself so that its mentality shall be changed into
an image of the divine, shall be divinised or spiritualised. This
may be done and primarily must be done by the mind’s power of
reflecting that which it knows, relates to its own consciousness,
contemplates. For the mind is really a reflector and a medium
and none of its activities originate in themselves, none exist per
se. Ordinarily, the mind reflects the status of mortal nature and
the activities of the Force which works under the conditions of
the material universe. But if it becomes clear, passive, pure by
the renunciation of these activities and of the characteristic ideas
and outlook of mental nature, then as in a clear mirror or like
the sky in clear water which is without ripple and unruffled by
winds, the divine is reflected. The mind still does not entirely
possess the divine or become divine, but is possessed by it or
by a luminous reflection of it so long as it remains in this pure
passivity. If it becomes active, it falls back into the disturbance of
the mortal nature and reflects that and no longer the divine. For
this reason an absolute quietism and a cessation first of all outer
action and then of all inner movement is the ideal ordinarily
proposed; here too, for the follower of the path of knowledge,
there must be a sort of waking Samadhi. Whatever action is
unavoidable, must be a purely superficial working of the organs
of perception and motor action in which the quiescent mind
takes eventually no part and from which it seeks no result or
profit.
Whatever action is
unavoidable, must be a purely superficial working of the organs
of perception and motor action in which the quiescent mind
takes eventually no part and from which it seeks no result or
profit.
But this is insufficient for the integral Yoga. There must be a
positive transformation and not merely a negative quiescence of
the waking mentality. The transformation is possible because,
although the divine planes are above the mental consciousness
and to enter actually into them we have ordinarily to lose the
mental in Samadhi, yet there are in the mental being divine
planes superior to our normal mentality which reproduce the
conditions of the divine plane proper, although modified by the
conditions, dominant here, of mentality. All that belongs to the
experience of the divine plane can there be seized, but in the
398
The Yoga of Integral Knowledge
mental way and in a mental form. To these planes of divine
mentality it is possible for the developed human being to arise
in the waking state; or it is possible for him to derive from them
a stream of influences and experiences which shall eventually
open to them and transform into their nature his whole waking
existence. These higher mental states are the immediate sources,
the large actual instruments, the inner stations^ of his perfection.
These higher mental states are the immediate sources,
the large actual instruments, the inner stations^ of his perfection.
But in arriving to these planes or deriving from them the
limitations of our mentality pursue us. In the first place the
mind is an inveterate divider of the indivisible and its whole
nature is to dwell on one thing at a time to the exclusion of
others or to stress it to the subordination of others. Thus in
approaching Sachchidananda it will dwell on its aspect of the
pure existence. Sat, and consciousness and bliss are compelled
then to lose themselves or remain quiescent in the experience of
pure, infinite being which leads to the realisation of the quietistic
Monist. Or it will dwell on the aspect of consciousness. Chit,
and existence and bliss become then dependent on the experience
of an infinite transcendent Power and Conscious-Force, which
leads to the realisation of the Tantric worshipper of Energy. Or
it will dwell on the aspect of delight, Ananda, and existence
and consciousness then seem to disappear into a bliss without
basis of self-possessing awareness or constituent being, which
leads to the realisation of the Buddhistic seeker of Nirvana. Or
it will dwell on some aspect of Sachchidananda which comes to
the mind from the supramental Knowledge, Will or Love, and
then the infinite impersonal aspect of Sachchidananda is almost
or quite lost in the experience of the Deity which leads to the
realisations of the various religions and to the possession of some
supernal world or divine status of the human soul in relation to
God. And for those whose object is to depart anywhither from
cosmic existence, this is enough, since they are able by the mind’s
immergence into or seizure upon any one of these principles or
aspects to effect through status in the divine planes of their
^ Called in the Veda variously seats, houses, placings or statuses, footings, earths,
dwelling-places, sadas, grha or ksaya, dhdma, padam, bhiimi, ksiti.
The Difficulties of the Mental Being
399
mentality or the possession by them of their waking state this
desired transit.
The Difficulties of the Mental Being
399
mentality or the possession by them of their waking state this
desired transit.
But the sadhaka of the integral Yoga has to harmonise all so
that they may become a plenary and equal unity of the full reali¬
sation of Sachchidananda. Here the last difficulty of mind meets
him, its inability to hold at once the unity and the multiplicity. It
is not altogether difficult to arrive at and dwell in a pure infinite
or even, at the same time, a perfect global experience of the Ex¬
istence which is Consciousness which is Delight. The mind may
even extend its experience of this Unity to the multiplicity so as
to perceive it immanent in the universe and in each object, force,
movement in the universe or at the same time to be aware of
this Existence-Consciousness-Bliss containing the universe and
enveloping all its objects and originating all its movements. It
is difficult indeed for it to unite and harmonise rightly all these
experiences; but still it can possess Sachchidananda at once in
himself and immanent in all and the continent of all. But with
this to unite the final experience of all this as Sachchidananda
and possess objects, movements, forces, forms as no other than
He, is the great difficulty for mind. Separately any of these things
may be done; the mind may go from one to the other, rejecting
one as it arrives at another and calling this the lower or that
the higher existence. But to unify without losing, to integralise
without rejecting is its supreme difficulty.
Chapter XIV
The Passive and the Active Brahman
But to unify without losing, to integralise
without rejecting is its supreme difficulty.
Chapter XIV
The Passive and the Active Brahman
The difficulty which the mental being experiences in
arriving at an integral realisation of true being and world¬
being may be met by following one or other of two dif¬
ferent lines of his self-development. He may evolve himself from
plane to plane of his own being and embrace on each successively
his oneness with the world and with Sachchidananda realised as
the Purusha and Prakriti, Conscious-Soul and Nature-Soul of
that plane, taking into himself the action of the lower grades
of being as he ascends. He may, that is to say, work out by a
sort of inclusive process of self-enlargement and transformation
the evolution of the material into the divine or spiritual man.
This seems to have been the method of the most ancient sages
of which we get some glimpse in the Rig Veda and some of
the Upanishads.^ He may, on the other hand, aim straight at
the realisation of pure self-existence on the highest plane of
mental being and from that secure basis realise spiritually under
the conditions of his mentality the process by which the self-
existent becomes all existences, but without that descent into
the self-divided egoistic consciousness which is a circumstance
of evolution in the Ignorance. Thus identified with Sachchid¬
ananda in the universal self-existence as the spiritualised mental
being, he may then ascend beyond to the supramental plane of
the pure spiritual existence. It is the latter method the stages of
which we may now attempt to trace for the seeker by the path
of knowledge.
When the sadhaka has followed the discipline of withdrawal
from the various identifications of the self with the ego, the mind,
the life, the body, he has arrived at realisation by knowledge
of a pure, still, self-aware existence, one, undivided, peaceful,
^ Notably, the Taittiriya Upanishad.
The Passive and the Active Brahman
401
The Passive and the Active Brahman
401
inactive, undisturbed by the action of the world. The only re¬
lation that this Self seems to have with the world is that of a
disinterested Witness not at all involved in or affected or even
touched by any of its activities. If this state of consciousness is
pushed farther one becomes aware of a self even more remote
from world-existence; all that is in the world is in a sense in
that Self and yet at the same time extraneous to its conscious¬
ness, non-existent in its existence, existing only in a sort of
unreal mind, — a dream therefore, an illusion. This aloof and
transcendent Real Existence may be realised as an utter Self of
one’s own being; or the very idea of a self and of one’s own
being may be swallowed up in it, so that it is only for the mind
an unknowable That, unknowable to the mental consciousness
and without any possible kind of actual connection or commerce
with world-existence. It can even be realised by the mental being
as a Nihil, Non-Existence or Void, but a Void of all that is in
the world, a Non-existence of all that is in the world and yet
the only Reality. To proceed farther towards that Transcendence
by concentration of one’s own being upon it is to lose mental
existence and world-existence altogether and cast oneself into
the Unknowable.
The integral Yoga of knowledge demands instead a divine
return upon world-existence and its first step must be to re¬
alise the Self as the All, sarvam brahma. Eirst, concentrating
on the Self-existent, we have to realise all of which the mind
and senses are aware as a figure of things existing in this pure
Self that we now are to our own consciousness. This vision of
the pure self translates itself to the mind-sense and the mind-
perception as an infinite Reality in which all exists merely as
name and form, not precisely unreal, not a hallucination or a
dream, but still only a creation of the consciousness, perceptual
and subtly sensible rather than substantial. In this poise of the
consciousness all seems to be, if not a dream, yet very much
like a representation or puppet-show taking place in the calm,
motionless, peaceful, indifferent Self. Our own phenomenal ex¬
istence is part of this conceptual movement, a mechanical form
of mind and body among other forms, ourselves a name of being
402
The Yoga of Integral Knowledge
Our own phenomenal ex¬
istence is part of this conceptual movement, a mechanical form
of mind and body among other forms, ourselves a name of being
402
The Yoga of Integral Knowledge
among other names, automatically mobile in this Self with its
all-encompassing, still self-awareness. The active consciousness
of the world is not present in this state to our realisation, because
thought has been stilled in us and therefore our own conscious¬
ness is perfectly still and inactive, — whatever we do, seems to be
purely mechanical, not attended with any conscious origination
by our active will and knowledge. Or if thought occurs, that
also happens mechanically like the rest, like the movement of
our body, moved by the unseen springs of Nature as in the plant
and element and not by any active will of our self-existence. For
this Self is the immobile and does not originate or take part in
the action which it allows. This Self is the All in the sense only of
being the infinite One who is immutably and contains all names
and forms.
The basis of this status of consciousness is the mind’s ex¬
clusive realisation of pure self-existence in which consciousness
is at rest, inactive, widely concentrated in pure self-awareness
of being, not active and originative of any kind of becoming.
Its aspect of knowledge is at rest in the awareness of undiffer¬
entiated identity; its aspect of force and will is at rest in the
awareness of unmodifiable immutability. And yet it is aware
of names and forms, it is aware of movement; but this move¬
ment does not seem to proceed from the Self, but to go on
by some inherent power of its own and only to be reflected
in the Self. In other words, the mental being has put away
from himself by exclusive concentration the dynamic aspect of
consciousness, has taken refuge in the static and built a wall
of non-communication between the two; between the passive
and the active Brahman a gulf has been created and they stand
on either side of it, the one visible to the other but with no
contact, no touch of sympathy, no sense of unity between them.
Therefore to the passive Self all conscious being seems to be
passive in its nature, all activity seems to be non-conscious in
itself and mechanical (jada) in its movement. The realisation of
this status is the basis of the ancient Sankhya philosophy which
taught that the Purusha or Conscious-Soul is a passive, inactive,
immutable entity, Prakriti or the Nature-Soul including even
The Passive and the Active Brahman
403
The realisation of
this status is the basis of the ancient Sankhya philosophy which
taught that the Purusha or Conscious-Soul is a passive, inactive,
immutable entity, Prakriti or the Nature-Soul including even
The Passive and the Active Brahman
403
the mind and the understanding active, mutable, mechanical,
but reflected in the Purusha which identifles itself with what is
reflected in it and lends to it its own light of consciousness. When
the Purusha learns not to identify himself, then Prakrit! begins
to fall away from its impulse of movement and returns towards
equilibrium and rest. The Vedantic view of the same status led
to the philosophy of the inactive Self or Brahman as the one
reality and of all the rest as name and form imposed on it by a
false activity of mental illusion which has to be removed by right
knowledge of the immutable Self and refusal of the imposition.^
The two views really differ only in their language and their view¬
point; substantially, they are the same intellectual generalisation
from the same spiritual experience.
If we rest here, there are only two possible attitudes towards
the world. Either we must remain as mere inactive witnesses of
the world-play or act in it mechanically without any participa¬
tion of the conscious self and by mere play of the organs of
sense and motor-action.^ In the former choice what we do is to
approach as completely as possible to the inactivity of the passive
and silent Brahman. We have stilled our mind and silenced the
activity of the thought and the disturbances of the heart, we have
arrived at an entire inner peace and indifference; we attempt now
to still the mechanical action of the life and body, to reduce it
to the most meagre minimum possible so that it may eventually
cease entirely and for ever. This, the final aim of the ascetic
Yoga which refuses life, is evidently not our aim. By the alterna¬
tive choice we can have an activity perfect enough in outward
appearance along with an entire inner passivity, peace, mental
silence, indifference and cessation of the emotions, absence of
choice in the will.
To the ordinary mind this does not seem possible. As, emo¬
tionally, it cannot conceive of activity without desire and emo¬
tional preference, so intellectually it cannot conceive of activity
without thought-conception, conscious motive and energising of
the will. But, as a matter of fact, we see that a large part of our
adhyaropa. kevalair indriyair. Gita.
404
The Yoga of Integral Knowledge
But, as a matter of fact, we see that a large part of our
adhyaropa. kevalair indriyair. Gita.
404
The Yoga of Integral Knowledge
own action as well as the whole activity of inanimate and merely
animate life is done by a mechanical impulse and movement in
which these elements are not, openly at least, at work. It may
be said that this is only possible of the purely physical and vital
activity and not of those movements which ordinarily depend
upon the functioning of the conceptual and volitional mind,
such as speech, writing and all the intelligent action of human
life. But this again is not true, as we find when we are able to go
behind the habitual and normal process of our mental nature. It
has been found by recent psychological experiment that all these
operations can be effected without any conscious origination in
the thought and will of the apparent actor; his organs of sense
and action, including the speech, become passive instruments
for a thought and will other than his.
Certainly, behind all intelligent action there must be an in¬
telligent will, but it need not be the intelligence or the will of the
conscious mind in the actor. In the psychological phenomena of
which I have spoken, it is obviously in some of them the will
and intelligence of other human beings that uses the organs,
in others it is doubtful whether it is an influence or actuation
by other beings or the emergence of a subconscious, subliminal
mind or a mixed combination of both these agencies. But in this
Yogic status of action by the mere organs, kevalair indriyair,
it is the universal intelligence and will of Nature itself working
from centres superconscious and subconscious as it acts in the
mechanically purposeful energies of plant-life or of the inani¬
mate material form, but here with a living instrument who is
the conscious witness of the action and instrumentation. It is a
remarkable fact that the speech, writing and intelligent actions
of such a state may convey a perfect force of thought, luminous,
faultless, logical, inspired, perfectly adapting means to ends, far
beyond what the man himself could have done in his old normal
poise of mind and will and capacity, yet all the time he himself
perceives but does not conceive the thought that comes to him,
observes in its works but does not appropriate or use the will
that acts through him, witnesses but does not claim as his own
the powers which play upon the world through him as through
The Passive and the Active Brahman
405
a passive channel. But this phenomenon is not really abnormal
or contrary to the general law of things. For do we not see a
perfect working of the secret universal Will and Intelligence in
the apparently brute [jada) action of material Nature? And it
is precisely this universal Will and Intelligence which thus acts
through the calm, indifferent and inwardly silent Yogin who
offers no obstacle of limited and ignorant personal will and in¬
telligence to its operations. He dwells in the silent Self; he allows
the active Brahman to work through his natural instruments,
accepting impartially, without participation, the formations of
its universal force and knowledge.
This status of an inner passivity and an outer action in¬
dependent of each other is a state of entire spiritual freedom.
The Yogin, as the Gita says, even in acting does no actions,
for it is not he, but universal Nature directed by the Lord of
Nature which is at work. He is not bound by his works, nor
do they leave any after effects or consequences in his mind,
nor cling to or leave any mark on his soul;"* they vanish and
are dissolved^ by their very execution and leave the immutable
self unaffected and the soul unmodified. Therefore this would
seem to be the poise the uplifted soul ought to take, if it has
still to preserve any relations with human action in the world-
existence, an unalterable silence, tranquillity, passivity within,
an action without regulated by the universal Will and Wisdom
which works, as the Gita says, without being involved in, bound
by or ignorantly attached to its works. And certainly this poise
of a perfect activity founded upon a perfect inner passivity is that
which the Yogin has to possess, as we have seen in the Yoga of
Works. But here in this status of self-knowledge at which we have
arrived, there is an evident absence of integrality; for there is still
a gulf, an unrealised unity or a cleft of consciousness between
the passive and the active Brahman. We have still to possess
consciously the active Brahman without losing the possession of
the silent Self. We have to preserve the inner silence, tranquillity.
na karma lipyate nare. Isha Upanishad.
5
praviliyante karmani. Gita.
406
The Yoga of Integral Knowledge
We have to preserve the inner silence, tranquillity.
na karma lipyate nare. Isha Upanishad.
5
praviliyante karmani. Gita.
406
The Yoga of Integral Knowledge
passivity as a foundation; but in place of an aloof indifference
to the works of the active Brahman we have to arrive at an
equal and impartial delight in them; in place of a refusal to
participate lest our freedom and peace be lost we have to arrive
at a conscious possession of the active Brahman whose joy of
existence does not abrogate His peace, nor His lordship of all
workings impair His calm freedom in the midst of His works.
The difficulty is created by the exclusive concentration of
the mental being on its plane of pure existence in which con¬
sciousness is at rest in passivity and delight of existence at rest in
peace of existence. It has to embrace also its plane of conscious
force of existence in which consciousness is active as power and
will and delight is active as joy of existence. Here the difficulty
is that mind is likely to precipitate itself into the consciousness
of Force instead of possessing it. The extreme mental state of
precipitation into Nature is that of the ordinary man who takes
his bodily and vital activity and the mind-movements dependent
on them for his whole real existence and regards all passivity of
the soul as a departure from existence and an approach towards
nullity. He lives in the superficies of the active Brahman and
while to the silent soul exclusively concentrated in the passive
self all activities are mere name and form, to him they are the
only reality and it is the Self that is merely a name. In one
the passive Brahman stands aloof from the active and does not
share in its consciousness; in the other the active Brahman stands
aloof from the passive and does not share in its consciousness
nor wholly possess its own. Each is to the other in these ex¬
clusivenesses an inertia of status or an inertia of mechanically
active non-possession of self if not altogether an unreality. But
the sadhaka who has once seen firmly the essence of things and
tasted thoroughly the peace of the silent Self, is not likely to
be content with any state which involves loss of self-knowledge
or a sacrifice of the peace of the soul. He will not precipitate
himself back into the mere individual movement of mind and
life and body with all its ignorance and straining and distur¬
bance. Whatever new status he may acquire, will only satisfy
him if it is founded upon and includes that which he has already
Whatever new status he may acquire, will only satisfy
him if it is founded upon and includes that which he has already
The Passive and the Active Brahman
407
found to be indispensable to real self-knowledge, self-delight
and self-possession.
Still there is the likelihood of a partial, superficial and tem¬
porary relapse into the old mental movement when he attempts
again to ally himself to the activity of the world. To prevent
this relapse or to cure it when it arrives, he has to hold fast
to the truth of Sachchidananda and extend his realisation of
the infinite One into the movement of the infinite multiplicity.
He has to concentrate on and realise the one Brahman in all
things as conscious force of being as well as pure awareness
of conscious being. The Self as the All, not only in the unique
essence of things, but in the manifold form of things, not only as
containing all in a transcendent consciousness, but as becoming
all by a constituting consciousness, this is the next step towards
his true possession of existence. In proportion as this realisation
is accomplished, the status of consciousness as well as the mental
view proper to it will change. Instead of an immutable Self con¬
taining name and form, containing without sharing in them the
mutations of Nature, there will be the consciousness of the Self
immutable in essence, unalterable in its fundamental poise but
constituting and becoming in its experience all these existences
which the mind distinguishes as name and form. All formations
of mind and body will be not merely figures reflected in the
Purusha, but real forms of which Brahman, Self, conscious Being
is the substance and, as it were, the material of their formation.
The name attaching to the form will be not a mere conception of
the mind answering to no real existence bearing the name, but
there will be behind it a true power of conscious being, a true
self-experience of the Brahman answering to something that it
contained potential but unmanifest in its silence. And yet in all
its mutations it will be realised as one, free and above them. The
realisation of a sole Reality suffering the imposition of names
and forms will give place to that of eternal Being throwing itself
out into infinite becoming. All existences will be to the con¬
sciousness of the Yogin soul-forms and not merely idea-forms
of the Self, of himself, one with him, contained in his universal
existence. All the soul-life, mental, vital, bodily existence of all
408
The Yoga of Integral Knowledge
All the soul-life, mental, vital, bodily existence of all
408
The Yoga of Integral Knowledge
that exists will be to him one indivisible movement and activity
of the Being who is the same forever. The Self will be realised
as the all in its double aspect of immutable status and mutable
activity and it is this that will be seen as the comprehensive truth
of our existence.
Chapter XV
The Cosmic Consciousness
To REALISE and unite oneself with the active Brahman
is to exchange, perfectly or imperfectly according as the
union is partial or complete, the individual for the cosmic
consciousness. The ordinary existence of man is not only an
individual but an egoistic consciousness; it is, that is to say, the
individual soul or Jivatman identifying himself with the nodus
of his mental, vital, physical experiences in the movement of
universal Nature, that is to say, with his mind-created ego, and,
less intimately, with the mind, life, body which receive the experi¬
ences. Less intimately, because of these he can say “my mind, life,
body,” he can regard them as himself, yet partly as not himself
and something rather which he possesses and uses, but of the
ego he says, “It is I.” By detaching himself from all identification
with mind, life and body, he can get back from his ego to the
consciousness of the true Individual, the Jivatman, who is the
real possessor of mind, life and body. Looking back from this
Individual to that of which it is the representative and conscious
figure, he can get back to the transcendent consciousness of pure
Self, absolute Existence or absolute Non-being, three poises of
the same eternal Reality. But between the movement of universal
Nature and this transcendent Existence, possessor of the one and
cosmic self of the other, is the cosmic consciousness, the universal
Purusha of whom all Nature is the Prakriti or active conscious
Eorce. We can arrive at that, become that whether by breaking
the walls of the ego laterally, as it were, and identifying oneself
with all existences in the One, or else from above by realising
the pure Self or absolute Existence in its outgoing, immanent,
all-embracing, all-constituting self-knowledge and self-creative
power.
The immanent, silent Self in all is the foundation of this
cosmic consciousness for the experience of the mental being. It
410
The Yoga of Integral Knowledge
The immanent, silent Self in all is the foundation of this
cosmic consciousness for the experience of the mental being. It
410
The Yoga of Integral Knowledge
is the Witness pure and omnipresent who as the silent Conscious
Soul of the cosmos regards all the activity of the universe; it
is Sachchidananda for whose delight universal Nature displays
the eternal procession of her works. We are aware of an un¬
wounded Delight, a pure and perfect Presence, an infinite and
self-contained Power present in ourselves and all things, not
divided by their divisions, not affected by the stress and struggle
of the cosmic manifestation; it is within it all, but it is superior
to it all. Because of that all this exists, but that does not exist
because of all this; it is too great to be limited by the movement in
Time and Space which it inhabits and supports. This foundation
enables us to possess in the security of the divine existence the
whole universe within our own being. We are no longer limited
and shut in by what we inhabit, but like the Divine contain in
ourselves all that for the purpose of the movement of Nature
we consent to inhabit. We are not mind or life or body, but the
informing and sustaining Soul, silent, peaceful, eternal, which
possesses them; and since we find this Soul everywhere sustain¬
ing and informing and possessing all lives and minds and bodies,
we cease to regard it as a separate and individual being in our
own. In it all this moves and acts; within all this it is stable and
immutable. Having this, we possess our eternal self-existence at
rest in its eternal consciousness and bliss.
Next we have to realise this silent Self as the Lord of all
the action of universal Nature; we have to see that it is this
same Self-existent who is displayed in the creative force of His
eternal consciousness. All this action is only His power and
knowledge and self-delight going abroad in His infinite being to
do the works of His eternal wisdom and will. We shall realise
the Divine, the eternal Self of all, first, as the source of all action
and inaction, of all knowledge and ignorance, of all delight
and suffering, of all good and evil, perfection and imperfection,
of all force and form, of all the outgoing of Nature from the
eternal divine Principle and of all the return of Nature towards
the Divine. We shall realise it next as itself going abroad in
its Power and Knowledge, — for the Power and Knowledge are
itself, — not only the source of their works, but the creator and
The Cosmic Consciousness
411
We shall realise it next as itself going abroad in
its Power and Knowledge, — for the Power and Knowledge are
itself, — not only the source of their works, but the creator and
The Cosmic Consciousness
411
doer of their works, one in all existences; for the many souls of
the universal manifestation are only faces of the one Divine, the
many minds, lives, bodies are only His masks and disguises. We
perceive each being to be the universal Narayana presenting to
us many faces; we lose ourselves in that universality and perceive
our own mind, life and body as only one presentation of the Self,
while all whom we formerly conceived of as others, are now to
our consciousness our self in other minds, lives and bodies. All
force and idea and event and figure of things in the universe are
only manifest degrees of this Self, values of the Divine in His
eternal self-figuration. Thus viewing things and beings we may
see them first as if they were parts and parcels of His divided
being; ^ but the realisation and the knowledge are not complete
unless we go beyond this idea of quality and space and division
by which there comes the experience of less and more, large and
small, part and whole, and see the whole Infinite everywhere;
we must see the universe and each thing in the universe as in
its existence and secret consciousness and power and delight
the indivisible Divine in its entirety, however much the figure it
makes to our minds may appear only as a partial manifestation.
When we possess thus the Divine as at once the silent and sur¬
passing Witness and the active Lord and all-constituting Being
without making any division between these aspects, we possess
the whole cosmic Divine, embrace all of the universal Self and
Reality, are awake to the cosmic consciousness.
What will be the relation of our individual existence to this
cosmic consciousness to which we have attained? For since we
have still a mind and body and human life, our individual exis¬
tence persists even though our separate individual consciousness
has been transcended. It is quite possible to realise the cosmic
consciousness without becoming that; we can see it, that is to
say, with the soul, feel it and dwell in it; we can even be united
with it without becoming wholly one with it; in a word, we may
preserve the individual consciousness of the Jivatman within the
cosmic consciousness of the universal Self. We may preserve a
The Gita speaks of the Jiva as a portion of the Lord.
1
412
The Yoga of Integral Knowledge
We may preserve a
The Gita speaks of the Jiva as a portion of the Lord.
1
412
The Yoga of Integral Knowledge
yet greater distinctness between the two and enjoy the relations
between them; we may remain, in a way, entirely the individual
self while participating in the bliss and infinity of the universal
Self. Or we may possess them both as a greater and lesser self,
one we feel pouring itself out in the universal play of the divine
consciousness and force, the other in the action of the same
universal Being through our individual soul-centre or soul-form
for the purposes of an individual play of mind, life and body. But
the summit of this cosmic realisation by knowledge is always the
power to dissolve the personality in universal being, to merge
the individual in the cosmic consciousness, to liberate even the
soul-form into the unity and universality of the Spirit. This is
the laya, dissolution, or moksa, liberation, at which the Yoga
of Knowledge aims. This may extend itself, as in the traditional
Yoga, to the dissolution of mind, life and body itself into the
silent Self or absolute Existence; but the essence of the liberation
is the merging of the individual in the Infinite. When the Yogin
no longer feels himself to be a consciousness situated in the body
or limited by the mind, but has lost the sense of division in the
boundlessness of an infinite consciousness, that which he set out
to do is accomplished. Afterwards the retaining or non-retaining
of the human life is a circumstance of no essential importance,
for it is always the formless One who acts through its many
forms of the mind and life and body and each soul is only one
of the stations from which it chooses to watch and receive and
actuate its own play.
That into which we merge ourselves in the cosmic con¬
sciousness is Sachchidananda. It is one eternal Existence that we
then are, one eternal Consciousness which sees its own works in
us and others, one eternal Will or Eorce of that Consciousness
which displays itself in infinite workings, one eternal Delight
which has the joy of itself and all its workings. It is itself stable,
immutable, timeless, spaceless, supreme and it is still itself in the
infinity of its workings, not changed by their variations, not bro¬
ken up by their multiplicity, not increased or diminished by their
ebbings and flowings in the seas of Time and Space, not confused
by their apparent contrarieties or limited by their divinely-willed
The Cosmic Consciousness
413
limitations. Sachchidananda is the unity of the many-sidedness
of manifested things, Sachchidananda is the eternal harmony
of all their variations and oppositions, Sachchidananda is the
infinite perfection which justifies their limitations and is the goal
of their imperfections.
So much for the essential relation; but we have to see also
the practical results of this internal transformation. It is evi¬
dent that by dwelling in this cosmic consciousness our whole
experience and valuation of everything in the universe will be
radically changed. As individual egos we dwell in the Ignorance
and judge everything by a broken, partial and personal stan¬
dard of knowledge; we experience everything according to the
capacity of a limited consciousness and force and are therefore
unable to give a divine response or set the true value upon any
part of cosmic experience. We experience limitation, weakness,
incapacity, grief, pain, struggle and its contradictory emotions
and we accept these things and their opposites as opposites in an
eternal duality and cannot reconcile them in the eternity of an
absolute good and happiness. We live by fragments of experience
and judge by our fragmentary values each thing and the whole.
When we try to arrive at absolute values we only promote some
partial view of things to do duty for a totality in the divine
workings; we then make believe that our fractions are integers
and try to thrust our one-sided view-points into the catholicity
of the all-vision of the Divine.
But by entering into the cosmic consciousness we begin to
participate in that all-vision and see everything in the values of
the Infinite and the One. Limitation itself, ignorance itself change
their meaning for us. Ignorance changes into a particularising
action of divine knowledge; strength and weakness and inca¬
pacity change into a free putting forth and holding back various
measures of divine Force; joy and grief, pleasure and pain change
into a mastering and a suffering of divine delight; struggle, losing
its discords, becomes a balancing of forces and values in the
divine harmony. We do not then suffer by the limitations of our
mind, life and body; for we no longer live in these, even when
we record and accept them, but in the infinity of the Spirit, and
414
The Yoga of Integral Knowledge
We do not then suffer by the limitations of our
mind, life and body; for we no longer live in these, even when
we record and accept them, but in the infinity of the Spirit, and
414
The Yoga of Integral Knowledge
these we view in their right value and place and purpose in the
manifestation, as degrees of the supreme being, conscious-force
and delight of Sachchidananda veiling and manifesting Himself
in the cosmos. We cease also to judge other men and things by
their outward appearances and are delivered from hostile and
contradictory ideas and emotions; for it is the soul that we see,
the Divine that we seek and find in every thing and creature,
and the rest has only a secondary value to us in a scheme of
relations which exist now for us only as self-expressions of the
Divine and not as having any absolute value in themselves. So
too no event can disturb us, since the distinction of happy and
unhappy, beneficent and maleficent happenings loses its force,
and all is seen in its divine value and its divine purpose. Thus
we arrive at a perfect liberation and an infinite equality. It is this
consummation of which the Upanishad speaks when it says “He
in whom the self has become all existences, how shall he have
delusion, whence shall he have grief who knows entirely^ and
sees in all things oneness.”
But this can be only when there is perfection in the cosmic
consciousness, and that is difficult for the mental being. The
mentality when it arrives at the idea or the realisation of the
Spirit, the Divine, tends to break existence into two opposite
halves, the lower and the higher existence. It sees on one side
the Infinite, the Formless, the One, the Peace and Bliss, the Calm
and Silence, the Absolute, the Vast and Pure; on the other it sees
the finite, the world of forms, the jarring multiplicity, the strife
and suffering and imperfect, unreal good, the tormented activity
and futile success, the relative, the limited and vain and vile.
To those who make this division and this opposition, complete
liberation is only attainable in the peace of the One, in the fea¬
turelessness of the Infinite, in the non-becoming of the Absolute
which is to them the only real being; to be free all values must
be destroyed, all limitations not only transcended but abolished.
Vijanatah. Vijnana is the knowledge of the One and the Many, by which the Many
are seen in the terms of the One, in the infinite unifying Truth, Right, Vast of the divine
existence.
The Cosmic Consciousness
415
Vijanatah. Vijnana is the knowledge of the One and the Many, by which the Many
are seen in the terms of the One, in the infinite unifying Truth, Right, Vast of the divine
existence.
The Cosmic Consciousness
415
They have the liberation of the divine rest, but not the liberty of
the divine action; they enjoy the peace of the Transcendent, but
not the cosmic bliss of the Transcendent. Their liberty depends
upon abstention from the cosmic movement, it cannot dominate
and possess cosmic existence itself. But it is also possible for
them to realise and participate in the immanent as well as the
transcendent peace. Still the division is not cured. The liberty
they enjoy is that of the silent unacting Witness, not the liberty
of the divine Master-consciousness which possesses all things,
delights in all, casts itself into all forms of existence without fear
of fall or loss or bondage or stain. All the rights of the Spirit are
not yet possessed; there is still a denial, a limitation, a holding
back from the entire oneness of all existence. The workings of
Mind, Life, Body are viewed from the calm and peace of the
spiritual planes of the mental being and are filled with that calm
and peace; they are not possessed by and subjected to the law of
the all-mastering Spirit.
The workings of
Mind, Life, Body are viewed from the calm and peace of the
spiritual planes of the mental being and are filled with that calm
and peace; they are not possessed by and subjected to the law of
the all-mastering Spirit.
All this is when the mental being takes its station in its own
spiritual planes, in the mental planes of Sat, Chit, Ananda, and
casts down their light and delight upon the lower existence. But
there is possible the attempt at a kind of cosmic consciousness
by dwelling on the lower planes themselves after breaking their
limitations laterally, as we have said, and then calling down into
them the light and largeness of the higher existence. Not only
Spirit is one, but Mind, Life, Matter are one. There is one cosmic
Mind, one cosmic Life, one cosmic Body. All the attempt of man
to arrive at universal sympathy, universal love and the under¬
standing and knowledge of the inner soul of other existences
is an attempt to beat thin, breach and eventually break down
by the power of the enlarging mind and heart the walls of the
ego and arrive nearer to a cosmic oneness. And if we can by the
mind and heart get at the touch of the Spirit, receive the powerful
inrush of the Divine into this lower humanity and change our
nature into a reflection of the divine nature by love, by universal
joy, by oneness of mind with all Nature and all beings, we can
break down the walls. Even our bodies are not really separate
entities and therefore our very physical consciousness is capable
416
The Yoga of Integral Knowledge
of oneness with the physical consciousness of others and of the
cosmos. The Yogin is able to feel his body one with all bodies,
to be aware of and even to participate in their affections; he
can feel constantly the unity of all Matter and be aware of his
physical being as only a movement in its movement.^ Still more
is it possible for him to feel constantly and normally the whole
sea of the infinite life as his true vital existence and his own life
as only a wave of that boundless surge. And more easily yet is
it possible for him to unite himself in mind and heart with all
existences, be aware of their desires, struggles, joys, sorrows,
thoughts, impulses, in a sense as if they were his own, at least
as occurring in his larger self hardly less intimately or quite as
intimately as the movements of his own heart and mind. This
too is a realisation of cosmic consciousness.
This
too is a realisation of cosmic consciousness.
It may even seem as if it were the greatest oneness, since it
accepts all that we can be sensible of in the mind-created world
as our own. Sometimes one sees it spoken of as the highest
achievement. Certainly, it is a great realisation and the path to
a greater. It is that which the Gita speaks of as the accepting of
all existences as if oneself whether in grief or in joy; it is the way
of sympathetic oneness and infinite compassion which helps the
Buddhist to arrive at his Nirvana. Still there are gradations and
degrees. In the first stage the soul is still subject to the reactions
of the duality, still subject therefore to the lower Prakriti; it is
depressed or hurt by the cosmic suffering, elated by the cosmic
joy. We suffer the joys of others, suffer their griefs; and this
oneness can be carried even into the body, as in the story of
the Indian saint who, seeing a bullock tortured in the field by its
cruel owner, cried out with the creature’s pain and the weal of the
lash was found reproduced on his own flesh. But there must be
a oneness with Sachchidananda in his freedom as well as with
the subjection of the lower being to the reactions of Prakriti.
This is achieved when the soul is free and superior to the cosmic
reactions which are then felt only in the life, mind and body
and as an inferior movement; the soul understands, accepts the
jagatyam jagat. Isha Upanishad.
The Cosmic Consciousness
417
experience, sympathises, but is not overpowered or affected, so
that at last even the mind and body learn also to accept without
being overpowered or even affected except on their surface. And
the consummation of this movement is when the two spheres of
existence are no longer divided and the mind, life and body
obeying utterly the higher law grow into the spirit’s freedom;
free from the lower or ignorant response to the cosmic touches,
their struggle and their subjection to the duality ceases. This
does not mean insensibility to the subjection and struggles and
sufferings of others, but it does mean a spiritual supremacy and
freedom which enables one to understand perfectly, put the right
values on things and heal from above instead of struggling from
below. It does not inhibit the divine compassion and helpfulness,
but it does inhibit the human and animal sorrow and suffering.
It does not inhibit the divine compassion and helpfulness,
but it does inhibit the human and animal sorrow and suffering.
The link between the spiritual and the lower planes of the
being is that which is called in the old Vedantic phraseology
the vijhdna and which we may describe in our modern turn of
language as the Truth-plane or the ideal mind or supermind.
There the One and the Many meet and our being is freely open
to the revealing light of the divine Truth and the inspiration of
the divine Will and Knowledge. If we can break down the veil of
the intellectual, emotional, sensational mind which our ordinary
existence has built between us and the Divine, we can then take
up through the Truth-mind all our mental, vital and physical
experience and offer it up to the spiritual — this was the secret
or mystic sense of the old Vedic “sacrifice” — to be converted
into the terms of the infinite truth of Sachchidananda, and we
can receive the powers and illuminations of the infinite Existence
in forms of a divine knowledge, will and delight to be imposed on
our mentality, vitality, physical existence till the lower members
are transformed into the perfect vessel of the higher nature. This
was the double Vedic movement of the descent and birth of the
gods in the human creature and the ascent of the human powers
that struggle towards the divine knowledge, power and delight
and climb into the godheads, the result of which was the pos¬
session of the One, the infinite, the beatific existence, the union
with God, the Immortality. By possession of this ideal plane we
418
The Yoga of Integral Knowledge
break down entirely the opposition of the lower and the higher
existence, the false gulf created by the Ignorance between the
finite and the Infinite, God and Nature, the One and the Many,
open the gates of the Divine, fulfil the individual in the complete
harmony of the cosmic consciousness and realise in the cosmic
being the epiphany of the transcendent Sachchidananda. And
these results, which obtained on the supramental plane itself or
beyond, would be the highest perfection of the human being,
we can attain to partially, in a very modified way, in a sort of
mental figure by awakening into activity on the corresponding
plane of the mental nature. We can get a luminous shadow of
that perfect harmony and light. But this belongs to another part
of our subject; it is the knowledge on which we must found our
Yoga of self-perfection.
Chapter XVI
Oneness
We can get a luminous shadow of
that perfect harmony and light. But this belongs to another part
of our subject; it is the knowledge on which we must found our
Yoga of self-perfection.
Chapter XVI
Oneness
WHEN, then, by the withdrawal of the centre of con¬
sciousness from identification with the mind, life and
body, one has discovered one’s true self, discovered the
oneness of that self with the pure, silent, immutable Brahman,
discovered in the immutable, in the Akshara Brahman, that by
which the individual being escapes from his own personality into
the impersonal, the first movement of the Path of Knowledge
has been completed. It is the sole that is absolutely necessary for
the traditional aim of the Yoga of Knowledge, for immergence,
for escape from cosmic existence, for release into the absolute
and ineffable Parabrahman who is beyond all cosmic being.
The seeker of this ultimate release may take other realisations
on his way, may realise the Lord of the universe, the Purusha
who manifests Himself in all creatures, may arrive at the cosmic
consciousness, may know and feel his unity with all beings; but
these are only stages or circumstances of his journey, results of
the unfolding of his soul as it approaches nearer the ineffable
goal. To pass beyond them all is his supreme object. When on the
other hand, having attained to the freedom and the silence and
the peace, we resume possession by the cosmic consciousness of
the active as well as the silent Brahman and can securely live
in the divine freedom as well as rest in it, we have completed
the second movement of the Path by which the integrality of
self-knowledge becomes the station of the liberated soul.
The soul thus possesses itself in the unity of Sachchid-
ananda upon all the manifest planes of its own being. This is
the characteristic of the integral knowledge that it unifies all in
Sachchidananda because not only is Being one in itself, but it
is one everywhere, in all its poises and in every aspect, in its
utmost appearance of multiplicity as in its utmost appearance of
oneness. The traditional knowledge while it admits this truth in
420
The Yoga of Integral Knowledge
The traditional knowledge while it admits this truth in
420
The Yoga of Integral Knowledge
theory, yet reasons practically as if the oneness were not equal
everywhere or could not be equally realised in all. It finds it in
the unmanifest Absolute, but not so much in the manifestation,
finds it purer in the Impersonal than in the Personal, complete in
the Nirguna, not so complete in the Saguna, satisfyingly present
in the silent and inactive Brahman, not so satisfyingly present in
the active. Therefore it places all these other terms of the Abso¬
lute below their opposites in the scale of ascent and urges their
final rejection as if it were indispensable to the utter realisation.
The integral knowledge makes no such division; it arrives at a
different kind of absoluteness in its vision of the unity. It finds
the same oneness in the Unmanifest and the Manifest, in the
Impersonal and the Personal, in Nirguna and Saguna, in the
infinite depths of the universal silence and the infinite largeness
of the universal action. It finds the same absolute oneness in the
Purusha and the Prakriti; in the divine Presence and the works
of the divine Power and Knowledge; in the eternal manifestness
of the one Purusha and the constant manifestation of the many
Purushas; in the inalienable unity of Sachchidananda keeping
constantly real to itself its own manifold oneness and in the
apparent divisions of mind, life and body in which oneness is
constantly, if secretly real and constantly seeks to be realised.
All unity is to it an intense, pure and infinite realisation, all
difference an abundant, rich and boundless realisation of the
same divine and eternal Being.
The complete realisation of unity is therefore the essence
of the integral knowledge and of the integral Yoga. To know
Sachchidananda one in Himself and one in all His manifestation
is the basis of knowledge; to make that vision of oneness real to
the consciousness in its status and in its action and to become
that by merging the sense of separate individuality in the sense
of unity with the Being and with all beings is its effectuation
in Yoga of knowledge; to live, think, feel, will and act in that
sense of unity is its effectuation in the individual being and the
individual life. This realisation of oneness and this practice of
oneness in difference is the whole of the Yoga.
Sachchidananda is one in Himself in whatever status or
Oneness
421
This realisation of oneness and this practice of
oneness in difference is the whole of the Yoga.
Sachchidananda is one in Himself in whatever status or
Oneness
421
whatever plane of existence. We have therefore to make that the
basis of all effectuation whether of consciousness or force or
being, whether of knowledge or will or delight. We have, as we
have seen, to live in the consciousness of the Absolute transcen¬
dent and of the Absolute manifested in all relations, impersonal
and manifest as all personalities, beyond all qualities and rich in
infinite quality, a silence out of which the eternal Word creates, a
divine calm and peace possessing itself in infinite joy and activity.
We have to find Him knowing all, sanctioning all, governing all,
containing, upholding and informing all as the Purusha and at
the same time executing all knowledge, will and formation as
Prakriti. We have to see Him as one Existence, Being gathered in
itself and Being displayed in all existences; as one Consciousness
concentrated in the unity of its existence, extended in universal
nature and many-centred in innumerable beings; one Force static
in its repose of self-gathered consciousness and dynamic in its
activity of extended consciousness; one Delight blissfully aware
of its featureless infinity and blissfully aware of all feature and
force and forms as itself; one creative knowledge and governing
Will, supramental, originative and determinative of all minds,
lives and bodies; one Mind containing all mental beings and
constituting all their mental activities; one Life active in all liv¬
ing beings and generative of their vital activities; one substance
constituting all forms and objects as the visible and sensible
mould in which mind and life manifest and act just as one pure
existence is that ether in which all Conscious-Force and Delight
exist unified and find themselves variously. For these are the
seven principles of the manifest being of Sachchidananda.
The integral Yoga of knowledge has to recognise the double
nature of this manifestation, — for there is the higher nature of
Sachchidananda in which He is found and the lower nature of
mind, life and body in which He is veiled, — and to reconcile
and unite the two in the oneness of the illumined realisation. We
have not to leave them separate so that we live a sort of double
life, spiritual within or above, mental and material in our active
and earthly living; we have to re-view and remould the lower
living in the light, force and joy of the higher reality. We have to
422
We have to
422
The Yoga of Integral Knowledge
realise Matter as a sense-created mould of Spirit, a vehicle for
all manifestation of the light, force and joy of Sachchidananda
in the highest conditions of terrestrial being and activity. We
have to see Life as a channel for the infinite Force divine and
break the barrier of a sense-created and mind-created farness and
division from it so that that divine Power may take possession
of and direct and change all our life-activities until our vitality
transfigured ceases in the end to be the limited life-force which
now supports mind and body and becomes a figure of the all¬
blissful conscious-force of Sachchidananda. We have similarly to
change our sensational and emotional mentality into a play of
the divine Love and universal Delight; and we have to surcharge
the intellect which seeks to know and will in us with the light of
the divine Knowledge-Will until it is transformed into a figure
of that higher and sublime activity.
This transformation cannot be complete or really executed
without the awakening of the truth-mind which corresponds in
the mental being to the Supermind and is capable of receiving
mentally its illuminations. By the opposition of Spirit and Mind
without the free opening of this intermediate power the two
natures, higher and lower, stand divided, and though there may
be communication and influence or the catching up of the lower
into the higher in a sort of luminous or ecstatic trance, there
cannot be a full and perfect transfiguration of the lower nature.
We may feel imperfectly by the emotional mind, we may have
a sense by the sense-mind or a conception and perception by
the intelligent mind of the Spirit present in Matter and all its
forms, the divine Delight present in all emotion and sensation,
the divine Force behind all life-activities; but the lower will still
keep its own nature and limit and divide in its action and mod¬
ify in its character the influence from above. Even when that
influence assumes its highest, widest, intensest power, it will be
irregular and disorderly in activity and perfectly realised only in
calm and stillness; we shall be subject to reactions and periods
of obscuration when it is withdrawn from us; we shall be apt
to forget it in the stress of ordinary life and its outward touches
and the siege of its dualities and to be fully possessed of it only
Oneness
423
when alone with ourselves and God or else only in moments or
periods of a heightened exaltation and ecstasy. For our mental¬
ity, a restricted instrument moving in a limited field and seizing
things by fragments and parcels, is necessarily shifting, restless
and mutable; it can find steadiness only by limiting its field of
action and fixity only by cessation and repose.
Our direct truth-perceptions on the other hand come from
that Supermind, — a Will that knows and a Knowledge that
effects, — which creates universal order out of infinity. Its awak¬
ening into action brings down, says the Veda, the unrestricted
downpour of the rain of heaven, — the full flowing of the seven
rivers from a superior sea of light and power and joy. It reveals
Sachchidananda. It reveals the Truth behind the scattered and
ill-combined suggestions of our mentality and makes each to
fall into its place in the unity of the Truth behind; thus it can
transform the half-light of our minds into a certain totality of
light. It reveals the Will behind all the devious and imperfectly
regulated strivings of our mental will and emotional wishes and
vital effort and makes each to fall into its place in the unity of
the luminous Will behind; thus it can transform the half-obscure
struggle of our life and mind into a certain totality of ordered
force. It reveals the delight for which each of our sensations and
emotions is groping and from which they fall back in movements
of partially grasped satisfaction or of dissatisfaction, pain, grief
or indifference, and makes each take its place in the unity of the
universal delight behind; thus it can transform the conflict of our
dualised emotions and sensations into a certain totality of serene,
yet profound and powerful love and delight. Moreover, revealing
the universal action, it shows the truth of being out of which
each of its movements arises and to which each progresses, the
force of effectuation which each carries with it and the delight
of being for which and from which each is born, and it relates
all to the universal being, consciousness, force and delight of
Sachchidananda. Thus it harmonises for us all the oppositions,
divisions, contrarieties of existence and shows us in them the
One and the Infinite. Uplifted into this supramental light, pain
and pleasure and indifference begin to be converted into joy of
424
The Yoga of Integral Knowledge
Uplifted into this supramental light, pain
and pleasure and indifference begin to be converted into joy of
424
The Yoga of Integral Knowledge
the one self-existent Delight; strength and weakness, success and
failure turn into powers of the one self-effective Force and Will;
truth and error, knowledge and ignorance change into light of
the one infinite self-awareness and universal knowledge; increase
of being and diminution of being, limitation and the overcoming
of limitation are transfigured into waves of the one self-realising
conscious existence. All our life as well as all our essential being
is transformed into the possession of Sachchidananda.
By way of this integral knowledge we arrive at the unity
of the aims set before themselves by the three paths of knowl¬
edge, works and devotion. Knowledge aims at the realisation
of true self-existence; works are directed to the realisation of
the divine Conscious-Will which secretly governs all works;
devotion yearns for the realisation of the Bliss which enjoys
as the Lover all beings and all existences, — Sat, Chit-Tapas
and Ananda. Each therefore aims at possessing Sachchidananda
through one or other aspect of his triune divine nature. By
Knowledge we arrive always at our true, eternal, immutable
being, the self-existent which every “I” in the universe obscurely
represents, and we abrogate difference in the great realisation.
So Aham, I am He, while we arrive also at our identity with all
other beings.
But at the same time the integral knowledge gives us the
awareness of that infinite existence as the conscious-force which
creates and governs the worlds and manifests itself in their
works; it reveals the Self-existent in his universal conscious-
will as the Lord, the Ishwara. It enables us to unite our will with
His, to realise His will in the energies of all existences and to
perceive the fulfilment of these energies of others as part of our
own universal self-fulfilment. Thus it removes the reality of strife
and division and opposition and leaves only their appearances.
By that knowledge therefore we arrive at the possibility of a
divine action, a working which is personal to our nature, but
impersonal to our being, since it proceeds from That which
is beyond our ego and acts only by its universal sanction. We
proceed in our works with equality, without bondage to works
and their results, in unison with the Highest, in unison with
Oneness
425
We
proceed in our works with equality, without bondage to works
and their results, in unison with the Highest, in unison with
Oneness
425
the universal, free from separate responsibility for our acts and
therefore unaffected by their reactions. This which we have seen
to be the fulfilment of the path of Works becomes thus an annexe
and result of the path of Knowledge.
The integral knowledge again reveals to us the Self-existent
as the All-blissful who, as Sachchidananda manifesting the
world, manifesting all beings, accepts their adoration, even
as He accepts their works of aspiration and their seekings of
knowledge, leans down to them and drawing them to Himself
takes all into the joy of His divine being. Knowing Him as our
divine Self, we become one with Him, as the lover and beloved
become one, in the ecstasy of that embrace. Knowing Him too in
all beings, perceiving the glory and beauty and joy of the Beloved
everywhere, we transform our souls into a passion of universal
delight and a wideness and joy of universal love. All this which,
as we shall find, is the summit of the path of Devotion, becomes
also an annexe and result of the path of Knowledge.
Thus by the integral knowledge we unify all things in
the One. We take up all the chords of the universal music,
strains sweet or discordant, luminous in their suggestion or
obscure, powerful or faint, heard or suppressed, and find
them all changed and reconciled in the indivisible harmony
of Sachchidananda. The Knowledge brings also the Power and
the Joy. “How shall he be deluded, whence shall he have sorrow
who sees everywhere the Oneness?”
Chapter XVII
The Soul and Nature
The Knowledge brings also the Power and
the Joy. “How shall he be deluded, whence shall he have sorrow
who sees everywhere the Oneness?”
Chapter XVII
The Soul and Nature
This is the result of the integral knowledge taken in its
mass; its work is to gather up the different strands of
our being into the universal oneness. If we are to possess
perfectly the world in our new divinised consciousness as the
Divine himself possesses it, we have to know also each thing in
its absoluteness, first by itself, secondly in its union with all that
completes it; for so has the Divine imaged out and seen its being
in the world. To see things as parts, as incomplete elements is
a lower analytic knowledge. The Absolute is everywhere; it has
to be seen and found everywhere. Every finite is an infinite and
has to be known and sensed in its intrinsic infiniteness as well
as in its surface finite appearance. But so to know the world,
so to perceive and experience it, it is not enough to have an
intellectual idea or imagination that so it is; a certain divine
vision, divine sense, divine ecstasy is needed, an experience of
union of ourselves with the objects of our consciousness. In that
experience not only the Beyond but all here, not only the totality,
the All in its mass, but each thing in the All becomes to us our
self, God, the Absolute and Infinite, Sachchidananda. This is the
secret of complete delight in God’s world, complete satisfaction
of the mind and heart and will, complete liberation of the con¬
sciousness. It is the supreme experience at which art and poetry
and all the various efforts of subjective and objective knowledge
and all desire and effort to possess and enjoy objects are trying
more or less obscurely to arrive; their attempt to seize the forms
and properties and qualities of things is only a first movement
which cannot give the deepest satisfaction unless by seizing them
perfectly and absolutely they get the sense of the infinite reality
of which these are the outer symbols. To the rational mind and
the ordinary sense-experience this may well seem only a poetic
fancy or a mystic hallucination; but the absolute satisfaction
The Soul and Nature
427
and sense of illumination which it gives and alone can give is
really a proof of its greater validity; we get by that a ray from
the higher consciousness and the diviner sense into which our
subjective being is intended eventually, if we will only allow it,
to be transfigured.
We have seen that this applies to the highest principles of
the Divine Being. Ordinarily, the discriminating mind tells us
that only what is beyond all manifestation is absolute, only the
formless Spirit is infinite, only the timeless, spaceless, immutable,
immobile Self in its repose is absolutely real; and if we follow
and are governed in our endeavour by this conception, that
is the subjective experience at which we shall arrive, all else
seeming to us false or only relatively true. But if we start from
the larger conception, a completer truth and a wider experience
open to us. We perceive that the immutability of the timeless,
spaceless existence is an absolute and an infinite, but that also
the conscious-force and the active delight of the divine Being
in its all-blissful possession of the outpouring of its powers,
qualities, self-creations is an absolute and an infinite, — and
indeed the same absolute and infinite, so much the same that
we can enjoy simultaneously, equally the divine timeless calm
and peace and the divine time-possessing joy of activity, freely,
infinitely, without bondage or the lapse into unrest and suffering.
So too we can have the same experience of all the principles of
this activity which in the Immutable are self-contained and in a
sense drawn in and concealed, in the cosmic are expressed and
realise their infinite quality and capacity.
The first of these principles in importance is the duality —
which resolves itself into a unity — of Purusha and Prakriti of
which we have had occasion to speak in the Yoga of Works,
but which is of equal importance for the Yoga of Knowledge.
This division was made most clearly by the old Indian philoso¬
phies; but it bases itself upon the eternal fact of practical duality
in unity upon which the world-manifestation is founded. It is
given different names according to our view of the universe.
The Vedantins spoke of the Self and Maya, meaning according
to their predilections by the Self the Immutable and by Maya
428
The Yoga of Integral Knowledge
It is
given different names according to our view of the universe.
The Vedantins spoke of the Self and Maya, meaning according
to their predilections by the Self the Immutable and by Maya
428
The Yoga of Integral Knowledge
the power the Self has of imposing on itself the cosmic illusion,
or by the Self the Divine Being and by Maya the nature of
conscious-being and the conscious-force by which the Divine
embodies himself in soul-forms and forms of things. Others
spoke of Ishwara and Shakti, the Lord and His force, His cosmic
power. The analytic philosophy of the Sankhyas affirmed their
eternal duality without any possibility of oneness, accepting only
relations of union and separation by which the cosmic action
of Prakriti begins, proceeds or ceases for the Purusha; for the
Purusha is an inactive conscious existence, — it is the Soul the
same in itself and immutable forever, — Prakriti the active force
of Nature which by its motion creates and maintains and by
its sinking into rest dissolves the phenomenon of the cosmos.
Leaving aside these philosophical distinctions, we come to the
original psychological experience from which all really take their
start, that there are two elements in the existence of living beings,
of human beings at least if not of all cosmos, — a dual being.
Nature and the soul.
This duality is self-evident. Without any philosophy at all,
by the mere force of experience it is what we can all perceive,
although we may not take the trouble to define. Even the most
thoroughgoing materialism which denies the soul or resolves it
into a more or less illusory result of natural phenomena act¬
ing upon some ill-explained phenomenon of the physical brain
which we call consciousness or the mind, but which is really no
more than a sort of complexity of nervous spasms, cannot get
rid of the practical fact of this duality. It does not matter at all
how it came about; the fact is not only there, it determines our
whole existence, it is the one fact which is really important to us
as human beings with a will and an intelligence and a subjective
existence which makes all our happiness and our suffering. The
whole problem of life resolves itself into this one question, —
“What are we to do with this soul and nature set face to face
with each other, — we who have as one side of our existence this
Nature, this personal and cosmic activity, which tries to impress
itself upon the soul, to possess, control, determine it, and as the
other side this soul which feels that in some mysterious way it has
The Soul and Nature
429
a freedom, a control over itself, a responsibility for what it is and
does, and tries therefore to turn upon Nature, its own and the
world’s, and to control, possess, enjoy, or even, it may be, reject
and escape from her?” In order to answer that question we have
to know, — to know what the soul can do, to know what it can
do with itself, to know too what it can do with Nature and the
world. The whole of human philosophy, religion, science is really
nothing but an attempt to get at the right data upon which it will
be possible to answer the question and solve, as satisfactorily as
our knowledge will allow, the problem of our existence.
The hope of a complete escape from our present strife with
and subjection to our lower and troubled nature and existence
arises when we perceive what religion and philosophy affirm,
but modern thought has tried to deny, that there are two poises
of our soul-existence, a lower, troubled and subjected, a higher,
supreme, untroubled and sovereign, one vibrant in Mind, the
other tranquil in Spirit. The hope not only of an escape, but
of a completely satisfying and victorious solution comes when
we perceive what some religions and philosophies affirm, but
others seem to deny, that there is also in the dual unity of soul
and nature a lower, an ordinary human status and a higher, a
divine; for it is in the divine alone that the conditions of the
duality stand reversed; there the soul becomes that which now
it only struggles and aspires to be, master of its nature, free and
by union with the Divine possessor also of the world-nature.
According to our idea of these possibilities will be the solution
we shall attempt to realise.
Involved in mind, possessed by the ordinary phenomenon
of mental thought, sensation, emotion, reception of the vital and
physical impacts of the world and mechanical reaction to them,
the soul is subject to Nature. Even its will and intelligence are
determined by its mental nature, determined even more largely
by the mental nature of its environment which acts upon, sub¬
tly as well as overtly, and overcomes the individual mentality.
Thus its attempt to regulate, to control, to determine its own
experience and action is pursued by an element of illusion, since
when it thinks it is acting, it is really Nature that is acting and
430
The Yoga of Integral Knowledge
Thus its attempt to regulate, to control, to determine its own
experience and action is pursued by an element of illusion, since
when it thinks it is acting, it is really Nature that is acting and
430
The Yoga of Integral Knowledge
determining all it thinks, wills and does. If there were not this
constant knowledge in it that it is, that it exists in itself, is not
the body or life but something other which at least receives and
accepts the cosmic experience if it does not determine it, it would
be compelled in the end to suppose that Nature is all and the soul
an illusion. This is the conclusion modern Materialism affirms
and to that nihilistic Buddhism arrived; the Sankhyas, perceiving
the dilemma, solved it by saying that the soul in fact only mirrors
Nature’s determinations and itself determines nothing, is not the
lord, but can by refusing to mirror them fall back into eternal
immobility and peace. There are too the other solutions which
arrive at the same practical conclusion, but from the other end,
the spiritual; for they affirm either that Nature is an illusion or
that both the soul and Nature are impermanent and they point
us to a state beyond in which their duality has no existence;
either they cease by the extinction of both in something perma¬
nent and ineffable or their discordances end by the exclusion
of the active principle altogether. Though they do not satisfy
humanity’s larger hope and deep-seated impulse and aspiration,
these are valid solutions so far as they go; for they arrive at an
Absolute in itself or at the separate absolute of the soul, even if
they reject the many rapturous infinities of the Absolute which
the true possession of Nature by the soul in its divine existence
offers to the eternal seeker in man.
Uplifted into the Spirit the soul is no longer subject to
Nature; it is above this mental activity. It may be above it in
detachment and aloofness, uddsma, seated above and indiffer¬
ent, or attracted by and lost in the absorbing peace or bliss of its
undifferentiated, its concentrated spiritual experience of itself;
we must then transcend by a complete renunciation of Nature
and cosmic existence, not conquer by a divine and sovereign
possession. But the Spirit, the Divine is not only above Nature;
it is master of Nature and cosmos; the soul rising into its spiritual
poise must at least be capable of the same mastery by its unity
with the Divine. It must be capable of controlling its own nature
not only in calm or by forcing it to repose, but with a sovereign
control of its play and activity.
The Soul and Nature
431
To arrive by an intense spirituality at the absolute of the soul
is our possibility on one side of our dual existence; to enjoy the
absolute of Nature and of everything in Nature is our possibility
on the other side of this eternal duality. To unify these highest
aspirations in a divine possession of God and ourselves and the
world, should be our happy completeness. In the lower poise this
is not possible because the soul acts through the mind and the
mind can only act individually and fragmentarily in a contented
obedience or a struggling subjection to that universal Nature
through which the divine knowledge and the divine Will are
worked out in the cosmos. But the Spirit is in possession of
knowledge and will, of which it is the source and cause and not
a subject; therefore in proportion as the soul assumes its divine
or spiritual being, it assumes also control of the movements of
its nature. It becomes, in the ancient language, Swarat, free and
a self-ruler over the kingdom of its own life and being. But also
it increases in control over its environment, its world.
It becomes, in the ancient language, Swarat, free and
a self-ruler over the kingdom of its own life and being. But also
it increases in control over its environment, its world.
This it can only do entirely by universalising itself; for it is
the divine and universal will that it must express in its action
upon the world. It must first extend its consciousness and see
the universe in itself instead of being like the mind limited by
the physical, vital, sensational, emotional, intellectual outlook of
the little divided personality. It must accept the world-truths, the
world-energies, the world-tendencies, the world-purposes as its
own instead of clinging to its own intellectual ideas, desires and
endeavours, preferences, objects, intentions, impulses; these, so
far as they remain, must be harmonised with the universal. It
must then submit its knowledge and will at their very source to
the divine Knowledge and the divine Will and so arrive through
submission at immergence, losing its personal light in the divine
Light and its personal initiative in the divine initiative. To be
first in tune with the Infinite, in harmony with the Divine, and
then to be unified with the Infinite, taken into the Divine is its
condition of perfect strength and mastery, and this is precisely
the very nature of the spiritual life and the spiritual existence.
The distinction made in the Gita between the Purusha and
the Prakriti gives us the clue to the various attitudes which the
432
The Yoga of Integral Knowledge
The distinction made in the Gita between the Purusha and
the Prakriti gives us the clue to the various attitudes which the
432
The Yoga of Integral Knowledge
soul can adopt towards Nature in its movement towards per¬
fect freedom and rule. The Purusha is, says the Gita, witness,
upholder, source of the sanction, knower, lord, enjoyer; Prakrit!
executes, it is the active principle and must have an operation
corresponding to the attitude of the Purusha. The soul may
assume, if it wishes, the poise of the pure witness, sdksi; it may
look on at the action of Nature as a thing from which it stands
apart; it watches, but does not itself participate. We have seen
the importance of this quietistic capacity; it is the basis of the
movement of withdrawal by which we can say of everything, —
body, life, mental action, thought, sensation, emotion, — “This
is Prakrit! working in the life, mind and body, it is not myself, it
is not even mine,” and thus come to the soul’s separation from
these things and to their quiescence. This may, therefore, be an
attitude of renunciation or at least of non-participation, tamasic,
with a resigned and inert endurance of the natural action so long
as it lasts, rajasic, with a disgust, aversion and recoil from it,
sattwic, with a luminous intelligence of the soul’s separateness
and the peace and joy of aloofness and repose; but also it may
be attended by an equal and impersonal delight as of a spectator
at a show, joyous but unattached and ready to rise up at any
moment and as joyfully depart. The attitude of the Witness at
its highest is the absolute of unattachment and freedom from
affection by the phenomena of the cosmic existence.
As the pure Witness, the soul refuses the function of up¬
holder or sustain er of Nature. The upholder, bhartd, is another,
God or Force or Maya, but not the soul, which only admits
the reflection of the natural action upon its watching conscious¬
ness, but not any responsibility for maintaining or continuing
it. It does not say “All this is in me and maintained by me,
an activity of my being,” but at the most “This is imposed on
me, but really external to myself.” Unless there is a clear and
real duality in existence, this cannot be the whole truth of the
matter; the soul is the upholder also, it supports in its being
the energy which unrolls the spectacle of the cosmos and which
conducts its energies. When the Purusha accepts this upholding,
it may do it still passively and without attachment, feeling that
The Soul and Nature
433
When the Purusha accepts this upholding,
it may do it still passively and without attachment, feeling that
The Soul and Nature
433
it contributes the energy, but not that it controls and determines
it. The control is another, God or Force or the very nature of
Maya; the soul only upholds indifferently so long as it must, so
long perhaps as the force of its past sanction and interest in the
energy continues and refuses to be exhausted. But if the attitude
of the upholder is fully accepted, an important step forward has
been taken towards identification with the active Brahman and
his joy of cosmic being. For the Purusha has become the active
giver of the sanction.
In the attitude of the Witness there is also a kind of sanction,
but it is passive, inert and has no kind of absoluteness about it;
but if he consents entirely to uphold, the sanction has become
active, even though the soul may do no more than consent to
reflect, support and thereby maintain in action all the energies
of Prakriti. It may refuse to determine, to select, believing that
it is God or Force itself or some Knowledge-Will that selects
and determines, and the soul only a witness and upholder and
thereby giver of the sanction, anumantd, but not the possessor
and the director of the knowledge and the will, jhdtd Isvarah.
Then there is a general sanction in the form of an active up¬
holding of whatever is determined by God or universal Will, but
there is not an active determination. But if the soul habitually
selects and rejects in what is offered to it, it determines; the
relatively passive has become an entirely active sanction and is
on the way to be an active control.
This it becomes when the soul accepts its complete function
as the knower, lord and enjoyer of Nature. As the knower the
soul possesses the knowledge of the force that acts and deter¬
mines, it sees the values of being which are realising themselves
in cosmos, it is in the secret of Fate. For the force that acts
is itself determined by the knowledge which is its origin and
the source and standardiser of its valuations and effectuations
of values. Therefore in proportion as the soul becomes again
the knower, it gets the capacity of becoming also the controller
of the action whether by spiritual force alone or by that force
figuring itself in mental and physical activities. There may be
in our soul life a perfect spiritual knowledge and understanding
434
The Yoga of Integral Knowledge
There may be
in our soul life a perfect spiritual knowledge and understanding
434
The Yoga of Integral Knowledge
not only of all our internal activities but of all the unrolling of
things, events, human, animal, natural activities around us, the
world-vision of the Rishi. This may not be attended by an active
putting forth of power upon the world, though that is seldom
entirely absent; for the Rishi is not uninterested in the world
or in his fellow-creatures, but one with them by sympathy or
by accepting all creatures as his own self in many minds and
bodies. The old forest-dwelling anchorites even are described
continually as busily engaged in doing good to all creatures. This
can only be done in the spiritual realisation, not by an effort, for
effort is a diminution of freedom, but by a spiritual influence or
by a spiritual mastery over the minds of men and the workings
of Nature, which reflects the divine effective immanence and the
divine effective mastery.
Nor can it do this without becoming the active enjoyer,
bhoktd. In the lower being the enjoyment is of a twofold kind,
positive and negative, which in the electricity of sensation trans¬
lates itself into joy and suffering; but in the higher it is an actively
equal enjoyment of the divine delight in self-manifestation. That
enjoyment again may be limited to a silent spiritual delight or
an integral divine joy possessing all things around us and all
activities of all parts of our being.
There is no loss of freedom, no descent into an ignorant
attachment. The man free in his soul is aware that the Divine is
the lord of the action of Nature, that Maya is His Knowledge-
Will determining and effecting all, that Force is the Will side of
this double divine Power in which knowledge is always present
and effectual. He is aware of himself also, even individually, as a
centre of the divine existence, — a portion of the Lord, the Gita
expresses it, — controlling so far the action of Nature which he
views, upholds, sanctions, enjoys, knows and by the determina¬
tive power of knowledge controls. And when he universalises
himself, his knowledge still reflects only the divine knowledge,
his will effectuates only the divine will, he enjoys only the
divine delight and not an ignorant personal satisfaction. Thus
the Purusha preserves its freedom in its possession, renunciation
of limited personality even in its representative enjoyment and
The Soul and Nature
435
delight of cosmic being. It has taken up fully in the higher poise
the true relations of the soul and Nature.
It has taken up fully in the higher poise
the true relations of the soul and Nature.
Purusha and Prakrit! in their union and duality arise from
the being of Sachchidananda. Self-conscious existence is the es¬
sential nature of the Being; that is Sat or Purusha. The Power of
self-aware existence, whether drawn into itself or acting in the
works of its consciousness and force, its knowledge and its will.
Chit and Tapas, Chit and its Shakti, — that is Prakrit!. Delight of
being, Ananda, is the eternal truth of the union of this conscious
being and its conscious force whether absorbed in itself or else
deployed in the inseparable duality of its two aspects. It unrolls
the worlds as Prakrit! and views them as Purusha; acts in them
and upholds the action; executes works and gives the sanction
without which the force of Nature cannot act; executes and
controls the knowledge and the will and knows and controls the
determinations of the knowledge-force and will-force; ministers
to the enjoyment and enjoys; — all is the Soul possessor, ob¬
server, knower, lord of Nature and Nature expressing the being,
executing the will, satisfying the self-knowledge, ministering to
the delight of being of the soul. There we have, founded on the
very nature of being, the supreme and the universal relation of
Prakrit! with Purusha. The relation in its imperfect, perverted or
reverse terms is the world as we see it; but the perfect relation
brings the absolute joy of the soul in itself and, based upon
that, the absolute joy of the soul in Nature which is the divine
fulfilment of world-existence.
Chapter XVIII
The Soul and Its Liberation
Chapter XVIII
The Soul and Its Liberation
WE HAVE now to pause and consider to what this
acceptance of the relations of Purusha and Prakriti
commits us; for it means that the Yoga which we are
pursuing has for end none of the ordinary aims of humanity. It
neither accepts our earthly existence as it is, nor can be satisfied
with some kind of moral perfection or religious ecstasy, with a
heaven beyond or with some dissolution of our being by which
we get satisfactorily done with the trouble of existence. Our aim
becomes quite other; it is to live in the Divine, the Infinite, in God
and not in any mere egoism and temporality, but at the same
time not apart from Nature, from our fellow-beings, from earth
and the mundane existence, any more than the Divine lives aloof
from us and the world. He exists also in relation to the world and
Nature and all these beings, but with an absolute and inalienable
power, freedom and self-knowledge. Our liberation and perfec¬
tion is to transcend ignorance, bondage and weakness and live in
Him in relation to the world and Nature with the divine power,
freedom and self-knowledge. Eor the highest relation of the Soul
to existence is the Purusha’s possession of Prakriti, when he is no
longer ignorant and subject to his nature, but knows, transcends,
enjoys and controls his manifested being and determines largely
and freely what shall be his self-expression.
A oneness finding itself out in the variations of its own du¬
ality is the whole play of the soul with Nature in its cosmic birth
and becoming. One Sachchidananda everywhere, self-existent,
illimitable, a unity indestructible by the utmost infinity of its
own variations, is the original truth of being for which our
knowledge seeks and to that our subjective existence eventually
arrives. Prom that all other truths arise, upon that they are based,
by that they are at every moment made possible and in that they
in the end can know themselves and each other, are reconciled.
The Soul and Its Liberation
437
Prom that all other truths arise, upon that they are based,
by that they are at every moment made possible and in that they
in the end can know themselves and each other, are reconciled.
The Soul and Its Liberation
437
harmonised and justified. All relations in the world, even to its
greatest and most shocking apparent discords, are relations of
something eternal to itself in its own universal existence; they are
not anywhere or at any time collisions of disconnected beings
who meet fortuitously or by some mechanical necessity of cosmic
existence. Therefore to get back to this eternal fact of oneness
is our essential act of self-knowledge; to live in it must be the
effective principle of our inner possession of our being and of
our right and ideal relations with the world. That is why we
have had to insist first and foremost on oneness as the aim and
in a way the whole aim of our Yoga of knowledge.
But this unity works itself out everywhere and on every plane
by an executive or practical truth of duality. The Eternal is the
one infinite conscious Existence, Purusha, and not something
inconscient and mechanical; it exists eternally in its delight of
the force of its own conscious being founded in an equilibrium
of unity; but it exists also in the no less eternal delight of its force
of conscious being at play with various creative self-experience
in the universe. Just as we ourselves are or can become aware of
being always something timeless, nameless, perpetual which we
call our self and which constitutes the unity of all that we are,
and yet simultaneously we have the various experience of what
we do, think, will, create, become, such too is the self-awareness
of this Purusha in the world. Only we, being at present limited
and ego-bound mental individuals, have usually this experience
in the ignorance and do not live in the self, but only look back at
it or draw back to it from time to time, while the Eternal has it in
His infinite self-knowledge, is eternally this self and looks from
the fullness of self-being at all this self-experience. He does not
like us, bound prisoners of the mind, conceive of His being as
either a sort of indefinite result and sum or else a high contradic¬
tion of self-experience. The old philosophical quarrel between
Being and Becoming is not possible to the eternal self-knowledge.
The old philosophical quarrel between
Being and Becoming is not possible to the eternal self-knowledge.
An active force of conscious-being which realises itself in
its powers of self-experience, its powers of knowledge, will,
self-delight, self-formulation with all their marvellous varia¬
tions, inversions, conservations and conversions of energy, even
438
The Yoga of Integral Knowledge
perversions, is what we call Prakrit! or Nature, in ourselves as
in the cosmos. But behind this force of variation is the eternal
equilibrium of the same force in an equal unity which supports
impartially, governs even as it has originated the variations and
directs them to whatever aim of its self-delight the Being, the
Purusha, has conceived in its consciousness and determined by
its will or power of consciousness. That is the divine Nature
into unity with which we have to get back by our Yoga of self-
knowledge. We have to become the Purusha, Sachchidananda,
delighting in a divine individual possession of its Prakrit! and no
longer mental beings subject to our egoistic nature. For that is
the real man, the supreme and integral self of the individual, and
the ego is only a lower and partial manifestation of ourselves
through which a certain limited and preparatory experience be¬
comes possible and is for a time indulged. But this indulgence of
the lower being is not our whole possibility; it is not the sole or
crowning experience for which we exist as human beings even
in this material world.
But this indulgence of
the lower being is not our whole possibility; it is not the sole or
crowning experience for which we exist as human beings even
in this material world.
This individual being of ours is that by which ignorance
is possible to self-conscious mind, but it is also that by which
liberation into the spiritual being is possible and the enjoyment
of divine immortality. It is not the Eternal in His transcendence
or in His cosmic being who arrives at this immortality; it is the
individual who rises into self-knowledge, in him it is possessed
and by him it is made effective. All life, spiritual, mental or
material, is the play of the soul with the possibilities of its
nature; for without this play there can be no self-expression
and no relative self-experience. Even, then, in our realisation of
all as our larger self and in our oneness with God and other
beings, this play can and must persist, unless we desire to cease
from all self-expression and all but a tranced and absorbed self¬
experience. But then it is in the individual being that this trance
or this liberated play is realised; the trance is this mental being’s
immersion in the sole experience of unity, the liberated play is
the taking up of his mind into the spiritual being for the free
realisation and delight of oneness. For the nature of the divine
existence is to possess always its unity, but to possess it also in
The Soul and Its Liberation
439
an infinite experience, from many standpoints, on many planes,
through many conscious powers or selves of itself, individualities
— in our limited intellectual language — of the one conscious
being. Each one of us is one of these individualities. To stand
away from God in limited ego, limited mind is to stand away
from ourselves, to be unpossessed of our true individuality, to
be the apparent and not the real individual; it is our power of
ignorance. To be taken up into the divine Being and be aware
of our spiritual, infinite and universal consciousness as that in
which we now live, is to possess our supreme and integral self,
our true individuality; it is our power of self-knowledge.
To be taken up into the divine Being and be aware
of our spiritual, infinite and universal consciousness as that in
which we now live, is to possess our supreme and integral self,
our true individuality; it is our power of self-knowledge.
By knowing the eternal unity of these three powers of the
eternal manifestation, God, Nature and the individual self, and
their intimate necessity to each other, we come to understand
existence itself and all that in the appearances of the world
now puzzles our ignorance. Our self-knowledge abolishes none
of these things, it abolishes only our ignorance and those cir¬
cumstances proper to the ignorance which made us bound and
subject to the egoistic determinations of our nature. When we
get back to our true being, the ego falls away from us; its place
is taken by our supreme and integral self, the true individuality.
As this supreme self it makes itself one with all beings and sees
all world and Nature in its own infinity. What we mean by
this is simply that our sense of separate existence disappears
into a consciousness of illimitable, undivided, infinite being in
which we no longer feel bound to the name and form and the
particular mental and physical determinations of our present
birth and becoming and are no longer separate from anything
or anyone in the universe. This was what the ancient thinkers
called the Non-birth or the destruction of birth or Nirvana. At
the same time we continue to live and act through our individual
birth and becoming, but with a different knowledge and quite
another kind of experience; the world also continues, but we
see it in our own being and not as something external to it
and other than ourselves. To be able to live permanently in this
new consciousness of our real, our integral being is to attain
liberation and enjoy immortality.
440
The Yoga of Integral Knowledge
To be able to live permanently in this
new consciousness of our real, our integral being is to attain
liberation and enjoy immortality.
440
The Yoga of Integral Knowledge
Here there comes in the complication of the idea that immor¬
tality is only possible after death in other worlds, upon higher
planes of existence or that liberation must destroy all possibility
of mental or bodily living and annihilate the individual exis¬
tence for ever in an impersonal infinity. These ideas derive their
strength from a certain justification in experience and a sort of
necessity or upward attraction felt by the soul when it shakes
off the compelling ties of mind and matter. It is felt that these
ties are inseparable from all earthly living or from all mental
existence. Death is the king of the material world, for life seems
to exist here only by submission to death, by a constant dying;
immortality has to be conquered here with difficulty and seems
to be in its nature a rejection of all death and therefore of all
birth into the material world. The field of immortality must be in
some immaterial plane, in some heavens where either the body
does not exist or else is different and only a form of the soul or
a secondary circumstance. On the other hand, it is felt by those
who would go beyond immortality even, that all planes and
heavens are circumstances of the finite existence and the infinite
self is void of all these things. They are dominated by a necessity
to disappear into the impersonal and infinite and an inability to
equate in any way the bliss of impersonal being with the soul’s
delight in its becoming. Philosophies have been invented which
justify to the intellect this need of immersion and disappearance;
but what is really important and decisive is the call of the Be¬
yond, the need of the soul, its delight — in this case — in a sort
of impersonal existence or non-existence. For what decides is the
determining delight of the Purusha, the relation which it wills
to establish with its Prakriti, the experience at which it arrives
as the result of the line it has followed in the development of its
individual self-experience among all the various possibilities of
its nature. Our intellectual justifications are only the account of
that experience which we give to the reason and the devices by
which we help the mind to assent to the direction in which the
soul is moving.
The cause of our world-existence is not, as our present ex¬
perience induces us to believe, the ego; for the ego is only a
The cause of our world-existence is not, as our present ex¬
perience induces us to believe, the ego; for the ego is only a
The Soul and Its Liberation
441
result and a circumstance of our mode of world-existence. It is
a relation which the many-souled Purusha has set up between
individualised minds and bodies, a relation of self-defence and
mutual exclusion and aggression in order to have among all the
dependences of things in the world upon each other a possibility
of independent mental and physical experience. But there can
be no absolute independence upon these planes; impersonality
which rejects all mental and physical becoming is therefore the
only possible culmination of this exclusive movement: so only
can an absolutely independent self-experience be achieved. The
soul then seems to exist absolutely, independently in itself; it is
free in the sense of the Indian word, svadhina, dependent only
on itself, not dependent upon God and other beings. Therefore
in this experience God, personal self and other beings are all
denied, cast away as distinctions of the ignorance. It is the ego
recognising its own insufficiency and abolishing both itself and
its contraries that its own essential instinct of independent self¬
experience may be accomplished; for it finds that its effort to
achieve it by relations with God and others is afflicted through¬
out with a sentence of illusion, vanity and nullity. It ceases to
admit them because by admitting them it becomes dependent
on them; it ceases to admit its own persistence, because the
persistence of ego means the admission of that which it tries to
exclude as not-self, of the cosmos and other beings. The self-
annihilation of the Buddhist is in its nature absolute exclusion
of all that the mental being perceives; the self-immersion of the
Adwaitin in his absolute being is the self-same aim differently
conceived: both are a supreme self-assertion of the soul of its
exclusive independence of Prakriti.
The experience which we first arrive at by the sort of short¬
cut to liberation which we have described as the movement of
withdrawal, assists this tendency. For it is a breaking of the ego
and a rejection of the habits of the mentality we now possess; for
that is subject to matter and the physical senses and conceives of
things only as forms, objects, external phenomena and as names
which we attach to those forms. We are not aware directly of
the subjective life of other beings except by analogy from our
442
The Yoga of Integral Knowledge
We are not aware directly of
the subjective life of other beings except by analogy from our
442
The Yoga of Integral Knowledge
own and by inference or derivative perception based upon their
external signs of speech, action, etc., which our minds translate
into the terms of our own subjectivity. When we break out from
ego and physical mind into the infinity of the spirit, we still see
the world and others as the mind has accustomed us to see them,
as names and forms; only in our new experience of the direct and
superior reality of spirit, they lose that direct objective reality
and that indirect subjective reality of their own which they had to
the mind. They seem to be quite the opposite of the truer reality
we now experience; our mentality, stilled and indifferent, no
longer strives to know and make real to itself those intermediate
terms which exist in them as in us and the knowledge of which
has for its utility to bridge over the gulf between the spiritual self
and the objective phenomena of the world. We are satisfied with
the blissful infinite impersonality of a pure spiritual existence;
nothing else and nobody else any longer matters to us. What
the physical senses show to us and what the mind perceives
and conceives about them and so imperfectly and transiently
delights in, seems now unreal and worthless; we are not and do
not care to be in possession of the intermediate truths of being
through which these things are enjoyed by the One and possess
for Him that value of His being and delight which makes, as
we might say, cosmic existence a thing beautiful to Him and
worth manifesting. We can no longer share in God’s delight
in the world; on the contrary it looks to us as if the Eternal
had degraded itself by admitting into the purity of its being the
gross nature of Matter or had falsified the truth of its being by
imagining vain names and unreal forms. Or else if we perceive
at all that delight, it is with a far-off detachment which prevents
us from participating in it with any sense of intimate possession,
or it is with an attraction to the superior delight of an absorbed
and exclusive self-experience which does not allow us to stay
any longer in these lower terms than we are compelled to stay
by the continuance of our physical life and body.
But if either in the course of our Yoga or as the result of
a free return of our realised Self upon the world and a free
repossession of its Prakriti by the Purusha in us, we become
The Soul and Its Liberation
443
But if either in the course of our Yoga or as the result of
a free return of our realised Self upon the world and a free
repossession of its Prakriti by the Purusha in us, we become
The Soul and Its Liberation
443
conscious not only of the bodies and outward self-expression
of others, but intimately of their inner being, their minds, their
souls and that in them of which their own surface minds are not
aware, then we see the real Being in them also and we see them
as selves of our Self and not as mere names and forms. They
become to us realities of the Eternal. Our minds are no longer
subject to the delusion of trivial unworthiness or the illusion of
unreality. The material life loses indeed for us its old absorbing
value, but finds the greater value which it has for the divine
Purusha; regarded no longer as the sole term of our becoming,
but as merely having a subordinate value in relation to the higher
terms of mind and spirit, it increases by that diminution instead
of losing in value. We see that our material being, life, nature
are only one poise of the Purusha in relation to its Prakriti and
that their true purpose and importance can only be appreciated
when they are seen not as a thing in itself, but as dependent on
higher poises by which they are supported; from those superior
relations they derive their meaning and, therefore, by conscious
union with them they can fulfil all their valid tendencies and
aims. Life then becomes justified to us and no longer stultified
by the possession of liberated self-knowledge.
Life then becomes justified to us and no longer stultified
by the possession of liberated self-knowledge.
This larger integral knowledge and freedom liberates in the
end and fulfils our whole existence. When we possess it, we
see why our existence moves between these three terms of God,
ourselves and the world; we no longer see them or any of them
in opposition to each other, inconsistent, incompatible, nor do
we on the other hand regard them as terms of our ignorance
which all disappear at last into a pure impersonal unity. We per¬
ceive their necessity as terms rather of our self-fulfilment which
preserve their value after liberation or rather find then only their
real value. We have no longer the experience of our existence as
exclusive of the other existences which make up by our relations
with them our experience of the world; in this new consciousness
they are all contained in ourselves and we in them. They and we
are no longer so many mutually exclusive egos each seeking its
own independent fulfilment or self-transcendence and ultimately
aiming at nothing else; they are all the Eternal and the self in
444
The Yoga of Integral Knowledge
each secretly embraces all in itself and seeks in various ways
to make that higher truth of its unity apparent and effective
in its terrestrial being. Not mutual exclusiveness, but mutual
inclusiveness is the divine truth of our individuality, love the
higher law and not an independent self-fulfilment.
Not mutual exclusiveness, but mutual
inclusiveness is the divine truth of our individuality, love the
higher law and not an independent self-fulfilment.
The Purusha who is our real being is always independent
and master of Prakriti and at this independence we are rightly
seeking to arrive; that is the utility of the egoistic movement
and its self-transcendence, but its right fulfilment is not in mak¬
ing absolute the ego’s principle of independent existence, but
in arriving at this other highest poise of the Purusha with re¬
gard to its Prakriti. There there is transcendence of Nature, but
also possession of Nature, perfect fulfilment of our individuality,
but also perfect fulfilment of our relations with the world and
with others. Therefore an individual salvation in heavens beyond
careless of the earth is not our highest objective; the liberation
and self-fulfilment of others is as much our own concern, — we
might almost say, our divine self-interest, — as our own libera¬
tion. Otherwise our unity with others would have no effective
meaning. To conquer the lures of egoistic existence in this world
is our first victory over ourselves; to conquer the lure of indi¬
vidual happiness in heavens beyond is our second victory; to
conquer the highest lure of escape from life and a self-absorbed
bliss in the impersonal infinity is the last and greatest victory.
Then are we rid of all individual exclusiveness and possessed of
our entire spiritual freedom.
The state of the liberated soul is that of the Purusha who
is for ever free. Its consciousness is a transcendence and an
all-comprehending unity. Its self-knowledge does not get rid of
all the terms of self-knowledge, but unifies and harmonises all
things in God and in the divine nature. The intense religious
ecstasy which knows only God and ourselves and shuts out all
else, is only to it an intimate experience which prepares it for
sharing in the embrace of the divine Love and Delight around
all creatures. A heavenly bliss which unites God and ourselves
and the blest, but enables us to look with a remote indifference
on the unblest and their sufferings is not possible to the perfect
The Soul and Its Liberation
445
A heavenly bliss which unites God and ourselves
and the blest, but enables us to look with a remote indifference
on the unblest and their sufferings is not possible to the perfect
The Soul and Its Liberation
445
soul; for these also are its selves; free individually from suffering
and ignorance, it must naturally turn to draw them also towards
its freedom. On the other hand any absorption in the relations
between self and others and the world to the exclusion of God
and the Beyond is still more impossible, and therefore it cannot
be limited by the earth or even by the highest and most altruistic
relations of man with man. Its activity or its culmination is not
to efface and utterly deny itself for the sake of others, but to fulfil
itself in God-possession, freedom and divine bliss that in and by
its fulfilment others too may be fulfilled. For it is in God alone,
by the possession of the Divine only that all the discords of life
can be resolved, and therefore the raising of men towards the
Divine is in the end the one effective way of helping mankind.
All the other activities and realisations of our self-experience
have their use and power, but in the end these crowded side¬
tracks or these lonely paths must circle round to converge into
the wideness of the integral way by which the liberated soul
transcends all, embraces all and becomes the promise and the
power of the fulfilment of all in their manifested being of the
Divine.
Chapter XIX
The Planes of Our Existence
Chapter XIX
The Planes of Our Existence
IF THE Purusha in us has thus to become by union with its
highest self, the Divine Purusha, the knower, lord, free en¬
joy er of its Prakriti, it cannot be done, evidently, by dwelling
on the present plane of our being; for that is the material plane in
which the reign of Prakriti is complete; there the divine Purusha
is entirely hidden in the blinding surge of her activities, in the
gross pomp of her workings, and the individual soul emerging
from her involution of spirit in matter, subject in all its activities
to its entangling in the material and vital instruments is unable
to experience the divine freedom. What it calls its freedom and
mastery, is only the subtle subjection of mind to Prakriti which
is lighter indeed, nearer to the possibility of liberty and rule
than the gross subjection of vital and material things like the
animal, plant and metal, but is still not real freedom and mas¬
tery. Therefore we have had to speak of different planes of our
consciousness and of the spiritual planes of the mental being; for
if these did not exist, the liberation of the embodied being would
have been impossible here on earth. He would have had to wait
and at most to prepare himself for seeking it in other worlds
and in a different kind of physical or spiritual embodiment less
obstinately sealed in its shell of material experience.
In the ordinary Yoga of knowledge it is only necessary to
recognise two planes of our consciousness, the spiritual and the
materialised mental; the pure reason standing between these two
views them both, cuts through the illusions of the phenomenal
world, exceeds the materialised mental plane, sees the reality
of the spiritual; and then the will of the individual Purusha
unifying itself with this poise of knowledge rejects the lower
and draws back to the supreme plane, dwells there, loses mind
and body, sheds life from it and merges itself in the supreme
Purusha, is delivered from individual existence. It knows that
The Planes of Our Existence
447
It knows that
The Planes of Our Existence
447
this is not the whole truth of our existence, which is much more
complex; it knows there are many planes, but it disregards them
or pays little attention to them because they are not essential
to this liberation. They indeed rather hamper it, because to live
on them brings new attractive psychical experiences, psychi¬
cal enjoyments, psychical powers, a new world of phenomenal
knowledge the pursuit of which creates stumbling-blocks in the
way of its one object, immergence in Brahman, and brings a
succession of innumerable way-side snares on the road which
leads to God. But since we accept world-existence, and for us
all world-existence is Brahman and full of the presence of God,
these things can have no terrors for us; whatever dangers of
distraction there may be, we have to face and overcome them.
If the world and our own existence are so complex, we must
know and embrace their complexities in order that our self-
knowledge and our knowledge of the dealings of Purusha with
its Prakriti may be complete. If there are many planes, we have
to possess them all for the Divine, even as we seek to possess
spiritually and transform our ordinary poise of mind, life and
body.
The ancient knowledge in all countries was full of the search
after the hidden truths of our being and it created that large field
of practice and inquiry which goes in Europe by the name of
occultism, — we do not use any corresponding word in the East,
because these things do not seem to us so remote, mysterious and
abnormal as to the occidental mentality; they are nearer to us
and the veil between our normal material life and this larger life
is much thinner. In India, ^ Egypt, Chaldea, China, Greece, the
Celtic countries they have formed part of various Yogic systems
and disciplines which had once a great hold everywhere, but to
the modern mind have seemed mere superstition and mysticism,
although the facts and experiences on which they are founded
are quite as real in their own field and as much governed by
intelligible laws of their own as the facts and experiences of the
material world. It is not our intention here to plunge into this
For example, the Tantric in India.
1
448
The Yoga of Integral Knowledge
It is not our intention here to plunge into this
For example, the Tantric in India.
1
448
The Yoga of Integral Knowledge
vast and difficult field of psychical knowledge.^ But it becomes
necessary now to deal with certain broad facts and principles
which form its framework, for without them our Yoga of knowl¬
edge cannot be complete. We find that in the various systems the
facts dealt with are always the same, but there are considerable
differences of theoretic and practical arrangement, as is natural
and inevitable in dealing with a subject so large and difficult.
Certain things are here omitted, there made all-important, here
understressed, there over-emphasised; certain fields of experi¬
ence which are in one system held to be merely subordinate
provinces, are in others treated as separate kingdoms. But I shall
follow here consistently the Vedic and Vedantic arrangement of
which we find the great lines in the Upanishads, first because it
seems to me at once the simplest and most philosophical and
more especially because it was from the beginning envisaged
from the point of view of the utility of these various planes to
the supreme object of our liberation. It takes as its basis the three
principles of our ordinary being, mind, life and matter, the triune
spiritual principle of Sachchidananda and the link principle of
vijhdna, supermind, the free or spiritual intelligence, and thus
arranges all the large possible poises of our being in a tier of
seven planes, — sometimes regarded as five only, because, only
the lower five are wholly accessible to us, — through which the
developing being can rise to its perfection.
But first we must understand what we mean by planes of
consciousness, planes of existence. We mean a general settled
poise or world of relations between Purusha and Prakriti, be¬
tween the Soul and Nature. For anything that we can call world
is and can be nothing else than the working out of a general
relation which a universal existence has created or established
between itself, or let us say its eternal fact or potentiality and the
powers of its becoming. That existence in its relations with and
its experience of the becoming is what we call soul or Purusha,
^ We hope to deal with it hereafter; but our first concern in the Arya must be with
spiritual and philosophical truths; it is only when these have been grasped that the
approach to the psychical becomes safe and clear.
The Planes of Our Existence
449
The Planes of Our Existence
449
individual soul in the individual, universal soul in the cosmos;
the principle and the powers of the becoming are what we call
Nature or Prakriti. But since Being, conscious force and delight
of being are always the three constituent terms of existence,
the nature of a world is really determined by the way in which
Prakriti is set to deal with these three primary things and the
forms which it is allowed to give to them. For existence itself is
and must always be the stuff of its own becoming; it must be
shaped into the substance with which Force has to deal. Force
again must be the power which works out that substance and
works with it to whatever ends; Force is that which we ordinarily
call Nature. Again the end, the object with which the worlds are
created must be worked out by the consciousness inherent in
all existence and all force and all their workings, and the object
must be the possession of itself and of its delight of existence in
the world. To that all the circumstances and aims of any world-
existence must reduce themselves; it is existence developing its
terms of being, its power of being, its conscious delight of being;
if these are involved, their evolution; if they are veiled, their
self-revelation.
Here the soul lives in a material universe; of that alone it is
immediately conscious; the realisation of its potentialities in that
is the problem with which it is concerned. But matter means the
involution of the conscious delight of existence in self-oblivious
force and in a self-dividing, infinitesimally disaggregated form of
substance. Therefore the whole principle and effort of a material
world must be the evolution of what is involved and the devel¬
opment of what is undeveloped. Here everything is shut up from
the first in the violently working inconscient sleep of material
force; therefore the whole aim of any material becoming must
be the waking of consciousness out of the inconscient; the whole
consummation of a material becoming must be the removal of
the veil of matter and the luminous revelation of the entirely
self-conscient Being to its own imprisoned soul in the becoming.
Since Man is such an imprisoned soul, this luminous liberation
and coming to self-knowledge must be his highest object and the
condition of his perfection.
450
The Yoga of Integral Knowledge
Since Man is such an imprisoned soul, this luminous liberation
and coming to self-knowledge must be his highest object and the
condition of his perfection.
450
The Yoga of Integral Knowledge
But the limitations of a material universe seem to be hostile
to the proper accomplishment of this object which is yet so
inevitably the highest aim of a mental being born into a physical
body. First existence has formed itself here, fundamentally, as
Matter; it has been objecti vised, made sensible and concrete to
its own self-experiencing conscious-force in the form of self-
dividing material substance, and by the aggregation of this mat¬
ter there has been built up for man a physical body separate,
divided from others and subject to the fixed habits of process
or, as we call them, the laws of inconscient material Nature. His
force of being too is nature or Force working in matter, which
has waked slowly out of inconscience to life and is always limited
by form, always dependent on the body, always separated by
it from the rest of Life and from other living beings, always
hampered in its development, persistence, self-perfectioning by
the laws of the Inconscience and the limitations of bodily living.
Equally, his consciousness is a mentality emerging in a body and
in a sharply individualised life; it is therefore limited in its work¬
ings and capacities and dependent on bodily organs of no great
competence and on a very restricted vital force; it is separated
from the rest of cosmic mind and shut out from the thoughts
of other mental beings whose inner workings are a sealed book
to man’s physical mind except in so far as he can read them
by the analogy of his own mentality and by their insufficient
bodily signs and self-expressions. His consciousness is always
falling back towards the inconscience in which a large part of
it is always involved, his life towards death, his physical being
towards disaggregation. His delight of being depends on the
relations of this imperfect consciousness with its environment
based upon physical sensations and the sense-mind, in other
words on a limited mind trying to lay hold on a world external
and foreign to it by means of a limited body, limited vital force,
limited organs. Therefore its power for possession is limited,
its force for delight is limited, and every touch of the world
which exceeds its force, which that force cannot bear, cannot
seize on, cannot assimilate and possess must turn to something
else than delight, to pain, discomfort or grief. Or else it must
Or else it must
The Planes of Our Existence
451
be met by non-reception, insensibility, or, if received, put away
by indifference. Moreover such delight of being as it possesses,
is not possessed naturally and eternally like the self-delight of
Sachchidananda, but by experience and acquisition in Time, and
can therefore only be maintained and prolonged by repetition
of experience and is in its nature precarious and transient.
All this means that the natural relations of Purusha to
Prakriti in the material universe are the complete absorption
of conscious being in the force of its workings, therefore the
complete self-oblivion and self-ignorance of the Purusha, the
complete domination of Prakriti and subjection of the soul to
Nature. The soul does not know itself, it only knows, if anything,
the workings of Prakriti. The emergence of the individual self-
conscious soul in Man does not of itself abrogate these primary
relations of ignorance and subjection. For this soul is living on a
material plane of existence, a poise of Prakriti in which matter
is still the chief determinant of its relations to Nature, and its
consciousness being limited by Matter cannot be an entirely self-
possessing consciousness. Even the universal soul, if limited by
the material formula, could not be in entire possession of itself;
much less can the individual soul to which the rest of existence
becomes by bodily, vital and mental limitation and separation
something external to it on which it is yet dependent for its
life and its delight and its knowledge. These limitations of his
power, knowledge, life, delight of existence are the whole cause
of man’s dissatisfaction with himself and the universe. And if
the material universe were all and the material plane the only
plane of his being, then man the individual Purusha could never
arrive at perfection and self-fulfilment or indeed to any other
life than that of the animals. There must be either worlds in
which he is liberated from these incomplete and unsatisfactory
relations of Purusha with Prakriti, or planes of his own being by
ascending to which he can transcend them, or at the very least
planes, worlds and higher beings from which he can receive or
be helped to knowledge, powers, joys, a growth of his being
otherwise impossible. All these things, the ancient knowledge
asserts, exist, — other worlds, higher planes, the possibility of
452
The Yoga of Integral Knowledge
All these things, the ancient knowledge
asserts, exist, — other worlds, higher planes, the possibility of
452
The Yoga of Integral Knowledge
communication, of ascension, of growth by contact with and
influence from that which is above him in the present scale of
his realised being.
As there is a poise of the relations of Purusha with Prakriti
in which Matter is the first determinant, a world of material
existence, so there is another just above it in which Matter is not
supreme, but rather Life-force takes its place as the first determi¬
nant. In this world forms do not determine the conditions of the
life, but it is life which determines the form, and therefore forms
are there much more free, fluid, largely and to our conceptions
strangely variable than in the material world. This life-force is
not inconscient material force, not even, except in its lowest
movements, an elemental subconscient energy, but a conscious
force of being which makes for formation, but much more essen¬
tially for enjoyment, possession, satisfaction of its own dynamic
impulse. Desire and the satisfaction of impulse are therefore
the first law of this world of sheer vital existence, this poise of
relations between the soul and its nature in which the life-power
plays with so much greater a freedom and capacity than in our
physical living; it may be called the desire-world, for that is its
principal characteristic. Moreover, it is not fixed in one hardly
variable formula as physical life seems to be, but is capable of
many variations of its poise, admits many sub-planes ranging
from those which touch material existence and, as it were, melt
into that, to those which touch at the height of the life-power the
planes of pure mental and psychic existence and melt into them.
For in Nature in the infinite scale of being there are no wide
gulfs, no abrupt chasms to be overleaped, but a melting of one
thing into another, a subtle continuity; out of that her power of
distinctive experience creates the orderings, the definite ranges,
the distinct gradations by which the soul variously knows and
possesses its possibilities of world-existence. Again, enjoyment
of one kind or another being the whole object of desire, that must
be the trend of the desire-world; but since wherever the soul is
not free, — and it cannot be free when subject to desire, — there
must be the negative as well as the positive of all its experience,
this world contains not only the possibility of large or intense
The Planes of Our Existence
453
or continuous enjoyments almost inconceivable to the limited
physical mind, but also the possibility of equally enormous suf¬
ferings. It is here therefore that there are situated the lowest
heavens and all the hells with the tradition and imagination
of which the human mind has lured and terrified itself since
the earliest ages. All human imaginations indeed correspond to
some reality or real possibility, though they may in themselves
be a quite inaccurate representation or couched in too physical
images and therefore inapt to express the truth of supraphysical
realities.
Nature being a complex unity and not a collection of unre¬
lated phenomena, there can be no unbridgeable gulf between the
material existence and this vital or desire world. On the contrary,
they may be said in a sense to exist in each other and are at least
interdependent to a certain extent. In fact, the material world is
really a sort of projection from the vital, a thing which it has
thrown out and separated from itself in order to embody and
fulfil some of its desires under conditions other than its own,
which are yet the logical result of its own most material longings.
Life on earth may be said to be the result of the pressure of this
life-world on the material, inconscient existence of the physical
universe. Our own manifest vital being is also only a surface
result of a larger and profounder vital being which has its proper
seat on the life-plane and through which we are connected with
the life- world. Moreover, the life- world is constantly acting upon
us and behind everything in material existence there stand ap¬
propriate powers of the life-world; even the most crude and
elemental have behind them elemental life-powers, elemental
beings by which or by whom they are supported. The influences
of the life-world are always pouring out on the material exis¬
tence and producing there their powers and results which return
again upon the life-world to modify it. From that the life-part
of us, the desire-part is being always touched and influenced;
there too are beneficent and malefic powers of good desire and
evil desire which concern themselves with us even when we are
ignorant of and unconcerned with them. Nor are these powers
merely tendencies, inconscient forces, nor, except on the verges
454
The Yoga of Integral Knowledge
Nor are these powers
merely tendencies, inconscient forces, nor, except on the verges
454
The Yoga of Integral Knowledge
of Matter, subconscient, but conscious powers, beings, living
influences. As we awaken to the higher planes of our existence,
we become aware of them as friends or enemies, powers which
seek to possess or which we can master, overcome, pass beyond
and leave behind. It is this possible relation of the human being
with the powers of the life-world which occupied to so large
an extent European occultism, especially in the Middle Ages,
as well as certain forms of Eastern magic and spiritualism. The
“superstitions” of the past — much superstition there was, that
is to say, much ignorant and distorted belief, false explanations
and obscure and clumsy dealing with the laws of the beyond,
— had yet behind them truths which a future Science, delivered
from its sole preoccupation with the material world, may redis¬
cover. Eor the supra-material is as much a reality as the existence
of mental beings in the material universe.
But why then are we not normally aware of so much that is
behind us and always pressing upon us? Eor the same reason that
we are not aware of the inner life of our neighbour, although
it exists as much as our own and is constantly exercising an
occult influence upon us, — for a great part of our thoughts and
feelings come into us from outside, from our fellow-men, both
from individuals and from the collective mind of humanity; and
for the same reason that we are not aware of the greater part
of our own being which is subconscient or subliminal to our
waking mind and is always influencing and in an occult manner
determining our surface existence. It is because we use, normally,
only our corporeal senses and live almost wholly in the body and
the physical vitality and the physical mind, and it is not directly
through these that the life-world enters into relations with us.
That is done through other sheaths of our being, — so they are
termed in the Upanishads, — other bodies, as they are called in a
later terminology, the mental sheath or subtle body in which our
true mental being lives and the life sheath or vital body which
is more closely connected with the physical or food-sheath and
forms with it the gross body of our complex existence. These
possess powers, senses, capacities which are always secretly act¬
ing in us, are connected with and impinge upon our physical
The Planes of Our Existence
455
These
possess powers, senses, capacities which are always secretly act¬
ing in us, are connected with and impinge upon our physical
The Planes of Our Existence
455
organs and the plexuses of our physical life and mentality. By
self-development we can become aware of them, possess our
life in them, get through them into conscious relation with the
life-world and other worlds and use them also for a more subtle
experience and more intimate knowledge of the truths, facts and
happenings of even the material world itself. We can by this self¬
development live more or less fully on planes of our existence
other than the material which is now all in all to us.
What has been said of the life-world applies with the nec¬
essary differences to still higher planes of the cosmic existence.
For beyond that is a mental plane, a world of mental existence
in which neither life, nor matter, but mind is the first deter¬
minant. Mind there is not determined by material conditions
or by the life-force, but itself determines and uses them for its
own satisfaction. There mind, that is to say, the psychical and
the intellectual being, is free in a certain sense, free at least to
satisfy and fulfil itself in a way hardly conceivable to our body-
bound and life-bound mentality; for the Purusha there is the
pure mental being and his relations with Prakriti are determined
by that purer mentality. Nature there is mental rather than vital
and physical. Both the life-world and indirectly the material are
a projection from that, the result of certain tendencies of the
mental Being which have sought a field, conditions, an arrange¬
ment of harmonies proper to themselves; and the phenomena
of mind in this world may be said to be a result of the pres¬
sure of that plane first on the life-world and then on life in
the material existence. By its modification in the life-world it
creates in us the desire-mind; in its own right it awakes in us the
purer powers of our psychical and intellectual existence. But our
surface mentality is only a secondary result of a larger subliminal
mentality whose proper seat is the mental plane. This world
of mental existence also is constantly acting upon us and our
world, has its powers and its beings, is related to us through our
mental body. There we find the psychical and mental heavens to
which the Purusha can ascend when it drops this physical body
and can there sojourn till the impulse to terrestrial existence
again draws it downward. Here too are many planes, the lowest
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The Yoga of Integral Knowledge
Here too are many planes, the lowest
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The Yoga of Integral Knowledge
converging upon and melting into the worlds below, the highest
at the heights of the mind-power into the worlds of a more
spiritual existence.
These highest worlds are therefore supramental; they be¬
long to the principle of supermind, the free, spiritual or divine
intelligence^ or gnosis and to the triple spiritual principle of
Sachchidananda. From them the lower worlds derive by a sort
of fall of the Purusha into certain specific or narrow conditions
of the play of the soul with its nature. But these also are divided
from us by no unbridgeable gulf; they affect us through what
are called the knowledge-sheath and the bliss-sheath, through
the causal or spiritual body, and less directly through the mental
body, nor are their secret powers absent from the workings of
the vital and material existence. Our conscious spiritual being
and our intuitive mind awaken in us as a result of the pressure
of these highest worlds on the mental being in life and body.
But this causal body is, as we may say, little developed in the
majority of men and to live in it or to ascend to the supramental
planes, as distinguished from corresponding sub-planes in the
mental being, or still more to dwell consciously upon them is
the most difficult thing of all for the human being. It can be done
in the trance of Samadhi, but otherwise only by a new evolution
of the capacities of the individual Purusha of which few are
even willing to conceive. Yet is that the condition of the perfect
self-consciousness by which alone the Purusha can possess the
full conscious control of Prakriti; for there not even the mind
determines, but the Spirit freely uses the lower differentiating
principles as minor terms of its existence governed by the higher
and reaching by them their own perfect capacity. That alone
would be the perfect evolution of the involved and development
of the undeveloped for which the Purusha has sought in the
material universe, as if in a wager with itself, the conditions of
the greatest difficulty.
^ Called the vijhdna or buddhi, a word which may lead to some misunderstanding as
it is also applied to the mental intelligence which is only a lower derivation from the
divine gnosis.
Chapter XX
The Lower Triple Purusha
^ Called the vijhdna or buddhi, a word which may lead to some misunderstanding as
it is also applied to the mental intelligence which is only a lower derivation from the
divine gnosis.
Chapter XX
The Lower Triple Purusha
SUCH is the constituent principle of the various worlds of
cosmic existence and the various planes of our being; they
are as if a ladder plunging down into Matter and perhaps
below it, rising up into the heights of the Spirit, even perhaps
to the point at which existence escapes out of cosmic being into
ranges of a supra-cosmic Absolute, — so at least it is averred in
the world-system of the Buddhists. But to our ordinary materi¬
alised consciousness all this does not exist because it is hidden
from us by our preoccupation with our existence in a little corner
of the material universe and with the petty experiences of the
little hour of time which is represented by our life in a single body
upon this earth. To that consciousness the world is a mass of
material things and forces thrown into some kind of shape and
harmonised into a system of regulated movements by a number
of fixed self-existent laws which we have to obey, by which we
are governed and circumscribed and of which we have to get
the best knowledge we can so as to make the most of this one
brief existence which begins with birth, ends with death and has
no second recurrence. Our own being is a sort of accident or at
least a very small and minor circumstance in the universal life
of Matter or the eternal continuity of the workings of material
Force. Somehow or other a soul or mind has come to exist in
a body and it stumbles about among things and forces which
it does not very well understand, at first preoccupied with the
difficulty of managing to live in a dangerous and largely hostile
world and then with the effort to understand its laws and use
them so as to make life as tolerable or as happy as possible
so long as it lasts. If we were really nothing more than such
a minor movement of individualised mind in Matter, existence
would have nothing more to offer us; its best part would be at
most this struggle of an ephemeral intellect and will with eternal
458
The Yoga of Integral Knowledge
Matter and with the difficulties of Life supplemented and eased
by a play of imagination and by the consoling fictions presented
to us by religion and art and all the wonders dreamed of by the
brooding mind and restless fancy of man.
But because he is a soul and not merely a living body, man
can never for long remain satisfied that this first view of his ex¬
istence, the sole view justified by the external and objective facts
of life, is the real truth or the whole knowledge: his subjective
being is full of hints and inklings of realities beyond, it is open
to the sense of infinity and immortality, it is easily convinced
of other worlds, higher possibilities of being, larger fields of
experience for the soul. Science gives us the objective truth of
existence and the superficial knowledge of our physical and vital
being; but we feel that there are truths beyond which possibly
through the cultivation of our subjective being and the enlarge¬
ment of its powers may come to lie more and more open to us.
When the knowledge of this world is ours, we are irresistibly
impelled to seek for the knowledge of other states of existence
beyond, and that is the reason why an age of strong materialism
and scepticism is always followed by an age of occultism, of
mystical creeds, of new religions and profounder seekings after
the Infinite and the Divine. The knowledge of our superficial
mentality and the laws of our bodily life is not enough; it brings
us always to all that mysterious and hidden depth of subjective
existence below and behind of which our surface consciousness
is only a fringe or an outer court. We come to see that what is
present to our physical senses is only the material shell of cosmic
existence and what is obvious in our superficial mentality is only
the margin of immense continents which lie behind unexplored.
To explore them must be the work of another knowledge than
that of physical science or of a superficial psychology.
Religion is the first attempt of man to get beyond himself
and beyond the obvious and material facts of his existence. Its
first essential work is to confirm and make real to him his sub¬
jective sense of an Infinite on which his material and mental
being depends and the aspiration of his soul to come into its
presence and live in contact with it. Its function is to assure
The Lower Triple Purusha
459
Its function is to assure
The Lower Triple Purusha
459
him too of that possibility of which he has always dreamed, but
of which his ordinary life gives him no assurance, the possibil¬
ity of transcending himself and growing out of bodily life and
mortality into the joy of immortal life and spiritual existence. It
also confirms in him the sense that there are worlds or planes of
existence other than that in which his lot is now cast, worlds in
which this mortality and this subjection to evil and suffering are
not the natural state, but rather bliss of immortality is the eternal
condition. Incidentally, it gives him a rule of mortal life by which
he shall prepare himself for immortality. He is a soul and not a
body and his earthly life is a means by which he determines the
future conditions of his spiritual being. So much is common to
all religions; beyond this we get from them no assured certainty.
Their voices vary; some tell us that one life on earth is all we
have in which to determine our future existence, deny the past
immortality of the soul and assert only its future immortality,
threaten it even with the incredible dogma of a future of eternal
suffering for those who miss the right path, while others more
large and rational affirm successive existences by which the soul
grows into the knowledge of the Infinite with a complete assur¬
ance for all of ultimate arrival and perfection. Some present the
Infinite to us as a Being other than ourselves with whom we can
have personal relations, others as an impersonal existence into
which our separate being has to merge; some therefore give us
as our goal worlds beyond in which we dwell in the presence of
the Divine, others a cessation of world-existence by immergence
in the Infinite. Most invite us to bear or to abandon earthly life
as a trial or a temporary affliction or a vanity and fix our hopes
beyond; in some we find a vague hint of a future triumph of the
Spirit, the Divine in the body, upon this earth, in the collective
life of man, and so justify not only the separate hope and aspira¬
tion of the individual but the united and sympathetic hope and
aspiration of the race. Religion in fact is not knowledge, but a
faith and aspiration; it is justified indeed both by an imprecise
intuitive knowledge of large spiritual truths and by the subjective
experience of souls that have risen beyond the ordinary life, but
in itself it only gives us the hope and faith by which we may be
460
The Yoga of Integral Knowledge
induced to aspire to the intimate possession of the hidden tracts
and larger realities of the Spirit. That we turn always the few
distinct truths and the symbols or the particular discipline of a
religion into hard and fast dogmas, is a sign that as yet we are
only infants in the spiritual knowledge and are yet far from the
science of the Infinite.
Yet behind every great religion, behind, that is to say, its
exoteric side of faith, hope, symbols, scattered truths and limit¬
ing dogmas, there is an esoteric side of inner spiritual training
and illumination by which the hidden truths may be known,
worked out, possessed. Behind every exoteric religion there is
an esoteric Yoga, an intuitive knowledge to which its faith is
the first step, inexpressible realities of which its symbols are
the figured expression, a deeper sense for its scattered truths,
mysteries of the higher planes of existence of which even its
dogmas and superstitions are crude hints and indications. What
Science does for our knowledge of the material world, replac¬
ing first appearances and uses by the hidden truths and as yet
occult powers of its great natural forces and in our own minds
beliefs and opinions by verified experience and a profounder
understanding. Yoga does for the higher planes and worlds and
possibilities of our being which are aimed at by the religions.
Therefore all this mass of graded experience existing behind
closed doors to which the consciousness of man may find, if it
wills, the key, falls within the province of a comprehensive Yoga
of knowledge, which need not be confined to the seeking after the
Absolute alone or the knowledge of the Divine in itself or of the
Divine only in its isolated relations with the individual human
soul. It is true that the consciousness of the Absolute is the
highest reach of the Yoga of knowledge and that the possession
of the Divine is its first, greatest and most ardent object and
that to neglect it for an inferior knowledge is to afflict our Yoga
with inferiority or even frivolity and to miss or fall away from
its characteristic object; but, the Divine in itself being known,
the Yoga of knowledge may well embrace also the knowledge of
the Divine in its relations with ourselves and the world on the
different planes of our existence. To rise to the pure Self being
The Lower Triple Purusha
461
steadfastly held to as the summit of our subjective self-uplifting,
we may from that height possess our lower selves even to the
physical and the workings of Nature which belong to them.
To rise to the pure Self being
The Lower Triple Purusha
461
steadfastly held to as the summit of our subjective self-uplifting,
we may from that height possess our lower selves even to the
physical and the workings of Nature which belong to them.
We may seek this knowledge on two sides separately, the side
of Purusha, the side of Prakriti; and we may combine the two
for the perfect possession of the various relations of Purusha and
Prakriti in the light of the Divine. There is, says the Upanishad,
a fivefold soul in man and the world, the microcosm and the
macrocosm. The physical soul, self or being, — Purusha, Atman,
— is that of which we are all at first conscious, a self which
seems to have hardly any existence apart from the body and
no action vital or even mental independent of it. This physical
soul is present everywhere in material Nature; it pervades the
body, actuates obscurely its movements and is the whole basis of
its experiences; it informs all things even that are not mentally
conscious. But in man this physical being has become vitalised
and mentalised; it has received something of the law and capac¬
ities of the vital and mental being and nature. But its possession
of them is derivative, superimposed, as it were, on its original
nature and exercised under subjection to the law and action of
the physical existence and its instruments. It is this dominance of
our mental and vital parts by the body and the physical nature
which seems at first sight to justify the theory of the materialists
that mind and life are only circumstances and results of physical
force and all their operations explicable by the activities of that
force in the animal body. In fact entire subjection of the mind
and the life to the body is the characteristic of an undeveloped
humanity, as it is in an even greater degree of the infra-human
animal. According to the theory of reincarnation those who do
not get beyond this stage in the earthly life, cannot rise after
death to the mental or higher vital worlds, but have to return
from the confines of a series of physical planes to increase their
development in the next earthly existence. For the undeveloped
physical soul is entirely dominated by material nature and its
impressions and has to work them out to a better advantage
before it can rise in the scale of being.
A more developed humanity allows us to make a better and
462
The Yoga of Integral Knowledge
A more developed humanity allows us to make a better and
462
The Yoga of Integral Knowledge
freer use of all the capacities and experiences that we derive from
the vital and mental planes of being, to lean more for support
upon these hidden planes, be less absorbed by the physical and
to govern and modify the original nature of the physical being
by greater vital forces and powers from the desire-world and
greater and subtler mental forces and powers from the psychical
and intellectual planes. By this development we are able to rise
to higher altitudes of the intermediary existence between death
and rebirth and to make a better and more rapid use of rebirth
itself for a yet higher mental and spiritual development. But
even so, in the physical being which still determines the greater
part of our waking self, we act without definite consciousness
of the worlds or planes which are the sources of our action.
We are aware indeed of the life-plane and mind-plane of the
physical being, but not of the life-plane and mind-plane proper
or of the superior and larger vital and mental being which we are
behind the veil of our ordinary consciousness. It is only at a high
stage of development that we become aware of them and even
then, ordinarily, only at the back of the action of our mentalised
physical nature; we do not actually live on those planes, for if
we did we could very soon arrive at the conscious control of the
body by the life-power and of both by the sovereign mind; we
should then be able to determine our physical and mental life to
a very large extent by our will and knowledge as masters of our
being and with a direct action of the mind on the life and body.
By Yoga this power of transcending the physical self and taking
possession of the higher selves may to a greater or less degree be
acquired through a heightened and widened self-consciousness
and self-mastery.
This may be done, on the side of Purusha, by drawing back
from the physical self and its preoccupation with physical nature
and through concentration of thought and will raising oneself
into the vital and then into the mental self. By doing so we can
become the vital being and draw up the physical self into that
new consciousness so that we are only aware of the body, its
nature and its actions as secondary circumstances of the Life-
soul which we now are, used by it for its relations with the
The Lower Triple Purusha
463
material world. A certain remoteness from physical being and
then a superiority to it; a vivid sense of the body being a mere
instrument or shell and easily detachable; an extraordinary effec-
tivity of our desires on our physical being and life-environment;
a great sense of power and ease in manipulating and directing
the vital energy of which we now become vividly conscious, for
its action is felt by us concretely, subtly physical in relation to
the body, sensible in a sort of subtle density as an energy used by
the mind; an awareness of the life-plane in us above the physical
and knowledge and contact with the beings of the desire- world;
a coming into action of new powers, — what are usually called
occult powers or siddhis; a close sense of and sympathy with
the Life-soul in the world and a knowledge or sensation of the
emotions, desires, vital impulses of others; these are some of the
signs of this new consciousness gained by Yoga.
But all this belongs to the inferior grades of spiritual ex¬
perience and indeed is hardly more spiritual than the physical
existence. We have in the same way to go yet higher and raise
ourselves into the mental self. By doing so we can become the
mental self and draw up the physical and vital being into it,
so that life and body and their operations become to us minor
circumstances of our being used by the Mind-soul which we
now are for the execution of its lower purposes that belong to
the material existence. Here too we acquire at first a certain
remoteness from the life and the body and our real life seems
to be on quite another plane than material man’s, in contact
with a subtler existence, a greater light of knowledge than the
terrestrial, a far rarer and yet more sovereign energy; we are in
touch in fact with the mental plane, aware of the mental worlds,
can be in communication with its beings and powers. From that
plane we behold the desire-world and the material existence as
if below us, things that we can cast away from us if we will and
in fact easily reject when we relinquish the body, so as to dwell
in the mental or psychical heavens. But we can also, instead of
being thus remote and detached, become rather superior to the
life and body and the vital and material planes and act upon
them with mastery from our new height of being. Another sort
464
The Yoga of Integral Knowledge
But we can also, instead of
being thus remote and detached, become rather superior to the
life and body and the vital and material planes and act upon
them with mastery from our new height of being. Another sort
464
The Yoga of Integral Knowledge
of dynamis than physical or vital energy, something that we
may call pure mind-power and soul-force, which the developed
human being uses indeed but derivatively and imperfectly, but
which we can now use freely and with knowledge, becomes the
ordinary process of our action, while desire-force and physical
action fall into a secondary place and are only used with this
new energy behind them and as its occasional channels. We are
in touch and sympathy also with the Mind in cosmos, conscious
of it, aware of the intentions, directions, thought-forces, struggle
of subtle powers behind all happenings, which the ordinary man
is ignorant of or can only obscurely infer from the physical hap¬
pening, but which we can now see and feel directly before there
is any physical sign or even vital intimation of their working.
We acquire too the knowledge and sense of the mind-action of
other beings whether on the physical plane or on those above it;
and the higher capacities of the mental being, — occult powers
or siddhis, but of a much rarer or subtler kind than those proper
to the vital plane, — naturally awake in our consciousness.
All these however are circumstances of the lower triple
world of our being, the trailokya of the ancient sages. Living on
these we are, whatever the enlargement of our powers and our
consciousness, still living within the limits of the cosmic gods
and subject, though with a much subtler, easier and modified
subjection, to the reign of Prakriti over Purusha. To achieve real
freedom and mastery we have to ascend to a yet higher level of
the many-plateaued mountain of our being.
Chapter XXI
The Ladder of Self-Transcendence
To achieve real
freedom and mastery we have to ascend to a yet higher level of
the many-plateaued mountain of our being.
Chapter XXI
The Ladder of Self-Transcendence
The transcendence of this lower triple being and
this lower triple world, to which ordinarily our conscious¬
ness and its powers and results are limited, — a transcen¬
dence described by the Vedic seers as an exceeding or breaking
beyond the two firmaments of heaven and earth, — opens out a
hierarchy of infinitudes to which the normal existence of man
even in its highest and widest flights is still a stranger. Into that
altitude, even to the lowest step of its hierarchy, it is difficult
for him to rise. A separation, acute in practice though unreal
in essence, divides the total being of man, the microcosm, as
it divides also the world-being, the macrocosm. Both have a
higher and a lower hemisphere, the parardha and aparardha of
the ancient wisdom. The higher hemisphere is the perfect and
eternal reign of the Spirit; for there it manifests without cessation
or diminution its infinities, deploys the unconcealed glories of
its illimitable existence, its illimitable consciousness and knowl¬
edge, its illimitable force and power, its illimitable beatitude.
The lower hemisphere belongs equally to the Spirit; but here it
is veiled, closely, thickly, by its inferior self-expression of limiting
mind, confined life and dividing body. The Self in the lower hemi¬
sphere is shrouded in name and form; its consciousness is broken
up by the division between the internal and external, the indi¬
vidual and universal; its vision and sense are turned outward; its
force, limited by division of its consciousness, works in fetters; its
knowledge, will, power, delight, divided by this division, limited
by this limitation, are open to the experience of their contrary
or perverse forms, to ignorance, weakness and suffering. We
can indeed become aware of the true Self or Spirit in ourselves
by turning our sense and vision inward; we can discover too
the same Self or Spirit in the external world and its phenomena
by plunging them there also inward through the veil of names
466
The Yoga of Integral Knowledge
and forms to that which dwells in these or else stands behind
them. Our normal consciousness through this inward look may
become by reflection aware of the infinite being, consciousness
and delight of the Self and share in its passive or static infinity
of these things. But we can only to a very limited extent share
in its active or dynamic manifestation of knowledge, power and
joy. Even this static identity by reflection cannot, ordinarily, be
effected without a long and difficult effort and as the result of
many lives of progressive self-development; for very firmly is our
normal consciousness bound to the law of its lower hemisphere
of being. To understand the possibility of transcending it at all,
we must restate in a practical formula the relations of the worlds
which constitute the two hemispheres.
All is determined by the Spirit, for all from subtlest existence
to grossest matter is manifestation of the Spirit. But the Spirit,
Self or Being determines the world it lives in and the experiences
of its consciousness, force and delight in that world by some
poise — among many possible — of the relations of Purusha and
Prakriti, Soul and Nature, — some basic poise in one or other
of its own cosmic principles. Poised in the principle of Matter,
it becomes the physical self of a physical universe in the reign
of a physical Nature. Spirit is then absorbed in its experience
of Matter; it is dominated by the ignorance and inertia of the
tamasic Power proper to physical existence. In the individual it
becomes a materialised soul, annamaya purusa, whose life and
mind have developed out of the ignorance and inertia of the ma¬
terial principle and are subject to their fundamental limitations.
For life in Matter works in dependence on the body; mind in
Matter works in dependence on the body and on the vital or
nervous being; spirit itself in Matter is limited and divided in
its self-relation and its powers by the limitations and divisions
of this matter-governed and life-driven mind. This materialised
soul lives bound to the physical body and its narrow superficial
external consciousness, and it takes normally the experiences of
its physical organs, its senses, its matter-bound life and mind,
with at most some limited spiritual glimpses, as the whole truth
of existence.
The Ladder of Self-Transcendence
467
The Ladder of Self-Transcendence
467
Man is a spirit, but a spirit that lives as a mental being in
physical Nature; he is to his own self-consciousness a mind in a
physical body. But at first he is this mental being materialised and
he takes the materialised soul, annamaya purusa, for his real self.
He is obliged to accept, as the Upanishad expresses it. Matter
for the Brahman because his vision here sees Matter as that from
which all is born, by which all lives and to which all return in
their passing. His natural highest concept of Spirit is an Infinite,
preferably an inconscient Infinite, inhabiting or pervading the
material universe (which alone it really knows), and manifesting
by the power of its presence all these forms around him. His
natural highest conception of himself is a vaguely conceived
soul or spirit, a soul manifested only by the physical life’s ex¬
periences, bound up with physical phenomena and forced on
its dissolution to return by an automatic necessity to the vast
indeterminateness of the Infinite. But because he has the power
of self-development, he can rise beyond these natural concep¬
tions of the materialised soul; he can supplement them with a
certain derivative experience drawn from supraphysical planes
and worlds. He can concentrate in mind and develop the mental
part of his being, usually at the expense of the fullness of his
vital and physical life and in the end the mind predominates and
can open to the Beyond. He can concentrate this self-liberating
mind on the Spirit. Here too usually in the process he turns
away more and more from his full mental and physical life; he
limits or discourages their possibilities as much as his material
foundation in nature will allow him. In the end his spiritual life
predominates, destroys his earthward tendency and breaks its
ties and limitations. Spiritualised, he places his real existence
beyond in other worlds, in the heavens of the vital or mental
plane; he begins to regard life on earth as a painful or trouble¬
some incident or passage in which he can never arrive at any full
enjoyment of his inner ideal self, his spiritual essence. Moreover,
his highest conception of the Self or Spirit is apt to be more or less
quietistic; for, as we have seen, it is its static infinity alone that he
can entirely experience, the still freedom of Purusha unlimited by
Prakriti, the Soul standing back from Nature. There may come
468
The Yoga of Integral Knowledge
There may come
468
The Yoga of Integral Knowledge
indeed some divine dynamic manifestation in him, but it cannot
rise entirely above the heavy limitations of physical Nature. The
peace of the silent and passive Self is more easily attainable and
he can more easily and fully hold it; too difficult for him is
the bliss of an infinite activity, the dynamis of an immeasurable
Power.
But the Spirit can be poised in the principle of Life, not in
Matter. The Spirit so founded becomes the vital self of a vital
world, the Life-soul of a Life-energy in the reign of a consciously
dynamic Nature. Absorbed in the experiences of the power and
play of a conscious Life, it is dominated by the desire, activity
and passion of the rajasic principle proper to vital existence. In
the individual this spirit becomes a vital soul, prdnamaya purusa,
in whose nature the life-energies tyrannise over the mental and
physical principles. The physical element in a vital world readily
shapes its activities and formations in response to desire and its
imaginations, it serves and obeys the passion and power of life
and their formations and does not thwart or limit them as it
does here on earth where life is a precarious incident in inan¬
imate Matter. The mental element too is moulded and limited
by the life-power, obeys it and helps only to enrich and fulfil
the urge of its desires and the energy of its impulses. This vital
soul lives in a vital body composed of a substance much subtler
than physical matter; it is a substance surcharged with conscious
energy, capable of much more powerful perceptions, capacities,
sense-activities than any that the gross atomic elements of earth-
matter can offer. Man too has in himself behind his physical
being, subliminal to it, unseen and unknown, but very close
to it and forming with it the most naturally active part of his
existence, this vital soul, this vital nature and this vital body; a
whole vital plane connected with the life-world or desire-world
is hidden in us, a secret consciousness in which life and desire
find their untrammelled play and their easy self-expression and
from there throw their influences and formations on our outer
life.
In proportion as the power of this vital plane manifests
itself in man and takes hold of his physical being, this son of
The Ladder of Self-Transcendence
469
In proportion as the power of this vital plane manifests
itself in man and takes hold of his physical being, this son of
The Ladder of Self-Transcendence
469
earth becomes a vehicle of the life energy, forceful in his desires,
vehement in his passions and emotions, intensely dynamic in his
action, more and more the rajasic man. It is possible now for him
to awaken in his consciousness to the vital plane and to become
the vital soul, prdnamaya purusa, put on the vital nature and
live in the secret vital as well as the visible physical body. If he
achieves this change with some fullness or one-pointedness —
usually it is under great and salutary limitations or attended by
saving complexities — and without rising beyond these things,
without climbing to a supra-vital height from which they can
be used, purified, uplifted, he becomes the lower type of Asura
or Titan, a Rakshasa in nature, a soul of sheer power and life-
energy, magnified or racked by a force of unlimited desire and
passion, hunted and driven by an active capacity and colossal
rajasic ego, but in possession of far greater and more various
powers than those of the physical man in the ordinary more
inert earth-nature. Even if he develops mind greatly on the vital
plane and uses its dynamic energy for self-control as well as for
self-satisfaction, it will still be with an Asuric energism (tapasyd)
although of a higher type and directed to a more governed
satisfaction of the rajasic ego.
But for the vital plane also it is possible, even as on the
physical, to rise to a certain spiritual greatness in its own kind.
It is open to the vital man to lift himself beyond the conceptions
and energies natural to the desire-soul and the desire-plane. He
can develop a higher mentality and, within the conditions of
the vital being, concentrate upon some realisation of the Spirit
or Self behind or beyond its forms and powers. In this spiritual
realisation there would be a less strong necessity of quietism;
for there would be a greater possibility of an active effectua¬
tion of the bliss and power of the Eternal, mightier and more
self-satisfied powers, a richer flowering of the dynamic Infinite.
Nevertheless that effectuality could never come anywhere near
to a true and integral perfection; for the conditions of the desire-
world are like those of the physical improper to the development
of the complete spiritual life. The vital being too must develop
spirit to the detriment of his fullness, activity and force of life
470
The Yoga of Integral Knowledge
The vital being too must develop
spirit to the detriment of his fullness, activity and force of life
470
The Yoga of Integral Knowledge
in the lower hemisphere of our existence and turn in the end
away from the vital formula, away from life either to the Silence
or to an ineffable Power beyond him. If he does not withdraw
from life, he must remain enchained by life, limited in his self-
fulfilment by the downward pull of the desire-world and its
dominant rajasic principle. On the vital plane also, in its own
right alone, a perfect perfection is impossible; the soul that at¬
tains only so far would have to return to the physical life for
a greater experience, a higher self-development, a more direct
ascent to the Spirit.
Above matter and life stands the principle of mind, nearer
to the secret Origin of things. The Spirit poised in mind becomes
the mental self of a mental world and dwells there in the reign
of its own pure and luminous mental Nature. There it acts in
the intrinsic freedom of the cosmic Intelligence supported by the
combined workings of a psycho-mental and a higher emotional
mind-force, subtilised and enlightened by the clarity and hap¬
piness of the sattwic principle proper to the mental existence.
In the individual the spirit so poised becomes a mental soul,
manomaya purusa, in whose nature the clarity and luminous
power of the mind acts in its own right independent of any
limitation or oppression by the vital or corporeal instruments;
it rather rules and determines entirely the forms of its body and
the powers of its life. For mind in its own plane is not limited by
life and obstructed by matter as it is here in the earth-process.
This mental soul lives in a mental or subtle body which enjoys
capacities of knowledge, perception, sympathy and interpene¬
tration with other beings hardly imaginable by us and a free,
delicate and extensive mentalised sense-faculty not limited by
the grosser conditions of the life nature or the physical nature.
Man too has in himself, subliminal, unknown and unseen,
concealed behind his waking consciousness and visible organism
this mental soul, mental nature, mental body and a mental plane,
not materialised, in which the principle of Mind is at home and
not as here at strife with a world which is alien to it, obstructive
to its freedom and corruptive of its purity and clearness. All
the higher faculties of man, his intellectual and psycho-mental
The Ladder of Self-Transcendence
471
All
the higher faculties of man, his intellectual and psycho-mental
The Ladder of Self-Transcendence
471
being and powers, his higher emotional life awaken and increase
in proportion as this mental plane in him presses upon him.
For the more it manifests, the more it influences the physical
parts, the more it enriches and elevates the corresponding mental
plane of the embodied nature. At a certain pitch of its increas¬
ing sovereignty it can make man truly man and not merely a
reasoning animal; for it gives then its characteristic force to that
mental being within us which our humanity is in the inwardly
governing but still too hampered essence of its psychological
structure.
It is possible for man to awaken to this higher mental con¬
sciousness, to become this mental being, ^ put on this mental
nature and live not only in the vital and physical sheaths, but in
this mental body. If there were a sufficient completeness in this
transformation he would become capable of a life and a being
at least half divine. For he would enjoy powers and a vision and
perceptions beyond the scope of this ordinary life and body; he
would govern all by the clarities of pure knowledge; he would be
united to other beings by a sympathy of love and happiness; his
emotions would be lifted to the perfection of the psycho-mental
plane, his sensations rescued from grossness, his intellect subtle,
pure and flexible, delivered from the deviations of the impure
pranic energy and the obstructions of matter. And he would
develop too the reflection of a wisdom and bliss higher than
any mental joy and knowledge; for he could receive more fully
and without our incompetent mind’s deforming and falsifying
mixture the inspirations and intuitions that are the arrows of the
supramental Light and form his perfected mental existence in the
mould and power of that vaster splendour. He could then realise
too the self or Spirit in a much larger and more luminous and
^ I include here in mind, not only the highest range of mind ordinarily known to man,
but yet higher ranges to which he has either no current faculty of admission or else only
a partial and mixed reception of some faint portion of their powers, — the illumined
mind, the intuition and finally the creative Overmind or Maya which stands far above
and is the source of our present existence. If mind is to be understood only as Reason or
human intelligence, then the free mental being and its state would be something much
more limited and very inferior to the description given here.
472
If mind is to be understood only as Reason or
human intelligence, then the free mental being and its state would be something much
more limited and very inferior to the description given here.
472
The Yoga of Integral Knowledge
more intimate intensity than is now possible and with a greater
play of its active power and bliss in the satisfied harmony of his
existence.
And to our ordinary notions this may well seem to be a
consummate perfection, something to which man might aspire in
his highest flights of idealism. No doubt, it would be a sufficient
perfection for the pure mental being in its own character; but it
would still fall far below the greater possibilities of the spiritual
nature. For here too our spiritual realisation would be subject to
the limitations of the mind which is in the nature of a reflected,
diluted and diffused or a narrowly intensive light, not the vast
and comprehensive self-existent luminosity and joy of the Spirit.
That vaster light, that profounder bliss are beyond the mental
reaches. Mind indeed can never be a perfect instrument of the
Spirit; a supreme self-expression is not possible in its movements
because to separate, divide, limit is its very character. Even if
mind could be free from all positive falsehood and error, even
if it could be all intuitive and infallibly intuitive, it could still
present and organise only half-truths or separate truths and
these too not in their own body but in luminous representative
figures put together to make an accumulated total or a massed
structure. Therefore the self-perfecting mental being here must
either depart into pure spirit by the shedding of its lower exis¬
tence or return upon the physical life to develop in it a capacity
not yet found in our mental and psychic nature. This is what
the Upanishad expresses when it says that the heavens attained
by the mind Purusha are those to which man is lifted by the
rays of the sun, the diffused, separated, though intense beams
of the supramental truth-consciousness, and from these it has
to return to the earthly existence. But the illuminates who re¬
nouncing earth-life go beyond through the gateways of the sun,
do not return hither. The mental being exceeding his sphere does
not return because by that transition he enters a high range of
existence peculiar to the superior hemisphere. He cannot bring
down its greater spiritual nature into this lower triplidty; for
here the mental being is the highest expression of the Self. Here
the triple mental, vital and physical body provides almost the
He cannot bring
down its greater spiritual nature into this lower triplidty; for
here the mental being is the highest expression of the Self. Here
the triple mental, vital and physical body provides almost the
The Ladder of Self-Transcendence
473
whole range of our capacity and cannot suffice for that greater
consciousness; the vessel has not been built to contain a greater
godhead or to house the splendours of this supramental force
and knowledge.
This limitation is true only so long as man remains closed
within the boundaries of the mental Maya. If he rises into the
knowledge-self beyond the highest mental stature, if he becomes
the knowledge-soul, the Spirit poised in gnosis, vijhdnamaya
purusa, and puts on the nature of its infinite truth and power,
if he lives in the knowledge-sheath, the causal body as well as
in these subtle mental, interlinking vital and grosser physical
sheaths or bodies, then, but then only he will be able to draw
down entirely into his terrestrial existence the fullness of the
infinite spiritual consciousness; only then will he avail to raise
his total being and even his whole manifested, embodied ex¬
pressive nature into the spiritual kingdom. But this is difficult
in the extreme; for the causal body opens itself readily to the
consciousness and capacities of the spiritual planes and belongs
in its nature to the higher hemisphere of existence, but it is either
not developed at all in man or only as yet crudely developed and
organised and veiled behind many intervening portals of the
subliminal in us. It draws its stuff from the plane of the truth-
knowledge and the plane of the infinite bliss and these pertain
altogether to a still inaccessible higher hemisphere. Shedding
upon this lower existence their truth and light and joy they are
the source of all that we call spirituality and all that we call
perfection. But this infiltration comes from behind thick cover¬
ings through which they arrive so tempered and weakened that
they are entirely obscured in the materiality of our physical per¬
ceptions, grossly distorted and perverted in our vital impulses,
perverted too though a little less grossly in our ideative seekings,
minimised even in the comparative purity and intensity of the
highest intuitive ranges of our mental nature. The supramental
principle is secretly lodged in all existence. It is there even in the
grossest materiality, it preserves and governs the lower worlds
by its hidden power and law; but that power veils itself and that
law works unseen through the shackled limitations and limping
474
The Yoga of Integral Knowledge
It is there even in the
grossest materiality, it preserves and governs the lower worlds
by its hidden power and law; but that power veils itself and that
law works unseen through the shackled limitations and limping
474
The Yoga of Integral Knowledge
deformations of the lesser rule of our physical, vital, mental
Nature. Yet its governing presence in the lowest forms assures us,
because of the unity of all existence, that there is a possibility of
their awakening, a possibility even of their perfect manifestation
here in spite of every veil, in spite of all the mass of our apparent
disabilities, in spite of the incapacity or unwillingness of our
mind and life and body. And what is possible, must one day be,
for that is the law of the omnipotent Spirit.
The character of these higher states of the soul and their
greater worlds of spiritual Nature is necessarily difficult to seize.
Even the Upanishads and the Veda only shadow them out by
figures, hints and symbols. Yet it is necessary to attempt some
account of their principles and practical effect so far as they
can be grasped by the mind that stands on the border of the
two hemispheres. The passage beyond that border would be the
culmination, the completeness of the Yoga of self-transcendence
by self-knowledge. The soul that aspires to perfection, draws
back and upward, says the Upanishad, from the physical into the
vital and from the vital into the mental Purusha, from the mental
into the knowledge-soul and from that self of knowledge into
the bliss Purusha. This self of bliss is the conscious foundation
of perfect Sachchidananda and to pass into it completes the
soul’s ascension. The mind therefore must try to give to itself
some account of this decisive transformation of the embodied
consciousness, this radiant transfiguration and self-exceeding of
our ever aspiring nature. The description mind can arrive at, can
never be adequate to the thing itself, but it may point at least
to some indicative shadow of it or perhaps some half-luminous
image.
Chapter XXII
Vijnana or Gnosis
The description mind can arrive at, can
never be adequate to the thing itself, but it may point at least
to some indicative shadow of it or perhaps some half-luminous
image.
Chapter XXII
Vijnana or Gnosis
IN OUR perfect self-transcendence we pass out and up from
the ignorance or half-enlightenment of our mental conscious-
being into a greater wisdom-self and truth-power above it,
there to dwell in the unwalled light of a divine knowledge. The
mental man that we are is changed into the gnostic soul, the
truth-conscious godhead, the vijndnamaya Purusha. Seated on
that level of the hill of our ascension we are in a quite different
plane from this material, this vital, this mental poise of the
universal spirit, and with this change changes too all our view
and experience of our soul-life and of the world around us. We
are born into a new soul-status and put on a new nature; for
according to the status of the soul is the status of the Prakriti.
At each transition of the world-ascent, from matter to life, from
life to mind, from mind bound to free intelligence, as the latent,
half-manifested or already manifest soul rises to a higher and
higher level of being, the nature also is elevated into a superior
working, a wider consciousness, a vaster force and an intenser
or larger range and joy of existence. But the transition from
the mind-self to the knowledge-self is the great and the decisive
transition in the Yoga. It is the shaking off of the last hold on us
of the cosmic ignorance and our firm foundation in the Truth of
things, in a consciousness infinite and eternal and inviolable by
obscurity, falsehood, suffering or error.
This is the first summit which enters into the divine perfec¬
tion, sadharmya, sadrsya; for all the rest only look up to it or
catch some rays of its significance. The highest heights of mind or
of overmind come still within the belt of a mitigated ignorance;
they can refract a divine Light but not pass it on in un diminished
power to our lower members. For so long as we are within the
triple stratum of mind, life and body, our active nature continues
to work in the force of the ignorance even when the soul in Mind
476
The Yoga of Integral Knowledge
For so long as we are within the
triple stratum of mind, life and body, our active nature continues
to work in the force of the ignorance even when the soul in Mind
476
The Yoga of Integral Knowledge
possesses something of the knowledge. And even if the soul were
to reflect or to represent all the largeness of the knowledge in its
mental consciousness, it would be unable to mobilise it rightly
in force of action. The truth in its action might greatly increase,
but it would still be pursued by a limitation, still condemned
to a divisibility which would prevent it from working integrally
in the power of the infinite. The power of a divinely illumined
mind may be immense compared with ordinary powers, but it
will still be subject to incapacity and there can be no perfect
correspondence between the force of the effective will and the
light of the idea which inspires it. The infinite Presence may
be there in status, but the dynamis of the operations of nature
still belongs to the lower Prakriti, must follow its triple modes
of working and cannot give any adequate form to the great¬
ness within it. This is the tragedy of ineffectivity, of the hiatus
between ideal and effective will, of our constant incapacity to
work out in living form and action the truth we feel in our inner
consciousness that pursues all the aspiration of mind and life
towards the divinity behind them. But the vijhdna or gnosis is
not only truth but truth power, it is the very working of the
infinite and divine nature; it is the divine knowledge one with
the divine will in the force and delight of a spontaneous and
luminous and inevitable self-fulfilment. By the gnosis, then, we
change our human into a divine nature.
What then is this gnosis and how can we describe it? Two
opposite errors have to be avoided, two misconceptions that
disfigure opposite sides of the truth of gnosis. One error of
intellect-bounded thinkers takes vijhdna as synonymous with
the other Indian term buddhi and buddhi as synonymous with
the reason, the discerning intellect, the logical intelligence. The
systems that accept this significance, pass at once from a plane of
pure intellect to a plane of pure spirit. No intermediate power is
recognised, no diviner action of knowledge than the pure reason
is admitted; the limited human means for fixing truth is taken
for the highest possible dynamics of consciousness, its topmost
force and original movement. An opposite error, a misconcep¬
tion of the mystics identifies vijhdna with the consciousness of
Vijnana or Gnosis
477
An opposite error, a misconcep¬
tion of the mystics identifies vijhdna with the consciousness of
Vijnana or Gnosis
477
the Infinite free from all ideation or else ideation packed into one
essence of thought, lost to other dynamic action in the single
and invariable idea of the One. This is the caitanyaghana of
the Upanishad and is one movement or rather one thread of
the many-aspected movement of the gnosis. The gnosis, the Vi¬
jnana, is not only this concentrated consciousness of the infinite
Essence; it is also and at the same time an infinite knowledge
of the myriad play of the Infinite. It contains all ideation (not
mental but supramental), but it is not limited by ideation, for it
far exceeds all ideative movement. Nor is the gnostic ideation in
its character an intellectual thinking; it is not what we call the
reason, not a concentrated intelligence. For the reason is mental
in its methods, mental in its acquisitions, mental in its basis, but
the ideative method of the gnosis is self-luminous, supramen¬
tal, its yield of thought-light spontaneous, not proceeding by
acquisition, its thought-basis a rendering of conscious identities,
not a translation of the impressions born of indirect contacts.
There is a relation and even a sort of broken identity between
the two forms of thought; for one proceeds covertly from the
other, mind is born from that which is beyond mind. But they
act on different planes and reverse each other’s process.
Even the purest reason, the most luminous rational intellec¬
tuality is not the gnosis. Reason or intellect is only the lower
buddhi; it is dependent for its action on the percepts of the
sense-mind and on the concepts of the mental intelligence. It is
not like the gnosis, self-luminous, authentic, making the sub¬
ject one with the object. There is, indeed, a higher form of the
buddhi that can be called the intuitive mind or intuitive reason,
and this by its intuitions, its inspirations, its swift revelatory
vision, its luminous insight and discrimination can do the work
of the reason with a higher power, a swifter action, a greater and
spontaneous certitude. It acts in a self-light of the truth which
does not depend upon the torch-flares of the sense-mind and
its limited uncertain percepts; it proceeds not by intelligent but
by visional concepts: it is a kind of truth-vision, truth-hearing,
truth-memory, direct truth-discernment. This true and authentic
intuition must be distinguished from a power of the ordinary
478
The Yoga of Integral Knowledge
This true and authentic
intuition must be distinguished from a power of the ordinary
478
The Yoga of Integral Knowledge
mental reason which is too easily confused with it, the power of
involved reasoning that reaches its conclusion by a bound and
does not need the ordinary steps of the logical mind. The logical
reason proceeds pace after pace and tries the sureness of each
step like a man who is walking over unsafe ground and has to
test by the hesitating touch of his foot each span of soil that
he perceives with his eye. But this other supralogical process of
the reason is a motion of rapid insight or swift discernment; it
proceeds by a stride or leap, like a man who springs from one
sure spot to another point of sure footing, — or at least held by
him to be sure. He sees the space he covers in one compact and
flashing view, but he does not distinguish or measure either by
eye or touch its successions, features and circumstances. This
movement has something of the sense of power of the intuition,
something of its velocity, some appearance of its light and cer¬
tainty, and we always are apt to take it for the intuition. But our
assumption is an error and, if we trust to it, may lead us into
grievous blunders.
It is even thought by the intellectualists that the intuition
itself is nothing more than this rapid process in which the
whole action of the logical mind is swiftly done or perhaps half-
consciously or subconsciously done, not deliberately worked out
in its reasoned method. In its nature, however, this proceeding
is quite different from the intuition and it is not necessarily a
truth-movement. The power of its leap may end in a stumble,
its swiftness may betray, its certainty is too often a confident
error. The validity of its conclusions must always depend on
a subsequent verification or support from the evidence of the
sense-perceptions or a rational linking of intelligent conceptions
must intervene to explain to it its own certitudes. This lower light
may indeed receive very readily a mixture of actual intuition into
it and then a pseudo-intuitive or half-intuitive mind is created,
very misleading by its frequent luminous successes palliating a
whirl of intensely self-assured false certitudes. The true intuition
on the contrary carries in itself its own guarantee of truth; it is
sure and infallible within its limits. And so long as it is pure intu¬
ition and does not admit into itself any mixture of sense-error or
Vijnana or Gnosis
479
The true intuition
on the contrary carries in itself its own guarantee of truth; it is
sure and infallible within its limits. And so long as it is pure intu¬
ition and does not admit into itself any mixture of sense-error or
Vijnana or Gnosis
479
intellectual ideation, it is never contradicted by experience: the
intuition may be verified by the reason or the sense-perception
afterwards, but its truth does not depend on that verification, it
is assured by an automatic self-evidence. If the reason depending
on its inferences contradicts the greater light, it will be found
in the end on ampler knowledge that the intuitional conclusion
was correct and that the more plausible rational and inferential
conclusion was an error. For the true intuition proceeds from the
self-existent truth of things and is secured by that self-existent
truth and not by any indirect, derivatory or dependent method
of arriving at knowledge.
For the true intuition proceeds from the
self-existent truth of things and is secured by that self-existent
truth and not by any indirect, derivatory or dependent method
of arriving at knowledge.
But even the intuitive reason is not the gnosis; it is only
an edge of light of the supermind finding its way by flashes of
illumination into the mentality like lightnings in dim and cloudy
places. Its inspirations, revelations, intuitions, self-luminous dis-
cernings are messages from a higher knowledge-plane that make
their way opportunely into our lower level of consciousness. The
very character of the intuitive mind sets a gulf of great difference
between its action and the action of the self-contained gnosis.
In the first place it acts by separate and limited illuminations
and its truth is restricted to the often narrow reach or the one
brief spot of knowledge lit up by that one lightning-flash with
which its intervention begins and terminates. We see the action
of the instinct in animals, — an automatic intuition in that vital
or sense-mind which is the highest and surest instrument that
the animal has to rely on, since it does not possess the human
light of the reason, only a cruder and yet ill-formed intelligence.
And we can observe at once that the marvellous truth of this
instinct which seems so much surer than the reason, is limited in
the bird, beast or insect to some particular and restricted utility
it is admitted to serve. When the vital mind of the animal tries
to act beyond that restricted limit, it blunders in a much blinder
way than the reason of man and has to learn with difficulty by
a succession of sense-experiences. The higher mental intuition
of the human being is an inner visional, not a sense intuition;
for it illumines the intelligence and not the sense-mind, it is self-
conscious and luminous, not a half-subconscious blind light: it
480
The Yoga of Integral Knowledge
is freely self-acting, not mechanically automatic. But still, even
when it is not marred by the imitative pseudo-intuition, it is
restricted in man like the instinct in the animal, restricted to
a particular purpose of will or knowledge as is the instinct
to a particular life utility or Nature purpose. And when the
intelligence, as is its almost invariable habit, tries to make use of
it, to apply it, to add to it, it builds round the intuitive nucleus in
its own characteristic fashion a mass of mixed truth and error.
More often than not, by foisting an element of sense-error and
conceptual error into the very substance of the intuition or by
coating it up in mental additions and deviations, it not merely
deflects but deforms its truth and converts it into a falsehood.
At the best therefore the intuition gives us only a limited, though
an intense light; at the worst, through our misuse of it or false
imitations of it, it may lead us into perplexities and confusions
which the less ambitious intellectual reason avoids by remaining
satisfied with its own safe and plodding method, — safe for the
inferior purposes of the reason, though never a satisfying guide
to the inner truth of things.
It is possible to cultivate and extend the use of the intuitive
mind in proportion as we rely less predominantly upon the rea¬
soning intelligence. We may train our mentality not to seize, as it
does now, upon every separate flash of intuitive illumination for
its own inferior purposes, not to precipitate our thought at once
into a crystallising intellectual action around it; we can train it to
think in a stream of successive and connected intuitions, to pour
light upon light in a brilliant and triumphant series. We shall
succeed in this difficult change in proportion as we purify the
interfering intelligence, — if we can reduce in it the element of
material thought enslaved to the external appearances of things,
the element of vital thought enslaved to the wishes, desires,
impulses of the lower nature, the element of intellectual thought
enslaved to our preferred, already settled or congenial ideas,
conceptions, opinions, fixed operations of intelligence, if, having
reduced to a minimum those elements, we can replace them by
an intuitive vision and sense of things, an intuitive insight into
appearances, an intuitive will, an intuitive ideation. This is hard
Vijnana or Gnosis
481
This is hard
Vijnana or Gnosis
481
enough for our consciousness naturally bound by the triple tie
of mentality, vitality, corporeality to its own imperfection and
ignorance, the upper, middle and lower cord in the Vedic parable
of the soul’s bondage, cords of the mixed truth and falsehood
of appearances by which Shunahshepa was bound to the post of
sacrifice.
But even if this difficult thing were perfectly accomplished,
still the intuition would not be the gnosis; it would only be its
thin prolongation into mind or its sharp edge of first entrance.
The difference, not easy to define except by symbols, may be
expressed if we take the Vedic image in which the Sun represents
the gnosis and the sky, mid-air and earth the mentality, vitality,
physicality of man and of the universe. Living on the earth,
climbing into the mid-air or even winging in the sky, the mental
being, the manomaya Purusha, would still live in the rays of the
sun and not in its bodily light. And in those rays he would see
things not as they are, but as reflected in his organ of vision,
deformed by its faults or limited in their truth by its restrictions.
But the vijndnamaya Purusha lives in the Sun itself, in the very
body and blaze of the true light; ^ he knows this light to be his
own self-luminous being and he sees besides all that dwells in the
rays of the sun, sees the whole truth of the lower triplicity and
each thing that is in it. He sees it not by reflection in a mental
organ of vision, but with the Sun of gnosis itself as his eye, —
for the Sun, says the Veda, is the eye of the gods. The mental
being, even in the intuitive mind, can perceive the truth only by
a brilliant reflection or limited communication and subject to
the restrictions and the inferior capacity of the mental vision;
but the supramental being sees it by the gnosis itself, from the
very centre and outwelling fount of the truth, in its very form
and by its own spontaneous and self-illumining process. For the
Vijnana is a direct and divine as opposed to an indirect and
human knowledge.
The nature of the gnosis can only be indicated to the intellect
by contrasting it with the nature of the intellect, and even then
So the Sun is called in the Veda, rtam jyotih.
1
482
The Yoga of Integral Knowledge
The nature of the gnosis can only be indicated to the intellect
by contrasting it with the nature of the intellect, and even then
So the Sun is called in the Veda, rtam jyotih.
1
482
The Yoga of Integral Knowledge
the phrases we must use cannot illuminate unless aided by some
amount of actual experience. For what language forged by the
reason can express the suprarational? Fundamentally, this is the
difference between these two powers that the mental reason
proceeds with labour from ignorance to truth, but the gnosis
has in itself the direct contact, the immediate vision, the easy
and constant possession of the truth and has no need of seeking
or any kind of procedure. The reason starts with appearances
and labours, never or seldom losing at least a partial dependence
on appearances, to arrive at the truth behind them; it shows the
truth in the light of the appearances. The gnosis starts from the
truth and shows the appearances in the light of the truth; it is
itself the body of the truth and its spirit. The reason proceeds
by inference, it concludes; but the gnosis proceeds by identity
or vision, — it is, sees and knows. As directly as the physical
vision sees and grasps the appearance of objects, so and far more
directly the gnosis sees and grasps the truth of things. But where
the physical sense gets into relation with objects by a veiled
contact, the gnosis gets into identity with things by an unveiled
oneness. Thus it is able to know all things as a man knows his
own existence, simply, convincingly, directly. To the reason only
what the senses give is direct knowledge, pratyaksa, the rest of
truth is arrived at indirectly; to the gnosis all its truth is direct
knowledge, pratyaksa. Therefore the truth gained by the intellect
is an acquisition over which there hangs always a certain shadow
of doubt, an incompleteness, a surrounding penumbra of night
and ignorance or half-knowledge, a possibility of alteration or
annullation by farther knowledge. The truth of the gnosis is free
from doubt, self-evident, self-existent, irrefragable, absolute.
The truth of the gnosis is free
from doubt, self-evident, self-existent, irrefragable, absolute.
The reason has as its first instrument observation general,
analytical and synthetic; it aids itself by comparison, contrast
and analogy, — proceeds from experience to indirect knowledge
by logical processes of deduction, induction, all kinds of infer¬
ence, — rests upon memory, reaches out beyond itself by imagi¬
nation, secures itself by judgment: all is a process of groping and
seeking. The gnosis does not seek, it possesses. Or if it has to
enlighten, it does not even then seek; it reveals, it illumines. In
Vijnana or Gnosis
483
a consciousness transmuted from intelligence to gnosis, imagi¬
nation would be replaced by truth-inspiration, mental judgment
would give place to a self-luminous discerning. The slow and
stumbling logical process from reasoning to conclusion would be
pushed out by a swift intuitive proceeding; the conclusion or fact
would be seen at once in its own right, by its own self-sufficient
witness, and all the evidence by which we arrive at it would be
seen too at once, along with it, in the same comprehensive figure,
not as its evidence, but as its intimate conditions, connections
and relations, its constituent parts or its wings of circumstance.
Mental and sense observation would be changed into an inner
vision using the instruments as channels, but not dependent on
them as the mind in us is blind and deaf without the physical
senses, and this vision would see not merely the thing, but all its
truth, its forces, powers, the eternities within it. Our uncertain
memory would fall away and there would come in its place a
luminous possession of knowledge, the divine memory that is not
a store of acquisition, but holds all things always contained in
the consciousness, a memory at once of past, present and future.
For while the reason proceeds from moment to moment of
time and loses and acquires and again loses and again acquires,
the gnosis dominates time in a one view and perpetual power and
links past, present and future in their indivisible connections, in
a single continuous map of knowledge, side by side. The gnosis
starts from the totality which it immediately possesses; it sees
parts, groups and details only in relation to the totality and in
one vision with it: the mental reason cannot really see the totality
at all and does not know fully any whole except by starting
from an analysis and synthesis of its parts, masses and details;
otherwise its whole-view is always a vague apprehension or an
imperfect comprehension or a confused summary of indistinct
features. The reason deals with constituents and processes and
properties; it tries in vain to form by them an idea of the thing in
itself, its reality, its essence. But the gnosis sees the thing in itself
first, penetrates to its original and eternal nature, adjoins its
processes and properties only as a self-expression of its nature.
The reason dwells in the diversity and is its prisoner: it deals
484
The Yoga of Integral Knowledge
with things separately and treats each as a separate existence,
as it deals with sections of Time and divisions of Space; it sees
unity only in a sum or by elimination of diversity or as a general
conception and a vacant figure. But the gnosis dwells in the
unity and knows by it all the nature of the diversities; it starts
from the unity and sees diversities only of a unity, not diversities
constituting the one, but a unity constituting its own multitudes.
The gnostic knowledge, the gnostic sense does not recognise any
real division; it does not treat things separately as if they were
independent of their true and original oneness. The reason deals
with the finite and is helpless before the infinite: it can conceive
of it as an indefinite extension in which the finite acts, but the
infinite in itself it can with difficulty conceive and cannot at all
grasp or penetrate. But the gnosis is, sees and lives in the infinite;
it starts always from the infinite and knows finite things only in
their relation to the infinite and in the sense of the infinite.
But the gnosis is, sees and lives in the infinite;
it starts always from the infinite and knows finite things only in
their relation to the infinite and in the sense of the infinite.
If we would describe the gnosis as it is in its own awareness,
not thus imperfectly as it is to us in contrast with our own
reason and intelligence, it is hardly possible to speak of it except
in figures and symbols. And first we must remember that the
gnostic level, Mahat, Vijnana, is not the supreme plane of our
consciousness, but a middle or link plane. Interposed between
the triune glory of the utter Spirit, the infinite existence, con¬
sciousness and bliss of the Eternal and our lower triple being
and nature, it is as if it stood there as the mediating, formulated,
organising and creative wisdom, power and joy of the Eternal. In
the gnosis Sachchidananda gathers up the light of his unseizable
existence and pours it out on the soul in the shape and power of
a divine knowledge, a divine will and a divine bliss of existence.
It is as if infinite light were gathered up into the compact orb
of the sun and lavished on all that depends upon the sun in
radiances that continue for ever. But the gnosis is not only light,
it is force; it is creative knowledge, it is the self-effective truth
of the divine Idea. This idea is not creative imagination, not
something that constructs in a void, but light and power of
eternal substance, truth-light full of truth-force; and it brings
out what is latent in being, it does not create a fiction that never
Vijnana or Gnosis
485
was in being. The ideation of the gnosis is radiating light-stuff
of the consciousness of the eternal Existence; each ray is a truth.
The will in the gnosis is a conscious force of eternal knowledge;
it throws the consciousness and substance of being into infallible
forms of truth-power, forms that embody the idea and make it
faultlessly effective, and it works out each truth-power and each
truth-form spontaneously and rightly according to its nature.
Because it carries this creative force of the divine Idea, the Sun,
the lord and symbol of the gnosis, is described in the Veda as the
Light which is the father of all things, Surya Savitri, the Wisdom-
Luminous who is the bringer-out into manifest existence. This
creation is inspired by the divine delight, the eternal Ananda;
it is full of the joy of its own truth and power, it creates in
bliss, creates out of bliss, creates that which is blissful. There¬
fore the world of the gnosis, the supramental world is the true
and the happy creation, rtam, bhadram, since all in it shares in
the perfect joy that made it. A divine radiance of undeviating
knowledge, a divine power of unfaltering will and a divine ease
of unstumbling bliss are the nature or Prakriti of the soul in
supermind, in vijnana.
The stuff of the gnostic or supramental plane is made of the
perfect absolutes of all that is here imperfect and relative and its
movement of the reconciled interlockings and happy fusions of
all that here are opposites. Lor behind the appearance of these
opposites are their truths and the truths of the Eternal are not
in conflict with each other; our mind’s and life’s opposites trans¬
formed in the supermind into their own true spirit link together
and are seen as tones and colourings of an eternal Reality and
everlasting Ananda. Supermind or Gnosis is the supreme Truth,
the supreme Thought, the supreme Word, the supreme Sight,
the supreme Will-Idea; it is the inner and outer extension of the
Infinite who is beyond Space, the unfettered Time of the Eternal
who is timeless, the supernal harmony of all absolutes of the
Absolute.
To the envisaging mind there are three powers of the Vi¬
jnana. Its supreme power knows and receives into it from above
all the infinite existence, consciousness and bliss of the Ishwara;
486
The Yoga of Integral Knowledge
To the envisaging mind there are three powers of the Vi¬
jnana. Its supreme power knows and receives into it from above
all the infinite existence, consciousness and bliss of the Ishwara;
486
The Yoga of Integral Knowledge
it is in its highest height the absolute knowledge and force of
eternal Sachchidananda. Its second power concentrates the In¬
finite into a dense luminous consciousness, caitanyaghana or
cidghana, the seed-state of the divine consciousness in which
are contained living and concrete all the immutable principles
of the divine being and all the inviolable truths of the divine
conscious-idea and nature. Its third power brings or looses out
these things by the effective ideation, vision, authentic iden¬
tities of the divine knowledge, movement of the divine will-
force, vibration of the divine delight intensities into a universal
harmony, an illimitable diversity, a manifold rhythm of their
powers, forms and interplay of living consequences. The mental
Purusha rising into the vijhdnamaya must ascend into these three
powers. It must turn by conversion of its movements into the
movements of the gnosis its mental perception, ideation, will,
pleasure into radiances of the divine knowledge, pulsations of
the divine will-force, waves and floods of the divine delight-seas.
It must convert its conscious stuff of mental nature into the
cidghana or dense self-luminous consciousness. It must trans¬
form its conscious substance into a gnostic self or Truth-self of
infinite Sachchidananda. These three movements are described
in the Isha Upanishad, the first as vyuha, the marshalling of the
rays of the Sun of gnosis in the order of the Truth-consciousness,
the second as samuha, the gathering together of the rays into the
body of the Sun of gnosis, the third as the vision of that Sun’s
fairest form of all in which the soul most intimately possesses
its oneness with the infinite Purusha.^ The Supreme above, in
him, around, everywhere and the soul dwelling in the Supreme
and one with it, — the infinite power and truth of the Divine
concentrated in his own concentrated luminous soul nature, —
Surya rasmin vyuha samuha tejo yat te kalyanatamam rupam tat te pasyami yo
'sdv asau purusah so ’ham asmi. The Veda describes the vijhdna plane as rtam satyam
brhat, the Right, Truth, Vast, the same triple idea differently expressed. Rtam is the
action of the divine knowledge, will and joy in the lines of the truth, the play of the
truth-consciousness. Satyam is the truth of being which so acts, the dynamic essence of
the truth-consciousness. Brhat is the infinity of Sachchidananda out of which the other
two proceed and in which they are founded.
Vijnana or Gnosis
487
a radiant activity of the divine knowledge, will and joy perfect
in the natural action of the Prakriti, — this is the fundamental
experience of the mental being transformed and fulfilled and
sublimated in the perfection of the gnosis.
Chapter XXIII
The Conditions of Attainment
to the Gnosis
Knowledge is the first principle of the Vijnana, but
knowledge is not its only power. The Truth-conscious¬
ness, like every other plane, founds itself upon that par¬
ticular principle which is naturally the key of all its motions;
but it is not limited by it, it contains all the other powers of
existence. Only the character and working of these other powers
is modified and moulded into conformity with its own original
and dominant law; intelligence, life, body, will, consciousness,
bliss are all luminous, awake, instinct with divine knowledge.
This is indeed the process of Purusha-Prakriti everywhere; it is
the key-movement of all the hierarchy and graded harmonies of
manifested existence.
In the mental being mind-sense or intelligence is the original
and dominant principle. The mental being in the mind-world
where he is native is in his central and determining nature in¬
telligence; he is a centre of intelligence, a massed movement of
intelligence, a receptive and radiating action of intelligence. He
has the intelligent sense of his own existence, the intelligent sense
of other existence than his own, the intelligent sense of his own
nature and activities and the activities of others, the intelligent
sense of the nature of things and persons and their relations with
himself and each other. That makes up his experience of exis¬
tence. He has no other knowledge of existence, no knowledge of
life and matter except as they make themselves sensible to him
and capable of being seized by his mental intelligence; what he
does not sense and conceive, is to him practically non-existent,
or at least alien to his world and his nature.
Man is in his principle a mental being, but not one living
in a mind world, but in a dominantly physical existence; his is
The Conditions of Attainment to the Gnosis
489
a mind cased in Matter and conditioned by Matter. Therefore
he has to start with the action of the physical senses which
are all channels of material contact; he does not start with the
mind-sense. But even so he does not and cannot make free use of
anything conveyed by these physical organs until and unless they
are taken hold of by the mind-sense and turned into stuff and
value of his intelligent being. What is in the lower subhuman
submental world a pranic, a nervous, a dynamic action and
reaction that proceeds very well without any need of transla¬
tion into mind-terms or government by mind, has in him to be
raised and offered to some kind of intelligence. In order to be
characteristically human it has to become first a sense of force,
sense of desire, sense of will, sense of intelligent will-action or
mentally conscious sense of force-action. His lower delight of
being translates itself into a sense of mental or mentalised vital
or physical pleasure and its perversion pain, or into a mental or
mentalised feeling-sensation of liking and disliking, or into an
intelligence of delight and failure of delight, — all phenomena
of the intelligent mind-sense. So too that which is above him
and that which is around him and in which he lives, — God,
the universal being, the cosmic Forces, — are non-existent and
unreal to him until his mind awakes to them and gets, not yet
their true truth, but some idea, observation, inference, imagina¬
tion of things supersensuous, some mental sense of the Infinite,
some intelligent interpreting consciousness of the forces of the
superself above and around him.
All changes when we pass from mind to gnosis; for there a
direct inherent knowledge is the central principle. The gnostic
[vijhdnamaya) being is in its character a truth-consciousness, a
centre and circumference of the truth- vision of things, a massed
movement or subtle body of gnosis. Its action is a self-fulfilling
and radiating action of the truth-power of things according to
the inner law of their deepest truest self and nature. This truth
of things at which we must arrive before we can enter into the
gnosis, — for in that all exists and from that all originates on the
gnostic plane, — is, first of all, a truth of unity, of oneness, but
of unity originating diversity, unity in multiplicity and still unity
490
The Yoga of Integral Knowledge
always, an indefeasible oneness. State of gnosis, the condition
of vijhdnamaya being, is impossible without an ample and close
self-identification of ourselves with all existence and with all
existences, a universal pervasiveness, a universal comprehension
or containing, a certain all-in-allness. The gnostic Purusha has
normally the consciousness of itself as infinite, normally too the
consciousness of containing the world in itself and exceeding it;
it is not like the divided mental being normally bound to a con¬
sciousness that feels itself contained in the world and a part of it.
It follows that a deliverance from the limiting and imprisoning
ego is the first elementary step towards the being of the gnosis;
for so long as we live in the ego, it is idle to hope for this higher
reality, this vast self-consciousness, this true self-knowledge. The
least reversion to ego-thought, ego-action, ego-will brings back
the consciousness tumbling out of such gnostic Truth as it has
attained into the falsehoods of the divided mind-nature. A secure
universality of being is the very basis of this luminous higher
consciousness. Abandoning all rigid separateness (but getting
instead a certain transcendent overlook or independence) we
have to feel ourselves one with all things and beings, to identify
ourselves with them, to become aware of them as ourselves, to
feel their being as our own, to admit their consciousness as part
of ours, to contact their energy as intimate to our energy, to learn
how to be one self with all. That oneness is not indeed all that is
needed, but it is a first condition and without it there is no gnosis.
This universality is impossible to achieve in its completeness
so long as we continue to feel ourselves, as we now feel, a con¬
sciousness lodged in an individual mind, life and body. There has
to be a certain elevation of the Purusha out of the physical and
even out of the mental into the vijhdnamaya body. No longer
can the brain nor its corresponding mental “lotus” remain the
centre of our thinking, no longer the heart nor its corresponding
“lotus” the originating centre of our emotional and sensational
being. The conscious centre of our being, our thought, our will
and action, even the original force of our sensations and emo¬
tions rise out of the body and mind and take a free station above
them. No longer have we the sensation of living in the body, but
The Conditions of Attainment to the Gnosis
491
No longer have we the sensation of living in the body, but
The Conditions of Attainment to the Gnosis
491
are above it as its lord, possessor or Ishwara and at the same
time encompass it with a wider consciousness than that of the
imprisoned physical sense. Now we come to realise with a very
living force of reality, normal and continuous, what the sages
meant when they spoke of the soul carrying the body or when
they said that the soul is not in the body, but the body in the soul.
It is from above the body and not from the brain that we shall
ideate and will; the brain-action will become only a response
and movement of the physical machinery to the shock of the
thought-force and will-force from above. All will be originated
from above; from above, all that corresponds in gnosis to our
present mental activity takes place. ^
But this centre and this action are free, not bound, not
dependent on the physical machine, not clamped to a narrow
ego-sense. It is not involved in body; it is not shut up in a
separated individuality feeling out for clumsy contacts with the
world outside or groping inward for its own deeper spirit. For in
this great transformation we begin to have a consciousness not
shut up in a generating box, but diffused freely and extending
self-existently everywhere; there is or may be a centre, but it
is a convenience for individual action, not rigid, not constitu¬
tive or separative. The very nature of our conscious activities is
henceforth universal; one with those of the universal being, it
proceeds from universality to a supple and variable individual¬
isation. It has become the awareness of an infinite being who
acts always universally though with emphasis on an individual
formation of its energies. But this emphasis is differential rather
than separative, and this formation is no longer what we now
understand by individuality; there is no longer a petty limited
constructed person shut up in the formula of his own mecha¬
nism. This state of consciousness is so abnormal to our present
mode of being that to the rational man who does not possess it
it may seem impossible or even a state of alienation; but once
^ Many, if not all, of these conditions of the gnostic change can and indeed have
to be attained long before we reach the gnosis, — but imperfectly at first as if by a
reflection, — in higher mind itself, and more completely in what we may call an overmind
consciousness between mentality and gnosis.
492
The Yoga of Integral Knowledge
492
The Yoga of Integral Knowledge
possessed it vindicates itself even to the mental intelligence by its
greater calm, freedom, light, power, effectivity of will, verifiable
truth of ideation and feeling. For this condition begins already
on the higher levels of liberated mind, and can therefore be
partly sensed and understood by mind-intelligence, but it rises
to perfect self-possession only when it leaves behind the mental
levels, only in the supramental gnosis.
In this state of consciousness the infinite becomes to us the
primal, the actual reality, the one thing immediately and sensibly
true. It becomes impossible for us to think of or realise the
finite apart from our fundamental sense of the infinite, in which
alone the finite can live, can form itself, can have any reality
or duration. So long as this finite mind and body are to our
consciousness the first fact of our existence and the foundation
of all our thinking, feeling and willing and so long as things
finite are the normal reality from which we can rise occasion¬
ally, or even frequently, to an idea and sense of the infinite,
we are still very far away from the gnosis. In the plane of the
gnosis the infinite is at once our normal consciousness of being,
its first fact, our sensible substance. It is very concretely to us
there the foundation from which everything finite forms itself
and its boundless incalculable forces are the origination of all
our thought, will and delight. But this infinite is not only an
infinite of pervasion or of extension in which everything forms
and happens. Behind that immeasurable extension the gnostic
consciousness is always aware of a spaceless inner infinite. It is
through this double infinite that we shall arrive at the essential
being of Sachchidananda, the highest self of our own being and
the totality of our cosmic existence. There is opened to us an
illimitable existence which we feel as if it were an infinity above
us to which we attempt to rise and an infinity around us into
which we strive to dissolve our separate existence. Afterwards
we widen into it and rise into it; we break out of the ego into
its largeness and are that for ever. If this liberation is achieved,
its power can take, if so we will, increasing possession of our
lower being also until even our lowest and perversest activities
are refashioned into the truth of the Vijnana.
The Conditions of Attainment to the Gnosis
493
If this liberation is achieved,
its power can take, if so we will, increasing possession of our
lower being also until even our lowest and perversest activities
are refashioned into the truth of the Vijnana.
The Conditions of Attainment to the Gnosis
493
This is the basis, this sense of the infinite and possession by
the infinite, and only when it is achieved, can we progress to¬
wards some normality of the supramental ideation, perception,
sense, identity, awareness. For even this sense of the infinite is
only a first foundation and much more has to be done before the
consciousness can become dynamically gnostic. The supramen¬
tal knowledge is the play of a supreme light; there are many other
lights, other levels of knowledge higher than human mind which
can open in us and receive or reflect something of that effulgence
even before we rise into the gnosis. But to command or wholly
possess it we must first enter into and become the being of the
supreme light, our consciousness must be transformed into that
consciousness, its principle and power of self-awareness and all¬
awareness by identity must be the very stuff of our existence. For
our means and ways of knowledge and action must necessarily
be according to the nature of our consciousness and it is the
consciousness that must radically change if we are to command
and not only be occasionally visited by that higher power of
knowledge. But it is not confined to a higher thought or the
action of a sort of divine reason. It takes up all our present
means of knowledge immensely extended, active and effective
where they are now debarred, blind, infructuous, and turns them
into a high and intense perceptive activity of the Vijnana. Thus
it takes up our sense action and illumines it even in its ordinary
field so that we get a true sense of things. But also it enables the
mind-sense to have a direct perception of the inner as well as the
outer phenomenon, to feel and receive or perceive, for instance,
the thoughts, feelings, sensations, the nervous reactions of the
object on which it is turned.^ It uses the subtle senses as well
as the physical and saves them from their errors. It gives us the
knowledge, the experience of planes of existence other than the
material to which our ordinary mentality is ignorantly attached
and it enlarges the world for us. It transforms similarly the
2 •
It gives us the
knowledge, the experience of planes of existence other than the
material to which our ordinary mentality is ignorantly attached
and it enlarges the world for us. It transforms similarly the
2 •
This power, says Patanjali, comes by “samyama” on an object. That is for the
mentality, in the gnosis there is no need of samyama. For this kind of perception is the
natural action of the Vijnana.
494
The Yoga of Integral Knowledge
sensations and gives them their full intensity as well as their full
holding-power; for in our normal mentality the full intensity
is impossible because the power to hold and sustain vibrations
beyond a certain point is denied to it, mind and body would
both break under the shock or the prolonged strain. It takes
up too the element of knowledge in our feelings and emotions,
— for our feelings too contain a power of knowledge and a
power of effectuation which we do not recognise and do not
properly develop, — and delivers them at the same time from
their limitations and from their errors and perversions. For in
all things the gnosis is the Truth, the Right, the highest Law,
devanam adabdhani vratdni.
For in
all things the gnosis is the Truth, the Right, the highest Law,
devanam adabdhani vratdni.
Knowledge and Force or Will — for all conscious force is
will — are the twin sides of the action of consciousness. In our
mentality they are divided. The idea comes first, the will comes
stumbling after it or rebels against it or is used as its imperfect
tool with imperfect results; or else the will starts up first with
a blind or half-seeing idea in it and works out something in
confusion of which we get the right understanding afterwards.
There is no oneness, no full understanding between these powers
in us; or else there is no perfect correspondence of initiation
with effectuation. Nor is the individual will in harmony with
the universal; it tries to reach beyond it or falls short of it or
deviates from and strives against it. It knows not the times and
seasons of the Truth, nor its degrees and measures. The Vijnana
takes up the will and puts it first into harmony and then into
oneness with the truth of the supramental knowledge. In this
knowledge the idea in the individual is one with the idea in
the universal, because both are brought back to the truth of
the supreme Knowledge and the transcendent Will. The gnosis
takes up not only our intelligent will, but our wishes, desires,
even what we call the lower desires, the instincts, the impulses,
the reachings out of sense and sensation and it transforms them.
They cease to be wishes and desires, because they cease first to be
personal and then cease to be that struggling after the ungrasped
which we mean by craving and desire. No longer blind or half¬
blind reachings out of the instinctive or intelligent mentality, they
The Conditions of Attainment to the Gnosis
495
are transformed into a various action of the Truth-will; and that
will acts with an inherent knowledge of the right measures of its
decreed action and therefore with an effectivity unknown to our
mental willing. Therefore too in the action of the vijhdnamaya
will there is no place for sin; for all sin is an error of the will, a
desire and act of the Ignorance.
Therefore too in the action of the vijhdnamaya
will there is no place for sin; for all sin is an error of the will, a
desire and act of the Ignorance.
When desire ceases entirely, grief and all inner suffering also
cease. The Vijnana takes up not only our parts of knowledge
and will, but our parts of affection and delight and changes
them into action of the divine Ananda. For if knowledge and
force are the twin sides or powers of the action of conscious¬
ness, delight, Ananda — which is something higher than what
we call pleasure — is the very stuff of consciousness and the
natural result of the interaction of knowledge and will, force and
self-awareness. Both pleasure and pain, both joy and grief are
deformations caused by the disturbance of harmony between our
consciousness and the force it applies, between our knowledge
and will, a breaking up of their oneness by a descent to a lower
plane in which they are limited, divided in themselves, restrained
from their full and proper action, at odds with other-force,
other-consciousness, other-knowledge, other-will. The Vijnana
sets this to rights by the power of its truth and a wholesale
restoration to oneness and harmony, to the Right and the highest
Law. It takes up all our emotions and turns them into various
forms of love and delight, even our hatreds, repulsions, causes
of suffering. It finds out or reveals the meaning they missed
and by missing it became the perversions they are; it restores
our whole nature to the eternal Good. It deals similarly with
our perceptions and sensations and reveals all the delight that
they seek, but in its truth, not in any perversion and wrong
seeking and wrong reception; it teaches even our lower impulses
to lay hold on the Divine and Infinite in the appearances after
which they run. All this is done not in the values of the lower
being, but by a lifting up of the mental, vital, material into the
inalienable purity, the natural intensity, the continual ecstasy,
one yet manifold, of the divine Ananda.
Thus the being of Vijnana is in all its activities a play of
496
The Yoga of Integral Knowledge
Thus the being of Vijnana is in all its activities a play of
496
The Yoga of Integral Knowledge
perfected knowledge-power, will-power, delight-power, raised
to a higher than the mental, vital and bodily level. All-pervasive,
universalised, freed from egoistic personality and individuality, it
is the play of a higher Self, a higher consciousness and therefore
a higher force and higher delight of being. All that acts in the
Vijnana in the purity, in the right, in the truth of the superior or
divine Prakriti. Its powers may often seem to be what are called
in ordinary Yogic parlance siddhis, by the Europeans occult
powers, shunned and dreaded by devotees and by many Yogins
as snares, stumbling-blocks, diversions from the true seeking
after the Divine. But they have that character and are dangerous
here because they are sought in the lower being, abnormally,
by the ego for an egoistic satisfaction. In the Vijnana they are
neither occult nor siddhis, but the open, unforced and normal
play of its nature. The Vijnana is the Truth-power and Truth-
action of the divine Being in its divine identities, and, when this
acts through the individual lifted to the gnostic plane, it fulfils
itself unperverted, without fault or egoistic reaction, without
diversion from the possession of the Divine. There the individual
is no longer the ego, but the free Jiva domiciled in the higher
divine nature of which he is a portion, para prakrtir jwabhutd,
the nature of the supreme and universal Self seen indeed in the
play of multiple individuality but without the veil of ignorance,
with self-knowledge, in its multiple oneness, in the truth of its
divine Shakti.
In the Vijnana the right relation and action of Purusha and
Prakriti are found, because there they become unified and the
Divine is no longer veiled in Maya. All is his action. The Jiva no
longer says “I think, I act, I desire, I feel”; he does not even say
like the sadhaka striving after unity but before he has reached
it, “As appointed by Thee seated in my heart, I act.” For the
heart, the centre of the mental consciousness is no longer the
centre of origination but only a blissful channel. He is rather
aware of the Divine seated above, lord of all, adhisthita, as well
as acting within him. And seated himself in that higher being,
parardhe, paramasydm pardvati, he can say truly and boldly,
“God himself by his Prakriti knows, acts, loves, takes delight
The Conditions of Attainment to the Gnosis
497
And seated himself in that higher being,
parardhe, paramasydm pardvati, he can say truly and boldly,
“God himself by his Prakriti knows, acts, loves, takes delight
The Conditions of Attainment to the Gnosis
497
through my individuality and its figures and fulfils there in its
higher and divine measures the multiple lild which the Infinite
for ever plays in the universality which is himself for ever.”
Chapter XXIV
Gnosis and Ananda
The ascent to the gnosis, the possession of something
of the gnostic consciousness must elevate the soul of man
and sublimate his life in the world into a glory of light
and power and bliss and infinity that can seem in comparison
with the lame action and limited realisations of our present
mental and physical existence the very status and dynamis of a
perfection final and absolute. And it is a true perfection, such as
nothing before it has yet been in the ascension of the spirit. Eor
even the highest spiritual realisation on the plane of mentality
has in it something top-heavy, one-sided and exclusive; even the
widest mental spirituality is not wide enough and it is marred
too by its imperfect power of self-expression in life. And yet
in comparison with what is beyond it, this too, this first gnostic
splendour is only a bright passage to a more perfect perfection. It
is the secure and shining step from which we can happily mount
still upwards into the absolute infinities which are the origin and
the goal of the incarnating spirit. In this farther ascension the
gnosis does not disappear, but reaches rather its own supreme
Light out of which it has descended to mediate between mind
and the supreme Infinite.
The Upanishad tells us that after the knowledge-self above
the mental is possessed and all the lower selves have been drawn
up into it, there is another and last step of all still left to us —
though one might ask, is it eternally the last or only the last
practically conceivable or at all necessary for us now? — to take
up our gnostic existence into the Bliss-Self and there complete the
spiritual self-discovery of the divine Infinite. Ananda, a supreme
Bliss eternal, far other and higher in its character than the highest
human joy or pleasure, is the essential and original nature of the
spirit. In Ananda our spirit will find its true self, in Ananda
its essential consciousness, in Ananda the absolute power of its
Gnosis and Ananda
499
In Ananda our spirit will find its true self, in Ananda
its essential consciousness, in Ananda the absolute power of its
Gnosis and Ananda
499
existence. The embodied soul’s entry into this highest absolute,
unlimited, unconditional bliss of the spirit is the infinite libera¬
tion and the infinite perfection. It is true that something of this
bliss can be enjoyed by reflection, by a qualified descent even
on the lower planes where the Purusha plays with his modified
and qualified Nature. There can be the experience of a spiritual
and boundless Ananda on the plane of matter, on the plane of
life, on the plane of mind as well as on the gnostic truth-plane
of knowledge and above it. And the Yogin who enters into these
lesser realisations, may find them so complete and compelling
that he will imagine there is nothing greater, nothing beyond
it. For each of the divine principles contains in itself the whole
potentiality of all the other six notes of our being; each plane
of Nature can have its own perfection of these notes under its
own conditions. But the integral perfection can come only by a
mounting ascent of the lowest into the highest and an incessant
descent of the highest into the lowest till all becomes one at once
solid block and plastic sea-stuff of the Truth infinite and eternal.
The very physical consciousness in man, the annamaya
purusa, can without this supreme ascent and integral descent
yet reflect and enter into the self of Sachchidananda. It can do
it either by a reflection of the Soul in physical Nature, its bliss,
power and infinity secret but still present here, or by losing its
separate sense of substance and existence in the Self within or
without it. The result is a glorified sleep of the physical mind
in which the physical being forgets itself in a kind of conscious
Nirvana or else moves about like a thing inert in the hands of
Nature, jadavat, like a leaf in the wind, or otherwise a state
of pure happy and free irresponsibility of action, bdlavat, a
divine childhood. But this comes without the higher glories of
knowledge and delight which belong to the same status upon a
more exalted level. It is an inert realisation of Sachchidananda
in which there is neither any mastery of the Prakriti by the
Purusha nor any sublimation of Nature into her own supreme
power, the infinite glories of the Para Shakti. Yet these two, this
mastery and this sublimation, are the two gates of perfection,
the splendid doors into the supreme Eternal.
500
The Yoga of Integral Knowledge
Yet these two, this
mastery and this sublimation, are the two gates of perfection,
the splendid doors into the supreme Eternal.
500
The Yoga of Integral Knowledge
The life soul and life consciousness in man, prdnamaya
purusa, can in the same way directly reflect and enter into the self
of Sachchidananda by a large and splendid and blissful reflection
of the Soul in universal Life or by losing its separate sense of life
and existence in the vast Self within or without it. The result is
either a profound state of sheer self-oblivion or else an action
driven irresponsibly by the life nature, an exalted enthusiasm
of self-abandonment to the great world-energy in its vitalistic
dance. The outer being lives in a God-possessed frenzy careless
of itself and the world, unmattavat, or with an entire disregard
whether of the conventions and proprieties of fitting human
action or of the harmony and rhythms of a greater Truth. It acts
as the unbound vital being, pisdcavat, the divine maniac or else
the divine demoniac. Here too there is no mastery or supreme
sublimation of nature. There is only a joyful static possession
by the Self within us and an unregulated dynamic possession by
the physical and the vital Nature without us.
The mind soul and mind consciousness in man, manomaya
purusa, can in the same direct way reflect and enter into Sach¬
chidananda by a reflection of the Soul as it mirrors itself in the
nature of pure universal mind luminous, unwalled, happy, plas¬
tic, illimitable, or by absorption in the vast free unconditioned
uncentred Self within it and without it. The result is either the im¬
mobile cessation of all mind and action or a desire-free unbound
action watched by the unparticipating inner Witness. The mental
being becomes the eremite soul alone in the world and careless
of all human ties or the saint soul that lives in a rapturous God-
nearness or felicitous identity and in joyful relations of pure love
and ecstasy towards all creatures. The mental being may even
realise the Self in all three planes together. Then he is all these
things alternately, successively or at once. Or he may transform
the lower forms into manifestations of the higher state; he may
draw upward the childlikeness or the inert irresponsibility of the
free physical mind or the free vital mind’s divine madness and
carelessness of all rules, proprieties, harmonies and colour or
disguise with them the ecstasy of the saint or the solitary liberty
of the wandering eremite. Here again there is no mastery, no
Gnosis and Ananda
501
Here again there is no mastery, no
Gnosis and Ananda
501
sublimation of the Nature by the soul in the world, but a double
possession, by the freedom and delight of the mental-spiritual in¬
finite within and without by the happy, natural and unregulated
play of the mind-Nature. But since the mental being is capable of
receiving the gnosis in a way in which the life soul and physical
soul cannot receive it, since he can accept it with knowledge
though only the limited knowledge of a mental response, he
may to a certain extent govern by its light his outer action or, if
not that, at least bathe and purify in it his will and his thinkings.
But Mind can arrive only at a compromise between the infinite
within and the finite nature without; it cannot pour the infinity
of the inner being’s knowledge and power and bliss with any
sense of fullness into its external action which remains always
inadequate. Still it is content and free because it is the Lord
within who takes up the responsibility of the action adequate or
inadequate, assumes its guidance and fixes its consequence.
But the gnostic soul, the vijndnamaya purusa, is the first
to participate not only in the freedom, but in the power and
sovereignty of the Eternal. For it receives the fullness, it has the
sense of plenitude of the Godhead in its action; it shares the
free, splendid and royal march of the Infinite, is a vessel of the
original knowledge, the immaculate power, the inviolable bliss,
transmutes all life into the eternal Light and the eternal Fire
and the eternal Wine of the nectar. It possesses the infinite of
the Self and it possesses the infinite of Nature. It does not so
much lose as find its nature self in the self of the Infinite. On the
other planes to which the mental being has easier access, man
finds God in himself and himself in God; he becomes divine
in essence rather than in person or nature. In the gnosis, even
the mentalised gnosis, the Divine Eternal possesses, changes and
stamps the human symbol, envelops and partly finds himself in
the person and nature. The mental being at most receives or
reflects that which is true, divine and eternal; the gnostic soul
reaches a true identity, possesses the spirit and power of the
truth-Nature. In the gnosis the dualism of Purusha and Prakriti,
Soul and Nature, two separate powers complementary to each
other, the great truth of the Sankhyas founded on the practical
502
The Yoga of Integral Knowledge
In the gnosis the dualism of Purusha and Prakriti,
Soul and Nature, two separate powers complementary to each
other, the great truth of the Sankhyas founded on the practical
502
The Yoga of Integral Knowledge
truth of our present natural existence, disappears in their biune
entity, the dynamic mystery of the occult Supreme. The Truth¬
being is the Hara-Gauri^ of the Indian iconological symbol; it is
the double Power masculine-feminine born from and supported
by the supreme Shakti of the Supreme.
Therefore the truth-soul does not arrive at self-oblivion in
the Infinite; it comes to an eternal self-possession in the Infinite.
Its action is not irregular; it is a perfect control in an infinite free¬
dom. In the lower planes the soul is naturally subject to Nature
and the regulating principle is found in the lower nature; all
regulation there depends on the acceptance of a strict subjection
to the law of the finite. If the soul on these planes withdraws
from that law into the liberty of the infinite, it loses its natural
centre and becomes centreless in a cosmic infinitude; it forfeits
the living harmonic principle by which its external being was
till then regulated and it finds no other. The personal nature
or what is left of it merely continues mechanically for a while
its past movements, or it dances in the gusts and falls of the
universal energy that acts on the individual system rather than
in that system, or it strays in the wild steps of an irresponsible
ecstasy, or it remains inert and abandoned by the breath of the
Spirit that was within it. If on the other hand the soul moves
in its impulse of freedom towards the discovery of another and
divine centre of control through which the Infinite can con¬
sciously govern its own action in the individual, it is moving
towards the gnosis where that centre pre-exists, the centre of an
eternal harmony and order. It is when he ascends above mind
and life to the gnosis that the Purusha becomes the master of
his own nature because subject only to supreme Nature. For
there force or will is the exact counterpart, the perfect dynamis
of the divine knowledge. And that knowledge is not merely the
eye of the Witness, it is the immanent and compelling gaze of
the Ishwara. Its luminous governing power, a power not to be
hedged in or denied, imposes its self-expressive force on all the
^ The biune body of the Lord and his Spouse, Ishwara and Shakti, the right half male,
the left half female.
Gnosis and Ananda
503
Its luminous governing power, a power not to be
hedged in or denied, imposes its self-expressive force on all the
^ The biune body of the Lord and his Spouse, Ishwara and Shakti, the right half male,
the left half female.
Gnosis and Ananda
503
action and makes true and radiant and authentic and inevitable
every movement and impulse.
The gnosis does not reject the realisations of the lower
planes; for it is not an annihilation or extinction, not a Nirvana
but a sublime fulfilment of our manifested Nature. It possesses
the first realisations under its own conditions after it has trans¬
formed them and made them elements of a divine order. The
gnostic soul is the child, but the king-child;^ here is the royal and
eternal childhood whose toys are the worlds and all universal
Nature is the miraculous garden of the play that tires never. The
gnosis takes up the condition of divine inertia; but this is no
longer the inertia of the subject soul driven by Nature like a
fallen leaf in the breath of the Lord. It is the happy passivity
bearing an unimaginable intensity of action and Ananda of the
Nature-Soul at once driven by the bliss of the mastering Purusha
and aware of herself as the supreme Shakti above and around
him and mastering and carrying him blissfully on her bosom
for ever. This biune being of Purusha-Prakriti is as if a flaming
Sun and body of divine Light self-carried in its orbit by its own
inner consciousness and power at one with the universal, at one
with a supreme Transcendence. Its madness is a wise madness
of Ananda, the incalculable ecstasy of a supreme consciousness
and power vibrating with an infinite sense of freedom and in¬
tensity in its divine life-movements. Its action is supra-rational
and therefore to the rational mind which has not the key it
seems a colossal madness. And yet this that seems madness is
a wisdom in action that only baffles the mind by the liberty
and richness of its contents and the infinite complexity in fun¬
damental simplicity of its motions, it is the very method of the
Lord of the worlds, a thing no intellectual interpretation can
fathom, — a dance this also, a whirl of mighty energies, but the
Master of the dance holds the hands of His energies and keeps
them to the rhythmic order, the self-traced harmonic circles of
his Rasa-lila. The gnostic soul is not bound any more than the
divine demoniac by the petty conventions and proprieties of the
So Heraclitus, “The kingdom is of the child.”
2
504
The Yoga of Integral Knowledge
The gnostic soul is not bound any more than the
divine demoniac by the petty conventions and proprieties of the
So Heraclitus, “The kingdom is of the child.”
2
504
The Yoga of Integral Knowledge
normal human life or the narrow rules through which it makes
some shift to accommodate itself with the perplexing dualities of
the lower nature and tries to guide its steps among the seeming
contradictions of the world, to avoid its numberless stumbling-
blocks and to foot with gingerly care around its dangers and
pitfalls. The gnostic supramental life is abnormal to us because
it is free to all the hardihoods and audacious delights of a soul
dealing fearlessly and even violently with Nature, but yet is it
the very normality of the infinite and all governed by the law of
the Truth in its exact unerring process. It obeys the law of a self-
possessed Knowledge, Love, Delight in an innumerable Oneness.
It seems abnormal only because its rhythm is not measurable by
the faltering beats of the mind, but yet it steps in a wonderful
and transcendent measure.
And what then is the necessity of a still higher step and
what difference is there between the soul in gnosis and the soul
in the Bliss? There is no essential difference, but yet a difference,
because there is a transfer to another consciousness and a certain
reversal in position, — for at each step of the ascent from Matter
to the highest Existence there is a reversal of consciousness. The
soul no longer looks up to something beyond it, but is in it
and from it looks down on all that it was before. On all planes
indeed the Ananda can be discovered, because everywhere it
exists and is the same. Even there is a repetition of the Ananda
plane in each lower world of consciousness. But in the lower
planes not only is it reached by a sort of dissolution into it of
the pure mind or the life-sense or the physical awareness, but it
is, as it were, itself diluted by the dissolved form of mind, life
or matter, held in the dilution and turned into a poor thinness
wonderful to the lower consciousness but not comparable to
its true intensities. The gnosis has on the contrary a dense light
of essential consciousness^ in which the intense fullness of the
Ananda can be. And when the form of gnosis is dissolved into the
Ananda, it is not annulled altogether, but undergoes a natural
change by which the soul is carried up into its last and absolute
cidghana.
Gnosis and Ananda
505
And when the form of gnosis is dissolved into the
Ananda, it is not annulled altogether, but undergoes a natural
change by which the soul is carried up into its last and absolute
cidghana.
Gnosis and Ananda
505
freedom; for it casts itself into the absolute existence of the spirit
and is enlarged into its own entirely self-existent bliss infinitudes.
The gnosis has the infinite and absolute as the conscious source,
accompaniment, condition, standard, field and atmosphere of all
its activities, it possesses it as its base, fount, constituent mate¬
rial, indwelling and inspiring Presence; but in its action it seems
to stand out from it as its operation, as the rhythmical working
of its activities, as a divine Maya"* or Wisdom-Formation of
the Eternal. Gnosis is the divine Knowledge-Will of the divine
Consciousness-Force; it is harmonic consciousness and action of
Prakriti-Purusha full of the delight of the divine existence. In the
Ananda the knowledge goes back from these willed harmonies
into pure self-consciousness, the will dissolves into pure tran¬
scendent force and both are taken up into the pure delight of the
Infinite. The basis of the gnostic existence is the self-stuff and
self-form of the Ananda.
This in the ascension takes place because there is here com¬
pleted the transition to the absolute unity of which the gnosis
is the decisive step, but not the final resting-place. In the gnosis
the soul is aware of its infinity and lives in it, yet it lives also
in a working centre for the individual play of the Infinite. It
realises its identity with all existences, but it keeps a distinction
without difference by which it can have also the contact with
them in a certain diverseness. This is that distinction for the
joy of contact which in the mind becomes not only difference,
but in its self-experience division from our other selves, in its
spiritual being a sense of loss of self one with us in others and
a reaching after the felicity it has forfeited, in life a compromise
between egoistic self-absorption and a blind seeking out for the
lost oneness. In its infinite consciousness, the gnostic soul creates
a sort of voluntary limitation for its own wisdom-purposes; it
has even its particular luminous aura of being in which it moves,
although beyond that it enters into all things and identifies itself
with all being and all existences. In the Ananda all is reversed,
In the Ananda all is reversed,
^ Not in the sense of illusion, but in the original Vedic significance of the word Maya.
All in the gnostic existence is real, spiritually concrete, eternally verifiable.
506
The Yoga of Integral Knowledge
the centre disappears. In the bliss nature there is no centre, nor
any voluntary or imposed circumference, but all is, all are one
equal being, one identical spirit. The bliss soul finds and feels
itself everywhere; it has no mansion, is aniketa, or has the all for
its mansion, or, if it likes, it has all things for its many mansions
open to each other for ever. All other selves are entirely its own
selves, in action as well as in essence. The joy of contact in
diverse oneness becomes altogether the joy of absolute identity
in innumerable oneness. Existence is no longer formulated in
the terms of the Knowledge, because the known and knowledge
and the knower are wholly one self here and, since all possesses
all in an intimate identity beyond the closest closeness, there is
no need of what we call knowledge. All the consciousness is of
the bliss of the Infinite, all power is power of the bliss of the
Infinite, all forms and activities are forms and activities of the
bliss of the Infinite. In this absolute truth of its being the eternal
soul of Ananda lives, here deformed by contrary phenomena,
there brought back and transfigured into their reality.
The soul lives: it is not abolished, it is not lost in a featureless
Indefinite. For on every plane of our existence the same principle
holds; the soul may fall asleep in a trance of self-absorption,
dwell in an ineffable intensity of God-possession, live in the
highest glory of its own plane, — the Anandaloka, Brahmaloka,
Vaikuntha, Goloka of various Indian systems, — even turn upon
the lower worlds to fill them with its own light and power
and beatitude. In the eternal worlds and more and more in
all worlds above Mind these states exist in each other. For they
are not separate; they are coexistent, even coincident powers of
the consciousness of the Absolute. The Divine on the Ananda
plane is not incapable of a world-play or self-debarred from
any expression of its glories. On the contrary, as the Upanishad
insists, the Ananda is the true creative principle. For all takes
birth from this divine Bliss;^ all is pre-existent in it as an absolute
truth of existence which the Vijnana brings out and subjects to
^ Therefore the world of the Ananda is called the Janaloka, in the double sense of birth
and delight.
Gnosis and Ananda
507
Gnosis and Ananda
507
voluntary limitation by the Idea and the law of the Idea. In the
Ananda all law ceases and there is an absolute freedom without
binding term or limit. It is superior to all principles and in one
and the same motion the enjoyer of all principles; it is free from
all gunas and the enjoyer of its own infinite gunas; it is above
all forms and the builder and enjoyer of all its self-forms and
figures. This unimaginable completeness is what the spirit is, the
spirit transcendent and universal, and to be one in bliss with
the transcendent and universal spirit is for the soul too to be
that and nothing less. Necessarily, since there is on this plane
the absolute and the play of absolutes, it is ineffable by any of
the conceptions of our mind or by signs of the phenomenal or
ideal realities of which mind-conceptions are the figures in our
intelligence. These realities are themselves indeed only relative
symbols of those ineffable absolutes. The symbol, the expressive
reality, may give an idea, a perception, sense, vision, contact
even of the thing itself to us, but at last we get beyond it to
the thing it symbolises, transcend idea, vision, contact, pierce
through the ideal and pass to the real realities, the identical, the
supreme, the timeless and eternal, the infinitely infinite.
Our first absorbing impulse when we become inwardly
aware of something entirely beyond what we now are and
know and are powerfully attracted to it, is to get away from
the present actuality and dwell in that higher reality altogether.
The extreme form of this attraction when we are drawn to the
supreme Existence and the infinite Ananda is the condemnation
of the lower and the finite as an illusion and an aspiration to
Nirvana in the beyond, — the passion for dissolution, immer¬
sion, extinction in the Spirit. But the real dissolution, the true
nirvana is the release of all that is bindingly characteristic of
the lower into the larger being of the Higher, the conscious
possession of the living symbol by the living Real. We discover
in the end that not only is that higher Reality the cause of all
the rest, not only it embraces and exists in all the rest, but
as more and more we possess it, all this rest is transformed
in our soul-experience into a superior value and becomes the
means of a richer expression of the Real, a more many-sided
508
The Yoga of Integral Knowledge
communion with the Infinite, a larger ascent to the Supreme.
Finally, we get close to the absolute and its supreme values
which are the absolutes of all things. We lose the passion for
release, mumuksutva, which till then actuated us, because we
are now intimately near to that which is ever free, that which
is neither attracted into attachment by what binds us now nor
afraid of what to us seems to be bondage. It is only by the loss of
the bound soul’s exclusive passion for its freedom that there can
come an absolute liberation of our nature. The Divine attracts
the soul of man to him by various lures; all of them are born
of its own relative and imperfect conceptions of bliss; all are
its ways of seeking for the Ananda, but, if clung to till the end,
miss the inexpressible truth of those surpassing felicities. First
in order comes the lure of an earthly reward, a prize of material,
intellectual, ethical or other joy in the terrestrial mind and body.
A second remoter greater version of the same fruitful error is the
hope of a heavenly bliss, far exceeding these earthly rewards; the
conception of heaven rises in altitude and purity till it reaches
the pure idea of the eternal presence of God or an unending
union with the Eternal. And last we get the subtlest of all lures,
an escape from these worldly or heavenly joys and from all
pains and sorrows, effort and trouble and from all phenomenal
things, a Nirvana, a self-dissolution in the Absolute, an Ananda
of cessation and ineffable peace. In the end all these toys of the
mind have to be transcended. The fear of birth and the desire
of escape from birth must entirely fall away from us. For, to
repeat the ancient language, the soul that has realised oneness
has no sorrow or shrinking; the spirit that has entered into the
bliss of the Spirit has nought to fear from anyone or anything
whatsoever. Fear, desire and sorrow are diseases of the mind;
born of its sense of division and limitation, they cease with
the falsehood that begot them. The Ananda is free from these
maladies; it is not the monopoly of the ascetic, it is not born
from the disgust of existence.
The bliss soul is not bound to birth or to non-birth; it is not
driven by desire of the Knowledge or harassed by fear of the
Ignorance. The supreme bliss Soul has already the Knowledge
Gnosis and Ananda
509
The bliss soul is not bound to birth or to non-birth; it is not
driven by desire of the Knowledge or harassed by fear of the
Ignorance. The supreme bliss Soul has already the Knowledge
Gnosis and Ananda
509
and transcends all need of knowledge. Not limited in conscious¬
ness by the form and the act, it can play with the manifestation
without being imbued with the Ignorance. Already it is taking its
part above in the mystery of an eternal manifestation and here,
when the time comes, it will descend into birth without being
the slave of Ignorance chained to the revolutions of the wheel
of Nature. For it knows that the purpose and law of the birth-
series is for the soul in the body to rise from plane to plane and
substitute always the rule of the higher for the rule of the lower
play even down to the material field. The bliss-soul neither dis¬
dains to help that ascent from above nor fears to descend down
the stairs of God into the material birth and there contribute the
power of its own bliss nature to the upward pull of the divine
forces. The time for that marvellous hour of the evolving Time-
Spirit is not yet come. Man, generally, cannot yet ascend to the
bliss nature; he has first to secure himself on the higher mental
altitudes, to ascend from them to the gnosis. Still less can he
bring down all the Bliss-Power into this terrestrial Nature; he
must first cease to be mental man and become superhuman. All
he can do now is to receive something of its power into his soul
in greater or less degree, by a diminishing transmission through
an inferior consciousness; but even that gives him the sense of
an ecstasy and an unsurpassable beatitude.
All
he can do now is to receive something of its power into his soul
in greater or less degree, by a diminishing transmission through
an inferior consciousness; but even that gives him the sense of
an ecstasy and an unsurpassable beatitude.
And what will be the bliss nature when it manifests in a
new supramental race? The fully evolved soul will be one with
all beings in the status and dynamic effects of experience of
a bliss-consciousness intense and illimitable. And since love is
the effective power and soul-symbol of bliss-oneness he will
approach and enter into this oneness by the gate of universal
love, a sublimation of human love at first, a divine love after¬
wards, at its summits a thing of beauty, sweetness and splendour
now to us inconceivable. He will be one in bliss-consciousness
with all the world-play and its powers and happenings and there
will be banished for ever the sorrow and fear, the hunger and
pain of our poor and darkened mental and vital and physical
existence. He will get that power of the bliss-freedom in which
all the conflicting principles of our being shall be unified in their
510
The Yoga of Integral Knowledge
absolute values. All evil shall perforce change itself into good;
the universal beauty of the All-beautiful will take possession
of its fallen kingdoms; every darkness will be converted into a
pregnant glory of light and the discords which the mind cre¬
ates between Truth and Good and Beauty, Power and Love and
Knowledge will disappear on the eternal summit, in the infinite
extensions where they are always one.
The Purusha in mind, life and body is divided from Nature
and in conflict with her. He labours to control and coerce what
he can embody of her by his masculine force and is yet subject
to her afflicting dualities and in fact her plaything from top to
bottom, beginning to end. In the gnosis he is biune with her, finds
as master of his own nature their reconciliation and harmony by
their essential oneness even while he accepts an infinite blissful
subjection, the condition of his mastery and his liberties, to the
Supreme in his sovereign divine Nature. In the tops of the gnosis
and in the Ananda he is one with the Prakriti and no longer solely
biune with her. There is no longer the baffling play of Nature
with the soul in the Ignorance; all is the conscious play of the
soul with itself and all its selves and the Supreme and the divine
Shakti in its own and the infinite bliss nature. This is the supreme
mystery, the highest secret, simple to its own experience, how¬
ever difficult and complex to our mental conceptions and the
effort of our limited intelligence to understand what is beyond
it. In the free infinity of the self-delight of Sachchidananda there
is a play of the divine Child, a rasa Uld of the infinite Lover
and its mystic soul-symbols repeat themselves in characters of
beauty and movements and harmonies of delight in a timeless
forever.
Chapter XXV
The Higher and the
Lower Knowledge
Chapter XXV
The Higher and the
Lower Knowledge
WE HAVE now completed our view of the path of
Knowledge and seen to what it leads. Eirst, the end of
Yoga of Knowledge is God-possession, it is to possess
God and be possessed by him through consciousness, through
identification, through reflection of the divine Reality. But not
merely in some abstraction away from our present existence, but
here also; therefore to possess the Divine in himself, the Divine
in the world, the Divine within, the Divine in all things and all
beings. It is to possess oneness with God and through that to
possess also oneness with the universal, with the cosmos and all
existences; therefore to possess the infinite diversity also in the
oneness, but on the basis of oneness and not on the basis of divi¬
sion. It is to possess God in his personality and his impersonality;
in his purity free from qualities and in his infinite qualities; in
time and beyond time; in his action and in his silence; in the finite
and in the infinite. It is to possess him not only in pure self, but
in all self; not only in self, but in Nature; not only in spirit, but in
supermind, mind, life and body; to possess him with the spirit,
with the mind, with the vital and the physical consciousness; and
it is again for all these to be possessed by him, so that our whole
being is one with him, full of him, governed and driven by him.
It is, since God is oneness, for our physical consciousness to be
one with the soul and the nature of the material universe; for
our life, to be one with all life; for our mind, to be one with the
universal mind; for our spirit, to be identified with the universal
spirit. It is to merge in him in the absolute and find him in all
relations.
Secondly, it is to put on the divine being and the divine
nature. And since God is Sachchidananda, it is to raise our
512
The Yoga of Integral Knowledge
It is to merge in him in the absolute and find him in all
relations.
Secondly, it is to put on the divine being and the divine
nature. And since God is Sachchidananda, it is to raise our
512
The Yoga of Integral Knowledge
being into the divine being, our consciousness into the divine
consciousness, our energy into the divine energy, our delight of
existence into the divine delight of being. And it is not only to
lift ourselves into this higher consciousness, but to widen into
it in all our being, because it is to be found on all the planes of
our existence and in all our members, so that our mental, vital,
physical existence shall become full of the divine nature. Our
intelligent mentality is to become a play of the divine knowledge-
will, our mental soul-life a play of the divine love and delight,
our vitality a play of the divine life, our physical being a mould
of the divine substance. This God-action in us is to be realised by
an opening of ourselves to the divine gnosis and divine Ananda
and, in its fullness, by an ascent into and a permanent dwelling in
the gnosis and the Ananda. For though we live physically on the
material plane and in normal outward-going life the mind and
soul are preoccupied with material existence, this externality of
our being is not a binding limitation. We can raise our internal
consciousness from plane to plane of the relations of Purusha
with Prakriti, and even become, instead of the mental being
dominated by the physical soul and nature, the gnostic being
or the bliss-self and assume the gnostic or the bliss nature. And
by this raising of the inner life we can transform our whole
outward-going existence; instead of a life dominated by matter
we shall then have a life dominated by spirit with all its cir¬
cumstances moulded and determined by the purity of being, the
consciousness infinite even in the finite, the divine energy, the
divine joy and bliss of the spirit.
This is the goal; we have seen also what are the essentials
of the method. But here we have first to consider briefly one
side of the question of method which we have hitherto left un¬
touched. In the system of an integral Yoga the principle must
be that all life is a part of the Yoga; but the knowledge which
we have been describing seems to be not the knowledge of what
is ordinarily understood as life, but of something behind life.
There are two kinds of knowledge, that which seeks to under¬
stand the apparent phenomenon of existence externally, by an
approach from outside, through the intellect, — this is the lower
The Higher and the Lower Knowledge
513
knowledge, the knowledge of the apparent world; secondly, the
knowledge which seeks to know the truth of existence from
within, in its source and reality, by spiritual realisation. Ordi¬
narily, a sharp distinction is drawn between the two, and it is
supposed that when we get to the higher knowledge, the God-
knowledge, then the rest, the world-knowledge, becomes of no
concern to us: but in reality they are two sides of one seeking. All
knowledge is ultimately the knowledge of God, through himself,
through Nature, through her works. Mankind has first to seek
this knowledge through the external life; for until its mentality is
sufficiently developed, spiritual knowledge is not really possible,
and in proportion as it is developed, the possibilities of spiritual
knowledge become richer and fuller.
Science, art, philosophy, ethics, psychology, the knowledge
of man and his past, action itself are means by which we arrive
at the knowledge of the workings of God through Nature and
through life. At first it is the workings of life and forms of
Nature which occupy us, but as we go deeper and deeper and
get a completer view and experience, each of these lines brings us
face to face with God. Science at its limits, even physical Science,
is compelled to perceive in the end the infinite, the universal, the
spirit, the divine intelligence and will in the material universe.
Still more easily must this be the end with the psychic sciences
which deal with the operations of higher and subtler planes
and powers of our being and come into contact with the beings
and the phenomena of the worlds behind which are unseen, not
sensible by our physical organs, but ascertainable by the subtle
mind and senses. Art leads to the same end; the aesthetic human
being intensely preoccupied with Nature through aesthetic emo¬
tion must in the end arrive at spiritual emotion and perceive
not only the infinite life, but the infinite presence within her;
preoccupied with beauty in the life of man he must in the end
come to see the divine, the universal, the spiritual in humanity.
Philosophy dealing with the principles of things must come to
perceive the Principle of all these principles and investigate its
nature, attributes and essential workings. So ethics must eventu¬
ally perceive that the law of good which it seeks is the law of God
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The Yoga of Integral Knowledge
and depends on the being and nature of the Master of the law.
Psychology leads from the study of mind and the soul in living
beings to the perception of the one soul and one mind in all things
and beings. The history and study of man like the history and
study of Nature lead towards the perception of the eternal and
universal Power and Being whose thought and will work out
through the cosmic and human evolution. Action itself forces
us into contact with the divine Power which works through,
uses, overrules our actions. The intellect begins to perceive and
understand, the emotions to feel and desire and revere, the will
to turn itself to the service of the Divine without whom Nature
and man cannot exist or move and by conscious knowledge of
whom alone we can arrive at our highest possibilities.
It is here that Yoga steps in. It begins by using knowledge,
emotion and action for the possession of the Divine. For Yoga
is the conscious and perfect seeking of union with the Divine
towards which all the rest was an ignorant and imperfect moving
and seeking. At first, then. Yoga separates itself from the action
and method of the lower knowledge. For while this lower knowl¬
edge approaches God indirectly from outside and never enters
his secret dwelling-place. Yoga calls us within and approaches
him directly; while that seeks him through the intellect and be¬
comes conscious of him from behind a veil. Yoga seeks him
through realisation, lifts the veil and gets the full vision; where
that only feels the presence and the influence. Yoga enters into
the presence and fills itself with the influence; where that is only
aware of the workings and through them gets some glimpse of
the Reality, Yoga identifies our inner being with the Reality and
sees from that the workings. Therefore the methods of Yoga are
different from the methods of the lower knowledge.
The method of Yoga in knowledge must always be a turning
of the eye inward and, so far as it looks upon outer things, a
penetrating of the surface appearances to get at the one eternal
reality within them. The lower knowledge is preoccupied with
the appearances and workings; it is the first necessity of the
higher to get away from them to the Reality of which they are
the appearances and the Being and Power of conscious existence
The Higher and the Lower Knowledge
515
of which they are the workings. It does this by three movements
each necessary to each other, by each of which the others
become complete, — purification, concentration, identification.
The object of purification is to make the whole mental being
a clear mirror in which the divine reality can be reflected, a
clear vessel and an unobstructing channel into which the divine
presence and through which the divine influence can be poured,
a subtilised stuff which the divine nature can take possession
of, new-shape and use to divine issues. For the mental being at
present reflects only the confusions created by the mental and
physical view of the world, is a channel only for the disorders of
the ignorant lower nature and full of obstructions and impurities
which prevent the higher from acting; therefore the whole shape
of our being is deformed and imperfect, indocile to the highest
influences and turned in its action to ignorant and inferior
utilities. It reflects even the world falsely; it is incapable of
reflecting the Divine.
Concentration is necessary, first, to turn the whole will and
mind from the discursive divagation natural to them, following
a dispersed movement of the thoughts, running after many-
branching desires, led away in the track of the senses and the out¬
ward mental response to phenomena: we have to fix the will and
the thought on the eternal and real behind all, and this demands
an immense effort, a one-pointed concentration. Secondly, it is
necessary in order to break down the veil which is erected by our
ordinary mentality between ourselves and the truth; for outer
knowledge can be picked up by the way, by ordinary attention
and reception, but the inner, hidden and higher truth can only
be seized by an absolute concentration of the mind on its ob¬
ject, an absolute concentration of the will to attain it and, once
attained, to hold it habitually and securely unite oneself with it.
For identification is the condition of complete knowledge and
possession; it is the intense result of a habitual purified reflecting
of the reality and an entire concentration on it; and it is necessary
in order to break down entirely that division and separation of
ourselves from the divine being and the eternal reality which is
the normal condition of our unregenerated ignorant mentality.
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The Yoga of Integral Knowledge
516
The Yoga of Integral Knowledge
None of these things can be done by the methods of the
lower knowledge. It is true that here also they have a preparing
action, but up to a certain point and to a certain degree of
intensity only, and it is where their action ceases that the action
of Yoga takes up our growth into the Divine and finds the means
to complete it. All pursuit of knowledge, if not vitiated by a too
earthward tendency, tends to refine, to subtilise, to purify the
being. In proportion as we become more mental, we attain to a
subtler action of our whole nature which becomes more apt to
reflect and receive higher thoughts, a purer will, a less physical
truth, more inward influences. The power of ethical knowledge
and the ethical habit of thought and will to purify is obvious.
Philosophy not only purifies the reason and predisposes it to the
contact of the universal and the infinite, but tends to stabilise the
nature and create the tranquillity of the sage; and tranquillity is
a sign of increasing self-mastery and purity. The preoccupation
with universal beauty even in its aesthetic forms has an intense
power for refining and subtilising the nature, and at its highest
it is a great force for purification. Even the scientific habit of
mind and the disinterested preoccupation with cosmic law and
truth not only refine the reasoning and observing faculty, but
have, when not counteracted by other tendencies, a steadying,
elevating and purifying influence on the mind and moral nature
which has not been sufficiently noticed.
The concentration of the mind and the training of the will
towards the reception of the truth and living in the truth is
also an evident result, a perpetual necessity of these pursuits;
and at the end or in their highest intensities they may and do
lead first to an intellectual, then to a reflective perception of
the divine Reality which may culminate in a sort of preliminary
identification with it. But all this cannot go beyond a certain
point. The systematic purification of the whole being for an
integral reflection and taking in of the divine reality can only be
done by the special methods of Yoga. Its absolute concentration
has to take the place of the dispersed concentrations of the
lower knowledge; the vague and ineffective identification which
is all the lower knowledge can bring, has to be replaced by
The Higher and the Lower Knowledge
517
the complete, intimate, imperative and living union which Yoga
brings.
Nevertheless, Yoga does not either in its path or in its
attainment exclude and throw away the forms of the lower
knowledge, except when it takes the shape of an extreme as¬
ceticism or a mysticism altogether intolerant of this other divine
mystery of the world-existence. It separates itself from them
by the intensity, largeness and height of its objective and the
specialisation of its methods to suit its aim; but it not only starts
from them, but for a certain part of the way carries them with
it and uses them as auxiliaries. Thus it is evident how largely
ethical thought and practice, — not so much external as internal
conduct, — enter into the preparatory method of Yoga, into its
aim at purity. Again the whole method of Yoga is psycholog¬
ical; it might almost be termed the consummate practice of a
perfect psychological knowledge. The data of philosophy are
the supports from which it begins in the realisation of God
through the principles of his being; only it carries the intelligent
understanding which is all philosophy gives, into an intensity
which carries it beyond thought into vision and beyond under¬
standing into realisation and possession; what philosophy leaves
abstract and remote, it brings into a living nearness and spiritual
concreteness. The aesthetic and emotional mind and aesthetic
forms are used by Yoga as a support for concentration even in
the Yoga of knowledge and are, sublimated, the whole means
of the Yoga of love and delight, as life and action, sublimated,
are the whole means of the Yoga of works. Contemplation of
God in Nature, contemplation and service of God in man and
in the life of man and of the world in its past, present and
future, are equally elements of which the Yoga of knowledge
can make use to complete the realisation of God in all things.
Only, all is directed to the one aim, directed towards God, filled
with the idea of the divine, infinite, universal existence so that
the outward-going, sensuous, pragmatical preoccupation of the
lower knowledge with phenomena and forms is replaced by the
one divine preoccupation. After attainment the same character
remains. The Yogin continues to know and see God in the finite
518
The Yoga of Integral Knowledge
After attainment the same character
remains. The Yogin continues to know and see God in the finite
518
The Yoga of Integral Knowledge
and be a channel of God-consciousness and God-action in the
world; therefore the knowledge of the world and the enlarging
and uplifting of all that appertains to life comes within his scope.
Only, in all he sees God, sees the supreme reality, and his motive
of work is to help mankind towards the knowledge of God
and the possession of the supreme reality. He sees God through
the data of science, God through the conclusions of philosophy,
God through the forms of Beauty and the forms of Good, God
in all the activities of life, God in the past of the world and
its effects, in the present and its tendencies, in the future and
its great progression. Into any or all of these he can bring his
illumined vision and his liberated power of the spirit. The lower
knowledge has been the step from which he has risen to the
higher; the higher illumines for him the lower and makes it part
of itself, even if only its lower fringe and most external radiation.
Chapter XXVI
Samadhi
The lower
knowledge has been the step from which he has risen to the
higher; the higher illumines for him the lower and makes it part
of itself, even if only its lower fringe and most external radiation.
Chapter XXVI
Samadhi
INTIMATELY connected with the aim of the Yoga of Knowl¬
edge which must always be the growth, the ascent or the
withdrawal into a higher or a divine consciousness not now
normal to us, is the importance attached to the phenomenon of
Yogic trance, to Samadhi. It is supposed that there are states of
being which can only be gained in trance; that especially is to be
desired in which all action of awareness is abolished and there is
no consciousness at all except the pure supramental immersion
in immobile, timeless and infinite being. By passing away in this
trance the soul departs into the silence of the highest Nirvana
without possibility of return into any illusory or inferior state
of existence. Samadhi is not so all-important in the Yoga of
devotion, but it still has its place there as the swoon of being
into which the ecstasy of divine love casts the soul. To enter into
it is the supreme step of the ladder of Yogic practice in Rajayoga
and Hathayoga. What then is the nature of Samadhi or the
utility of its trance in an integral Yoga? It is evident that where
our objective includes the possession of the Divine in life, a state
of cessation of life cannot be the last consummating step or the
highest desirable condition: Yogic trance cannot be an aim, as
in so many Yogic systems, but only a means, and a means not of
escape from the waking existence, but to enlarge and raise the
whole seeing, living and active consciousness.
The importance of Samadhi rests upon the truth which mod¬
ern knowledge is rediscovering, but which has never been lost
in Indian psychology, that only a small part whether of world¬
being or of our own being comes into our ken or into our action.
The rest is hidden behind in subliminal reaches of being which
descend into the profoundest depths of the subconscient and rise
to highest peaks of superconscience, or which surround the little
field of our waking self with a wide circumconscient existence
520
The Yoga of Integral Knowledge
of which our mind and sense catch only a few indications. The
old Indian psychology expressed this fact by dividing conscious¬
ness into three provinces, waking state, dream-state, sleep-state,
jdgrat, svapna, susupti; and it supposed in the human being
a waking self, a dream-self, a sleep-self, with the supreme or
absolute self of being, the fourth or Turiya, beyond, of which all
these are derivations for the enjoyment of relative experience in
the world.
If we examine the phraseology of the old books, we shall
find that the waking state is the consciousness of the material
universe which we normally possess in this embodied existence
dominated by the physical mind. The dream-state is a conscious¬
ness corresponding to the subtler life-plane and mind-plane
behind, which to us, even when we get intimations of them,
have not the same concrete reality as the things of the physical
existence. The sleep-state is a consciousness corresponding to
the supramental plane proper to the gnosis, which is beyond
our experience because our causal body or envelope of gnosis is
not developed in us, its faculties not active, and therefore we are
in relation to that plane in a condition of dreamless sleep. The
Turiya beyond is the consciousness of our pure self-existence or
our absolute being with which we have no direct relations at
all, whatever mental reflections we may receive in our dream or
our waking or even, irrecoverably, in our sleep consciousness.
This fourfold scale corresponds to the degrees of the ladder of
being by which we climb back towards the absolute Divine.
Normally therefore we cannot get back from the physical mind
to the higher planes or degrees of consciousness without receding
from the waking state, without going in and away from it and
losing touch with the material world. Hence to those who desire
to have the experience of these higher degrees, trance becomes
a desirable thing, a means of escape from the limitations of the
physical mind and nature.
Samadhi or Yogic trance retires to increasing depths ac¬
cording as it draws farther and farther away from the normal or
waking state and enters into degrees of consciousness less and
less communicable to the waking mind, less and less ready to
Samadhi
521
receive a summons from the waking world. Beyond a certain
point the trance becomes complete and it is then almost or quite
impossible to awaken or call back the soul that has receded into
them; it can only come back by its own will or at most by a
violent shock of physical appeal dangerous to the system owing
to the abrupt upheaval of return. There are said to be supreme
states of trance in which the soul persisting for too long a time
cannot return; for it loses its hold on the cord which binds it to
the consciousness of life, and the body is left, maintained indeed
in its set position, not dead by dissolution, but incapable of
recovering the ensouled life which had inhabited it. Finally, the
Yogin acquires at a certain stage of development the power of
abandoning his body definitively without the ordinary phenom¬
ena of death, by an act of will,^ or by a process of withdrawing
the pranic life-force through the gate of the upward life-current
{uddna), opening for it a way through the mystic brahmarandhra
in the head. By departure from life in the state of Samadhi he
attains directly to that higher status of being to which he aspires.
In the dream-state itself there are an infinite series of depths;
from the lighter recall is easy and the world of the physical senses
is at the doors, though for the moment shut out; in the deeper
it becomes remote and less able to break in upon the inner
absorption, the mind has entered into secure depths of trance.
There is a complete difference between Samadhi and normal
sleep, between the dream-state of Yoga and the physical state of
dream. The latter belongs to the physical mind; in the former the
mind proper and subtle is at work liberated from the immixture
of the physical mentality. The dreams of the physical mind are an
incoherent jumble made up partly of responses to vague touches
from the physical world round which the lower mind-faculties
disconnected from the will and reason, the buddhi, weave a web
of wandering phantasy, partly of disordered associations from
the brain-memory, partly of reflections from the soul travelling
on the mental plane, reflections which are, ordinarily, received
iccha-mrtyu.
1
522
The Yoga of Integral Knowledge
1
522
The Yoga of Integral Knowledge
without intelligence or coordination, wildly distorted in the re¬
ception and mixed up confusedly with the other dream elements,
with brain-memories and fantastic responses to any sensory
touch from the physical world. In the Yogic dream-state, on the
other hand, the mind is in clear possession of itself, though not
of the physical world, works coherently and is able to use either
its ordinary will and intelligence with a concentrated power or
else the higher will and intelligence of the more exalted planes
of mind. It withdraws from experience of the outer world, it
puts its seals upon the physical senses and their doors of com¬
munication with material things; but everything that is proper
to itself, thought, reasoning, reflection, vision, it can continue
to execute with an increased purity and power of sovereign
concentration free from the distractions and unsteadiness of the
waking mind. It can use too its will and produce upon itself or
upon its environment mental, moral and even physical effects
which may continue and have their after consequences on the
waking state subsequent to the cessation of the trance.
To arrive at full possession of the powers of the dream-state,
it is necessary first to exclude the attack of the sights, sounds etc.
of the outer world upon the physical organs. It is quite possible
indeed to be aware in the dream-trance of the outer physical
world through the subtle senses which belong to the subtle body;
one may be aware of them just so far as one chooses and on a
much wider scale than in the waking condition: for the subtle
senses have a far more powerful range than the gross physical
organs, a range which may be made practically unlimited. But
this awareness of the physical world through the subtle senses
is something quite different from our normal awareness of it
through the physical organs; the latter is incompatible with the
settled state of trance, for the pressure of the physical senses
breaks the Samadhi and calls back the mind to live in their
normal field where alone they have power. But the subtle senses
have power both upon their own planes and upon the physical
world, though this is to them more remote than their own world
of being. In Yoga various devices are used to seal up the doors of
the physical sense, some of them physical devices; but the one all-
Samadhi
523
In Yoga various devices are used to seal up the doors of
the physical sense, some of them physical devices; but the one all-
Samadhi
523
sufficient means is a force of concentration by which the mind is
drawn inward to depths where the call of physical things can no
longer easily attain to it. A second necessity is to get rid of the
intervention of physical sleep. The ordinary habit of the mind
when it goes in away from contact with physical things is to fall
into the torpor of sleep or its dreams, and therefore when called
in for the purposes of Samadhi, it gives or tends to give, at the
first chance, by sheer force of habit, not the response demanded,
but its usual response of physical slumber. This habit of the mind
has to be got rid of; the mind has to learn to be awake in the
dream-state, in possession of itself, not with the outgoing, but
with an ingathered wakefulness in which, though immersed in
itself, it exercises all its powers.
The experiences of the dream-state are infinitely various. For
not only has it sovereign possession of the usual mental powers,
reasoning, discrimination, will, imagination, and can use them
in whatever way, on whatever subject, for whatever purpose it
pleases, but it is able to establish connection with all the worlds
to which it has natural access or to which it chooses to acquire
access, from the physical to the higher mental worlds. This it
does by various means open to the subtlety, flexibility and com¬
prehensive movement of this internalised mind liberated from
the narrow limitations of the physical outward-going senses. It is
able first to take cognizance of all things whether in the material
world or upon other planes by aid of perceptible images, not only
images of things visible, but of sounds, touch, smell, taste, move¬
ment, action, of all that makes itself sensible to the mind and its
organs. For the mind in Samadhi has access to the inner space
called sometimes the cidakasa, to depths of more and more sub¬
tle ether which are heavily curtained from the physical sense by
the grosser ether of the material universe, and all things sensible,
whether in the material world or any other, create reconstituting
vibrations, sensible echoes, reproductions, recurrent images of
themselves which that subtler ether receives and retains.
It is this which explains many of the phenomena of clair¬
voyance, clairaudience, etc.; for these phenomena are only the
exceptional admission of the waking mentality into a limited
524
The Yoga of Integral Knowledge
It is this which explains many of the phenomena of clair¬
voyance, clairaudience, etc.; for these phenomena are only the
exceptional admission of the waking mentality into a limited
524
The Yoga of Integral Knowledge
sensitiveness to what might be called the image memory of the
subtle ether, by which not only the signs of all things past and
present, but even those of things future can be seized; for things
future are already accomplished to knowledge and vision on
higher planes of mind and their images can be reflected upon
mind in the present. But these things which are exceptional to
the waking mentality, difficult and to be perceived only by the
possession of a special power or else after assiduous training, are
natural to the dream-state of trance consciousness in which the
subliminal mind is free. And that mind can also take cognizance
of things on various planes not only by these sensible images,
but by a species of thought perception or of thought reception
and impression analogous to that phenomenon of consciousness
which in modern psychical science has been given the name of
telepathy. But the powers of the dream-state do not end here. It
can by a sort of projection of ourselves, in a subtle form of the
mental body, actually enter into other planes and worlds or into
distant places and scenes of this world, move among them with
a sort of bodily presence and bring back the direct experience
of their scenes and truths and occurrences. It may even project
actually the mental or vital body for the same purpose and travel
in it, leaving the physical body in a profoundest trance without
sign of life until its return.
The greatest value of the dream-state of Samadhi lies, how¬
ever, not in these more outward things, but in its power to open
up easily higher ranges and powers of thought, emotion, will
by which the soul grows in height, range and self-mastery. Espe¬
cially, withdrawing from the distraction of sensible things, it can,
in a perfect power of concentrated self-seclusion, prepare itself
by a free reasoning, thought, discrimination, or more intimately,
more finally, by an ever deeper vision and identification, for
access to the Divine, the supreme Self, the transcendent Truth,
both in its principles and powers and manifestations and in its
highest original Being. Or it can by an absorbed inner joy and
emotion, as in a sealed and secluded chamber of the soul, prepare
itself for the delight of union with the divine Beloved, the Master
of all bliss, rapture and Ananda.
Samadhi
525
Or it can by an absorbed inner joy and
emotion, as in a sealed and secluded chamber of the soul, prepare
itself for the delight of union with the divine Beloved, the Master
of all bliss, rapture and Ananda.
Samadhi
525
For the integral Yoga this method of Samadhi may seem to
have the disadvantage that when it ceases, the thread is broken
and the soul returns into the distraction and imperfection of
the outward life, with only such an elevating effect upon that
outer life as the general memory of these deeper experiences
may produce. But this gulf, this break is not inevitable. In the
first place, it is only in the untrained psychic being that the
experiences of the trance are a blank to the waking mind; as it
becomes the master of its Samadhi, it is able to pass without any
gulf of oblivion from the inner to the outer waking. Secondly,
when this has been once done, what is attained in the inner state,
becomes easier to acquire by the waking consciousness and to
turn into the normal experience, powers, mental status of the
waking life. The subtle mind which is normally eclipsed by the
insistence of the physical being, becomes powerful even in the
waking state, until even there the enlarging man is able to live
in his several subtle bodies as well as in his physical body, to be
aware of them and in them, to use their senses, faculties, powers,
to dwell in possession of supraphysical truth, consciousness and
experience.
The sleep-state ascends to a higher power of being, beyond
thought into pure consciousness, beyond emotion into pure bliss,
beyond will into pure mastery; it is the gate of union with the
supreme state of Sachchidananda out of which all the activities
of the world are born. But here we must take care to avoid the
pitfalls of symbolic language. The use of the words dream and
sleep for these higher states is nothing but an image drawn from
the experience of the normal physical mind with regard to planes
in which it is not at home. It is not the truth that the Self in the
third status called perfect sleep, susupti, is in a state of slumber.
The sleep self is on the contrary described as Prajna, the Master
of Wisdom and Knowledge, Self of the Gnosis, and as Ishwara,
the Lord of being. To the physical mind a sleep, it is to our
wider and subtler consciousness a greater waking. To the normal
mind all that exceeds its normal experience but still comes into
its scope, seems a dream; but at the point where it borders on
things quite beyond its scope, it can no longer see truth even as
526
To the normal
mind all that exceeds its normal experience but still comes into
its scope, seems a dream; but at the point where it borders on
things quite beyond its scope, it can no longer see truth even as
526
The Yoga of Integral Knowledge
in a dream, but passes into the blank incomprehension and non¬
reception of slumber. This border-line varies with the power of
the individual consciousness, with the degree and height of its
enlightenment and awakening. The line may be pushed up higher
and higher until it may pass even beyond the mind. Normally
indeed the human mind cannot be awake, even with the inner
waking of trance, on the supramental levels; but this disability
can be overcome. Awake on these levels the soul becomes master
of the ranges of gnostic thought, gnostic will, gnostic delight, and
if it can do this in Samadhi, it may carry its memory of experience
and its power of experience over into the waking state. Even on
the yet higher level open to us, that of the Ananda, the awakened
soul may become similarly possessed of the Bliss-Self both in its
concentration and in its cosmic comprehension. But still there
may be ranges above from which it can bring back no memory
except that which says, “somehow, indescribably, I was in bliss,”
the bliss of an unconditioned existence beyond all potentiality of
expression by thought or description by image or feature. Even
the sense of being may disappear in an experience in which
the word existence loses its sense and the Buddhistic symbol of
Nirvana seems alone and sovereignly justified. However high the
power of awakening goes, there seems to be a beyond in which
the image of sleep, of susupti, will still find its application.
However high the
power of awakening goes, there seems to be a beyond in which
the image of sleep, of susupti, will still find its application.
Such is the principle of the Yogic trance, Samadhi, — into
its complex phenomena we need not now enter. It is sufficient
to note its double utility in the integral Yoga. It is true that up
to a point difficult to define or delimit almost all that Samadhi
can give, can be acquired without recourse to Samadhi. But still
there are certain heights of spiritual and psychic experience of
which the direct as opposed to a reflecting experience can only be
acquired deeply and in its fullness by means of the Yogic trance.
And even for that which can be otherwise acquired, it offers
a ready means, a facility which becomes more helpful, if not
indispensable, the higher and more difficult of access become the
planes on which the heightened spiritual experience is sought.
Once attained there, it has to be brought as much as possible
into the waking consciousness. Eor in a Yoga which embraces
Samadhi
527
all life completely and without reserve, the full use of Samadhi
comes only when its gains can be made the normal possession
and experience for an integral waking of the embodied soul in
the human being.
Chapter XXVII
Hathayoga
Chapter XXVII
Hathayoga
There are almost as many ways of arriving at Samadhi
as there are different paths of Yoga. Indeed so great is the
importance attached to it, not only as a supreme means of
arriving at the highest consciousness, but as the very condition
and status of that highest consciousness itself, in which alone
it can be completely possessed and enjoyed while we are in the
body, that certain disciplines of Yoga look as if they were only
ways of arriving at Samadhi. All Yoga is in its nature an attempt
and an arriving at unity with the Supreme, — unity with the be¬
ing of the Supreme, unity with the consciousness of the Supreme,
unity with the bliss of the Supreme, — or, if we repudiate the idea
of absolute unity, at least at some kind of union, even if it be
only for the soul to live in one status and periphery of being
with the Divine, sdlokya, or in a sort of indivisible proximity,
sdmipya. This can only be gained by rising to a higher level and
intensity of consciousness than our ordinary mentality possesses.
Samadhi, as we have seen, offers itself as the natural status of
such a higher level and greater intensity. It assumes naturally a
great importance in the Yoga of knowledge, because there it is
the very principle of its method and its object to raise the mental
consciousness into a clarity and concentrated power by which it
can become entirely aware of, lost in, identified with true being.
But there are two great disciplines in which it becomes of an
even greater importance. To these two systems, to Rajayoga and
Hathayoga, we may as well now turn; for in spite of the wide
difference of their methods from that of the path of knowledge,
they have this same principle as their final justification. At the
same time, it will not be necessary for us to do more than regard
the spirit of their gradations in passing; for in a synthetic and
integral Yoga they take a secondary importance; their aims have
indeed to be included, but their methods can either altogether
Hathayoga
529
be dispensed with or used only for a preliminary or else a casual
assistance.
Hathayoga is a powerful, but difficult and onerous system
whose whole principle of action is founded on an intimate con¬
nection between the body and the soul. The body is the key,
the body the secret both of bondage and of release, of animal
weakness and of divine power, of the obscuration of the mind
and soul and of their illumination, of subjection to pain and
limitation and of self-mastery, of death and of immortality. The
body is not to the Hathayogin a mere mass of living matter, but
a mystic bridge between the spiritual and the physical being; one
has even seen an ingenious exegete of the Hathayogic discipline
explain the Vedantic symbol OM as a figure of this mystic human
body. Although, however, he speaks always of the physical body
and makes that the basis of his practices, he does not view it
with the eye of the anatomist or physiologist, but describes and
explains it in language which always looks back to the subtle
body behind the physical system. In fact the whole aim of the
Hathayogin may be summarised from our point of view, though
he would not himself put it in that language, as an attempt by
fixed scientific processes to give to the soul in the physical body
the power, the light, the purity, the freedom, the ascending scales
of spiritual experience which would naturally be open to it, if it
dwelt here in the subtle and the developed causal vehicle.
To speak of the processes of Hathayoga as scientific may
seem strange to those who associate the idea of science only with
the superficial phenomena of the physical universe apart from
all that is behind them; but they are equally based on definite
experience of laws and their workings and give, when rightly
practised, their well-tested results. In fact, Hathayoga is, in its
own way, a system of knowledge; but while the proper Yoga of
knowledge is a philosophy of being put into spiritual practice, a
psychological system, this is a science of being, a psycho-physical
system. Both produce physical, psychic and spiritual results; but
because they stand at different poles of the same truth, to one the
psycho-physical results are of small importance, the pure psychic
and spiritual alone matter, and even the pure psychic are only
530
The Yoga of Integral Knowledge
accessories of the spiritual which absorb all the attention; in
the other the physical is of immense importance, the psychical
a considerable fruit, the spiritual the highest and consummating
result, but it seems for a long time a thing postponed and remote,
so great and absorbing is the attention which the body demands.
It must not be forgotten, however, that both do arrive at the same
end. Hathayoga, also, is a path, though by a long, difficult and
meticulous movement, duhkham dptum, to the Supreme.
All Yoga proceeds in its method by three principles of prac¬
tice; first, purification, that is to say, the removal of all aberra¬
tions, disorders, obstructions brought about by the mixed and
irregular action of the energy of being in our physical, moral
and mental system; secondly, concentration, that is to say, the
bringing to its full intensity and the mastered and self-directed
employment of that energy of being in us for a definite end;
thirdly, liberation, that is to say, the release of our being from
the narrow and painful knots of the individualised energy in
a false and limited play, which at present are the law of our
nature. The enjoyment of our liberated being which brings us
into unity or union with the Supreme, is the consummation; it is
that for which Yoga is done. Three indispensable steps and the
high, open and infinite levels to which they mount; and in all its
practice Hathayoga keeps these in view.
The two main members of its physical discipline, to which
the others are mere accessories, are dsana, the habituating of
the body to certain attitudes of immobility, and prdndydma, the
regulated direction and arrestation by exercises of breathing of
the vital currents of energy in the body. The physical being is the
instrument; but the physical being is made up of two elements,
the physical and the vital, the body which is the apparent instru¬
ment and the basis, and the life energy, prana, which is the power
and the real instrument. Both of these instruments are now our
masters. We are subject to the body, we are subject to the life
energy; it is only in a very limited degree that we can, though
souls, though mental beings, at all pose as their masters. We
are bound by a poor and limited physical nature, we are bound
consequently by a poor and limited life-power which is all that
Hathayoga
531
We
are bound by a poor and limited physical nature, we are bound
consequently by a poor and limited life-power which is all that
Hathayoga
531
the body can bear or to which it can give scope. Moreover, the
action of each and both in us is subject not only to the narrowest
limitations, but to a constant impurity, which renews itself every
time it is rectified, and to all sorts of disorders, some of which
are normal, a violent order, part of our ordinary physical life,
others abnormal, its maladies and disturbances. With all this
Hathayoga has to deal; all this it has to overcome; and it does it
mainly by these two methods, complex and cumbrous in action,
but simple in principle and effective.
The Hathayogic system of Asana has at its basis two pro¬
found ideas which bring with them many effective implications.
The first is that of control by physical immobility, the second is
that of power by immobility. The power of physical immobility
is as important in Hathayoga as the power of mental immobil¬
ity in the Yoga of knowledge, and for parallel reasons. To the
mind unaccustomed to the deeper truths of our being and nature
they would both seem to be a seeking after the listless passivity
of inertia. The direct contrary is the truth; for Yogic passivity,
whether of mind or body, is a condition of the greatest increase,
possession and continence of energy. The normal activity of our
minds is for the most part a disordered restlessness, full of waste
and rapidly tentative expenditure of energy in which only a little
is selected for the workings of the self-mastering will, — waste,
be it understood, from this point of view, not that of universal
Nature in which what is to us waste, serves the purposes of her
economy. The activity of our bodies is a similar restlessness.
It is the sign of a constant inability of the body to hold even
the limited life energy that enters into or is generated in it, and
consequently of a general dissipation of this Pranic force with
a quite subordinate element of ordered and well-economised
activity. Moreover in the consequent interchange and balancing
between the movement and interaction of the vital energies nor¬
mally at work in the body and their interchange with those which
act upon it from outside, whether the energies of others or of the
general Pranic force variously active in the environment, there
is a constant precarious balancing and adjustment which may
at any moment go wrong. Every obstruction, every defect, every
532
The Yoga of Integral Knowledge
Every obstruction, every defect, every
532
The Yoga of Integral Knowledge
excess, every lesion creates impurities and disorders. Nature
manages it all well enough for her own purposes, when left
to herself; but the moment the blundering mind and will of the
human being interfere with her habits and her vital instincts and
intuitions, especially when they create false or artificial habits,
a still more precarious order and frequent derangement become
the rule of the being. Yet this interference is inevitable, since
man lives not for the purposes of the vital Nature in him alone,
but for higher purposes which she had not contemplated in her
first balance and to which she has with difficulty to adjust her
operations. Therefore the first necessity of a greater status or
action is to get rid of this disordered restlessness, to still the
activity and to regulate it. The Hathayogin has to bring about
an abnormal poise of status and action of the body and the life
energy, abnormal not in the direction of greater disorder, but of
superiority and self-mastery.
The first object of the immobility of the Asana is to get rid
of the restlessness imposed on the body and to force it to hold
the Pranic energy instead of dissipating and squandering it. The
experience in the practice of Asana is not that of a cessation
and diminution of energy by inertia, but of a great increase,
inpouring, circulation of force. The body, accustomed to work
off superfluous energy by movement, is at first ill able to bear
this increase and this retained inner action and betrays it by
violent tremblings; afterwards it habituates itself and, when the
Asana is conquered, then it finds as much ease in the posture,
however originally difficult or unusual to it, as in its easiest at¬
titudes sedentary or recumbent. It becomes increasingly capable
of holding whatever amount of increased vital energy is brought
to bear upon it without needing to spill it out in movement,
and this increase is so enormous as to seem illimitable, so that
the body of the perfected Hathayogin is capable of feats of
endurance, force, unfatigued expenditure of energy of which
the normal physical powers of man at their highest would be
incapable. For it is not only able to hold and retain this energy,
but to bear its possession of the physical system and its more
complete movement through it. The life energy, thus occupying
Hathayoga
533
For it is not only able to hold and retain this energy,
but to bear its possession of the physical system and its more
complete movement through it. The life energy, thus occupying
Hathayoga
533
and operating in a powerful, unified movement on the tranquil
and passive body, freed from the restless balancing between the
continent power and the contained, becomes a much greater
and more effective force. In fact, it seems then rather to contain
and possess and use the body than to be contained, possessed
and used by it, — just as the restless active mind seems to seize
on and use irregularly and imperfectly whatever spiritual force
comes into it, but the tranquillised mind is held, possessed and
used by the spiritual force.
The body, thus liberated from itself, purified from many
of its disorders and irregularities, becomes, partly by Asana,
completely by combined Asana and Pranayama, a perfected in¬
strument. It is freed from its ready liability to fatigue; it acquires
an immense power of health; its tendencies of decay, age and
death are arrested. The Hathayogin even at an age advanced be¬
yond the ordinary span maintains the unimpaired vigour, health
and youth of the life in the body; even the appearance of physical
youth is sustained for a longer time. He has a much greater
power of longevity, and from his point of view, the body being
the instrument, it is a matter of no small importance to preserve
it long and to keep it for all that time free from impairing defi¬
ciencies. It is to be observed, also, that there are an enormous
variety of Asanas in Hathayoga, running in their fullness beyond
the number of eighty, some of them of the most complicated
and difficult character. This variety serves partly to increase the
results already noted, as well as to give a greater freedom and
flexibility to the use of the body, but it serves also to alter the
relation of the physical energy in the body to the earth energy
with which it is related. The lightening of the heavy hold of the
latter, of which the overcoming of fatigue is the first sign and the
phenomenon of utthapana or partial levitation the last, is one
result. The gross body begins to acquire something of the nature
of the subtle body and to possess something of its relations with
the life-energy; that becomes a greater force more powerfully felt
and yet capable of a lighter and freer and more resolvable physi¬
cal action, powers which culminate in the Hathayogic siddhis or
extraordinary powers of garimd, mahimd, animd and laghimd.
534
534
The Yoga of Integral Knowledge
Moreover, the life ceases to be entirely dependent on the action
of the physical organs and functionings, such as the heart-beats
and the breathing. These can in the end be suspended without
cessation of or lesion to the life.
All this, however, the result in its perfection of Asana
and Pranayama, is only a basic physical power and freedom.
The higher use of Hathayoga depends more intimately on
Pranayama. Asana deals more directly with the more material
part of the physical totality, though here too it needs the aid
of the other; Pranayama, starting from the physical immobility
and self-holding which is secured by Asana, deals more directly
with the subtler vital parts, the nervous system. This is done by
various regulations of the breathing, starting from equality of
respiration and inspiration and extending to the most diverse
rhythmic regulations of both with an interval of inholding of
the breath. In the end the keeping in of the breath, which has
first to be done with some effort, and even its cessation become
as easy and seem as natural as the constant taking in and
throwing out which is its normal action. But the first objects of
the Pranayama are to purify the nervous system, to circulate the
life-energy through all the nerves without obstruction, disorder
or irregularity, and to acquire a complete control of its function¬
ings, so that the mind and will of the soul inhabiting the body
may be no longer subject to the body or life or their combined
limitations. The power of these exercises of breathing to bring
about a purified and unobstructed state of the nervous system
is a known and well-established fact of our physiology. It helps
also to clear the physical system, but is not entirely effective at
first on all its canals and openings; therefore the Hathayogin uses
supplementary physical methods for clearing them out regularly
of all their accumulations. The combination of these with Asana,
— particular Asanas have even an effect in destroying particular
diseases, — and with Pranayama maintains perfectly the health
of the body. But the principal gain is that by this purification the
vital energy can be directed anywhere, to any part of the body
and in any way or with any rhythm of its movement.
The mere function of breathing into and out of the lungs is
Hathayoga
535
But the principal gain is that by this purification the
vital energy can be directed anywhere, to any part of the body
and in any way or with any rhythm of its movement.
The mere function of breathing into and out of the lungs is
Hathayoga
535
only the most sensible, outward and seizable movement of the
Prana, the Breath of Life in our physical system. The Prana has
according to Yogic science a fivefold movement pervading all
the nervous system and the whole material body and determin¬
ing all its functionings. The Hathayogin seizes on the outward
movement of respiration as a sort of key which opens to him the
control of all these five powers of the Prana. He becomes sensibly
aware of their inner operations, mentally conscious of his whole
physical life and action. He is able to direct the Prana through all
the nddis or nerve-channels of his system. He becomes aware of
its action in the six cakras or ganglionic centres of the nervous
system, and is able to open it up in each beyond its present
limited, habitual and mechanical workings. He gets, in short, a
perfect control of the life in the body in its most subtle nervous as
well as in its grossest physical aspects, even over that in it which
is at present involuntary and out of the reach of our observing
consciousness and will. Thus a complete mastery of the body
and the life and a free and effective use of them established
upon a purification of their workings is founded as a basis for
the higher aims of Hathayoga.
All this, however, is still a mere basis, the outward and
inward physical conditions of the two instruments used by
Hathayoga. There still remains the more important matter of
the psychical and spiritual effects to which they can be turned.
This depends on the connection between the body and the mind
and spirit and between the gross and the subtle body on which
the system of Hathayoga takes its stand. Here it comes into
line with Rajayoga, and a point is reached at which a transition
from the one to the other can be made.
Chapter XXVIII
Rajayoga
Here it comes into
line with Rajayoga, and a point is reached at which a transition
from the one to the other can be made.
Chapter XXVIII
Rajayoga
As THE body and the Prana are the key of all the closed
doors of the Yoga for the Hathayogin, so is the mind the
key in Rajayoga. But since in both the dependence of the
mind on the body and the Prana is admitted, in the Hathayoga
totally, in the established system of Rajayoga partially, therefore
in both systems the practice of Asana and Pranayama is included;
but in the one they occupy the whole field, in the other each is
limited only to one simple process and in their unison they are
intended to serve only a limited and intermediate office. We
can easily see how largely man, even though in his being an
embodied soul, is in his earthly nature the physical and vital
being and how, at first sight at least, his mental activities seem
to depend almost entirely on his body and his nervous system.
Modern Science and psychology have even held, for a time, this
dependence to be in fact an identity; they have tried to establish
that there is no such separate entity as mind or soul and that
all mental operations are in reality physical functionings. Even
otherwise, apart from this untenable hypothesis, the dependence
is so exaggerated that it has been supposed to be an altogether
binding condition, and any such thing as the control of the vital
and bodily functionings by the mind or its power to detach itself
from them has long been treated as an error, a morbid state
of the mind or a hallucination. Therefore the dependence has
remained absolute, and Science neither finds nor seeks for the
real key of the dependence and therefore can discover for us no
secret of release and mastery.
The psycho-physical science of Yoga does not make this
mistake. It seeks for the key, finds it and is able to effect the
release; for it takes account of the psychical or mental body
behind of which the physical is a sort of reproduction in gross
form, and is able to discover thereby secrets of the physical body
Rajayoga
S3 7
which do not appear to a purely physical enquiry. This mental
or psychical body, which the soul keeps even after death, has
also a subtle pranic force in it corresponding to its own subtle
nature and substance, — for wherever there is life of any kind,
there must be the pranic energy and a substance in which it can
work, — and this force is directed through a system of numerous
channels, called nadt, — the subtle nervous organisation of the
psychic body, — which are gathered up into six (or really seven)
centres called technically lotuses or circles, cakra, and which rise
in an ascending scale to the summit where there is the thousand-
petalled lotus from which all the mental and vital energy flows.
Each of these lotuses is the centre and the storing-house of its
own particular system of psychological powers, energies and
operations, — each system corresponding to a plane of our psy¬
chological existence, — and these flow out and return in the
stream of the pranic energies as they course through the nddls.
This arrangement of the psychic body is reproduced in the
physical with the spinal column as a rod and the ganglionic
centres as the chakras which rise up from the bottom of the
column, where the lowest is attached, to the brain and find their
summit in the brahmarandhra at the top of the skull. These
chakras or lotuses, however, are in physical man closed or only
partly open, with the consequence that only such powers and
only so much of them are active in him as are sufficient for his
ordinary physical life, and so much mind and soul only is at
play as will accord with its need. This is the real reason, looked
at from the mechanical point of view, why the embodied soul
seems so dependent on the bodily and nervous life, — though
the dependence is neither so complete nor so real as it seems.
The whole energy of the soul is not at play in the physical body
and life, the secret powers of mind are not awake in it, the
bodily and nervous energies predominate. But all the while the
supreme energy is there, asleep; it is said to be coiled up and
slumbering like a snake, — therefore it is called the kundalinl
sakti, — in the lowest of the chakras, in the mulddhdra. When
by Pranayama the division between the upper and lower prana
currents in the body is dissolved, this Kundalini is struck and
538
The Yoga of Integral Knowledge
When
by Pranayama the division between the upper and lower prana
currents in the body is dissolved, this Kundalini is struck and
538
The Yoga of Integral Knowledge
awakened, it uncoils itself and begins to rise upward like a fiery
serpent breaking open each lotus as it ascends until the Shakti
meets the Purusha in the brahmarandhra in a deep samadhi of
union.
Put less symbolically, in more philosophical though perhaps
less profound language, this means that the real energy of our
being is lying asleep and inconscient in the depths of our vital
system, and is awakened by the practice of Pranayama. In its
expansion it opens up all the centres of our psychological being
in which reside the powers and the consciousness of what would
now be called perhaps our subliminal self; therefore as each
centre of power and consciousness is opened up, we get access
to successive psychological planes and are able to put ourselves
in communication with the worlds or cosmic states of being
which correspond to them; all the psychic powers abnormal to
physical man, but natural to the soul develop in us. Finally, at
the summit of the ascension, this arising and expanding energy
meets with the superconscient self which sits concealed behind
and above our physical and mental existence; this meeting leads
to a profound samadhi of union in which our waking conscious¬
ness loses itself in the superconscient. Thus by the thorough and
unremitting practice of Pranayama the Hathayogin attains in
his own way the psychic and spiritual results which are pursued
through more directly psychical and spiritual methods in other
Yogas. The one mental aid which he conjoins with it, is the use
of the mantra, sacred syllable, name or mystic formula which
is of so much importance in the Indian systems of Yoga and
common to them all. This secret of the power of the mantra,
the six chakras and the Kundalini Shakti is one of the central
truths of all that complex psycho-physical science and practice
of which the Tantric philosophy claims to give us a rationale
and the most complete compendium of methods. All religions
and disciplines in India which use largely the psycho-physical
method, depend more or less upon it for their practices.
Rajayoga also uses the Pranayama and for the same princi¬
pal psychic purposes as the Hathayoga, but being in its whole
principle a psychical system, it employs it only as one stage
Rajayoga
539
Rajayoga also uses the Pranayama and for the same princi¬
pal psychic purposes as the Hathayoga, but being in its whole
principle a psychical system, it employs it only as one stage
Rajayoga
539
in the series of its practices and to a very limited extent, for
three or four large utilities. It does not start with Asana and
Pranayama, but insists first on a moral purification of the men¬
tality. This preliminary is of supreme importance; without it the
course of the rest of the Rajayoga is likely to be troubled, marred
and full of unexpected mental, moral and physical perils.^ This
moral purification is divided in the established system under
two heads, five yamas and five niyamas. The first are rules of
moral self-control in conduct such as truth-speaking, abstinence
from injury or killing, from theft etc.; but in reality these must
be regarded as merely certain main indications of the general
need of moral self-control and purity. Yama is, more largely,
any self-discipline by which the rajasic egoism and its passions
and desires in the human being are conquered and quieted into
perfect cessation. The object is to create a moral calm, a void
of the passions, and so prepare for the death of egoism in the
rajasic human being. The niyamas are equally a discipline of the
mind by regular practices of which the highest is meditation on
the divine Being, and their object is to create a sattwic calm,
purity and preparation for concentration upon which the secure
pursuance of the rest of the Yoga can be founded.
It is here, when this foundation has been secured, that
the practice of Asana and Pranayama come in and can then
bear their perfect fruits. By itself the control of the mind and
moral being only puts our normal consciousness into the right
preliminary condition; it cannot bring about that evolution or
manifestation of the higher psychic being which is necessary for
the greater aims of Yoga. In order to bring about this manifes¬
tation the present nodus of the vital and physical body with the
mental being has to be loosened and the way made clear for
the ascent through the greater psychic being to the union with
the superconscient Purusha. This can be done by Pranayama.
^ In modern India people attracted to Yoga, but picking up its processes from books
or from persons only slightly acquainted with the matter, often plunge straight into
Pranayama of Rajayoga, frequently with disastrous results. Only the very strong in
spirit can afford to make mistakes in this path.
540
The Yoga of Integral Knowledge
Only the very strong in
spirit can afford to make mistakes in this path.
540
The Yoga of Integral Knowledge
Asana is used by the Rajayoga only in its easiest and most nat¬
ural position, that naturally taken by the body when seated and
gathered together, but with the back and head strictly erect and
in a straight line, so that there may be no deflection of the spinal
cord. The object of the latter rule is obviously connected with the
theory of the six chakras and the circulation of the vital energy
between the muladhara and the brahmarandhra. The Rajayogic
Pranayama purifies and clears the nervous system; it enables us
to circulate the vital energy equally through the body and direct
it also where we will according to need, and thus maintain a
perfect health and soundness of the body and the vital being; it
gives us control of all the five habitual operations of the vital
energy in the system and at the same time breaks down the habit¬
ual divisions by which only the ordinary mechanical processes
of the vitality are possible to the normal life. It opens entirely
the six centres of the psycho-physical system and brings into the
waking consciousness the power of the awakened Shakti and the
light of the unveiled Purusha on each of the ascending planes.
Coupled with the use of the mantra it brings the divine energy
into the body and prepares for and facilitates that concentration
in Samadhi which is the crown of the Rajayogic method.
Rajayogic concentration is divided into four stages; it com¬
mences with the drawing both of the mind and senses from
outward things, proceeds to the holding of the one object of
concentration to the exclusion of all other ideas and mental
activities, then to the prolonged absorption of the mind in this
object. Anally, to the complete ingoing of the consciousness by
which it is lost to all outward mental activity in the oneness of
Samadhi. The real object of this mental discipline is to draw
away the mind from the outward and the mental world into
union with the divine Being. Therefore in the first three stages
use has to be made of some mental means or support by which
the mind, accustomed to run about from object to object, shall
fix on one alone, and that one must be something which repre¬
sents the idea of the Divine. It is usually a name or a form or a
mantra by which the thought can be fixed in the sole knowledge
or adoration of the Lord. By this concentration on the idea the
Rajayoga
541
It is usually a name or a form or a
mantra by which the thought can be fixed in the sole knowledge
or adoration of the Lord. By this concentration on the idea the
Rajayoga
541
mind enters from the idea into its reality, into which it sinks
silent, absorbed, unified. This is the traditional method. There
are, however, others which are equally of a Rajayogic character,
since they use the mental and psychical being as key. Some of
them are directed rather to the quiescence of the mind than to
its immediate absorption, as the discipline by which the mind
is simply watched and allowed to exhaust its habit of vagrant
thought in a purposeless running from which it feels all sanc¬
tion, purpose and interest withdrawn, and that, more strenuous
and rapidly effective, by which all outward-going thought is
excluded and the mind forced to sink into itself where in its
absolute quietude it can only reflect the pure Being or pass away
into its superconscient existence. The method differs, the object
and the result are the same.
Here, it might be supposed, the whole action and aim of
Rajayoga must end. For its action is the stilling of the waves
of consciousness, its manifold activities, cittavrtti, first, through
a habitual replacing of the turbid rajasic activities by the quiet
and luminous sattwic, then, by the stilling of all activities; and
its object is to enter into silent communion of soul and unity
with the Divine. As a matter of fact we find that the system of
Rajayoga includes other objects, — such as the practice and use
of occult powers, — some of which seem to be unconnected with
and even inconsistent with its main purpose. These powers or
siddhis are indeed frequently condemned as dangers and distrac¬
tions which draw away the Yogin from his sole legitimate aim
of divine union. On the way, therefore, it would naturally seem
as if they ought to be avoided; and once the goal is reached, it
would seem that they are then frivolous and superfluous. But
Rajayoga is a psychic science and it includes the attainment of
all the higher states of consciousness and their powers by which
the mental being rises towards the superconscient as well as
its ultimate and supreme possibility of union with the Highest.
Moreover, the Yogin, while in the body, is not always mentally
inactive and sunk in Samadhi, and an account of the powers
and states which are possible to him on the higher planes of his
being is necessary to the completeness of the science.
542
The Yoga of Integral Knowledge
542
The Yoga of Integral Knowledge
These powers and experiences belong, first, to the vital and
mental planes above this physical in which we live, and are
natural to the soul in the subtle body; as the dependence on
the physical body decreases, these abnormal activities become
possible and even manifest themselves without being sought for.
They can be acquired and fixed by processes which the science
gives, and their use then becomes subject to the will; or they can
be allowed to develop of themselves and used only when they
come, or when the Divine within moves us to use them; or else,
even though thus naturally developing and acting, they may be
rejected in a single-minded devotion to the one supreme goal of
the Yoga. Secondly, there are fuller, greater powers belonging to
the supramental planes which are the very powers of the Divine
in his spiritual and supramentally ideative being. These cannot
be acquired at all securely or integrally by personal effort, but
can only come from above, or else can become natural to the man
if and when he ascends beyond mind and lives in the spiritual
being, power, consciousness and ideation. They then become,
not abnormal and laboriously acquired siddhis, but simply the
very nature and method of his action, if he still continues to be
active in the world-existence.
On the whole, for an integral Yoga the special methods of
Rajayoga and Hathayoga may be useful at times in certain stages
of the progress, but are not indispensable. It is true that their
principal aims must be included in the integrality of the Yoga;
but they can be brought about by other means. For the methods
of the integral Yoga must be mainly spiritual, and dependence on
physical methods or fixed psychic or psycho-physical processes
on a large scale would be the substitution of a lower for a higher
action. We shall have occasion to touch upon this question later
when we come to the final principle of synthesis in method to
which our examination of the different Yogas is intended to lead.
Sri Aurobindo in Pondicherry, c. 1915-1918
Part III
The Yoga of Divine Love
Chapter I
Love and the Triple Path
WILL, KNOWLEDGE and love are the three divine
powers in human nature and the life of man, and
they point to the three paths by which the human
soul rises to the divine. The integrality of them, the union of
man with God in all the three, must therefore, as we have seen,
be the foundation of an integral Yoga.
The integrality of them, the union of
man with God in all the three, must therefore, as we have seen,
be the foundation of an integral Yoga.
Action is the first power of life. Nature begins with force
and its works which, once conscious in man, become will and
its achievements; therefore it is that by turning his action God-
wards the life of man best and most surely begins to become
divine. It is the door of first access, the starting-point of the
initiation. When the will in him is made one with the divine will
and the whole action of the being proceeds from the Divine and
is directed towards the Divine, the union in works is perfectly
accomplished. But works fulfil themselves in knowledge; all the
totality of works, says the Gita, finds its rounded culmination
in knowledge, sarvam karmdkhilam jndne parisamdpyate. By
union in will and works we become one in the omnipresent
conscious being from whom all our will and works have their
rise and draw their power and in whom they fulfil the round of
their energies. And the crown of this union is love; for love is
the delight of conscious union with the Being in whom we live,
act and move, by whom we exist, for whom alone we learn in
the end to act and to be. That is the trinity of our powers, the
union of all three in God to which we arrive when we start from
works as our way of access and our line of contact.
Knowledge is the foundation of a constant living in the
Divine. Eor consciousness is the foundation of all living and
being, and knowledge is the action of the consciousness, the
light by which it knows itself and its realities, the power by
which, starting from action, we are able to hold the inner results
546
The Yoga of Divine Love
of thought and act in a firm growth of our conscious being
until it accomplishes itself, by union, in the infinity of the divine
being. The Divine meets us in many aspects and to each of
them knowledge is the key, so that by knowledge we enter into
and possess the infinite and divine in every way of his being,
sarvabhdvenaf and receive him into us and are possessed by
him in every way of ours.
Without knowledge we live blindly in him with the blindness
of the power of Nature intent on its works, but forgetful of its
source and possessor, undivinely therefore, deprived of the real,
the full delight of our being. By knowledge arriving at conscious
oneness with that which we know, — for by identity alone can
complete and real knowledge exist, — the division is healed and
the cause of all our limitation and discord and weakness and
discontent is abolished. But knowledge is not complete without
works; for the Will in being also is God and not the being
or its self-aware silent existence alone, and if works find their
culmination in knowledge, knowledge also finds its fulfilment
in works. And, here too, love is the crown of knowledge; for
love is the delight of union, and unity must be conscious of
joy of union to find all the riches of its own delight. Perfect
knowledge indeed leads to perfect love, integral knowledge to
a rounded and multitudinous richness of love. “He who knows
me” says the Gita “as the supreme Purusha,” — not only as the
immutable oneness, but in the many-souled movement of the
divine and as that, superior to both, in which both are divinely
held, — “he, because he has the integral knowledge, seeks me by
love in every way of his being.” This is the trinity of our powers,
the union of all three in God to which we arrive when we start
from knowledge.
Love is the crown of all being and its way of fulfilment, that
by which it rises to all intensity and all fullness and the ecstasy of
utter self-finding. For if the Being is in its very nature conscious¬
ness and by consciousness we become one with it, therefore by
perfect knowledge of it fulfilled in identity, yet is delight the
1
Gita.
Love and the Triple Path
547
For if the Being is in its very nature conscious¬
ness and by consciousness we become one with it, therefore by
perfect knowledge of it fulfilled in identity, yet is delight the
1
Gita.
Love and the Triple Path
547
nature of consciousness and of the acme of delight love is the
key and the secret. And if will is the power of conscious being
by which it fulfils itself and by union in will we become one with
the Being in its characteristic infinite power, yet all the works of
that power start from delight, live in the delight, have delight
for their aim and end; love of the Being in itself and in all of
itself that its power of consciousness manifests, is the way to the
perfect wideness of the Ananda. Love is the power and passion
of the divine self-delight and without love we may get the rapt
peace of its infinity, the absorbed silence of the Ananda, but
not its absolute depth of richness and fullness. Love leads us
from the suffering of division into the bliss of perfect union, but
without losing that joy of the act of union which is the soul’s
greatest discovery and for which the life of the cosmos is a long
preparation. Therefore to approach God by love is to prepare
oneself for the greatest possible spiritual fulfilment.
Love fulfilled does not exclude knowledge, but itself brings
knowledge; and the completer the knowledge, the richer the
possibility of love. “By Bhakti” says the Lord in the Gita “shall
a man know Me in all my extent and greatness and as I am in
the principles of my being, and when he has known Me in the
principles of my being, then he enters into Me. ” Love without
knowledge is a passionate and intense, but blind, crude, often
dangerous thing, a great power, but also a stumbling-block; love,
limited in knowledge, condemns itself in its fervour and often
by its very fervour to narrowness; but love leading to perfect
knowledge brings the infinite and absolute union. Such love
is not inconsistent with, but rather throws itself with joy into
divine works; for it loves God and is one with him in all his
being, and therefore in all beings, and to work for the world is
then to feel and fulfil multitudinously one’s love for God. This is
the trinity of our powers, the union of all three in God to which
we arrive when we start on our journey by the path of devotion
with Love for the Angel of the Way to find in the ecstasy of
the divine delight of the All-Lover’s being the fulfilment of ours,
its secure home and blissful abiding-place and the centre of its
universal radiation.
548
The Yoga of Divine Love
Since then in the union of these three powers lies our base
of perfection, the seeker of an integral self-fulfilment in the
Divine must avoid or throw away, if he has them at all, the
misunderstanding and mutual depreciation which we often find
existent between the followers of the three paths. Those who
have the cult of knowledge seem often, if not to despise, yet
to look downward from their dizzy eminence on the path of
the devotee as if it were a thing inferior, ignorant, good only
for souls that are not yet ready for the heights of the Truth. It
is true that devotion without knowledge is often a thing raw,
crude, blind and dangerous, as the errors, crimes, follies of the
religious have too often shown. But this is because devotion
in them has not found its own path, its own real principle,
has not therefore really entered on the path, but is fumbling
and feeling after it, is on one of the bypaths that lead to it;
and knowledge too at this stage is as imperfect as devotion,
dogmatic, schismatic, intolerant, bound up in the narrowness
of some single and exclusive principle, even that being usually
very imperfectly seized. When the devotee has grasped the power
that shall raise him, has really laid hold on love, that in the end
purifies and enlarges him as effectively as knowledge can; they
are equal powers, though their methods of arriving at the same
goal are different. The pride of the philosopher looking down
on the passion of the devotee arises, as does all pride, from a
certain deficiency of his nature; for the intellect too exclusively
developed misses what the heart has to offer. The intellect is
not in every way superior to the heart; if it opens more readily
doors at which the heart is apt to fumble in vain, it is, itself,
apt to miss truths which to the heart are very near and easy
to hold. And if when the way of thought deepens into spiritual
experience, it arrives readily at the etherial heights, pinnacles,
skiey widenesses, it cannot without the aid of the heart fathom
the intense and rich abysses and oceanic depths of the divine
being and the divine Ananda.
The way of Bhakti is supposed often to be necessarily infe¬
rior because it proceeds by worship which belongs to that stage
of spiritual experience where there is a difference, an insufficient
Love and the Triple Path
549
The way of Bhakti is supposed often to be necessarily infe¬
rior because it proceeds by worship which belongs to that stage
of spiritual experience where there is a difference, an insufficient
Love and the Triple Path
549
unity between the human soul and the Divine, because its very
principle is love and love means always two, the lover and the
beloved, a dualism therefore, while oneness is the highest spir¬
itual experience, and because it seeks after the personal God
while the Impersonal is the highest and the eternal truth, if not
even the sole Reality. But worship is only the first step on the
path of devotion. Where external worship changes into the inner
adoration, real Bhakti begins; that deepens into the intensity of
divine love; that love leads to the joy of closeness in our relations
with the Divine; the joy of closeness passes into the bliss of union.
Love too as well as knowledge brings us to a highest oneness and
it gives to that oneness its greatest possible depth and intensity.
It is true that love returns gladly upon a difference in oneness,
by which the oneness itself becomes richer and sweeter. But here
we may say that the heart is wiser than the thought, at least than
that thought which fixes upon opposite ideas of the Divine and
concentrates on one to the exclusion of the other which seems its
contrary, but is really its complement and a means of its greatest
fulfilment. This is the weakness of the mind that it limits itself
by its thoughts, its positive and negative ideas, the aspects of the
Divine Reality that it sees, and tends too much to pit one against
the other.
This is the weakness of the mind that it limits itself
by its thoughts, its positive and negative ideas, the aspects of the
Divine Reality that it sees, and tends too much to pit one against
the other.
Thought in the mind, vicdra, the philosophic trend by which
mental knowledge approaches the Divine, is apt to lend a greater
importance to the abstract over the concrete, to that which is
high and remote over that which is intimate and near. It finds
a greater truth in the delight of the One in itself, a lesser truth
or even a falsehood in the delight of the One in the Many and
of the Many in the One, a greater truth in the impersonal and
the Nirguna, a lesser truth or a falsehood in the personal and
the Saguna. But the Divine is beyond our oppositions of ideas,
beyond the logical contradictions we make between his aspects.
He is not, we have seen, bound and restricted by exclusive unity;
his oneness realises itself in infinite variation and to the joy
of that love has the completest key, without therefore missing
the joy of the unity. The highest knowledge and highest spiri¬
tual experience by knowledge find his oneness as perfect in his
550
The Yoga of Divine Love
various relations with the Many as in his self-absorbed delight. If
to thought the Impersonal seems the wider and higher truth, the
Personal a narrower experience, the spirit finds both of them to
be aspects of a Reality which figures itself in both, and if there is a
knowledge of that Reality to which thought arrives by insistence
on the infinite Impersonality, there is also a knowledge of it to
which love arrives by insistence on the infinite Personality. The
spiritual experience of each leads, if followed to the end, to the
same ultimate Truth. By Bhakti as by knowledge, as the Gita tells
us, we arrive at unity with the Purushottama, the Supreme who
contains in himself the impersonal and numberless personalities,
the qualitiless and infinite qualities, pure being, consciousness
and delight and the endless play of their relations.
The devotee on the other hand tends to look down on the
sawdust dryness of mere knowledge. And it is true that phi¬
losophy by itself without the rapture of spiritual experience is
something as dry as it is clear and cannot give all the satisfaction
we seek, that its spiritual experience even, when it has not left its
supports of thought and shot up beyond the mind, lives too much
in an abstract delight and that what it reaches, is not indeed the
void it seems to the passion of the heart, but still has the limita¬
tions of the peaks. On the other hand, love itself is not complete
without knowledge. The Gita distinguishes between three initial
kinds of Bhakti, that which seeks refuge in the Divine from the
sorrows of the world, drta, that which, desiring, approaches
the Divine as the giver of its good, arthdrthi, and that which
attracted by what it already loves, but does not yet know, yearns
to know this divine Unknown, jijhdsu-, but it gives the palm to
the Bhakti that knows. Evidently the intensity of passion which
says, “I do not understand, I love,” and, loving, cares not to
understand, is not love’s last self-expression, but its first, nor is
it its highest intensity. Rather as knowledge of the Divine grows,
delight in the Divine and love of it must increase. Nor can mere
rapture be secure without the foundation of knowledge; to live
in what we love, gives that security, and to live in it means to
be one with it in consciousness, and oneness of consciousness
is the perfect condition of knowledge. Knowledge of the Divine
Love and the Triple Path
551
gives to love of the Divine its firmest security, opens to it its
own widest joy of experience, raises it to its highest pinnacles of
outlook.
Knowledge of the Divine
Love and the Triple Path
551
gives to love of the Divine its firmest security, opens to it its
own widest joy of experience, raises it to its highest pinnacles of
outlook.
If the mutual misunderstandings of these two powers are
an ignorance, no less so is the tendency of both to look down
on the way of works as inferior to their own loftier pitch of
spiritual achievement. There is an intensity of love, as there
is an intensity of knowledge, to which works seem something
outward and distracting. But works are only thus outward and
distracting when we have not found oneness of will and con¬
sciousness with the Supreme. When once that is found, works
become the very power of knowledge and the very outpouring of
love. If knowledge is the very state of oneness and love its bliss,
divine works are the living power of its light and sweetness.
There is a movement of love, as in the aspiration of human love,
to separate the lover and the loved in the enjoyment of their
exclusive oneness away from the world and from all others,
shut up in the nuptial chambers of the heart. That is perhaps
an inevitable movement of this path. But still the widest love
fulfilled in knowledge sees the world not as something other
and hostile to this joy, but as the being of the Beloved and all
creatures as his being, and in that vision divine works find their
joy and their justification.
This is the knowledge in which an integral Yoga must live.
We have to start Godward from the powers of the mind, the
intellect, the will, the heart, and in the mind all is limited. Limi¬
tations, exclusiveness there can hardly fail to be at the beginning
and for a long time on the way. But an integral Yoga will wear
these more loosely than more exclusive ways of seeking, and it
will sooner emerge from the mental necessity. It may commence
with the way of love, as with the way of knowledge or of works;
but where they meet, is the beginning of its joy of fulfilment.
Love it cannot miss, even if it does not start from it; for love is
the crown of works and the flowering of knowledge.
Chapter II
The Motives of Devotion
Love it cannot miss, even if it does not start from it; for love is
the crown of works and the flowering of knowledge.
Chapter II
The Motives of Devotion
All religion begins with the conception of some
Power or existence greater and higher than our limited
and mortal selves, a thought and act of worship done to
that Power, and an obedience offered to its will, its laws or its
demands. But Religion, in its beginnings, sets an immeasurable
gulf between the Power thus conceived, worshipped and obeyed
and the worshipper. Yoga in its culmination abolishes the gulf;
for Yoga is union. We arrive at union with it through knowledge;
for as our first obscure conceptions of it clarify, enlarge, deepen,
we come to recognise it as our own highest self, the origin and
sustainer of our being and that towards which it tends. We arrive
at union with it through works; for from simply obeying we
come to identify our will with its Will, since only in proportion
as it is identified with this Power that is its source and ideal, can
our will become perfect and divine. We arrive at union with it
also by worship; for the thought and act of a distant worship
develops into the necessity of close adoration and this into the
intimacy of love, and the consummation of love is union with
the Beloved. It is from this development of worship that the
Yoga of devotion starts and it is by this union with the Beloved
that it finds its highest point and consummation.
All our instincts and the movements of our being begin by
supporting themselves on the ordinary motives of our lower
human nature, — mixed and egoistic motives at first, but after¬
wards they purify and elevate themselves, they become an intense
and special need of our higher nature quite apart from the results
our actions bring with them; finally they exalt themselves into
a sort of categorical imperative of our being, and it is through
our obedience to this that we arrive at that supreme something
self-existent in us which was all the time drawing us towards it,
first by the lures of our egoistic nature, then by something much
The Motives of Devotion
553
higher, larger, more universal, until we are able to feel its own
direct attraction which is the strongest and most imperative of
all. In the transformation of ordinary religious worship into the
Yoga of pure Bhakti we see this development from the motived
and interested worship of popular religion into a principle of
motiveless and self-existent love. This last is in fact the touch¬
stone of the real Bhakti and shows whether we are really in the
central way or are only upon one of the bypaths leading to it.
We have to throw away the props of our weakness, the motives
of the ego, the lures of our lower nature before we can deserve
the divine union.
Faced with the sense of a Power or perhaps a number of
Powers greater and higher than himself by whom his life in
Nature is overshadowed, influenced, governed, man naturally
applies to it or to them the first primitive feelings of the natural
being among the difficulties, desires and dangers of that life, —
fear and interest. The enormous part played by these motives
in the evolution of the religious instinct, is undeniable, and in
fact, man being what he is, it could hardly have been less; and
even when religion has advanced fairly far on its road, we see
these motives still surviving, active, playing a sufficiently large
part, justified and appealed to by Religion herself in support of
her claims on man. The fear of God, it is said, — or, it may be
added for the sake of historical truth, the fear of the Gods, —
is the beginning of religion, a half-truth upon which scientific
research, trying to trace the evolution of religion, ordinarily in a
critical and often a hostile rather than in a sympathetic spirit, has
laid undue emphasis. But not the fear of God only, for man does
not act, even most primitively, from fear alone, but from twin
motives, fear and desire, fear of things unpleasant and maleficent
and desire of things pleasant and beneficent, — therefore from
fear and interest. Life to him is primarily and engrossingly, —
until he learns to live more in his soul and only secondarily in
the action and reaction of outward things, — a series of actions
and results, things to be desired, pursued and gained by action
and things to be dreaded and shunned, yet which may come
upon him as a result of action. And it is not only by his own
SS4
The Yoga of Divine Love
And it is not only by his own
SS4
The Yoga of Divine Love
action but by that also of others and of Nature around him
that these things come to him. As soon, then, as he comes to
sense a Power behind all this which can influence or determine
action and result, he conceives of it as a dispenser of boons and
sufferings, able and under certain conditions willing to help him
or hurt, save and destroy.
In the most primitive parts of his being he conceives of it as
a thing of natural egoistic impulses like himself, beneficent when
pleased, maleficent when offended; worship is then a means of
propitiation by gifts and a supplication by prayer. He gets God
on his side by praying to him and flattering him. With a more
advanced mentality, he conceives of the action of life as reposing
on a certain principle of divine justice, which he reads always
according to his own ideas and character, as a sort of enlarged
copy of his human justice; he conceives the idea of moral good
and evil and looks upon suffering and calamity and all things
unpleasant as a punishment for his sins and upon happiness
and good fortune and all things pleasant as a reward of his
virtue. God appears to him as a king, judge, legislator, executor
of justice. But still regarding him as a sort of magnified Man,
he imagines that as his own justice can be deflected by prayers
and propitiation, so the divine justice can also be deflected by
the same means. Justice is to him reward and punishment, and
the justice of punishment can be modified by mercy to the sup¬
pliant, while rewards can be supplemented by special favours
and kindness such as Power when pleased can always bestow
on its adherents and worshippers. Moreover God like ourselves
is capable of wrath and revenge, and wrath and revenge can be
turned by gifts and supplication and atonement; he is capable
too of partiality, and his partiality can be attracted by gifts, by
prayer and by praise. Therefore instead of relying solely on the
observation of the moral law, worship as prayer and propitiation
is still continued.
Along with these motives there arises another development
of personal feeling, first of the awe which one naturally feels for
something vast, powerful and incalculable beyond our nature
by a certain inscrutability in the springs and extent of its action.
The Motives of Devotion
555
The Motives of Devotion
555
and of the veneration and adoration which one feels for that
which is higher in its nature or its perfection than ourselves.
For, even while preserving largely the idea of a God endowed
with the qualities of human nature, there still grows up along
with it, mixed up with it or superadded, the conception of an
omniscience, an omnipotence and a mysterious perfection quite
other than our nature. A confused mixture of all these motives,
variously developed, often modified, subtilised or glossed over, is
what constitutes nine tenths of popular religion; the other tenth
is a suffusion of the rest by the percolation into it of nobler,
more beautiful and profounder ideas of the Divine which minds
of a greater spirituality have been able to bring into the more
primitive religious concepts of mankind. The result is usually
crude enough and a ready target for the shafts of scepticism and
unbelief, — powers of the human mind which have their utility
even for faith and religion, since they compel a religion to purify
gradually what is crude or false in its conceptions. But what we
have to see is how far in purifying and elevating the religious
instinct of worship any of these earlier motives need to survive
and enter into the Yoga of devotion which itself starts from
worship. That depends on how far they correspond to any truth
of the divine Being and its relations with the human soul; for we
seek by Bhakti union with the Divine and true relation with it,
with its truth and not with any mirage of our lower nature and
of its egoistic impulses and ignorant conceptions.
The ground on which sceptical unbelief assails Religion,
namely, that there is in fact no conscient Power or Being in
the universe greater and higher than ourselves or in any way
influencing or controlling our existence, is one which Yoga can¬
not accept, as that would contradict all spiritual experience and
make Yoga itself impossible. Yoga is not a matter of theory
or dogma, like philosophy or popular religion, but a matter of
experience. Its experience is that of a conscient universal and
supracosmic Being with whom it brings us into union, and this
conscious experience of union with the Invisible, always renew¬
able and verifiable, is as valid as our conscious experience of a
physical world and of visible bodies with whose invisible minds
556
The Yoga of Divine Love
we daily communicate. Yoga proceeds by conscious union, the
conscious being is its instrument, and a conscious union with
the Inconscient cannot be. It is true that it goes beyond the
human consciousness and in Samadhi becomes superconscient,
but this is not an annullation of our conscious being, it is only
its self-exceeding, the going beyond its present level and normal
limits.
So far, then, all Yogic experience is agreed. But Religion
and the Yoga of Bhakti go farther; they attribute to this Being
a Personality and human relations with the human being. In
both the human being approaches the Divine by means of his
humanity, with human emotions, as he would approach a fellow¬
being, but with more intense and exalted feelings; and not only
so, but the Divine also responds in a manner answering to these
emotions. In that possibility of response lies the whole question;
for if the Divine is impersonal, featureless and relationless, no
such response is possible and all human approach to it becomes
an absurdity; we must rather dehumanise, depersonalise, annul
ourselves in so far as we are human beings or any kind of beings;
on no other conditions and by no other means can we approach
it. Love, fear, prayer, praise, worship of an Impersonality which
has no relation with us or with anything in the universe and no
feature that our minds can lay hold of, are obviously an irra¬
tional foolishness. On such terms religion and devotion become
out of the question. The Adwaitin in order to find a religious ba¬
sis for his bare and sterile philosophy, has to admit the practical
existence of God and the gods and to delude his mind with the
language of Maya. Buddhism only became a popular religion
when Buddha had taken the place of the supreme Deity as an
object of worship.
Even if the Supreme be capable of relations with us but only
of impersonal relations, religion is robbed of its human vitality
and the Path of Devotion ceases to be effective or even possible.
We may indeed apply our human emotions to it, but in a vague
and imprecise fashion, with no hope of a human response: the
only way in which it can respond to us, is by stilling our emotions
and throwing upon us its own impersonal calm and immutable
The Motives of Devotion
557
equality; and this is what in fact happens when we approach
the pure impersonality of the Godhead. We can obey it as a
Law, lift our souls to it in aspiration towards its tranquil being,
grow into it by shedding from us our emotional nature; the
human being in us is not satisfied, but it is quieted, balanced,
stilled. But the Yoga of devotion, agreeing in this with Religion,
insists on a closer and warmer worship than this impersonal
aspiration. It aims at a divine fulfilment of the humanity in us
as well as of the impersonal part of our being; it aims at a
divine satisfaction of the emotional being of man. It demands
of the Supreme acceptance of our love and a response in kind;
as we delight in Him and seek Him, so it believes that He too
delights in us and seeks us. Nor can this demand be condemned
as irrational, for if the supreme and universal Being did not take
any delight in us, it is not easy to see how we could have come
into being or could remain in being, and if He does not at all
draw us towards him, — a divine seeking of us, — there would
seem to be no reason in Nature why we should turn from the
round of our normal existence to seek Him.
Therefore that there may be at all any possibility of a Yoga
of devotion, we must assume first that the supreme Existence is
not an abstraction or a state of existence, but a conscious Being;
secondly, that he meets us in the universe and is in some way
immanent in it as well as its source, — otherwise, we should
have to go out of cosmic life to meet him; thirdly, that he is
capable of personal relations with us and must therefore be not
incapable of personality; finally, that when we approach him by
our human emotions, we receive a response in kind. This does
not mean that the nature of the Divine is precisely the same
as our human nature though upon a larger scale, or that it is
that nature pure of certain perversions and God a magnified or
else an ideal Man. God is not and cannot be an ego limited by
his qualities as we are in our normal consciousness. But on the
other hand our human consciousness must certainly originate
and have been derived from the Divine; though the forms which
it takes in us may and must be other than the divine because we
are limited by ego, not universal, not superior to our nature, not
558
The Yoga of Divine Love
greater than our qualities and their workings, as he is, still our
human emotions and impulses must have behind them a Truth
in him of which they are the limited and very often, therefore,
the perverse or even the degraded forms. By approaching him
through our emotional being we approach that Truth, it comes
down to us to meet our emotions and lift them towards it;
through it our emotional being is united with him.
Secondly, this supreme Being is also the universal Being and
our relations with the universe are all means by which we are pre¬
pared for entering into relation with him. All the emotions with
which we confront the action of the universal existence upon us,
are really directed towards him, in ignorance at first, but it is by
directing them in growing knowledge towards him that we enter
into more intimate relations with him, and all that is false and
ignorant in them will fall away as we draw nearer towards unity.
To all of them he answers, taking us in the stage of progress in
which we are; for if we met no kind of response or help to our
imperfect approach, the more perfect relations could never be
established. Even as men approach him, so he accepts them and
responds too by the divine Love to their bhakti, tathaiva bhajate.
Whatever form of being, whatever qualities they lend to him,
through that form and those qualities he helps them to develop,
encourages or governs their advance and in their straight way
or their crooked draws them towards him. What they see of
him is a truth, but a truth represented to them in the terms of
their own being and consciousness, partially, distortedly, not in
the terms of its own higher reality, not in the aspect which it
assumes when we become aware of the complete Divinity. This
is the justification of the cruder and more primitive elements of
religion and also their sentence of transience and passing. They
are justified because there is a truth of the Divine behind them
and only so could that truth of the Divine be approached in
that stage of the developing human consciousness and be helped
forward; they are condemned, because to persist always in these
crude conceptions and relations with the Divine is to miss that
closer union towards which these crude beginnings are the first
steps, however faltering.
The Motives of Devotion
559
The Motives of Devotion
559
All life, we have said, is a Yoga of Nature; here in this
material world life is her reaching out from her first incon¬
science towards a return to union with the conscient Divine
from whom she proceeded. In religion the mind of man, her
accomplished instrument, becomes aware of her goal in him,
responds to her aspiration. Even popular religion is a sort of
ignorant Yoga of devotion. But it does not become what we
specifically call Yoga until the motive becomes in a certain degree
clairvoyant, until it sees that union is its object and that love is
the principle of union, and until therefore it tries to realise love
and lose its separative character in love. When that has been
accomplished, then the Yoga has taken its decisive step and is
sure of its fruition. Thus the motives of devotion have first to
direct themselves engrossingly and predominantly towards the
Divine, then to transform themselves so that they are rid of their
more earthy elements and finally to take their stand in pure
and perfect love. All those that cannot coexist with the perfect
union of love, must eventually fall away, while only those that
can form themselves into expressions of divine love and into
means of enjoying divine love, can remain. For love is the one
emotion in us which can be entirely motiveless and self-existent;
love need have no other motive than love. For all our emotions
arise either from the seeking after delight and the possession of
it, or from the baffling of the search, or from the failure of the
delight we have possessed or had thought to grasp; but love is
that by which we can enter directly into possession of the self-
existent delight of the divine Being. Divine love is indeed itself
that possession and, as it were, the body of the Ananda.
These are the truths which condition our approach to this
Yoga and our journey on this path. There are subsidiary ques¬
tions which arise and trouble the intellect of man, but, though
we may have yet to deal with them they are not essential. Yoga of
Bhakti is a matter of the heart and not of the intellect. For even
for the knowledge which comes on this way, we set out from the
heart and not from the intelligence. The truth of the motives of
the heart’s devotion and their final arrival and in some sort their
disappearance into the supreme and unique self-existent motive
560
The Yoga of Divine Love
The truth of the motives of
the heart’s devotion and their final arrival and in some sort their
disappearance into the supreme and unique self-existent motive
560
The Yoga of Divine Love
of love, is therefore all that initially and essentially concerns us.
Such difficult questions there are as whether the Divine has an
original supraphysical form or power of form from which all
forms proceed or is eternally formless; all we need at present
say is that the Divine does at least accept the various forms
which the devotee gives to him and through them meets him in
love, while the mixing of our spirits with his spirit is essential
to the fruition of Bhakti. So too, certain religions and religious
philosophies seek to bind down devotion by a conception of
an eternal difference between the human soul and the Divine,
without which they say love and devotion cannot exist, while
that philosophy which considers that One alone exists, consigns
love and devotion to a movement in the ignorance, necessary
perhaps or at the least useful as a preparatory movement while
yet the ignorance lasts, but impossible when all difference is
abolished and therefore to be transcended and discarded. We
may hold, however, the truth of the one existence in this sense
that all in Nature is the Divine even though God be more than
all in Nature, and love becomes then a movement by which the
Divine in Nature and man takes possession of and enjoys the
delight of the universal and the supreme Divine. In any case, love
has necessarily a twofold fulfilment by its very nature, that by
which the lover and the beloved enjoy their union in difference
and all too that enhances the joy of various union, and that
by which they throw themselves into each other and become
one Self. That truth is quite sufficient to start with, for it is the
very nature of love, and since love is the essential motive of this
Yoga, as is the whole nature of love, so will be too the crown
and fulfilment of the movement of the Yoga.
Chapter III
The Godward Emotions
Chapter III
The Godward Emotions
The principle of Yoga is to turn Godward all or any of
the powers of the human consciousness so that through
that activity of the being there may be contact, relation,
union. In the Yoga of Bhakti it is the emotional nature that is
made the instrument. Its main principle is to adopt some human
relation between man and the Divine Being by which through
the ever intenser flowing of the heart’s emotions towards him
the human soul may at last be wedded to and grow one with
him in a passion of divine Love. It is not ultimately the pure
peace of oneness or the power and desireless will of oneness, but
the ecstatic joy of union which the devotee seeks by his Yoga.
Every feeling that can make the heart ready for this ecstasy the
Yoga admits; everything that detracts from it must increasingly
drop away as the strong union of love becomes closer and more
perfect.
All the feelings with which religion approaches the worship,
service and love of God, the Yoga admits, if not as its final ac¬
companiments, yet as preparatory movements of the emotional
nature. But there is one feeling with which the Yoga, at least as
practised in India, has very little dealing. In certain religions, in
most perhaps, the idea of the fear of God plays a very large part,
sometimes the largest, and the Godfearing man is the typical
worshipper of these religions. The sentiment of fear is indeed
perfectly consistent with devotion of a certain kind and up to a
certain point; at its highest it rises into a worship of the divine
Power, the divine Justice, divine Law, divine Righteousness, and
ethical obedience, an awed reverence for the almighty Creator
and Judge. Its motive is therefore ethico-religious and it belongs
not so strictly to the devotee, but to the man of works moved
by a devotion to the divine ordainer and judge of his works. It
regards God as the King and does not approach too near the
562
The Yoga of Divine Love
glory of his throne unless justified by righteousness or led there
by a mediator who will turn away the divine wrath for sin. Even
when it draws nearest, it keeps an awed distance between itself
and the high object of its worship. It cannot embrace the Divine
with all the fearless confidence of the child in his mother or of
the lover in his beloved or with that intimate sense of oneness
which perfect love brings with it.
It cannot embrace the Divine
with all the fearless confidence of the child in his mother or of
the lover in his beloved or with that intimate sense of oneness
which perfect love brings with it.
The origin of this divine fear was crude enough in some of
the primitive popular religions. It was the perception of pow¬
ers in the world greater than man, obscure in their nature and
workings, which seemed always ready to strike him down in his
prosperity and to smite him for any actions which displeased
them. Fear of the gods arose from man’s ignorance of God and
his ignorance of the laws that govern the world. It attributed
to the higher powers caprice and human passion; it made them
in the image of the great ones of the earth, capable of whim,
tyranny, personal enmity, jealous of any greatness in man which
might raise him above the littleness of terrestrial nature and
bring him too near to the divine nature. With such notions no
real devotion could arise, except that doubtful kind which the
weaker may feel for the stronger whose protection he can buy by
worship and gifts and propitiation and obedience to such laws
as he may have laid upon those beneath him and may enforce by
rewards and punishments, or else the submissive and prostrate
reverence and adoration which one may feel for a greatness,
glory, wisdom, sovereign power which is above the world and
is the source or at any rate the regulator of all its laws and
happenings.
A nearer approach to the beginnings of the way of devotion
becomes possible when this element of divine Power disengages
itself from these crudities and fixes on the idea of a divine ruler,
creator of the world and master of the Law who governs the
earth and heavens and is the guide and helper and saviour of
his creatures. This larger and higher idea of the divine Being
long kept many elements and still keeps some elements of the
old crudity. The Jews who brought it forward most prominently
and from whom it overspread a great part of the world, could
The Godward Emotions
563
The Jews who brought it forward most prominently
and from whom it overspread a great part of the world, could
The Godward Emotions
563
believe in a God of righteousness who was exclusive, arbitrary,
wrathful, jealous, often cruel and even wantonly sanguinary.
Even now it is possible for some to believe in a Creator who
has made heaven and hell, an eternal hell, the two poles of his
creation, and has even according to some religions predestined
the souls he has created not only to sin and punishment, but to
an eternal damnation. But even apart from these extravagances
of a childish religious belief, the idea of the almighty Judge,
Legislator, King, is a crude and imperfect idea of the Divine,
when taken by itself, because it takes an inferior and an external
truth for the main truth and it tends to prevent a higher approach
to a more intimate reality. It exaggerates the importance of the
sense of sin and thereby prolongs and increases the soul’s fear
and self-distrust and weakness. It attaches the pursuit of virtue
and the shunning of sin to the idea of rewards and punishment,
though given in an after life, and makes them dependent on the
lower motives of fear and interest instead of the higher spirit
which should govern the ethical being. It makes hell and heaven
and not the Divine himself the object of the human soul in its
religious living. These crudities have served their turn in the
slow education of the human mind, but they are of no utility to
the Yogin who knows that whatever truth they may represent
belongs rather to the external relations of the developing human
soul with the external law of the universe than any intimate truth
of the inner relations of the human soul with the Divine; but it
is these which are the proper field of Yoga.
Still out of this conception there arise certain developments
which bring us nearer to the threshold of the Yoga of devotion.
First, there can emerge the idea of the Divine as the source and
law and aim of our ethical being and from this there can come the
knowledge of him as the highest Self to which our active nature
aspires, the Will to which we have to assimilate our will, the
eternal Right and Purity and Truth and Wisdom into harmony
with which our nature has to grow and towards whose being
our being is attracted. By this way we arrive at the Yoga of
works, and this Yoga has a place for personal devotion to the
Divine, for the divine Will appears as the Master of our works
564
The Yoga of Divine Love
By this way we arrive at the Yoga of
works, and this Yoga has a place for personal devotion to the
Divine, for the divine Will appears as the Master of our works
564
The Yoga of Divine Love
to whose voice we must listen, whose divine impulsion we must
obey and whose work it is the sole business of our active life and
will to do. Secondly, there emerges the idea of the divine Spirit,
the father of all who extends his wings of benignant protection
and love over all his creatures, and from that grows between the
soul and the Divine the relation of father and child, a relation
of love, and as a result the relation of brotherhood with our
fellow-beings. These relations of the Divine into the calm pure
light of whose nature we have to grow and the Master whom we
approach through works and service, the Father who responds
to the love of the soul that approaches him as the child, are
admitted elements of the Yoga of devotion.
The moment we come well into these developments and
their deeper spiritual meaning, the motive of the fear of God
becomes otiose, superfluous and even impossible. It is of
importance chiefly in the ethical field when the soul has not
yet grown sufficiently to follow good for its own sake and needs
an authority above it whose wrath or whose stern passionless
judgment it can fear and found upon that fear its fidelity to
virtue. When we grow into spirituality, this motive can no
longer remain except by the lingering on of some confusion in
the mind, some persistence of the old mentality. Moreover, the
ethical aim in Yoga is different from that of the external idea of
virtue. Ordinarily, ethics is regarded as a sort of machinery of
right action, the act is everything and how to do the right act
is the whole question and the whole trouble. But to the Yogin
action is chiefly important not for its own sake, but rather
as a means for the growth of the soul Godward. Therefore
what Indian spiritual writings lay stress upon is not so much
the quality of the action to be done as the quality of the soul
from which the action flows, upon its truth, fearlessness, purity,
love, compassion, benevolence, absence of the will to hurt, and
upon the actions as their outflowings. The old western idea
that human nature is intrinsically bad and virtue is a thing to
be followed out in despite of our fallen nature to which it is
contrary, is foreign to the Indian mentality trained from ancient
times in the ideas of the Yogins. Our nature contains, as well as
The Godward Emotions
565
Our nature contains, as well as
The Godward Emotions
565
its passionate rajasic and its downward-tending tamasic quality,
a purer sattwic element and it is the encouragement of this, its
highest part, which is the business of ethics. By it we increase
the divine nature, daivi prakrti, which is present in us and get
rid of the Titanic and demoniac elements. Not therefore the
Hebraic righteousness of the Godfearing man, but the purity,
love, beneficence, truth, fearlessness, harmlessness of the saint
and the God-lover are the goal of the ethical growth according
to this notion. And, speaking more largely, to grow into the
divine nature is the consummation of the ethical being. This can
be done best by realising God as the higher Self, the guiding
and uplifting Will or the Master whom we love and serve. Not
fear of him, but love of him and aspiration to the freedom and
eternal purity of his being must be the motive.
Certainly, fear enters into the relations of the master and
the servant and even of the father and the child, but only when
they are on the human level, when control and subjection and
punishment figure predominantly in them and love is obliged
to efface itself more or less behind the mask of authority. The
Divine even as the Master does not punish anybody, does not
threaten, does not force obedience. It is the human soul that has
freely to come to the Divine and offer itself to his overpowering
force that he may seize and uplift it towards his own divine levels,
and give it that joy of mastery of the finite nature by the Infinite
and of service to the Highest by which there comes freedom from
the ego and the lower nature. Love is the key of this relation, and
this service, dasyam, is in Indian Yoga the happy service of the
divine Friend or the passionate service to the divine Beloved. The
Master of the worlds who in the Gita demands of his servant, the
bhakta, to be nothing more in life than his instrument, makes
this claim as the friend, the guide, the higher Self, and describes
himself as the Lord of all the worlds who is the friend of all
creatures, sarvalokamahesvaram suhrdam sarvabhiitdndm; the
two relations in fact must go together and neither can be perfect
without the other. So too it is not the fatherhood of God as
the Creator who demands obedience because he is the maker of
our being, but the fatherhood of love which leads us towards
566
The Yoga of Divine Love
So too it is not the fatherhood of God as
the Creator who demands obedience because he is the maker of
our being, but the fatherhood of love which leads us towards
566
The Yoga of Divine Love
the closer soul-union of Yoga. Love is the real key in both, and
perfect love is inconsistent with the admission of the motive of
fear. Closeness of the human soul to the Divine is the object, and
fear sets always a barrier and a distance; even awe and reverence
for the divine Power are a sign of distance and division and they
disappear in the intimacy of the union of love. Moreover, fear
belongs to the lower nature, to the lower self, and in approaching
the higher Self must be put aside before we can enter into its
presence.
This relation of the divine fatherhood and the closer rela¬
tion with the Divine as the Mother-Soul of the universe have
their springs in another early religious motive. One type of the
Bhakta, says the Gita, is the devotee who comes to the Divine as
the giver of his wants, the giver of his good, the satisfier of the
needs of his inner and his outer being. “I bring to my bhakta”
says the Lord “his getting and his having of good, yogaksemam
vahdmyaham.” The life of man is a life of wants and needs and
therefore of desires, not only in his physical and vital, but in
his mental and spiritual being. When he becomes conscious of
a greater Power governing the world, he approaches it through
prayer for the fulfilment of his needs, for help in his rough
journey, for protection and aid in his struggle. Whatever cru¬
dities there may be in the ordinary religious approach to God
by prayer, and there are many, especially that attitude which
imagines the Divine as if capable of being propitiated, bribed,
flattered into acquiescence or indulgence by praise, entreaty and
gifts and has often little regard to the spirit in which he is
approached, still this way of turning to the Divine is an essential
movement of our religious being and reposes on a universal
truth.
The efficacy of prayer is often doubted and prayer itself
supposed to be a thing irrational and necessarily superfluous
and ineffective. It is true that the universal will executes always
its aim and cannot be deflected by egoistic propitiation and en¬
treaty, it is true of the Transcendent who expresses himself in the
universal order that being omniscient his larger knowledge must
foresee the thing to be done and it does not need direction or
The Godward Emotions
567
stimulation by human thought and that the individual’s desires
are not and cannot be in any world-order the true determining
factor. But neither is that order or the execution of the universal
will altogether effected by mechanical Law, but by powers and
forces of which for human life at least human will, aspiration
and faith are not among the least important. Prayer is only a
particular form given to that will, aspiration and faith. Its forms
are very often crude and not only childlike, which is in itself no
defect, but childish; but still it has a real power and significance.
Its power and sense is to put the will, aspiration and faith of
man into touch with the divine Will as that of a conscious Being
with whom we can enter into conscious and living relations.
For our will and aspiration can act either by our own strength
and endeavour, which can no doubt be made a thing great and
effective whether for lower or higher purposes, — and there are
plenty of disciplines which put it forward as the one force to
be used, — or it can act in dependence upon and with subordi¬
nation to the divine or the universal Will. And this latter way
again may either look upon that Will as responsive indeed to our
aspiration, but almost mechanically, by a sort of law of energy,
or at any rate quite impersonally, or else it may look upon it
as responding consciously to the divine aspiration and faith of
the human soul and consciously bringing to it the help, the
guidance, the protection and fruition demanded, yogaksemam
vahdmyaham.
Prayer helps to prepare this relation for us at first on the
lower plane even while it is there consistent with much that
is mere egoism and self-delusion; but afterwards we can draw
towards the spiritual truth which is behind it. It is not then the
giving of the thing asked for that matters, but the relation itself,
the contact of man’s life with God, the conscious interchange.
In spiritual matters and in the seeking of spiritual gains, this
conscious relation is a great power; it is a much greater power
than our own entirely self-reliant struggle and effort and it brings
a fuller spiritual growth and experience. Necessarily in the end
prayer either ceases in the greater thing for which it prepared us,
— in fact the form we call prayer is not itself essential so long
568
The Yoga of Divine Love
Necessarily in the end
prayer either ceases in the greater thing for which it prepared us,
— in fact the form we call prayer is not itself essential so long
568
The Yoga of Divine Love
as the faith, the will, the aspiration are there, — or remains only
for the joy of the relation. Also its objects, the artha or interest
it seeks to realise, become higher and higher until we reach the
highest motiveless devotion, which is that of divine love pure
and simple without any other demand or longing.
The relations which arise out of this attitude towards the
Divine, are that of the divine Father and the Mother with the
child and that of the divine Friend. To the Divine as these things
the human soul comes for help, for protection, for guidance, for
fruition, — or if knowledge be the aim, to the Guide, Teacher,
Giver of light, for the Divine is the Sun of knowledge, — or it
comes in pain and suffering for relief and solace and deliverance,
it may be deliverance either from the suffering itself or from the
world-existence which is the habitat of the suffering or from
all its inner and real causes.^ In these things we find there is
a certain gradation. For the relation of fatherhood is always
less close, intense, passionate, intimate, and therefore it is less
resorted to in the Yoga which seeks for the closest union. That of
the divine Friend is a thing sweeter and more intimate, admits of
an equality and intimacy even in inequality and the beginning of
mutual self-giving; at its closest when all idea of other giving and
taking disappears, when this relation becomes motiveless except
for the one sole all-sufficing motive of love, it turns into the free
and happy relation of the playmate in the Lila of existence. But
closer and more intimate still is the relation of the Mother and
the child, and that therefore plays a very large part wherever the
religious impulse is most richly fervent and springs most warmly
from the heart of man. The soul goes to the Mother-Soul in all
its desires and troubles and the divine Mother wishes that it
should be so, so that she may pour out her heart of love. It turns
to her too because of the self-existent nature of this love and
because that points us to the home towards which we turn from
our wanderings in the world and to the bosom in which we find
our rest.
^ These are three of the four classes of devotee which are recognised hy the Gita,
drta, arthdrtht, jijndsu, the distressed, the seeker of personal objects and the seeker of
God-knowledge.
The Godward Emotions
569
^ These are three of the four classes of devotee which are recognised hy the Gita,
drta, arthdrtht, jijndsu, the distressed, the seeker of personal objects and the seeker of
God-knowledge.
The Godward Emotions
569
But the highest and the greatest relation is that which starts
from none of the ordinary religious motives, but is rather of
the very essence of Yoga, springs from the very nature of love
itself; it is the passion of the Lover and the Beloved. Wherever
there is the desire of the soul for its utter union with God, this
form of the divine yearning makes its way even into religions
which seem to do without it and give it no place in their ordinary
system. Here the one thing asked for is love, the one thing feared
is the loss of love, the one sorrow is the sorrow of separation
of love; for all other things either do not exist for the lover or
come in only as incidents or as results and not as objects or
conditions of love. All love is indeed in its nature self-existent
because it springs from a secret oneness in being and a sense of
that oneness or desire of oneness in the heart between souls that
are yet able to conceive of themselves as different from each
other and divided. Therefore all these other relations too can
arrive at their self-existent motiveless joy of being for the sake
of love alone. But still they start from and to the end they to
some extent find a satisfaction of their play in other motives.
But here the beginning is love and the end is love and the whole
aim is love. There is indeed the desire of possession, but even
this is overcome in the fullness of the self-existent love and the
final demand of the Bhakta is simply that his bhakti may never
cease nor diminish. He does not ask for heaven or for liberation
from birth or for any other object, but only that his love may be
eternal and absolute.
He does not ask for heaven or for liberation
from birth or for any other object, but only that his love may be
eternal and absolute.
Love is a passion and it seeks for two things, eternity and
intensity, and in the relation of the Lover and Beloved the seeking
for eternity and for intensity is instinctive and self-born. Love is a
seeking for mutual possession, and it is here that the demand for
mutual possession becomes absolute. Passing beyond desire of
possession which means a difference, it is a seeking for oneness,
and it is here that the idea of oneness, of two souls merging
into each other and becoming one finds the acme of its longing
and the utterness of its satisfaction. Love, too, is a yearning for
beauty, and it is here that the yearning is eternally satisfied in
the vision and the touch and the joy of the All-beautiful. Love
570
The Yoga of Divine Love
is a child and a seeker of Delight, and it is here that it finds the
highest possible ecstasy both of the heart-consciousness and of
every fibre of the being. Moreover, this relation is that which
as between human being and human being demands the most
and, even while reaching the greatest intensities, is still the least
satisfied, because only in the Divine can it find its real and its
utter satisfaction. Therefore it is here most that the turning of
human emotion Godwards finds its full meaning and discovers
all the truth of which love is the human symbol, all its essential
instincts divinised, raised, satisfied in the bliss from which our
life was born and towards which by oneness it returns in the
Ananda of the divine existence where love is absolute, eternal
and unalloyed.
Chapter IV
The Way of Devotion
Chapter IV
The Way of Devotion
BHAKTI in itself is as wide as the heart-yearning of the
soul for the Divine and as simple and straightforward as
love and desire going straight towards their object. It can¬
not therefore be fixed down to any systematic method, cannot
found itself on a psychological science like the Rajayoga, or
a psycho-physical like the Hathayoga, or start from a definite
intellectual process like the ordinary method of the Jnanayoga.
It may employ various means or supports, and man, having in
him a tendency towards order, process and system, may try to
methodise his resort to these auxiliaries: but to give an account
of their variations one would have to review almost all man’s
numberless religions upon their side of inner approach to the
Deity. Really, however, the more intimate yoga of Bhakti resolves
itself simply into these four movements, the desire of the Soul
when it turns towards God and the straining of its emotion
towards him, the pain of love and the divine return of love,
the delight of love possessed and the play of that delight, and
the eternal enjoyment of the divine Lover which is the heart of
celestial bliss. These are things that are at once too simple and
too profound for methodising or for analysis. One can at best
only say, here are these four successive elements, steps, if we
may so call them, of the siddhi, and here are, largely, some of
the means which it uses, and here again are some of the aspects
and experiences of the sadhana of devotion. We need only trace
broadly the general line they follow before we turn to consider
how the way of devotion enters into a synthetic and integral
Yoga, what place it takes there and how its principle affects the
other principles of divine living.
All Yoga is a turning of the human mind and the human
soul, not yet divine in realisation, but feeling the divine impulse
and attraction in it, towards that by which it finds its greater
572
The Yoga of Divine Love
All Yoga is a turning of the human mind and the human
soul, not yet divine in realisation, but feeling the divine impulse
and attraction in it, towards that by which it finds its greater
572
The Yoga of Divine Love
being. Emotionally, the first form which this turning takes must
be that of adoration. In ordinary religion this adoration wears
the form of external worship and that again develops a most
external form of ceremonial worship. This element is ordinarily
necessary because the mass of men live in their physical minds,
cannot realise anything except by the force of a physical symbol
and cannot feel that they are living anything except by the force
of a physical action. We might apply here the Tantric gradation
of sadhana, which makes the way of the pasu, the herd, the
animal or physical being, the lowest stage of its discipline, and
say that the purely or predominantly ceremonial adoration is the
first step of this lowest part of the way. It is evident that even real
religion, — and Yoga is something more than religion, — only
begins when this quite outward worship corresponds to some¬
thing really felt within the mind, some genuine submission, awe
or spiritual aspiration, to which it becomes an aid, an outward
expression and also a sort of periodical or constant reminder
helping to draw back the mind to it from the preoccupations of
ordinary life. But so long as it is only an idea of the Godhead to
which one renders reverence or homage, we have not yet got to
the beginning of Yoga. The aim of Yoga being union, its begin¬
ning must always be a seeking after the Divine, a longing after
some kind of touch, closeness or possession. When this comes on
us, the adoration becomes always primarily an inner worship;
we begin to make ourselves a temple of the Divine, our thoughts
and feelings a constant prayer of aspiration and seeking, our
whole life an external service and worship. It is as this change,
this new soul-tendency grows, that the religion of the devotee
becomes a Yoga, a growing contact and union. It does not follow
that the outward worship will necessarily be dispensed with,
but it will increasingly become only a physical expression or
outflowing of the inner devotion and adoration, the wave of the
soul throwing itself out in speech and symbolic act.
Adoration, before it turns into an element of the deeper
Yoga of devotion, a petal of the flower of love, its homage and
self-uplifting to its sun, must bring with it, if it is profound, an
increasing consecration of the being to the Divine who is adored.
The Way of Devotion
573
And one element of this consecration must be a self-purifying
so as to become fit for the divine contact, or for the entrance
of the Divine into the temple of our inner being, or for his self¬
revelation in the shrine of the heart. This purifying may be ethical
in its character, but it will not be merely the moralist’s seeking
for the right and blameless action or even, when once we reach
the stage of Yoga, an obedience to the law of God as revealed in
formal religion; but it will be a throwing away, katharsis, of all
that conflicts whether with the idea of the Divine in himself or
of the Divine in ourselves. In the former case it becomes in habit
of feeling and outer act an imitation of the Divine, in the latter
a growing into his likeness in our nature. What inner adoration
is to ceremonial worship, this growing into the divine likeness is
to the outward ethical life. It culminates in a sort of liberation
by likeness to the Divine,^ a liberation from our lower nature
and a change into the divine nature.
Consecration becomes in its fullness a devoting of all our
being to the Divine; therefore also of all our thoughts and our
works. Here the Yoga takes into itself the essential elements of
the Yoga of works and the Yoga of knowledge, but in its own
manner and with its own peculiar spirit. It is a sacrifice of life and
works to the Divine, but a sacrifice of love more than a tuning of
the will to the divine Will. The bhakta offers up his life and all
that he is and all that he has and all that he does to the Divine.
This surrender may take the ascetic form, as when he leaves
the ordinary life of men and devotes his days solely to prayer
and praise and worship or to ecstatic meditation, gives up his
personal possessions and becomes the monk or the mendicant
whose one and only possession is the Divine, gives up all actions
in life except those only which help or belong to the communion
with the Divine and communion with other devotees, or at most
keeps the doing from the secure fortress of the ascetic life of
those services to men which seem peculiarly the outflowing of
the divine nature of love, compassion and good. But there is
the wider self-consecration, proper to any integral Yoga, which,
^ sadrsya-mukti.
But there is
the wider self-consecration, proper to any integral Yoga, which,
^ sadrsya-mukti.
574
The Yoga of Divine Love
accepting the fullness of life and the world in its entirety as the
play of the Divine, offers up the whole being into his possession;
it is a holding of all one is and has as belonging to him only and
not to ourselves and a doing of all works as an offering to him.
By this comes the complete active consecration of both the inner
and the outer life, the unmutilated self-giving.
There is also the consecration of the thoughts to the Divine.
In its inception this is the attempt to fix the mind on the object
of adoration, — for naturally the restless human mind is occu¬
pied with other objects and, even when it is directed upwards,
constantly drawn away by the world, — so that in the end it
habitually thinks of him and all else is only secondary and
thought of only in relation to him. This is done often with the
aid of a physical image or, more intimately and characteristically,
of a mantra or a divine name through which the divine being
is realised. There are supposed by those who systematise to be
three stages of the seeking through the devotion of the mind,
first, the constant hearing of the divine name, qualities and all
that has been attached to them, secondly, the constant thinking
on them or on the divine being or personality, thirdly, the settling
and fixing of the mind on the object; and by this comes the full
realisation. And by these, too, there comes when the accompa¬
nying feeling or the concentration is very intense, the Samadhi,
the ecstatic trance in which the consciousness passes away from
outer objects. But all this is really incidental; the one thing es¬
sential is the intense devotion of the thought in the mind to the
object of adoration. Although it seems akin to the contemplation
of the way of knowledge, it differs from that in its spirit. It is in its
real nature not a still, but an ecstatic contemplation; it seeks not
to pass into the being of the Divine, but to bring the Divine into
ourselves and to lose ourselves in the deep ecstasy of his presence
or of his possession; and its bliss is not the peace of unity, but
the ecstasy of union. Here, too, there may be the separative self¬
consecration which ends in the giving up of all other thought
of life for the possession of this ecstasy, eternal afterwards in
planes beyond, or the comprehensive consecration in which all
the thoughts are full of the Divine and even in the occupations
The Way of Devotion
575
of life every thought remembers him. As in the other Yogas, so
in this, one comes to see the Divine everywhere and in all and to
pour out the realisation of the Divine in all one’s inner activities
and outward actions. But all is supported here by the primary
force of the emotional union: for it is by love that the entire
self-consecration and the entire possession is accomplished, and
thought and action become shapes and figures of the divine love
which possesses the spirit and its members.
This is the ordinary movement by which what may be at
first a vague adoration of some idea of the Divine takes on the
hue and character and then, once entered into the path of Yoga,
the inner reality and intense experience of divine love. But there
is the more intimate Yoga which from the first consists in this
love and attains only by the intensity of its longing without
other process or method. All the rest comes, but it comes out
of this, as leaf and flower out of the seed; other things are not
the means of developing and fulfilling love, but the radiations of
love already growing in the soul. This is the way that the soul
follows when, while occupied perhaps with the normal human
life, it has heard the flute of the Godhead behind the near screen
of secret woodlands and no longer possesses itself, can have no
satisfaction or rest till it has pursued and seized and possessed
the divine fluteplayer. This is in essence the power of love itself
in the heart and soul turning from earthly objects to the spiritual
source of all beauty and delight. There live in this seeking all the
sentiment and passion, all the moods and experiences of love
concentrated on a supreme object of desire and intensified a
hundredfold beyond the highest acme of intensity possible to
a human love. There is the disturbance of the whole life, the
illumination by an unseized vision, the unsatisfied yearning for
a single object of the heart’s desire, the intense impatience of all
that distracts from the one preoccupation, the intense pain of the
obstacles that stand in the way of possession, the perfect vision of
all beauty and delight in a single form. And there are all the many
moods of love, the joy of musing and absorption, the delight of
the meeting and fulfilment and embrace, the pain of separation,
the wrath of love, the tears of longing, the increased delight
576
The Yoga of Divine Love
And there are all the many
moods of love, the joy of musing and absorption, the delight of
the meeting and fulfilment and embrace, the pain of separation,
the wrath of love, the tears of longing, the increased delight
576
The Yoga of Divine Love
of reunion. The heart is the scene of this supreme idyll of the
inner consciousness, but a heart which undergoes increasingly
an intense spiritual change and becomes the radiantly unfolding
lotus of the spirit. And as the intensity of its seeking is beyond the
highest power of the normal human emotions, so also the delight
and the final ecstasy are beyond the reach of the imagination
and beyond expression by speech. For this is the delight of the
Godhead that passes human understanding.
For this is the delight of the
Godhead that passes human understanding.
Indian bhakti has given to this divine love powerful forms,
poetic symbols which are not in reality so much symbols as
intimate expressions of truth which can find no other expres¬
sion. It uses human relations and sees a divine person, not as
mere figures, but because there are divine relations of supreme
Delight and Beauty with the human soul of which human rela¬
tions are the imperfect but still the real type, and because that
Delight and Beauty are not abstractions or qualities of a quite
impalpable metaphysical entity, but the very body and form
of the supreme Being. It is a living Soul to which the soul of
the bhakta yearns; for the source of all life is not an idea or a
conception or a state of existence, but a real Being. Therefore
in the possession of the divine Beloved all the life of the soul
is satisfied and all the relations by which it finds and in which
it expresses itself, are wholly fulfilled; therefore, too, by any
and all of them can the Beloved be sought, though those which
admit the greatest intensity, are always those by which he can
be most intensely pursued and possessed with the profoundest
ecstasy. He is sought within in the heart and therefore apart
from all by an inward-gathered concentration of the being in
the soul itself; but he is also seen and loved everywhere where
he manifests his being. All the beauty and joy of existence is seen
as his joy and beauty; he is embraced by the spirit in all beings;
the ecstasy of love enjoyed pours itself out in a universal love;
all existence becomes a radiation of its delight and even in its
very appearances is transformed into something other than its
outward appearance. The world itself is experienced as a play
of the divine Delight, a Lila, and that in which the world loses
itself is the heaven of beatitude of the eternal union.
Chapter V
The Divine Personality
The world itself is experienced as a play
of the divine Delight, a Lila, and that in which the world loses
itself is the heaven of beatitude of the eternal union.
Chapter V
The Divine Personality
ONE QUESTION rises immediately in a synthetic Yoga
which must not only comprise but unify knowledge
and devotion, the difficult and troubling question of
the divine Personality. All the trend of modern thought has
been towards the belittling of personality; it has seen behind
the complex facts of existence only a great impersonal force,
an obscure becoming, and that too works itself out through
impersonal forces and impersonal laws, while personality
presents itself only as a subsequent, subordinate, partial, tran¬
sient phenomenon upon the face of this impersonal movement.
Granting even to this Eorce a consciousness, that seems to be
impersonal, indeterminate, void in essence of all but abstract
qualities or energies; for everything else is only a result, a minor
phenomenon. Ancient Indian thought starting from quite the
other end of the scale arrived on most of its lines at the same
generalisation. It conceived of an impersonal existence as the
original and eternal truth; personality is only an illusion or at
best a phenomenon of the mind.
On the other hand, the way of devotion is impossible if
the personality of the Divine cannot be taken as a reality, a
real reality and not a hypostasis of the illusion. There can be
no love without a lover and beloved. If our personality is an
illusion and the Personality to whom our adoration rises only a
primary aspect of the illusion, and if we believe that, then love
and adoration must at once be killed, or can only survive in the
illogical passion of the heart denying by its strong beats of life the
clear and dry truths of the reason. To love and adore a shadow
of our minds or a bright cosmic phenomenon which vanishes
from the eye of Truth, may be possible, but the way of salvation
cannot be built upon a foundation of wilful self-deception. The
bhakta indeed does not allow these doubts of the intellect to
578
The Yoga of Divine Love
The
bhakta indeed does not allow these doubts of the intellect to
578
The Yoga of Divine Love
come in his way; he has the divinations of his heart, and these
are to him sufficient. But the sadhaka of the integral Yoga has
to know the eternal and ultimate Truth and not to persist to
the end in the delight of a Shadow. If the impersonal is the sole
enduring truth, then a firm synthesis is impossible. He can at
most take the divine personality as a symbol, a powerful and
effective fiction, but he will have in the end to overpass it and to
abandon devotion for the sole pursuit of the ultimate knowledge.
He will have to empty being of all its symbols, values, contents
in order to arrive at the featureless Reality.
We have said, however, that personality and impersonality,
as our minds understand them, are only aspects of the Divine
and both are contained in his being; they are one thing which
we see from two opposite sides and into which we enter by two
gates. We have to see this more clearly in order to rid ourselves
of any doubts with which the intellect may seek to afflict us as
we follow the impulse of devotion and the intuition of love or
to pursue us into the joy of the divine union. They fall away
indeed from that joy, but if we are too heavily weighted with
the philosophical mind, they may follow us almost up to its
threshold. It is well therefore to discharge ourselves of them
as early as may be by perceiving the limits of the intellect, the
rational philosophic mind, in its peculiar way of approaching the
truth and the limits even of the spiritual experience which sets
out from the approach through the intellect, to see that it need
not be the whole integrality of the highest and widest spiritual
experience. Spiritual intuition is always a more luminous guide
than the discriminating reason, and spiritual intuition addresses
itself to us not only through the reason, but through the rest
of our being as well, through the heart and the life also. The
integral knowledge will then be that which takes account of all
and unifies their diverse truths. The intellect itself will be more
deeply satisfied if it does not confine itself to its own data, but
accepts truth of the heart and the life also and gives to them
their absolute spiritual value.
The nature of the philosophical intellect is to move among
ideas and to give them a sort of abstract reality of their own
The Divine Personality
579
The nature of the philosophical intellect is to move among
ideas and to give them a sort of abstract reality of their own
The Divine Personality
579
apart from all their concrete representations which affect our
life and personal consciousness. Its bent is to reduce these repre¬
sentations to their barest and most general terms and to subtilise
even these if possible into some final abstraction. The pure intel¬
lectual direction travels away from life. In judging things it tries
to get back from their effects on our personality and to arrive
at whatever general and impersonal truth may be behind them;
it is inclined to treat that kind of truth as the only real truth
of being or at least as the one superior and permanent power
of reality. Therefore it is bound by its own nature to end in its
extremes at an absolute impersonality and an absolute abstrac¬
tion. This is where the ancient philosophies ended. They reduced
everything to three abstractions, existence, consciousness and
bliss of being, and they tended to get rid of the two of these
three which seemed dependent on the first and most abstract,
and to throw all back into a pure featureless existence from
which everything else had been discharged, all representations,
all values, except the one infinite and timeless fact of being. But
the intellect had still one farther possible step to take and it took
it in Buddhistic philosophy. It found that even this final fact of
existence was only a representation; it abstracted that also and
got to an infinite zero which might be either a void or an eternal
inexpressible.
The heart and life, as we know, have an exactly opposite
law. They cannot live with abstractions; they can find their
satisfaction only in things that are concrete or can be made
seizable; whether physically, mentally or spiritually, their object
is not something which they seek to discriminate and arrive at
by intellectual abstraction; a living becoming of it or a conscious
possession and joy of their object is what they seek. Nor is it the
satisfaction of an abstract mind or impersonal existence to which
they respond, but the joy and the activity of a being, a conscious
Person in us, whether finite or infinite, to whom the delights and
powers of his existence are a reality. Therefore when the heart
and life turn towards the Highest and the Infinite, they arrive not
at an abstract existence or non-existence, a Sat or else a Nirvana,
but at an existent, a Sat Purusha, not merely at a consciousness.
580
The Yoga of Divine Love
580
The Yoga of Divine Love
but at a conscious Being, a Chaitanya Purusha, not merely at a
purely impersonal delight of the Is, but at an infinite I Am of
bliss, an Anandamaya Purusha; nor can they immerge and lose
his consciousness and bliss in featureless existence, but must
insist on all three in one, for delight of existence is their highest
power and without consciousness delight cannot be possessed.
That is the sense of the supreme figure of the intensest Indian
religion of love, Sri Krishna, the All-blissful and All-beautiful.
The intelligence can also follow this trend, but it ceases then
to be the pure intellect; it calls in its power of imagination to
its aid, it becomes the image-maker, the creator of symbols and
values, a spiritual artist and poet. Therefore the severest intel¬
lectual philosophy admits the Saguna, the divine Person, only
as the supreme cosmic symbol; go beyond it to reality and you
will arrive, it says, at last to the Nirguna, the pure Impersonal.
The rival philosophy asserts the superiority of the Saguna; that
which is impersonal is, it will perhaps say, only the material, the
stuff of his spiritual nature out of which he manifests the powers
of his being, consciousness and bliss, all that expresses him; the
impersonal is the apparent negative out of which he looses the
temporal variations of his eternal positive of personality. There
are evidently here two instincts, or, if we hesitate to apply that
word to the intellect, two innate powers of our being which are
dealing each in its own manner with the same Reality.
Both the ideas of the intellect, its discriminations, and the
aspirations of the heart and life, their approximations, have
behind them realities at which they are the means of arriving.
Both are justified by spiritual experience; both arrive at the
divine absolute of that which they are seeking. But still each
tends, if too exclusively indulged, to be hampered by the limi¬
tations of its innate quality and its characteristic means. We see
that in our earthly living, where the heart and life followed ex¬
clusively failed to lead to any luminous issue, while an exclusive
intellectuality becomes either remote, abstract and impotent or a
sterile critic or dry mechanist. Their sufficient harmony and just
reconciliation is one of the great problems of our psychology
and our action.
The Divine Personality
581
Their sufficient harmony and just
reconciliation is one of the great problems of our psychology
and our action.
The Divine Personality
581
The reconciling power lies beyond in the intuition. But there
is an intuition which serves the intellect and an intuition which
serves the heart and the life, and if we follow either of these
exclusively, we shall not get much farther than before; we shall
only make more intimately real to us, but still separately, the
things at which the other and less seeing powers are aiming.
But the fact that it can lend itself impartially to all parts of
our being, — for even the body has its intuitions, — shows that
the intuition is not exclusive, but an integral truth-finder. We
have to question the intuition of our whole being, not only
separately in each part of it, nor in a sum of their findings,
but beyond all these lower instruments, beyond even their first
spiritual correspondents, by rising into the native home of the
intuition which is the native home of the infinite and illimitable
Truth, rtasya sve dame, where all existence discovers its unity.
That is what the ancient Veda meant when it cried, “There is a
firm truth hidden by truth (the eternal truth concealed by this
other of which we have here these lower intuitions); there the
ten hundred rays of light stand together; that is One.” Rtena
rtam apihitam dhruvam . . . dasa satd saha tasthus, tad ekam.
The spiritual intuition lays hold always upon the reality;
it is the luminous harbinger of spiritual realisation or else its
illuminative light; it sees that which the other powers of our
being are labouring to explore; it gets at the firm truth of the
abstract representations of the intellect and the phenomenal rep¬
resentations of the heart and life, a truth which is itself neither
remotely abstract nor outwardly concrete, but something else for
which these are only two sides of its psychological manifestation
to us. What the intuition of our integral being perceives, when its
members no longer dispute among themselves but are illumined
from above, is that the whole of our being aims at the one reality.
The impersonal is a truth, the personal too is a truth; they are
the same truth seen from two sides of our psychological activity;
neither by itself gives the total account of the Reality, and yet by
either we can approach it.
Looked at from one side, it would seem as if an imper¬
sonal Thought were at work and created the fiction of the
582
The Yoga of Divine Love
Looked at from one side, it would seem as if an imper¬
sonal Thought were at work and created the fiction of the
582
The Yoga of Divine Love
thinker for the convenience of its action, an impersonal Power
at work creating the fiction of the doer, an impersonal existence
in operation which uses the fiction of a personal being who
has a conscious personality and a personal delight. Looked at
from the other side, it is the thinker who expresses himself in
thoughts which without him could not exist and our general
notion of thought symbolises simply the power of the nature of
the thinker; the Ishwara expresses himself by will and power and
force; the Existent extends himself in all the forms integral and
partial, direct, inverse and perverse of his existence, conscious¬
ness and bliss, and our abstract general notion of these things
is only an intellectual representation of the triple power of his
nature of being. All impersonality seems in its turn to become a
fiction and existence in its every movement and its every particle
nothing but the life, the consciousness, the power, the delight of
the one and yet innumerable Personality, the infinite Godhead,
the self-aware and self-unfolding Purusha. Both views are true,
except that the idea of fiction, which is borrowed from our own
intellectual processes, has to be exiled and each must be given
its proper validity. The integral seeker has to see in this light
that he can reach one and the same Reality on both lines, either
successively or simultaneously, as if on two connected wheels
travelling on parallel lines, but parallel lines which in defiance
of intellectual logic but in obedience to their own inner truth of
unity do meet in infinity.
We have to look at the divine Personality from this stand¬
point. When we speak of personality, we mean by it at first
something limited, external and separative, and our idea of a
personal God assumes the same imperfect character. Our per¬
sonality is to us at first a separate creature, a limited mind,
body, character which we conceive of as the person we are, a
fixed quantity; for although in reality it is always changing, yet
there is a sufficient element of stability to give a kind of practical
justification to this notion of fixedness. We conceive of God as
such a person, only without body, a separate person different
from all others with a mind and character limited by certain
qualities. At first in our primitive conceptions his deity is a thing
The Divine Personality
583
We conceive of God as
such a person, only without body, a separate person different
from all others with a mind and character limited by certain
qualities. At first in our primitive conceptions his deity is a thing
The Divine Personality
583
of much inconstancy, freak and caprice, an enlarged edition of
our human character; but afterwards we conceive of the divine
nature of personality as a quite fixed quantity and we attribute
to it those qualities alone which we regard as divine and ideal,
while all the others are eliminated. This limitation compels us
to account for all the rest by attributing them to a Devil, or
by lending to man an original creative capacity for all that we
consider evil, or else, when we perceive that this will not quite
do, by erecting a power which we call Nature and attributing to
that all the lower quality and mass of action for which we do
not wish to make the Divine responsible. At a higher pitch the
attribution of mind and character to God becomes less anthro¬
pomorphic and we regard him as an infinite Spirit, but still a
separate person, a spirit with certain fixed divine qualities as his
attributes. So are conceived the ideas of the divine Personality,
the personal God which vary so much in various religions.
So are conceived the ideas of the divine Personality,
the personal God which vary so much in various religions.
All this may seem at first sight to be an original anthro¬
pomorphism terminating in an intellectual notion of the Deity
which is very much at variance with the actualities of the world
as we see it. It is not surprising that the philosophical and
sceptical mind should have found little difficulty in destroying
it all intellectually, whether in the direction of the denial of
a personal God and the assertion of an impersonal Force or
Becoming or in that of an impersonal Being or an ineffable
denial of existence with all the rest as only symbols of Maya or
phenomenal truths of the Time-consciousness. But these are only
the personifications of monotheism. Polytheistic religions, less
exalted perhaps, but wider and more sensitive in their response
to cosmic life, have felt that all in the cosmos has a divine
origin; therefore they conceived of the existence of many divine
personalities with a vague sense of an indefinable Divine behind,
whose relations with the personal gods were not very clearly con¬
ceived. And in their more exoteric forms these gods were crudely
anthropomorphic; but where the inner sense of spiritual things
became clearer, the various godheads assumed the appearance
of personalities of the one Divine, — that is the declared point
of view of the ancient Veda. This Divine might be a supreme
584
The Yoga of Divine Love
Being who manifests himself in various divine personalities or
an impersonal existence which meets the human mind in these
forms; or both views might be held simultaneously without any
intellectual attempt to reconcile them, since both were felt to be
true to spiritual experience.
If we subject these notions of the divine Personality to the
discrimination of the intellect, we shall be inclined to reduce
them, according to our bent, to fictions of the imagination or to
psychological symbols, in any case, the response of our sensitive
personality to something which is not this at all, but is purely
impersonal. We may say that That is in reality the very opposite
of our humanity and our personality and therefore in order to
enter into relations with it we are impelled to set up these human
fictions and these personal symbols so as to make it nearer to
us. But we have to judge by spiritual experience, and in a total
spiritual experience we shall find that these things are not fictions
and symbols, but truths of divine being in their essence, however
imperfect may have been our representations of them. Even our
first idea of our own personality is not an absolute error, but only
an incomplete and superficial view beset by many mental errors.
Greater self-knowledge shows us that we are not fundamentally
the particular formulation of form, powers, properties, qualities
with a conscious I identifying itself with them, which we at first
appear to be. That is only a temporary fact, though still a fact, of
our partial being on the surface of our active consciousness. We
find within an infinite being with the potentiality of all qualities,
of infinite quality, ananta-guna, which can be combined in any
number of possible ways, and each combination is a revelation
of our being. For all this personality is the self-manifestation
of a Person, that is to say of a being who is conscious of his
manifestation.
But we see too that this being does not seem to be composed
even of infinite quality, but has a status of his complex reality in
which he seems to stand back from it and to become an indefin¬
able conscious existence, anirdesyam. Even consciousness seems
to be drawn back and leave merely a timeless pure existence.
And again even this pure self of our being seems at a certain
The Divine Personality
585
Even consciousness seems
to be drawn back and leave merely a timeless pure existence.
And again even this pure self of our being seems at a certain
The Divine Personality
585
pitch to deny its own reality, or to be a projection from a self¬
less^ baseless unknowable, which we may conceive of either as a
nameless somewhat, or as a Nihil. It is when we would fix upon
this exclusively and forget all that it has withdrawn into itself
that we speak of pure impersonality or the void Nihil as the high¬
est truth. But a more integral vision shows us that it is the Person
and the personality and all that it had manifested which has thus
cast itself upward into its own unexpressed absolute. And if we
carry up our heart as well as our reasoning mind to the Highest,
we shall find that we can reach it through the absolute Person
as well as through an absolute impersonality. But all this self-
knowledge is only the type within ourselves of the corresponding
truth of the Divine in his universality. There too we meet him
in various forms of divine personality; in formulations of qual¬
ity which variously express him to us in his nature; in infinite
quality, the Ananta-guna; in the divine Person who expresses
himself through infinite quality; in absolute impersonality, an
absolute existence or an absolute non-existence, which is yet all
the time the unexpressed Absolute of this divine Person, this
conscious Being who manifests himself through us and through
the universe.
Even on the cosmic plane we are constantly approaching
the Divine on either of these sides. We may think, feel and say
that God is Truth, Justice, Righteousness, Power, Love, Delight,
Beauty; we may see him as a universal force or as a universal
consciousness. But this is only the abstract way of experience. As
we ourselves are not merely a number of qualities or powers or
a psychological quantity, but a being, a person who so expresses
his nature, so is the Divine a Person, a conscious Being who thus
expresses his nature to us. And we can adore him through differ¬
ent forms of this nature, a God of righteousness, a God of love
and mercy, a God of peace and purity; but it is evident that there
are other things in the divine nature which we have put outside
the form of personality in which we are thus worshipping him.
The courage of an unflinching spiritual vision and experience
^ anatmyam anilayanam. Taittiriya Upanishad.
586
The Yoga of Divine Love
The courage of an unflinching spiritual vision and experience
^ anatmyam anilayanam. Taittiriya Upanishad.
586
The Yoga of Divine Love
can meet him also in more severe or in terrible forms. None
of these are all the Divinity; yet these forms of his personality
are real truths of himself in which he meets us and seems to
deal with us, as if the rest had been put away behind him. He is
each separately and all altogether. He is Vishnu, Krishna, Kali; he
reveals himself to us in humanity as the Christ personality or the
Buddha personality. When we look beyond our first exclusively
concentrated vision, we see behind Vishnu all the personality
of Shiva and behind Shiva all the personality of Vishnu. He
is the Ananta-guna, infinite quality and the infinite divine Per¬
sonality which manifests itself through it. Again he seems to
withdraw into a pure spiritual impersonality or beyond all idea
even of impersonal Self and to justify a spiritualised atheism
or agnosticism; he becomes to the mind of man an indefinable,
anirdesyam. But out of this unknowable the conscious Being,
the divine Person, who has manifested himself here, still speaks,
“This too is I; even here beyond the view of mind, I am He, the
Purushottama.”
For beyond the divisions and contradictions of the intellect
there is another light and there the vision of a truth reveals itself
which we may thus try to express to ourselves intellectually.
There all is one truth of all these truths; for there each is present
and justified in all the rest. In that light our spiritual experience
becomes united and integralised; no least hair’s breadth of real
division is left, no shade of superiority and inferiority remains
between the seeking of the Impersonal and the adoration of the
divine Personality, between the way of knowledge and the way
of devotion.
Chapter VI
The Delight of the Divine
Chapter VI
The Delight of the Divine
This then is the way of devotion and this its justification
to the highest and the widest, the most integral knowl¬
edge, and we can now perceive what form and place it
will take in an integral Yoga. Yoga is in essence the union of the
soul with the immortal being and consciousness and delight of
the Divine, effected through the human nature with a result of
development into the divine nature of being, whatever that may
be, so far as we can conceive it in mind and realise it in spiritual
activity. Whatever we see of this Divine and fix our concentrated
effort upon it, that we can become or grow into some kind of
unity with it or at the lowest into tune and harmony with it. The
old Upanishad put it trenchantly in its highest terms, “Whoever
envisages it as the Existence becomes that existence and whoever
envisages it as the Non-existence, becomes that non-existence;”
so too it is with all else that we see of the Divine, — that, we
may say, is at once the essential and the pragmatic truth of the
Godhead. It is something beyond us which is indeed already
within us, but which we as yet are not or are only initially in
our human existence; but whatever of it we see, we can create or
reveal in our conscious nature and being and can grow into it,
and so to create or reveal in ourselves individually the Godhead
and grow into its universality and transcendence is our spiritual
destiny. Or if this seem too high for the weakness of our nature,
then at least to approach, reflect and be in secure communion
with it is a near and possible consummation.
The aim of this synthetic or integral Yoga which we are con¬
sidering, is union with the being, consciousness and delight of
the Divine through every part of our human nature separately or
simultaneously, but all in the long end harmonised and unified,
so that the whole may be transformed into a divine nature of
being. Nothing less than this can satisfy the integral seer, because
588
The Yoga of Divine Love
Nothing less than this can satisfy the integral seer, because
588
The Yoga of Divine Love
what he sees must be that which he strives to possess spiritually
and, so far as may be, become. Not with the knower in him
alone, nor with the will alone, nor with the heart alone, but
with all these equally and also with the whole mental and vital
being in him he aspires to the Godhead and labours to convert
their nature into its divine equivalents. And since God meets
us in many ways of his being and in all tempts us to him even
while he seems to elude us, — and to see divine possibility and
overcome its play of obstacles constitutes the whole mystery and
greatness of human existence, — therefore in each of these ways
at its highest or in the union of all, if we can find the key of
their oneness, we shall aspire to track out and find and possess
him. Since he withdraws into impersonality, we follow after his
impersonal being and delight, but since he meets us also in our
personality and through personal relations of the Divine with
the human, that too we shall not deny ourselves; we shall admit
both the play of the love and the delight and its ineffable union.
By knowledge we seek unity with the Divine in his conscious
being: by works we seek also unity with the Divine in his con¬
scious being, not statically, but dynamically, through conscious
union with the divine Will; but by love we seek unity with him
in all the delight of his being. For that reason the way of love,
however narrow it may seem in some of its first movements, is in
the end more imperatively all-embracing than any other motive
of Yoga. The way of knowledge tends easily towards the imper¬
sonal and the absolute, may very soon become exclusive. It is
true that it need not do so; since the conscious being of the Divine
is universal and individual as well as transcendent and absolute,
here too there may be and should be a tendency to integral
realisation of unity and we can arrive by it at a spiritual oneness
with God in man and God in the universe not less complete than
any transcendent union. But still this is not quite imperative. For
we may plead that there is a higher and a lower knowledge, a
higher self-awareness and a lower self-awareness, and that here
the apex of knowledge is to be pursued to the exclusion of
the mass of knowledge, the way of exclusion preferred to the
integral way. Or we may discover a theory of illusion to justify
The Delight of the Divine
589
Or we may discover a theory of illusion to justify
The Delight of the Divine
589
our rejection of all connection with our fellow-men and with the
cosmic action. The way of works leads us to the Transcendent
whose power of being manifests itself as a will in the world one
in us and all, by identity with which we come, owing to the
conditions of that identity, into union with him as the one self
in all and as the universal self and Lord in the cosmos. And
this might seem to impose a certain comprehensiveness in our
realisation of the unity. But still this too is not quite imperative.
For this motive also may lean towards an entire impersonality
and, even if it leads to a continued participation in the activities
of the universal Godhead, may be entirely detached and passive
in its principle. It is only when delight intervenes that the motive
of integral union becomes quite imperative.
This delight which is so entirely imperative, is the delight in
the Divine for his own sake and for nothing else, for no cause or
gain whatever beyond itself. It does not seek God for anything
that he can give us or for any particular quality in him, but
simply and purely because he is our self and our whole being
and our all. It embraces the delight of the transcendence, not for
the sake of transcendence, but because he is the transcendent;
the delight of the universal, not for the sake of universality,
but because he is the universal; the delight of the individual
not for the sake of individual satisfaction, but because he is the
individual. It goes behind all distinctions and appearances and
makes no calculations of more or less in his being, but embraces
him wherever he is and therefore everywhere, embraces him
utterly in the seeming less as in the seeming more, in the appar¬
ent limitation as in the revelation of the illimitable; it has the
intuition and the experience of his oneness and completeness
everywhere. To seek after him for the sake of his absolute being
alone is really to drive at our own individual gain, the gain of
absolute peace. To possess him absolutely indeed is necessarily
the aim of this delight in his being, but this comes when we
possess him utterly and are utterly possessed by him and need
be limited to no particular status or condition. To seek after him
in some heaven of bliss is to seek him not for himself, but for the
bliss of heaven; when we have all the true delight of his being.
590
The Yoga of Divine Love
To seek after him
in some heaven of bliss is to seek him not for himself, but for the
bliss of heaven; when we have all the true delight of his being.
590
The Yoga of Divine Love
then heaven is within ourselves, and wherever he is and we are,
there we have the joy of his kingdom. So too to seek him only in
ourselves and for ourselves, is to limit both ourselves and our joy
in him. The integral delight embraces him not only within our
own individual being, but equally in all men and in all beings.
And because in him we are one with all, it seeks him not only for
ourselves, but for all our fellows. A perfect and complete delight
in the Divine, perfect because pure and self-existent, complete
because all-embracing as well as all-absorbing, is the meaning
of the way of Bhakti for the seeker of the integral Yoga.
Once it is active in us, all other ways of Yoga convert them¬
selves, as it were, to its law and find by it their own richest
significance. This integral devotion of our being to God does
not turn away from knowledge; the bhakta of this path is the
God-lover who is also the God-knower, because by knowledge
of his being comes the whole delight of his being; but it is
in delight that knowledge fulfils itself, the knowledge of the
transcendent in the delight of the Transcendent, the knowledge
of the universal in the delight of the universal Godhead, the
knowledge of the individual manifestation in the delight of God
in the individual, the knowledge of the impersonal in the pure
delight of his impersonal being, the knowledge of the personal in
the full delight of his personality, the knowledge of his qualities
and their play in the delight of the manifestation, the knowledge
of the quality-less in the delight of his colourless existence and
non-manifestation.
So too this God-lover will be the divine worker, not for the
sake of works or for a self-regarding pleasure in action, but
because in this way God expends the power of his being and in
his powers and their signs we find him, because the divine Will
in works is the outflowing of the Godhead in the delight of its
power, of divine Being in the delight of divine Force. He will feel
perfect joy in the works and acts of the Beloved, because in them
too he finds the Beloved; he will himself do all works because
through those works too the Lord of his being expresses his
divine joy in him: when he works, he feels that he is expressing in
act and power his oneness with that which he loves and adores;
The Delight of the Divine
591
he feels the rapture of the will which he obeys and with which
all the force of his being is blissfully identified. So too, again,
this God-lover will seek after perfection, because perfection is
the nature of the Divine and the more he grows into perfection,
the more he feels the Beloved manifest in his natural being. Or
he will simply grow in perfection like the blossoming of a flower
because the Divine is in him and the joy of the Divine, and as
that joy expands in him, soul and mind and life too expand
naturally into their godhead. At the same time, because he feels
the Divine in all, perfect within every limiting appearance, he
will not have the sorrow of his imperfection.
Nor will the seeking of the Divine through life and the
meeting of him in all the activities of his being and of the
universal being be absent from the scope of his worship. All
Nature and all life will be to him at once a revelation and a fine
trysting-place. Intellectual and aesthetic and dynamic activities,
science and philosophy and life, thought and art and action will
assume for him a diviner sanction and a greater meaning. He
will seek them because of his clear sight of the Divine through
them and because of the delight of the Divine in them. He will
not be indeed attached to their appearances, for attachment is
an obstacle to the Ananda; but because he possesses that pure,
powerful and perfect Ananda which obtains everything but is
dependent on nothing, and because he finds in them the ways
and acts and signs, the becomings and the symbols and images
of the Beloved, he draws from them a rapture which the normal
mind that pursues them for themselves cannot attain or even
dream. All this and more becomes part of the integral way and
its consummation.
The general power of Delight is love and the special mould
which the joy of love takes is the vision of beauty. The God-
lover is the universal lover and he embraces the All-blissful and
All-beautiful. When universal love has seized on his heart, it is
the decisive sign that the Divine has taken possession of him;
and when he has the vision of the All-beautiful everywhere and
can feel at all times the bliss of his embrace, that is the decisive
sign that he has taken possession of the Divine. Union is the
592
The Yoga of Divine Love
consummation of love, but it is this mutual possession that gives
it at once the acme and the largest reach of its intensity. It is the
foundation of oneness in ecstasy.
Chapter VII
The Ananda Brahman
Union is the
592
The Yoga of Divine Love
consummation of love, but it is this mutual possession that gives
it at once the acme and the largest reach of its intensity. It is the
foundation of oneness in ecstasy.
Chapter VII
The Ananda Brahman
The way of devotion in the integral synthetic Yoga will
take the form of a seeking after the Divine through love
and delight and a seizing with joy on all the ways of his
being. It will find its acme in a perfect union of love and a perfect
enjoyment of all the ways of the soul’s intimacy with God. It may
start from knowledge or it may start from works, but it will then
turn knowledge into a joy of luminous union with the being of
the Beloved and turn works into a joy of the active union of our
being with the will and the power of being of the Beloved. Or it
may start directly from love and delight; it will then take both
these other things into itself and will develop them as part of the
complete joy of oneness.
The beginning of the heart’s attraction to the Divine may be
impersonal, the touch of an impersonal joy in something univer¬
sal or transcendent that has revealed itself directly or indirectly
to our emotional or our aesthetic being or to our capacity of spir¬
itual felicity. That which we thus grow aware of is the Ananda
Brahman, the bliss existence. There is an adoration of an imper¬
sonal Delight and Beauty, of a pure and an infinite perfection to
which we can give no name or form, a moved attraction of the
soul to some ideal and infinite Presence, Power, existence in the
world or beyond it, which in some way becomes psychologically
or spiritually sensible to us and then more and more intimate
and real. That is the call, the touch of the bliss existence upon
us. Then to have always the joy and nearness of its presence, to
know what it is, so as to satisfy the intellect and the intuitional
mind of its constant reality, to put our passive and, so far as we
can manage it, our active, our inner immortal and even our outer
mortal being into perfect harmony with it, grow into a necessity
of our living. And to open ourselves to it is what we feel to be
the one true happiness, to live into it the sole real perfection.
594
The Yoga of Divine Love
And to open ourselves to it is what we feel to be
the one true happiness, to live into it the sole real perfection.
594
The Yoga of Divine Love
A transcendent Bliss, unimaginable and inexpressible by the
mind and speech, is the nature of the Ineffable. That broods
immanent and secret in the whole universe and in everything in
the universe. Its presence is described as a secret ether of the bliss
of being, of which the Scripture says that, if this were not, none
could for a moment breathe or live. And this spiritual bliss is
here also in our hearts. It is hidden in from the toil of the surface
mind which catches only at weak and flawed translations of
it into various mental, vital and physical forms of the joy of
existence. But if the mind has once grown sufficiently subtle and
pure in its receptions and not limited by the grosser nature of
our outward responses to existence, we can take a reflection of
it which will wear perhaps wholly or predominantly the hue of
whatever is strongest in our nature. It may present itself first as a
yearning for some universal Beauty which we feel in Nature and
man and in all that is around us; or we may have the intuition
of some transcendent Beauty of which all apparent beauty here
is only a symbol. That is how it may come to those in whom
the aesthetic being is developed and insistent and the instincts
which, when they find form of expression, make the poet and
artist, are predominant. Or it may be the sense of a divine spirit
of love or else a helpful and compassionate infinite Presence in
the universe or behind or beyond it which responds to us when
we turn the need of our spirit towards it. So it may first show
itself when the emotional being is intensely developed. It may
come near to us in other ways, but always as a Power or Presence
of delight, beauty, love or peace which touches the mind, but is
beyond the forms these things take ordinarily in the mind.
For all joy, beauty, love, peace, delight are outflowings from
the Ananda Brahman, — all delight of the spirit, the intellect,
the imagination, aesthetic sense, ethical aspiration and satisfac¬
tion, action, life, the body. And through all ways of our being
the Divine can touch us and make use of them to awaken and
liberate the spirit. But to reach the Ananda Brahman in itself the
mental reception of it must be subtilised, spiritualised, univer-
salised, discharged of everything that is turbid and limiting. For
when we draw quite near or enter into it, it is by an awakened
The Ananda Brahman
595
For
when we draw quite near or enter into it, it is by an awakened
The Ananda Brahman
595
spiritual sense of a transcendent and a universal Delight which
exists within and yet behind and beyond the contradictions
of the world and to which we can unite ourselves through a
growing universal and spiritual or a transcendental ecstasy.
Ordinarily, the mind is satisfied with reflecting this Infinity
we perceive or with feeling the sense of it within and with¬
out us, as an experience which, however frequent, yet remains
exceptional. It seems in itself so satisfying and wonderful when
it comes and our ordinary mind and the active life which we
have to lead may seem to us so incompatible with it, that we
may think it excessive to expect anything more. But the very
spirit of Yoga is this, to make the exceptional normal, and to
turn that which is above us and greater than our normal selves
into our own constant consciousness. Therefore we should not
hesitate to open ourselves more steadily to whatever experience
of the Infinite we have, to purify and intensify it, to make it our
object of constant thought and contemplation, till it becomes
the originating power that acts in us, the Godhead we adore
and embrace, our whole being is put into tune with it and it is
made the very self of our being.
Our experience of it has to be purified of any mental alloy
in it, otherwise it departs, we cannot hold it. And part of this
purification is that it shall cease to be dependent on any cause
or exciting condition of mind; it must become its own cause
and self-existent, source of all other delight, which will exist
only by it, and not attached to any cosmic or other image or
symbol through which we first came into contact with it. Our
experience of it has to be constantly intensified and made more
concentrated; otherwise we shall only reflect it in the mirror
of the imperfect mind and not reach that point of uplifting and
transfiguration by which we are carried beyond the mind into the
ineffable bliss. Object of our constant thought and contempla¬
tion, it will turn all that is into itself, reveal itself as the universal
Ananda Brahman and make all existence its outpouring. If we
wait upon it for the inspiration of all our inner and our outer
acts, it will become the joy of the Divine pouring itself through
us in light and love and power on life and all that lives. Sought
596
The Yoga of Divine Love
If we
wait upon it for the inspiration of all our inner and our outer
acts, it will become the joy of the Divine pouring itself through
us in light and love and power on life and all that lives. Sought
596
The Yoga of Divine Love
by the adoration and love of the soul, it reveals itself as the
Godhead, we see in it the face of God and know the bliss of
our Lover. Tuning our whole being to it, we grow into a happy
perfection of likeness to it, a human rendering of the divine
nature. And when it becomes in every way the self of our self,
we are fulfilled in being and we bear the plenitude.
Brahman always reveals himself to us in three ways, within
ourselves, above our plane, around us in the universe. Within
us, there are two centres of the Purusha, the inner Soul through
which he touches us to our awakening; there is the Purusha in
the lotus of the heart which opens upward all our powers and the
Purusha in the thousand-petalled lotus whence descend through
the thought and will, opening the third eye in us, the lightnings
of vision and the fire of the divine energy. The bliss existence
may come to us through either one of these centres. When the
lotus of the heart breaks open, we feel a divine joy, love and
peace expanding in us like a flower of light which irradiates the
whole being. They can then unite themselves with their secret
source, the Divine in our hearts, and adore him as in a temple;
they can flow upwards to take possession of the thought and
the will and break out upward towards the Transcendent; they
stream out in thought and feeling and act towards all that is
around us. But so long as our normal being offers any obstacle
or is not wholly moulded into a response to this divine influence
or an instrument of this divine possession, the experience will
be intermittent and we may fall back constantly into our old
mortal heart; but by repetition, abhyasa, or by the force of
our desire and adoration of the Divine, it will be progressively
remoulded until this abnormal experience becomes our natural
consciousness.
When the other upper lotus opens, the whole mind becomes
full of a divine light, joy and power, behind which is the Divine,
the Lord of our being on his throne with our soul beside him
or drawn inward into his rays; all the thought and will become
then a luminosity, power and ecstasy; in communication with the
Transcendent, this can pour down towards our mortal members
and flow by them outwards on the world. In this dawn too there
The Ananda Brahman
597
In this dawn too there
The Ananda Brahman
597
are, as the Vedic mystics knew, our alternations of its day and
night, our exiles from the light; but as we grow in the power
to hold this new existence, we become able to look long on the
sun from which this irradiation proceeds and in our inner being
we can grow one body with it. Sometimes the rapidity of this
change depends on the strength of our longing for the Divine
thus revealed, and on the intensity of our force of seeking; but at
others it proceeds rather by a passive surrender to the rhythms
of his all-wise working which acts always by its own at first
inscrutable method. But the latter becomes the foundation when
our love and trust are complete and our whole being lies in the
clasp of a Power that is perfect love and wisdom.
The Divine reveals himself in the world around us when we
look upon that with a spiritual desire of delight that seeks him
in all things. There is often a sudden opening by which the veil
of forms is itself turned into a revelation. A universal spiritual
Presence, a universal peace, a universal infinite Delight has man¬
ifested, immanent, embracing, all-penetrating. This Presence by
our love of it, our delight in it, our constant thought of it returns
and grows upon us; it becomes the thing that we see and all else
is only its habitation, form and symbol. Even all that is most
outward, the body, the form, the sound, whatever our senses
seize, are seen as this Presence; they cease to be physical and are
changed into a substance of spirit. This transformation means
a transformation of our own inner consciousness; we are taken
by the surrounding Presence into itself and we become part of
it. Our own mind, life, body become to us only its habitation
and temple, a form of its working and an instrument of its
self-expression. All is only soul and body of this delight.
This is the Divine seen around us and on our own physical
plane. But he may reveal himself above. We see or feel him as
a high-uplifted Presence, a great infinite of Ananda above us,
— or in it, our Father in heaven, — and do not feel or see him
in ourselves or around us. So long as we keep this vision, the
mortality in us is quelled by that Immortality; it feels the light,
power and joy and responds to it according to its capacity;
or it feels the descent of the spirit and it is then for a time
598
The Yoga of Divine Love
transformed or else uplifted into some lustre of reflection of the
light and power; it becomes a vessel of the Ananda. But at other
times it lapses into the old mortality and exists or works dully or
pettily in the ruck of its earthly habits. The complete redemption
comes by the descent of the divine Power into the human mind
and body and the remoulding of their inner life into the divine
image, — what the Vedic seers called the birth of the Son by
the sacrifice. It is in fact by a continual sacrifice or offering, a
sacrifice of adoration and aspiration, of works, of thought and
knowledge, of the mounting flame of the Godward will that we
build ourselves into the being of this Infinite.
When we possess firmly this consciousness of the Ananda
Brahman in all of these three manifestations, above, within,
around, we have the full oneness of it and embrace all existences
in its delight, peace, joy and love; then all the worlds become
the body of this self. But we have not the richest knowledge of
this Ananda if it is only an impersonal presence, largeness or
immanence that we feel, if our adoration has not been intimate
enough for this Being to reveal to us out of its wide-extended joy
the face and body and make us feel the hands of the Friend and
Lover. Its impersonality is the blissful greatness of the Brahman,
but from that can look out upon us the sweetness and intimate
control of the divine Personality. For Ananda is the presence of
the Self and Master of our being and the stream of its outflowing
can be the pure joy of his Lila.
Chapter VIII
The Mystery of Love
For Ananda is the presence of
the Self and Master of our being and the stream of its outflowing
can be the pure joy of his Lila.
Chapter VIII
The Mystery of Love
The adoration of the impersonal Divine would not
be strictly a Yoga of devotion according to the current
interpretation; for in the current forms of Yoga it is sup¬
posed that the Impersonal can only be sought for a complete
unity in which God and our own person disappear and there is
none to adore or to be adored; only the delight of the experience
of oneness and infinity remains. But in truth the miracles of
spiritual consciousness are not to be subjected to so rigid a
logic. When we first come to feel the presence of the infinite,
as it is the finite personality in us which is touched by it, that
may well answer to the touch and call with a sort of adoration.
Secondly, we may regard the Infinite not so much as a spiritual
status of oneness and bliss, or that only as its mould and medium
of being, but rather as the presence of the ineffable Godhead to
our consciousness, and then too love and adoration find their
place. And even when our personality seems to disappear into
unity with it, it may still be — and really is — the individual
divine who is melting to the universal or the supreme by a union
in which love and lover and loved are forgotten in a fusing
experience of ecstasy, but are still there latent in the oneness and
subconsciently persisting in it. All union of the self by love must
necessarily be of this nature. We may even say, in a sense, that
it is to have this joy of union as the ultimate crown of all the
varied experiences of spiritual relation between the individual
soul and God that the One became many in the universe.
Still, the more varied and most intimate experience of divine
love cannot come by the pursuit of the impersonal Infinite alone;
for that the Godhead we adore must become near and personal
to us. It is possible for the Impersonal to reveal within itself
all the riches of personality when we get into its heart, and one
who sought only to enter into or to embrace the infinite Presence
600
The Yoga of Divine Love
It is possible for the Impersonal to reveal within itself
all the riches of personality when we get into its heart, and one
who sought only to enter into or to embrace the infinite Presence
600
The Yoga of Divine Love
alone, may discover in it things he had not dreamed of; the being
of the Divine has surprises for us which confound the ideas of the
limiting intellect. But ordinarily the way of devotion begins from
the other end; it starts from and it rises and widens to its issue
by adoration of the divine Personality. The Divine is a Being and
not an abstract existence or a status of pure timeless infinity;
the original and universal existence is He, but that existence
is inseparable from consciousness and bliss of being, and an
existence conscious of its own being and its own bliss is what
we may well call a divine infinite Person, — Purusha. Moreover
all consciousness implies power, Shakti; where there is infinite
consciousness of being, there is infinite power of being, and by
that power all exists in the universe. All beings exist by this
Being; all things are the faces of God; all thought and action
and feeling and love proceed from him and return to him, all
their results have him for source and support and secret goal.
It is to this Godhead, this Being that the Bhakti of an integral
Yoga will be poured out and uplifted. Transcendent, it will seek
him in the ecstasy of an absolute union; universal, it will seek
him in infinite quality and every aspect and in all beings with
a universal delight and love; individual, it will enter into all
human relations with him that love creates between person and
person.
It may not be possible to seize from the beginning on all
the complete integrality of that which the heart is seeking; in
fact, it is only possible if the intelligence, the temperament, the
emotional mind have already been developed into largeness and
fineness by the trend of our previous living. That is what the
experience of the normal life is meant to lead to by its widening
culture of the intellect, the aesthetic and emotional mind and
of our parts too of will and active experience. It widens and
refines the normal being so that it may open easily to all the
truth of That which was preparing it for the temple of its self¬
manifestation. Ordinarily, man is limited in all these parts of
his being and he can grasp at first only so much of the divine
truth as has some large correspondence to his own nature and
its past development and associations. Therefore God meets us
Ordinarily, man is limited in all these parts of
his being and he can grasp at first only so much of the divine
truth as has some large correspondence to his own nature and
its past development and associations. Therefore God meets us
The Mystery of Love
601
first in different limited affirmations of his divine qualities and
nature; he presents himself to the seeker as an absolute of the
things he can understand and to which his will and heart can
respond; he discloses some name and aspect of his Godhead.
This is what is called in Yoga the ista-devata, the name and form
elected by our nature for its worship. In order that the human
being may embrace this Godhead with every part of himself, it is
represented with a form that answers to its aspects and qualities
and which becomes the living body of God to the adorer. These
are those forms of Vishnu, Shiva, Krishna, Kali, Durga, Christ,
Buddha, which the mind of man seizes on for adoration. Even
the monotheist who worships a formless Godhead, yet gives to
him some form of quality, some mental form or form of Nature
by which he envisages and approaches him. But to be able to see
a living form, a mental body, as it were, of the Divine gives to
the approach a greater closeness and sweetness.
But to be able to see
a living form, a mental body, as it were, of the Divine gives to
the approach a greater closeness and sweetness.
The way of the integral Yoga of bhakti will be to universalise
this conception of the Deity, to personalise him intimately by a
multiple and an all-embracing relation, to make him constantly
present to all the being and to devote, give up, surrender the
whole being to him, so that he shall dwell near to us and in
us and we with him and in him. Manana and darsana, a con¬
stant thinking of him in all things and seeing of him always and
everywhere is essential to this way of devotion. When we look
on the things of physical Nature, in them we have to see the
divine object of our love; when we look upon men and beings,
we have to see him in them and in our relation with them to
see that we are entering into relations with forms of him; when
breaking beyond the limitation of the material world we know
or have relations with the beings of other planes, still the same
thought and vision has to be made real to our minds. The normal
habit of our minds which are open only to the material and
apparent form and the ordinary mutilated relation and ignore
the secret Godhead within, has to yield by an unceasing habit of
all-embracing love and delight to this deeper and ampler com¬
prehension and this greater relation. In all godheads we have to
see this one God whom we worship with our heart and all our
602
The Yoga of Divine Love
being; they are forms of his divinity. So enlarging our spiritual
embrace we reach a point at which all is he and the delight of
this consciousness becomes to us our normal uninterrupted way
of looking at the world. That brings us the outward or objective
universality of our union with him.
So enlarging our spiritual
embrace we reach a point at which all is he and the delight of
this consciousness becomes to us our normal uninterrupted way
of looking at the world. That brings us the outward or objective
universality of our union with him.
Inwardly, the image of the Beloved has to become visible to
the eye within, dwelling in us as in his mansion, informing our
hearts with the sweetness of his presence, presiding over all our
activities of mind and life as the friend, master and lover from the
summit of our being, uniting us from above with himself in the
universe. A constant inner communion is the joy to be made close
and permanent and unfailing. This communion is not to be con¬
fined to an exceptional nearness and adoration when we retire
quite into ourselves away from our normal preoccupations, nor
is it to be sought by a putting away of our human activities. All
our thoughts, impulses, feelings, actions have to be referred to
him for his sanction or disallowance, or if we cannot yet reach
this point, to be offered to him in our sacrifice of aspiration,
so that he may more and more descend into us and be present
in them all and pervade them with all his will and power, his
light and knowledge, his love and delight. In the end all our
thoughts, feelings, impulses, actions will begin to proceed from
him and change into some divine seed and form of themselves;
in our whole inner living we shall have grown conscious of
ourselves as a part of his being till between the existence of the
Divine whom we adore and our own lives there is no longer any
division. So too in all happenings we have to come to see the
dealings with us of the divine Lover and take such pleasure in
them that even grief and suffering and physical pain become his
gifts and turn to delight and disappear finally into delight, slain
by the sense of the divine contact, because the touch of his hands
is the alchemist of a miraculous transformation. Some reject life
because it is tainted with grief and pain, but to the God-lover
grief and pain become means of meeting with him, imprints
of his pressure and finally cease as soon as our union with his
nature becomes too complete for these masks of the universal
delight at all to conceal it. They change into the Ananda.
The Mystery of Love
603
They change into the Ananda.
The Mystery of Love
603
All the relations by which this union comes about, become
on this path intensely and blissfully personal. That which in the
end contains, takes up or unifies them all, is the relation of lover
and beloved, because that is the most intense and blissful of
all and carries up all the rest into its heights and yet exceeds
them. He is the teacher and guide and leads us to knowledge;
at every step of the developing inner light and vision, we feel
his touch like that of the artist moulding our clay of mind, his
voice revealing the truth and its word, the thought he gives us to
which we respond, the flashing of his spears of lightning which
chase the darkness of our ignorance. Especially, in proportion as
the partial lights of the mind become transformed into lights of
gnosis, in whatever slighter or greater degree that may happen,
we feel it as a transformation of our mentality into his and more
and more he becomes the thinker and seer in us. We cease to
think and see for ourselves, but think only what he wills to think
for us and see only what he sees for us. And then the teacher is
fulfilled in the lover; he lays hands on all our mental being to
embrace and possess, to enjoy and use it.
He is the Master; but in this way of approach all distance
and separation, all awe and fear and mere obedience disappear,
because we become too close and united with him for these
things to endure and it is the lover of our being who takes it
up and occupies and uses and does with it whatever he wills.
Obedience is the sign of the servant, but that is the lowest stage
of this relation, dasya. Afterwards we do not obey, but move
to his will as the string replies to the finger of the musician.
To be the instrument is this higher stage of self-surrender and
submission. But this is the living and loving instrument and it
ends in the whole nature of our being becoming the slave of
God, rejoicing in his possession and its own blissful subjection
to the divine grasp and mastery. With a passionate delight it does
all he wills it to do without questioning and bears all he would
have it bear, because what it bears is the burden of the beloved
being.
He is the friend, the adviser, helper, saviour in trouble and
distress, the defender from enemies, the hero who fights our
604
The Yoga of Divine Love
He is the friend, the adviser, helper, saviour in trouble and
distress, the defender from enemies, the hero who fights our
604
The Yoga of Divine Love
battles for us or under whose shield we fight, the charioteer, the
pilot of our ways. And here we come at once to a closer intimacy;
he is the comrade and eternal companion, the playmate of the
game of living. But still there is so far a certain division, however
pleasant, and friendship is too much limited by the appearance
of beneficence. The lover can wound, abandon, be wroth with
us, seem to betray, yet our love endures and even grows by
these oppositions; they increase the joy of reunion and the joy
of possession; through them the lover remains the friend, and all
that he does we find in the end has been done by the lover and
helper of our being for our soul’s perfection as well as for his joy
in us. These contradictions lead to a greater intimacy. He is the
father and mother too of our being, its source and protector and
its indulgent cherisher and giver of our desires. He is the child
born to our desire whom we cherish and rear. All these things
the lover takes up; his love in its intimacy and oneness keeps in
it the paternal and maternal care and lends itself to our demands
upon it. All is unified in that deepest many-sided relation.
From the beginning even it is possible to have this closest
relation of the lover and beloved, but it will not be as exclu¬
sive for the integral Yogin as for certain purely ecstatic ways of
Bhakti. It will from the beginning take into itself something of
the hues of the other relations, since he follows too knowledge
and works and has need of the Divine as teacher, friend and
master. The growing of the love of God must carry with it in
him an expansion of the knowledge of God and of the action of
the divine Will in his nature and living. The divine Lover reveals
himself; he takes possession of the life. But still the essential
relation will be that of love from which all things flow, love pas¬
sionate, complete, seeking a hundred ways of fulfilment, every
means of mutual possession, a million facets of the joy of union.
All the distinctions of the mind, all its barriers and “cannot be”s,
all the cold analyses of the reason are mocked at by this love
or they are only used as the tests and fields and gates of union.
Love comes to us in many ways; it may come as an awakening
to the beauty of the Lover, by the sight of an ideal face and
image of him, by his mysterious hints to us of himself behind
Love comes to us in many ways; it may come as an awakening
to the beauty of the Lover, by the sight of an ideal face and
image of him, by his mysterious hints to us of himself behind
The Mystery of Love
605
the thousand faces of things in the world, by a slow or sudden
need of the heart, by a vague thirst in the soul, by the sense
of someone near us drawing us or pursuing us with love or of
someone blissful and beautiful whom we must discover.
We may seek after him passionately and pursue the unseen
beloved; but also the lover whom we think not of, may pursue
us, may come upon us in the midst of the world and seize on
us for his own whether at first we will or no. Even, he may
come to us at first as an enemy, with the wrath of love, and our
earliest relations with him may be those of battle and struggle.
Where first there is love and attraction, the relations between
the Divine and the soul may still for long be chequered with
misunderstanding and offence, jealousy and wrath, strife and
the quarrels of love, hope and despair and the pain of absence
and separation. We throw up all the passions of the heart against
him, till they are purified into a sole ecstasy of bliss and oneness.
But that too is no monotony; it is not possible for the tongue
of human speech to tell all the utter unity and all the eternal
variety of the ananda of divine love. Our higher and our lower
members are both flooded with it, the mind and life no less than
the soul: even the physical body takes its share of the joy, feels
the touch, is filled in all its limbs, veins, nerves with the flowing
of the wine of the ecstasy, amrta. Love and Ananda are the last
word of being, the secret of secrets, the mystery of mysteries.
Love and Ananda are the last
word of being, the secret of secrets, the mystery of mysteries.
Thus universalised, personalised, raised to its intensities,
made all-occupying, all-embracing, all-fulfilling, the way of love
and delight gives the supreme liberation. Its highest crest is a
supracosmic union. But for love complete union is mukti; lib¬
eration has to it no other sense; and it includes all kinds of
mukti together, nor are they in the end, as some would have it,
merely successive to each other and therefore mutually exclu¬
sive. We have the absolute union of the divine with the human
spirit, sayujya; in that reveals itself a content of all that depends
here upon difference, — but there the difference is only a form
of oneness, — ananda too of nearness and contact and mutual
presence, sdmipya, sdlokya, ananda of mutual reflection, the
thing that we call likeness, sadrsya, and other wonderful things
606
The Yoga of Self -F erf ection
too for which language has as yet no name. There is nothing
which is beyond the reach of the God-lover or denied to him;
for he is the favourite of the divine Lover and the self of the
Beloved.
Part IV
The Yoga of Self-Perfection
The Synthesis of Yo^fa
Tin; YOOA OF «iF,r.F-I*F.RKErTtON'
CHAI'TER X!.IX
THF. PniM iri-F. <tF THE INTKllRAL T<M!A
Tlic ixiiitiplc of Yo;>;i i> llie tiiriiiiiji of one or of ;ill
powriN of onr hiiin:in cxl-itencc into a means of rracliinK
Hiviiie Ik-inK. Ill An ordinarx- Yojja one main power of Iv-
ill;; or one group of its poweisis made llir mrans,vi liicle,
palh. Ill a svntlielic Yoga all powers evill Ik- comliiiu-d and
ill. liirlrtl in the Iransnuiting inslrumcnlalion.
In llatliayoga the inslriimcnl i- the IkkIv and life. All
the power of the body is stilled. collecU .i.piirilied, heightcp.
ed. concentr.ited to its utmost limits m iKyoiid any limits
hy Asana and other physical i>riHesses ; tiie powei of the
hie too is similarly piiiiried, hcighicnetl, conceiiti.itcd be
.\sana and Pranayama, This conccntiation ol powers is
then directed towards that physical centre in which the
divine consciousness sitsconcealerl in the human Inidy. The
power of Life. Xaturc-powor, coilerl up with all its secr«-t
forces .asleep in the lowest nervous plexus of the carlh-lK--
j„j._ — for only so much rsca|K*s into waking action in onr
nor nal operations as is sutbeient for the limited uses of
human life. — rises .iwakenrd through centre after centre
and awakens. tiKi, in its ascent and pass.ige the fon . - of
i -h .accessive iiodiis of onr lieiiig, the nervous life, the
■4
— rises .iwakenrd through centre after centre
and awakens. tiKi, in its ascent and pass.ige the fon . - of
i -h .accessive iiodiis of onr lieiiig, the nervous life, the
■4
The first page of “The Yoga of Self-Perfection”
as it appeared in the Arya of 15 December 1918
Chapter I
The Principle of the Integral Yoga
The principle of Yoga is the turning of one or of all
powers of our human existence into a means of reaching
divine Being. In an ordinary Yoga one main power of be¬
ing or one group of its powers is made the means, vehicle, path.
In a synthetic Yoga all powers will be combined and included in
the transmuting instrumentation.
In Hathayoga the instrument is the body and life. All the
power of the body is stilled, collected, purified, heightened, con¬
centrated to its utmost limits or beyond any limits by Asana and
other physical processes; the power of the life too is similarly
purified, heightened, concentrated by Asana and Pranayama.
This concentration of powers is then directed towards that phys¬
ical centre in which the divine consciousness sits concealed in
the human body. The power of Life, Nature-power, coiled up
with all its secret forces asleep in the lowest nervous plexus
of the earth-being, — for only so much escapes into waking
action in our normal operations as is sufficient for the limited
uses of human life, — rises awakened through centre after centre
and awakens, too, in its ascent and passage the forces of each
successive nodus of our being, the nervous life, the heart of emo¬
tion and ordinary mentality, the speech, sight, will, the higher
knowledge, till through and above the brain it meets with and
it becomes one with the divine consciousness.
In Rajayoga the chosen instrument is the mind. Our ordi¬
nary mentality is first disciplined, purified and directed towards
the divine Being, then by a summary process of Asana and
Pranayama the physical force of our being is stilled and concen¬
trated, the life-force released into a rhythmic movement capable
of cessation and concentrated into a higher power of its upward
action, the mind, supported and strengthened by this greater
action and concentration of the body and life upon which it rests.
610
The Yoga of Self -F erf ection
610
The Yoga of Self -F erf ection
is itself purified of all its unrest and emotion and its habitual
thought-waves, liberated from distraction and dispersion, given
its highest force of concentration, gathered up into a trance of
absorption. Two objects, the one temporal, the other eternal,
are gained by this discipline. Mind-power develops in another
concentrated action abnormal capacities of knowledge, effective
will, deep light of reception, powerful light of thought-radiation
which are altogether beyond the narrow range of our normal
mentality; it arrives at the Yogic or occult powers around which
there has been woven so much quite dispensable and yet perhaps
salutary mystery. But the one final end and the one all-important
gain is that the mind, stilled and cast into a concentrated trance,
can lose itself in the divine consciousness and the soul be made
free to unite with the divine Being.
The triple way takes for its chosen instruments the three
main powers of the mental soul-life of the human being. Knowl¬
edge selects the reason and the mental vision and it makes them
by purification, concentration and a certain discipline of a God-
directed seeking its means for the greatest knowledge and the
greatest vision of all. God-knowledge and God-vision. Its aim
is to see, know and be the Divine. Works, action selects for
its instrument the will of the doer of works; it makes life an
offering of sacrifice to the Godhead and by purification, con¬
centration and a certain discipline of subjection to the divine
Will a means for contact and increasing unity of the soul of
man with the divine Master of the universe. Devotion selects
the emotional and aesthetic powers of the soul and by turning
them all Godward in a perfect purity, intensity, infinite passion
of seeking makes them a means of God-possession in one or
many relations of unity with the Divine Being. All aim in their
own way at a union or unity of the human soul with the supreme
Spirit.
Each Yoga in its process has the character of the instrument
it uses; thus the Hathayogic process is psycho-physical, the Raja-
yogic mental and psychic, the way of knowledge is spiritual and
cognitive, the way of devotion spiritual, emotional and aesthetic,
the way of works spiritual and dynamic by action. Each is guided
The Principle of the Integral Yoga
611
Each is guided
The Principle of the Integral Yoga
611
in the ways of its own characteristic power. But all power is in the
end one, all power is really soul-power. In the ordinary process of
life, body and mind this truth is quite obscured by the dispersed,
dividing and distributive action of Nature which is the normal
condition of all our functionings, although even there it is in the
end evident; for all material energy contains hidden the vital,
mental, psychic, spiritual energy and in the end it must release
these forms of the one Shakti, the vital energy conceals and
liberates into action all the other forms, the mental supporting
itself on the life and body and their powers and functionings
contains undeveloped or only partially developed the psychic
and the spiritual power of the being. But when by Yoga any
of these powers is taken up from the dispersed and distributive
action, raised to its highest degree, concentrated, it becomes
manifest soul-power and reveals the essential unity. Therefore
the Hathayogic process has too its pure psychic and spiritual
result, the Rajayogic arrives by psychic means at a spiritual con¬
summation. The triple way may appear to be altogether mental
and spiritual in its way of seeking and its objectives, but it can be
attended by results more characteristic of the other paths, which
offer themselves in a spontaneous and involuntary flowering,
and for the same reason, because soul-power is all-power and
where it reaches its height in one direction its other possibilities
also begin to show themselves in fact or in incipient potentiality.
This unity at once suggests the possibility of a synthetic Yoga.
Tantric discipline is in its nature a synthesis. It has seized
on the large universal truth that there are two poles of being
whose essential unity is the secret of existence. Brahman and
Shakti, Spirit and Nature, and that Nature is power of the spirit
or rather is spirit as power. To raise nature in man into manifest
power of spirit is its method and it is the whole nature that it
gathers up for the spiritual conversion. It includes in its system of
instrumentation the forceful Hathayogic process and especially
the opening up of the nervous centres and the passage through
them of the awakened Shakti on her way to her union with the
Brahman, the subtler stress of the Rajayogic purification, medi¬
tation and concentration, the leverage of will-force, the motive
612
The Yoga of Self -F erf ection
power of devotion, the key of knowledge. But it does not stop
short with an effective assembling of the different powers of
these specific Yogas. In two directions it enlarges by its synthetic
turn the province of the Yogic method. First, it lays its hand
firmly on many of the main springs of human quality, desire,
action and it subjects them to an intensive discipline with the
soul’s mastery of its motives as a first aim and their elevation
to a diviner spiritual level as its final utility. Again, it includes
in its objects of Yoga not only liberation,^ which is the one all¬
mastering preoccupation of the specific systems, but a cosmic
enjoyment^ of the power of the Spirit, which the others may
take incidentally on the way, in part, casually, but avoid making
a motive or object. It is a bolder and larger system.
In the method of synthesis which we have been following,
another clue of principle has been pursued which is derived from
another view of the possibilities of Yoga. This starts from the
method of Vedanta to arrive at the aim of the Tantra. In the
Tantric method Shakti is all-important, becomes the key to the
finding of spirit; in this synthesis spirit, soul is all-important,
becomes the secret of the taking up of Shakti. The Tantric
method starts from the bottom and grades the ladder of ascent
upwards to the summit; therefore its initial stress is upon the
action of the awakened Shakti in the nervous system of the body
and its centres; the opening of the six lotuses is the opening up
of the ranges of the power of Spirit. Our synthesis takes man as
a spirit in mind much more than a spirit in body and assumes in
him the capacity to begin on that level, to spiritualise his being by
the power of the soul in mind opening itself directly to a higher
spiritual force and being and to perfect by that higher force so
possessed and brought into action the whole of his nature. For
that reason our initial stress has fallen upon the utilisation of
the powers of soul in mind and the turning of the triple key
of knowledge, works and love in the locks of the spirit; the
Hathayogic methods can be dispensed with, — though there is
no objection to their partial use, — the Rajayogic will only enter
1
Mukti.
2
Bhukti.
The Principle of the Integral Yoga
613
in as an informal element. To arrive by the shortest way at the
largest development of spiritual power and being and divinise
by it a liberated nature in the whole range of human living is
our inspiring motive.
The Principle of the Integral Yoga
613
in as an informal element. To arrive by the shortest way at the
largest development of spiritual power and being and divinise
by it a liberated nature in the whole range of human living is
our inspiring motive.
The principle in view is a self-surrender, a giving up of the
human being into the being, consciousness, power, delight of the
Divine, a union or communion at all the points of meeting in
the soul of man, the mental being, by which the Divine himself,
directly and without veil master and possessor of the instrument,
shall by the light of his presence and guidance perfect the human
being in all the forces of the Nature for a divine living. Here we
arrive at a farther enlargement of the objects of the Yoga. The
common initial purpose of all Yoga is the liberation of the soul
of man from its present natural ignorance and limitation, its
release into spiritual being, its union with the highest self and
Divinity. But ordinarily this is made not only the initial but the
whole and final object: enjoyment of spiritual being there is,
but either in a dissolution of the human and individual into the
silence of self-being or on a higher plane in another existence.
The Tantric system makes liberation the final, but not the only
aim; it takes on its way a full perfection and enjoyment of the
spiritual power, light and joy in the human existence, and even
it has a glimpse of a supreme experience in which liberation and
cosmic action and enjoyment are unified in a final overcoming
of all oppositions and dissonances. It is this wider view of our
spiritual potentialities from which we begin, but we add another
stress which brings in a completer significance. We regard the
spirit in man not as solely an individual being travelling to a
transcendent unity with the Divine, but as a universal being
capable of oneness with the Divine in all souls and all Nature
and we give this extended view its entire practical consequence.
The human soul’s individual liberation and enjoyment of union
with the Divine in spiritual being, consciousness and delight
must always be the first object of the Yoga; its free enjoyment of
the cosmic unity of the Divine becomes a second object; but out
of that a third appears, the effectuation of the meaning of the
divine unity with all beings by a sympathy and participation in
614
The Yoga of Self -F erf ection
the spiritual purpose of the Divine in humanity. The individual
Yoga then turns from its separateness and becomes a part of
the collective Yoga of the divine Nature in the human race. The
liberated individual being, united with the Divine in self and
spirit, becomes in his natural being a self-perfecting instrument
for the perfect outflowering of the Divine in humanity.
This outflowering has its two terms; first, comes the growth
out of the separative human ego into the unity of the spirit,
then the possession of the divine nature in its proper and its
higher forms and no longer in the inferior forms of the mental
being which are a mutilated translation and not the authentic
text of the original script of divine Nature in the cosmic indi¬
vidual. In other words, a perfection has to be aimed at which
amounts to the elevation of the mental into the full spiritual and
supramental nature. Therefore this integral Yoga of knowledge,
love and works has to be extended into a Yoga of spiritual and
gnostic self-perfection. As gnostic knowledge, will and ananda
are a direct instrumentation of spirit and can only be won by
growing into the spirit, into divine being, this growth has to be
the first aim of our Yoga. The mental being has to enlarge itself
into the oneness of the Divine before the Divine will perfect
in the soul of the individual its gnostic outflowering. That is
the reason why the triple way of knowledge, works and love
becomes the key-note of the whole Yoga, for that is the direct
means for the soul in mind to rise to its highest intensities where
it passes upward into the divine oneness. That too is the reason
why the Yoga must be integral. For if immergence in the Infinite
or some close union with the Divine were all our aim, an integral
Yoga would be superfluous, except for such greater satisfaction
of the being of man as we may get by a self-lifting of the whole
of it towards its Source. But it would not be needed for the
essential aim, since by any single power of the soul-nature we
can meet with the Divine; each at its height rises up into the
infinite and absolute, each therefore offers a sufficient way of
arrival, for all the hundred separate paths meet in the Eternal.
But the gnostic being is a complete enjoyment and possession
of the whole divine and spiritual nature; and it is a complete
The Principle of the Integral Yoga
615
lifting of the whole nature of man into its power of a divine
and spiritual existence. Integrality becomes then an essential
condition of this Yoga.
Integrality becomes then an essential
condition of this Yoga.
At the same time we have seen that each of the three ways
at its height, if it is pursued with a certain largeness, can take
into itself the powers of the others and lead to their fulfilment. It
is therefore sufficient to start by one of them and find the point
at which it meets the other at first parallel lines of advance and
melts into them by its own widenings. At the same time a more
difficult, complex, wholly powerful process would be to start, as
it were, on three lines together, on a triple wheel of soul-power.
But the consideration of this possibility must be postponed till
we have seen what are the conditions and means of the Yoga
of self-perfection. For we shall see that this also need not be
postponed entirely, but a certain preparation of it is part of and
a certain initiation into it proceeds by the growth of the divine
works, love and knowledge.
Chapter II
The Integral Perfection
A DIVINE perfection of the human being is our aim. We
must know then first what are the essential elements
that constitute man’s total perfection; secondly, what we
mean by a divine as distinguished from a human perfection of
our being. That man as a being is capable of self-development
and of some approach at least to an ideal standard of perfection
which his mind is able to conceive, fix before it and pursue,
is common ground to all thinking humanity, though it may be
only the minority who concern themselves with this possibility
as providing the one most important aim of life. But by some the
ideal is conceived as a mundane change, by others as a religious
conversion.
But by some the
ideal is conceived as a mundane change, by others as a religious
conversion.
The mundane perfection is sometimes conceived of as some¬
thing outward, social, a thing of action, a more rational dealing
with our fellow-men and our environment, a better and more
efficient citizenship and discharge of duties, a better, richer,
kindlier and happier way of living, with a more just and more
harmonious associated enjoyment of the opportunities of ex¬
istence. By others again a more inner and subjective ideal is
cherished, a clarifying and raising of the intelligence, will and
reason, a heightening and ordering of power and capacity in
the nature, a nobler ethical, a richer aesthetic, a finer emotional,
a much healthier and better-governed vital and physical being.
Sometimes one element is stressed, almost to the exclusion of
the rest; sometimes, in wider and more well-balanced minds, the
whole harmony is envisaged as a total perfection. A change of
education and social institutions is the outward means adopted
or an inner self-training and development is preferred as the true
instrumentation. Or the two aims may be clearly united, the per¬
fection of the inner individual, the perfection of the outer living.
But the mundane aim takes for its field the present life
The Integral Perfection
617
and its opportunities; the religious aim on the contrary fixes
before it the self-preparation for another existence after death,
its commonest ideal is some kind of pure sainthood, its means
a conversion of the imperfect or sinful human being by divine
grace or through obedience to a law laid down by a scripture or
else given by a religious founder. The aim of religion may include
a social change, but it is then a change brought about by the
acceptance of a common religious ideal and way of consecrated
living, a brotherhood of the saints, a theocracy or kingdom of
God reflecting on earth the kingdom of heaven.
The object of our synthetic Yoga must, in this respect too as
in its other parts, be more integral and comprehensive, embrace
all these elements or these tendencies of a larger impulse of self-
perfection and harmonise them or rather unify, and in order to
do that successfully it must seize on a truth which is wider than
the ordinary religious and higher than the mundane principle.
All life is a secret Yoga, an obscure growth of Nature towards
the discovery and fulfilment of the divine principle hidden in her
which becomes progressively less obscure, more self-conscient
and luminous, more self-possessed in the human being by the
opening of all his instruments of knowledge, will, action, life to
the Spirit within him and in the world. Mind, life, body, all the
forms of our nature are the means of this growth, but they find
their last perfection only by opening out to something beyond
them, first, because they are not the whole of what man is,
secondly, because that other something which he is, is the key of
his completeness and brings a light which discovers to him the
whole high and large reality of his being.
Mind is fulfilled by a greater knowledge of which it is only a
half-light, life discovers its meaning in a greater power and will
of which it is the outward and as yet obscure functioning, body
finds its last use as an instrument of a power of being of which it
is a physical support and material starting-point. They have all
themselves first to be developed and find out their ordinary pos¬
sibilities; all our normal life is a trying of these possibilities and
an opportunity for this preparatory and tentative self-training.
But life cannot find its perfect self-fulfilment till it opens to
618
The Yoga of Self -F erf ection
that greater reality of being of which by this development of a
richer power and a more sensitive use and capacity it becomes
a well-prepared field of working.
Intellectual, volitional, ethical, emotional, aesthetic and
physical training and improvement are all so much to the good,
but they are only in the end a constant movement in a circle
without any last delivering and illumining aim, unless they
arrive at a point when they can open themselves to the power
and presence of the Spirit and admit its direct workings. This
direct working effects a conversion of the whole being which
is the indispensable condition of our real perfection. To grow
into the truth and power of the Spirit and by the direct action
of that power to be made a fit channel of its self-expression, —
a living of man in the Divine and a divine living of the Spirit in
humanity, — will therefore be the principle and the whole object
of an integral Yoga of self-perfection.
In the process of this change there must be by the very
necessity of the effort two stages of its working. First, there will
be the personal endeavour of the human being, as soon as he
becomes aware by his soul, mind, heart of this divine possibility
and turns towards it as the true object of life, to prepare himself
for it and to get rid of all in him that belongs to a lower working,
of all that stands in the way of his opening to the spiritual truth
and its power, so as to possess by this liberation his spiritual
being and turn all his natural movements into free means of
its self-expression. It is by this turn that the self-conscious Yoga
aware of its aim begins: there is a new awakening and an upward
change of the life motive. So long as there is only an intellectual,
ethical and other self-training for the now normal purposes of
life which does not travel beyond the ordinary circle of working
of mind, life and body, we are still only in the obscure and yet
unillumined preparatory Yoga of Nature; we are still in pursuit
of only an ordinary human perfection. A spiritual desire of the
Divine and of the divine perfection, of a unity with him in all our
being and a spiritual perfection in all our nature, is the effective
sign of this change, the precursory power of a great integral
conversion of our being and living.
The Integral Perfection
619
The Integral Perfection
619
By personal effort a precursory change, a preliminary
conversion can be effected; it amounts to a greater or less
spiritualising of our mental motives, our character and temper¬
ament, and a mastery, stilling or changed action of the vital and
physical life. This converted subjectivity can be made the base of
some communion or unity of the soul in mind with the Divine
and some partial reflection of the divine nature in the mentality
of the human being. That is as far as man can go by his unaided
or indirectly aided effort, because that is an effort of mind and
mind cannot climb beyond itself permanently: at most it arises to
a spiritualised and idealised mentality. If it shoots up beyond that
border, it loses hold of itself, loses hold of life, and arrives either
at a trance of absorption or a passivity. A greater perfection can
only be arrived at by a higher power entering in and taking up
the whole action of the being. The second stage of this Yoga will
therefore be a persistent giving up of all the action of the nature
into the hands of this greater Power, a substitution of its influ¬
ence, possession and working for the personal effort, until the
Divine to whom we aspire becomes the direct master of the Yoga
and effects the entire spiritual and ideal conversion of the being.
This double character of our Yoga raises it beyond the
mundane ideal of perfection, while at the same time it goes
too beyond the loftier, intenser, but much narrower religious
formula. The mundane ideal regards man always as a mental,
vital and physical being and it aims at a human perfection well
within these limits, a perfection of mind, life and body, an expan¬
sion and refinement of the intellect and knowledge, of the will
and power, of ethical character, aim and conduct, of aesthetic
sensibility and creativeness, of emotional balanced poise and
enjoyment, of vital and physical soundness, regulated action and
just efficiency. It is a wide and full aim, but yet not sufficiently
full and wide, because it ignores that other greater element of our
being which the mind vaguely conceives as the spiritual element
and leaves it either undeveloped or insufficiently satisfied as
merely some high occasional or added derivatory experience,
the result of the action of mind in its exceptional aspects or
dependent upon mind for its presence and persistence. It can
620
The Yoga of Self -F erf ection
It can
620
The Yoga of Self -F erf ection
become a high aim when it seeks to develop the loftier and the
larger reaches of our mentality, but yet not sufficiently high,
because it does not aspire beyond mind to that of which our
purest reason, our brightest mental intuition, our deepest mental
sense and feeling, strongest mental will and power or ideal aim
and purpose are only pale radiations. Its aim besides is limited
to a terrestrial perfection of the normal human life.
A Yoga of integral perfection regards man as a divine spir¬
itual being involved in mind, life and body; it aims therefore
at a liberation and a perfection of his divine nature. It seeks to
make an inner living in the perfectly developed spiritual being
his constant intrinsic living and the spiritualised action of mind,
life and body only its outward human expression. In order that
this spiritual being may not be something vague and indefinable
or else but imperfectly realised and dependent on the mental
support and the mental limitations, it seeks to go beyond mind
to the supramental knowledge, will, sense, feeling, intuition,
dynamic initiation of vital and physical action, all that makes
the native working of the spiritual being. It accepts human life,
but takes account of the large supraterrestrial action behind the
earthly material living, and it joins itself to the divine Being from
whom the supreme origination of all these partial and lower
states proceeds so that the whole of life may become aware of
its divine source and feel in each action of knowledge, of will, of
feeling, sense and body the divine originating impulse. It rejects
nothing that is essential in the mundane aim, but enlarges it,
finds and lives in its greater and its truer meaning now hidden
from it, transfigures it from a limited, earthly and mortal thing
to a figure of infinite, divine and immortal values.
The integral Yoga meets the religious ideal at several points,
but goes beyond it in the sense of a greater wideness. The reli¬
gious ideal looks, not only beyond this earth, but away from it to
a heaven or even beyond all heavens to some kind of Nirvana. Its
ideal of perfection is limited to whatever kind of inner or outer
mutation will eventually serve the turning away of the soul from
the human life to the beyond. Its ordinary idea of perfection is a
religio-ethical change, a drastic purification of the active and the
The Integral Perfection
621
Its ordinary idea of perfection is a
religio-ethical change, a drastic purification of the active and the
The Integral Perfection
621
emotional being, often with an ascetic abrogation and rejection
of the vital impulses as its completest reaching of excellence, and
in any case a supraterrestrial motive and reward or result of a
life of piety and right conduct. In so far as it admits a change
of knowledge, will, aesthesis, it is in the sense of the turning of
them to another object than the aims of human life and even¬
tually brings a rejection of all earthly objects of aesthesis, will
and knowledge. The method, whether it lays stress on personal
effort or upon divine influence, on works and knowledge or
upon grace, is not like the mundane a development, but rather
a conversion; but in the end the aim is not a conversion of our
mental and physical nature, but the putting on of a pure spiritual
nature and being, and since that is not possible here on earth, it
looks for its consummation by a transference to another world
or a shuffling off of all cosmic existence.
But the integral Yoga founds itself on a conception of the
spiritual being as an omnipresent existence, the fullness of which
comes not essentially by a transference to other worlds or a
cosmic self-extinction, but by a growth out of what we now are
phenomenally into the consciousness of the omnipresent reality
which we always are in the essence of our being. It substitutes
for the form of religious piety its completer spiritual seeking of
a divine union. It proceeds by a personal effort to a conversion
through a divine influence and possession; but this divine grace,
if we may so call it, is not simply a mysterious flow or touch com¬
ing from above, but the all-pervading act of a divine presence
which we come to know within as the power of the highest Self
and Master of our being entering into the soul and so possessing
it that we not only feel it close to us and pressing upon our mortal
nature, but live in its law, know that law, possess it as the whole
power of our spiritualised nature. The conversion its action will
effect is an integral conversion of our ethical being into the
Truth and Right of the divine nature, of our intellectual into the
illumination of divine knowledge, our emotional into the divine
love and unity, our dynamic and volitional into a working of
the divine power, our aesthetic into a plenary reception and
a creative enjoyment of divine beauty, not excluding even in
622
The Yoga of Self -F erf ection
the end a divine conversion of the vital and physical being. It
regards all the previous life as an involuntary and unconscious
or half-conscious preparatory growing towards this change and
Yoga as the voluntary and conscious effort and realisation of the
change, by which all the aim of human existence in all its parts is
fulfilled, even while it is transfigured. Admitting the supracosmic
truth and life in worlds beyond, it admits too the terrestrial as a
continued term of the one existence and a change of individual
and communal life on earth as a strain of its divine meaning.
To open oneself to the supracosmic Divine is an essential
condition of this integral perfection; to unite oneself with the
universal Divine is another essential condition. Here the Yoga
of self-perfection coincides with the Yogas of knowledge, works
and devotion; for it is impossible to change the human nature
into the divine or to make it an instrument of the divine knowl¬
edge, will and joy of existence, unless there is a union with
the supreme Being, Consciousness and Bliss and a unity with
its universal Self in all things and beings. A wholly separative
possession of the divine nature by the human individual, as
distinct from a self-withdrawn absorption in it, is not possible.
But this unity will not be an inmost spiritual oneness qualified, so
long as the human life lasts, by a separative existence in mind,
life and body; the full perfection is a possession, through this
spiritual unity, of unity too with the universal Mind, the univer¬
sal Life, the universal Form which are the other constant terms
of cosmic being. Moreover, since human life is still accepted as
a self-expression of the realised Divine in man, there must be
an action of the entire divine nature in our life; and this brings
in the need of the supramental conversion which substitutes the
native action of spiritual being for the imperfect action of the
superficial nature and spiritualises and transfigures its mental,
vital and physical parts by the spiritual ideality. These three ele¬
ments, a union with the supreme Divine, unity with the universal
Self, and a supramental life action from this transcendent origin
and through this universality, but still with the individual as the
soul-channel and natural instrument, constitute the essence of
the integral divine perfection of the human being.
Chapter III
The Psychology of Self-Perfection
Chapter III
The Psychology of Self-Perfection
Essentially, then, this divine self-perfection is a conver¬
sion of the human into a likeness of and a fundamental
oneness with the divine nature, a rapid shaping of the
image of God in man and filling in of its ideal outlines. It is what
is ordinarily termed sadrsya-mukti, a liberation into the divine
resemblance out of the bondage of the human seeming, or, to
use the expression of the Gita, sadharmya-gati, a coming to be
one in law of being with the supreme, universal and indwelling
Divine. To perceive and have a right view of our way to such
a transformation we must form some sufficient working idea
of the complex thing that this human nature at present is in
the confused interminglings of its various principles, so that we
may see the precise nature of the conversion each part of it
must undergo and the most effective means for the conversion.
How to disengage from this knot of thinking mortal matter the
Immortal it contains, from this mentalised vital animal man the
happy fullness of his submerged hints of Godhead, is the real
problem of a human being and living. Life develops many first
hints of the divinity without completely disengaging them; Yoga
is the unravelling of the knot of Life’s difficulty.
Lirst of all we have to know the central secret of the psy¬
chological complexity which creates the problem and all its
difficulties. But an ordinary psychology which only takes mind
and its phenomena at their surface values, will be of no help
to us; it will not give us the least guidance in this line of self¬
exploration and self-conversion. Still less can we find the clue in
a scientific psychology with a materialistic basis which assumes
that the body and the biological and physiological factors of our
nature are not only the starting-point but the whole real foun¬
dation and regards human mind as only a subtle development
from the life and the body. That may be the actual truth of the
624
The Yoga of Self -F erf ection
That may be the actual truth of the
624
The Yoga of Self -F erf ection
animal side of human nature and of the human mind in so far as
it is limited and conditioned by the physical part of our being.
But the whole difference between man and the animal is that
the animal mind, as we know it, cannot get for one moment
away from its origins, cannot break out from the covering, the
close chrysalis which the bodily life has spun round the soul,
and become something greater than its present self, a more free,
magnificent and noble being; but in man mind reveals itself as
a greater energy escaping from the restrictions of the vital and
physical formula of being. But even this is not all that man is
or can be: he has in him the power to evolve and release a
still greater ideal energy which in its turn escapes out of the
restrictions of the mental formula of his nature and discloses the
supramental form, the ideal power of a spiritual being. In Yoga
we have to travel beyond the physical nature and the superficial
man and to discover the workings of the whole nature of the real
man. In other words we must arrive at and use a psycho-physical
knowledge with a spiritual foundation.
Man is in his real nature, — however obscure now this truth
may be to our present understanding and self-consciousness, we
must for the purposes of Yoga have faith in it, and we shall
then find that our faith is justified by an increasing experi¬
ence and a greater self-knowledge, — a spirit using the mind,
life and body for an individual and a communal experience
and self-manifestation in the universe. This spirit is an infinite
existence limiting itself in apparent being for individual experi¬
ence. It is an infinite consciousness which defines itself in finite
forms of consciousness for joy of various knowledge and various
power of being. It is an infinite delight of being expanding and
contracting itself and its powers, concealing and discovering,
formulating many terms of its joy of existence, even to an ap¬
parent obscuration and denial of its own nature. In itself it is
eternal Sachchidananda, but this complexity, this knotting up
and unravelling of the infinite in the finite is the aspect we see
it assume in universal and in individual nature. To discover the
eternal Sachchidananda, this essential self of our being within
us, and live in it is the stable basis, to make its true nature
The Psychology of Self-Perfection
625
To discover the
eternal Sachchidananda, this essential self of our being within
us, and live in it is the stable basis, to make its true nature
The Psychology of Self-Perfection
625
evident and creative of a divine way of living in our instruments,
supermind, mind, life and body, the active principle of a spiritual
perfection.
Supermind, mind, life and body are the four instruments
which the spirit uses for its manifestation in the workings of
Nature. Supermind is spiritual consciousness acting as a self-
luminous knowledge, will, sense, aesthesis, energy, self-creative
and unveiling power of its own delight and being. Mind is the
action of the same powers, but limited and only very indirectly
and partially illumined. Supermind lives in unity though it plays
with diversity; mind lives in a separative action of diversity,
though it may open to unity. Mind is not only capable of igno¬
rance, but, because it acts always partially and by limitation, it
works characteristically as a power of ignorance: it may even
and it does forget itself in a complete inconscience, or nescience,
awaken from it to the ignorance of a partial knowledge and
move from the ignorance towards a complete knowledge, —
that is its natural action in the human being, — but it can never
have by itself a complete knowledge. Supermind is incapable of
real ignorance; even if it puts full knowledge behind it in the lim¬
itation of a particular working, yet all its working refers back to
what it has put behind it and all is instinct with self-illumination;
even if it involves itself in material nescience, it yet does there
accurately the works of a perfect will and knowledge. Supermind
lends itself to the action of the inferior instruments; it is always
there indeed at the core as a secret support of their operations.
In matter it is an automatic action and effectuation of the hid¬
den idea in things; in life its most seizable form is instinct, an
instinctive, subconscious or partly subconscious knowledge and
operation; in mind it reveals itself as intuition, a swift, direct
and self-effective illumination of intelligence, will, sense and
aesthesis. But these are merely irradiations of the supermind
which accommodate themselves to the limited functioning of the
obscurer instruments: its own characteristic nature is a gnosis
superconscient to mind, life and body. Supermind or gnosis is
the characteristic, illumined, significant action of spirit in its
own native reality.
626
The Yoga of Self -F erf ection
Supermind or gnosis is
the characteristic, illumined, significant action of spirit in its
own native reality.
626
The Yoga of Self -F erf ection
Life is an energy of spirit subordinated to action of mind
and body, which fulfils itself through mentality and physicality
and acts as a link between them. It has its own characteristic
operation but nowhere works independently of mind and body.
All energy of the spirit in action works in the two terms of
existence and consciousness, for the self-formation of existence
and the play and self-realisation of consciousness, for the delight
of existence and the delight of consciousness. In this inferior
formulation of being in which we at present live, the spirit’s
energy of life works between the two terms of mind and matter,
supporting and effecting the formulations of substance of matter
and working as a material energy, supporting the formulations
of consciousness of mind and the workings of mental energy,
supporting the interaction of mind and body and working as
a sensory and nervous energy. What we call vitality is for the
purposes of our normal human existence power of conscious
being emerging in matter, liberating from it and in it mind and
the higher powers and supporting their limited action in the
physical life, — just as what we call mentality is power of con¬
scious being awaking in body to light of its own consciousness
and to consciousness of all the rest of being immediately around
it and working at first in the limited action set for it by life
and body, but at certain points and at a certain height escaping
from it to a partial action beyond this circle. But this is not the
whole power whether of life or mentality; they have planes of
conscious existence of their own kind, other than this material
level, where they are freer in their characteristic action. Matter
or body itself is a limiting form of substance of spirit in which
life and mind and spirit are involved, self-hidden, self-forgetful
by absorption in their own externalising action, but bound to
emerge from it by a self-compelling evolution. But matter too
is capable of refining to subtler forms of substance in which
it becomes more apparently a formal density of life, of mind,
of spirit. Man himself has, besides this gross material body, an
encasing vital sheath, a mental body, a body of bliss and gnosis.
But all matter, all body contains within it the secret powers of
these higher principles; matter is a formation of life that has no
The Psychology of Self-Perfection
627
But all matter, all body contains within it the secret powers of
these higher principles; matter is a formation of life that has no
The Psychology of Self-Perfection
627
real existence apart from the informing universal spirit which
gives it its energy and substance.
This is the nature of spirit and its instruments. But to un¬
derstand its operations and to get at a knowledge which will
give to us a power of leverage in uplifting them out of the
established groove in which our life goes spinning, we have
to perceive that the Spirit has based all its workings upon two
twin aspects of its being, Soul and Nature, Purusha and Prakriti.
We have to treat them as different and diverse in power, — for
in practice of consciousness this difference is valid, — although
they are only two sides of the same reality, pole and pole of the
one conscious being. Purusha or soul is spirit cognizant of the
workings of its nature, supporting them by its being, enjoying
or rejecting enjoyment of them in its delight of being. Nature is
power of the spirit, and she is too working and process of its
power formulating name and form of being, developing action
of consciousness and knowledge, throwing itself up in will and
impulsion, force and energy, fulfilling itself in enjoyment. Nature
is Prakriti, Maya, Shakti. If we look at her on her most external
side where she seems the opposite of Purusha, she is Prakriti, an
inert and mechanical self-driven operation, inconscient or con-
scient only by the light of Purusha, elevated by various degrees,
vital, mental, supramental, of his soul-illumination of her work¬
ings. If we look at her on her other internal side where she
moves nearer to unity with Purusha, she is Maya, will of being
and becoming or of cessation from being and becoming with
all their results, apparent to the consciousness, of involution
and evolution, existing and non-existing, self-concealment of
spirit and self-discovery of spirit. Both are sides of one and the
same thing, Shakti, power of being of the spirit which operates,
whether superconsciously or consciously or subconsciously in
a seeming inconscience, — in fact all these motions coexist at
the same time and in the same soul, — as the spirit’s power of
knowledge, power of will, power of process and action, jhdna-
sakti, icchd-sakti, kriyd-sakti. By this power the spirit creates
all things in itself, hides and discovers all itself in the form and
behind the veil of its manifestation.
628
The Yoga of Self -F erf ection
By this power the spirit creates
all things in itself, hides and discovers all itself in the form and
behind the veil of its manifestation.
628
The Yoga of Self -F erf ection
Purusha is able by this power of its nature to take whatever
poise it may will and to follow the law and form of being proper
to any self-formulation. It is eternal soul and spirit in its own
power of self-existence superior to and governing its manifesta¬
tions; it is universal soul and spirit developed in power of becom¬
ing of its existence, infinite in the finite; it is individual soul and
spirit absorbed in development of some particular course of its
becoming, in appearance mutably finite in the infinite. All these
things it can be at once, eternal spirit universalised in cosmos,
individualised in its beings; it can too found the consciousness
rejecting, governing or responding to the action of Nature in
any one of them, put the others behind it or away from it, know
itself as pure eternity, self-supporting universality or exclusive
individuality. Whatever the formulation of its nature, soul can
seem to become that and view itself as that only in the frontal
active part of its consciousness; but it is never only what it seems
to be; it is too the so much else that it can be; secretly, it is the
all of itself that is yet hidden. It is not irrevocably limited by any
particular self-formulation in Time, but can break through and
beyond it, break it up or develop it, select, reject, new-create,
reveal out of itself a greater self-formulation. What it believes
itself to be by the whole active will of its consciousness in its
instruments, that it is or tends to become, yo yacchraddhah sa
eva sah: what it believes it can be and has full faith in becoming,
that it changes to in nature, evolves or discovers.
This power of the soul over its nature is of the utmost impor¬
tance in the Yoga of self-perfection; if it did not exist, we could
never get by conscious endeavour and aspiration out of the fixed
groove of our present imperfect human being; if any greater
perfection were intended, we should have to wait for Nature to
effect it in her own slow or swift process of evolution. In the
lower forms of being the soul accepts this complete subjection
to Nature, but as it rises higher in the scale, it awakes to a sense
of something in itself which can command Nature; but it is only
when it arrives at self-knowledge that this free will and control
becomes a complete reality. The change effects itself through
process of nature, not therefore by any capricious magic, but an
The Psychology of Self-Perfection
629
ordered development and intelligible process. When complete
mastery is gained, then the process by its self-effective rapidity
may seem a miracle to the intelligence, but it still proceeds by
law of the truth of Spirit, — when the Divine within us by close
union of our will and being with him takes up the Yoga and acts
as the omnipotent master of the nature. For the Divine is our
highest Self and the self of all Nature, the eternal and universal
Purusha.
For the Divine is our
highest Self and the self of all Nature, the eternal and universal
Purusha.
Purusha may establish himself in any plane of being, take
any principle of being as the immediate head of his power and
live in the working of its proper mode of conscious action.
The soul may dwell in the principle of infinite unity of self¬
existence and be aware of all consciousness, energy, delight,
knowledge, will, activity as conscious form of this essential
truth. Sat or Satya. It may dwell in the principle of infinite
conscious energy, Tapas, and be aware of it unrolling out of
self-existence the works of knowledge, will and dynamic soul-
action for the enjoyment of an infinite delight of the being. It
may dwell in the principle of infinite self-existent delight and be
aware of the divine Ananda creating out of its self-existence by
its energy whatever harmony of being. In these three poises the
consciousness of unity dominates; the soul lives in its awareness
of eternity, universality, unity, and whatever diversity there is,
is not separative, but only a multitudinous aspect of oneness. It
may dwell too in the principle of supermind, in a luminous self-
determining knowledge, will and action which develops some
coordination of perfect delight of conscious being. In the higher
gnosis unity is the basis, but it takes its joy in diversity; in lower
fact of supermind diversity is the basis, but it refers back always
to a conscious unity and it takes joy in unity. These ranges of con¬
sciousness are beyond our present level; they are superconscious
to our normal mentality. That belongs to a lower hemisphere of
being.
This lower being begins where a veil falls between soul and
nature, between spirit in supermind and spirit in mind, life and
body. Where this veil has not fallen, these instrumental powers
are not what they are in us, but an enlightened part of the unified
630
The Yoga of Self -F erf ection
Where this veil has not fallen, these instrumental powers
are not what they are in us, but an enlightened part of the unified
630
The Yoga of Self -F erf ection
action of supermind and spirit. Mind gets to an independent idea
of its own action when it forgets to refer back to the light from
which it derives and becomes absorbed in the possibilities of its
own separative process and enjoyment. The soul when it dwells
in the principle of mind, not yet subject to but user of life and
body, knows itself as a mental being working out its mental life
and forces and images, bodies of the subtle mental substance,
according to its individual knowledge, will and dynamis mod¬
ified by its relation to other similar beings and powers in the
universal mind. When it dwells in the principle of life, it knows
itself as a being of the universal life working out action and
consciousness by its desires under similar modifying conditions
proper to a universal life-soul whose action is through many
individual life-beings. When it dwells in the principle of matter,
it knows itself as a consciousness of matter acting under a similar
law of the energy of material being. In proportion as it leans
towards the side of knowledge, it is aware of itself more or less
clearly as a soul of mind, a soul of life, a soul of body viewing and
acting in or acted upon by its nature; but where it leans towards
the side of ignorance, it knows itself as an ego identified with
nature of mind, of life or of body, a creation of Nature. But the
native tendency of material being leads towards an absorption
of the soul’s energy in the act of formation and material move¬
ment and a consequent self-oblivion of the conscious being. The
material universe begins from an apparent inconscience.
The universal Purusha dwells in all these planes in a certain
simultaneity and builds upon each of these principles a world
or series of worlds with its beings who live in the nature of
that principle. Man, the microcosm, has all these planes in his
own being, ranged from his subconscient to his superconscient
existence. By a developing power of Yoga he can become aware
of these concealed worlds hidden from his physical, materialised
mind and senses which know only the material world, and then
he becomes aware that his material existence is not a thing apart
and self-existent, as the material universe in which he lives is also
not a thing apart and self-existent, but is in constant relation to
the higher planes and acted on by their powers and beings. He
He
The Psychology of Self-Perfection
631
can open up and increase the action of these higher planes in
himself and enjoy some sort of participation in the life of the
other worlds, — which, for the rest, are or can be his dwelling-
place, that is to say, the station of his awareness, dhama, after
death or between death and rebirth in a material body. But his
most important capacity is that of developing the powers of
the higher principles in himself, a greater power of life, a purer
light of mind, the illumination of supermind, the infinite being,
consciousness and delight of spirit. By an ascending movement
he can develop his human imperfection towards that greater
perfection.
But whatever his aim, however exalted his aspiration, he
has to begin from the law of his present imperfection, to take
full account of it and see how it can be converted to the law of a
possible perfection. This present law of his being starts from the
inconscience of the material universe, an involution of the soul
in form and subjection to material nature; and, though in this
matter life and mind have developed their own energies, yet they
are limited and bound up in the action of the lower material,
which is to the ignorance of his practical surface consciousness
his original principle. Mind in him, though he is an embodied
mental being, has to bear the control of the body and the phys¬
ical life and can only by some more or less considerable effort
of energy and concentration consciously control life and body.
It is only by increasing that control that he can move towards
perfection, — and it is only by developing soul-power that he can
reach it. Nature-power in him has to become more and more
completely a conscious act of soul, a conscious expression of all
the will and knowledge of spirit. Prakriti has to reveal itself as
shakti of the Purusha.
Chapter IV
The Perfection of the Mental Being
The fundamental idea of a Yoga of self-perfection
must be, under these conditions, a reversal of the present
relations of the soul of man to his mental, vital and phys¬
ical nature. Man is at present a partly self-conscious soul subject
to and limited by mind, life and body, who has to become an
entirely self-conscious soul master of his mind, life and body.
Not limited by their claims and demands, a perfect self-conscious
soul would be superior to and a free possessor of its instruments.
This effort of man to be master of his own being has been the
sense of a large part of his past spiritual, intellectual and moral
strivings.
This effort of man to be master of his own being has been the
sense of a large part of his past spiritual, intellectual and moral
strivings.
In order to be possessor of his being with any complete
reality of freedom and mastery, man must find out his highest
self, the real man or highest Purusha in him, which is free and
master in its own inalienable power. He must cease to be the
mental, vital, physical ego; for that is always the creation, in¬
strument and subject of mental, vital, physical Nature. This ego
is not his real self, but an instrumentation of Nature by which it
has developed a sense of limited and separate individual being
in mind, life and body. By this instrumentation he acts as if he
were a separate existence in the material universe. Nature has
evolved certain habitual limiting conditions under which that
action takes place; self-identification of the soul with the ego
is the means by which she induces the soul to consent to this
action and accept these habitual limiting conditions. While the
identification lasts, there is a self-imprisonment in this habitual
round and narrow action, and, until it is transcended, there can
be no free use by the soul of its individual living, much less a
real self-exceeding. For this reason an essential movement of the
Yoga is to draw back from the outward ego sense by which we
are identified with the action of mind, life and body and live
The Perfection of the Mental Being
633
inwardly in the soul. The liberation from an externalised ego
sense is the first step towards the soul’s freedom and mastery.
The liberation from an externalised ego
sense is the first step towards the soul’s freedom and mastery.
When we thus draw back into the soul, we find ourselves
to be not the mind, but a mental being who stands behind the
action of the embodied mind, not a mental and vital person¬
ality, — personality is a composition of Nature, — but a men¬
tal Person, manomaya purusa. We become aware of a being
within who takes his stand upon mind for self-knowledge and
world-knowledge and thinks of himself as an individual for self¬
experience and world-experience, for an inward action and an
outward-going action, but is yet different from mind, life and
body. This sense of difference from the vital actions and the
physical being is very marked; for although the Purusha feels
his mind to be involved in life and body, yet he is aware that
even if the physical life and body were to cease or be dissolved,
he would still go on existing in his mental being. But the sense
of difference from the mind is more difficult and less firmly
distinct. But still it is there; it is characterised by any or all of
three intuitions in which this mental Purusha lives and becomes
by them aware of his own greater existence.
First, he has the intuition of himself as someone observing
the action of the mind; it is something which is going on in him
and yet before him as an object of his regarding knowledge.
This self-awareness is the intuitive sense of the witness Purusha,
saksi. Witness Purusha is a pure consciousness who watches
Nature and sees it as an action reflected upon the consciousness
and enlightened by that consciousness, but in itself other than it.
To mental Purusha Nature is only an action, a complex action
of discriminating and combining thought, of will, of sense, of
emotion, of temperament and character, of ego feeling, which
works upon a foundation of vital impulses, needs and cravings
in the conditions imposed by the physical body. But it is not
limited by them, since it can not only give them new directions
and much variation, refining and extension, but is able to act
in thought and imagination and a mental world of much more
subtle and flexible creations. But also there is an intuition in the
mental Purusha of something larger and greater than this present
634
The Yoga of Self -F erf ection
But also there is an intuition in the
mental Purusha of something larger and greater than this present
634
The Yoga of Self -F erf ection
action in which he lives, a range of experience of which it is
only a frontal scheme or a narrow superficial selection. By this
intuition he stands upon the threshold of a subliminal self with
a more extended possibility than this superficial mentality opens
to his self-knowledge. A last and greatest intuition is an inner
awareness of something which he more essentially is, something
as high above mind as mind is above the physical life and body.
This inner awareness is his intuition of his supramental and
spiritual being.
The mental Purusha can at any time involve himself again
in the superficial action from which he has drawn back, live for
a while entirely identified with the mechanism of mind, life and
body and absorbedly repeat its recurrent normal action. But once
that separative movement has been made and lived in for some
time, he can never be to himself quite what he was before. The
involution in the outward action becomes now only a recurrent
self-oblivion from which there is a tendency in him to draw back
again to himself and to pure self-experience. It may be noted too
that the Purusha by drawing back from the normal action of this
outward consciousness which has created for him his present
natural form of self-experience, is able to take two other poises.
He can have an intuition of himself as a soul in body, which puts
forth life as its activity and mind as the light of that activity. This
soul in body is the physical conscious being, annamaya purusa,
which uses life and mind characteristically for physical expe¬
rience, — all else being regarded as a consequence of physical
experience, — does not look beyond the life of the body and,
so far as it feels anything beyond its physical individuality, is
aware only of the physical universe and at most its oneness with
the soul of physical Nature. But he can have too an intuition of
himself as a soul of life, self-identified with a great movement
of becoming in Time, which puts forth body as a form or basic
sense-image and mind as a conscious activity of life-experience.
This soul in life is the vital conscious being, prdnamaya purusa,
which is capable of looking beyond the duration and limits of
the physical body, of feeling an eternity of life behind and in
front, an identity with a universal Life-being, but does not look
The Perfection of the Mental Being
635
beyond a constant vital becoming in Time. These three Purushas
are soul-forms of the Spirit by which it identifies its conscious
existence with and founds its action upon any of these three
planes or principles of its universal being.
But man is characteristically a mental being. Moreover, men¬
tality is his highest present status in which he is nearest to his
real self, most easily and largely aware of spirit. His way to
perfection is not to involve himself in the outward or superficial
existence, nor is it to place himself in the soul of life or the soul of
body, but to insist on the three mental intuitions by which he can
lift himself eventually above the physical, vital and mental levels.
This insistence may take two quite different forms, each with its
own object and way of proceeding. It is quite possible for him
to accentuate it in a direction away from existence in Nature,
a detachment, a withdrawal from mind, life and body. He may
try to live more and more as the witness Purusha, regarding
the action of Nature, without interest in it, without sanction to
it, detached, rejecting the whole action, withdrawing into pure
conscious existence. This is the Sankhya liberation. He may go
inward into that larger existence of which he has the intuition
and away from the superficial mentality into a dream-state or
sleep-state which admits him into wider or higher ranges of
consciousness. By passing away into these ranges he may put
away from him the terrestrial being. There is even, it was sup¬
posed in ancient times, a transition to supramental worlds from
which a return to earthly consciousness was either not possible
or not obligatory. But the definite and sure finality of this kind of
liberation depends on the elevation of the mental being into that
spiritual self of which he becomes aware when he looks away
and upward from all mentality. That is given as the key to entire
cessation from terrestrial existence whether by immergence in
pure being or a participation in supracosmic being.
But if our aim is to be not only free by self-detachment
from Nature, but perfected in mastery, this type of insistence
can no longer suffice. We have to regard our mental, vital and
physical action of Nature, find out the knots of its bondage
and the loosing-points of liberation, discover the keys of its
636
The Yoga of Self -F erf ection
We have to regard our mental, vital and
physical action of Nature, find out the knots of its bondage
and the loosing-points of liberation, discover the keys of its
636
The Yoga of Self -F erf ection
imperfection and lay our finger on the key of perfection. When
the regarding soul, the witness Purusha stands back from his ac¬
tion of nature and observes it, he sees that it proceeds of its own
impulsion by the power of its mechanism, by force of continuity
of movement, continuity of mentality, continuity of life impulse,
continuity of an involuntary physical mechanism. At first the
whole thing seems to be the recurrent action of an automatic
machinery, although the sum of that action mounts constantly
into a creation, development, evolution. He was as if seized in
this wheel, attached to it by the ego sense, whirled round and
onward in the circling of the machinery. A complete mechanical
determinism or a stream of determinations of Nature to which
he lent the light of his consciousness, is the natural aspect of his
mental, vital and physical personality once it is regarded from
this stable detached standpoint and no longer by a soul caught up
in the movement and imagining itself to be a part of the action.
But on a farther view we find that this determinism is not so
complete as it seemed; action of Nature continues and is what it
is because of the sanction of the Purusha. The regarding Purusha
sees that he supports and in some way fills and pervades the
action with his conscious being. He discovers that without him
it could not continue and that where he persistently withdraws
this sanction, the habitual action becomes gradually enfeebled,
flags and ceases. His whole active mentality can be thus brought
to a complete stillness. There is yet a passive mentality which
mechanically continues, but this too can be stilled by his with¬
drawal into himself out of the action. Even then the life action in
its most mechanical parts continues; but that too can be stilled
into cessation. It would appear then that he is not only the
upholding [bhartr) Purusha, but in some way the master of his
nature, Ishwara. It was the consciousness of this sanctioning
control, this necessity of his consent, which made him in the
ego-sense conceive of himself as a soul or mental being with a
free will determining all his own becomings. Yet the free-will
seems to be imperfect, almost illusory, since the actual will itself
is a machinery of Nature and each separate willing determined
by the stream of past action and the sum of conditions it created.
The Perfection of the Mental Being
637
Yet the free-will
seems to be imperfect, almost illusory, since the actual will itself
is a machinery of Nature and each separate willing determined
by the stream of past action and the sum of conditions it created.
The Perfection of the Mental Being
637
— although, because the result of the stream, the sum, is at each
moment a new development, a new determination, it may seem
to be a self-born willing, virginally creative at each moment.
What he contributed all the while was a consent behind, a
sanction to what Nature was doing. He does not seem able to
rule her entirely, but only choose between certain well-defined
possibilities: there is in her a power of resistance born of her past
impetus and a still greater power of resistance born of the sum
of fixed conditions she has created, which she presents to him as
a set of permanent laws to be obeyed. He cannot radically alter
her way of proceeding, cannot freely effect his will from within
her present movement, nor, while standing in the mentality, get
outside or above her in such a way as to exercise a really free
control. There is a duality of dependence, her dependence on
his consent, his dependence on her law and way and limits of
action, determination denied by a sense of free-will, free-will
nullified by the actuality of natural determination. He is sure
that she is his power, but yet he seems to be subject to her. He
is the sanctioning [anumantr) Purusha, but does not seem to be
the absolute lord, Ishwara.
He is sure
that she is his power, but yet he seems to be subject to her. He
is the sanctioning [anumantr) Purusha, but does not seem to be
the absolute lord, Ishwara.
Nevertheless, there is somewhere an absolute control, a real
Ishwara. He is aware of it and knows that if he can find it, he
will enter into control, become not only the passive sanctioning
witness and upholding soul of her will, but the free powerful
user and determiner of her movements. But this control seems
to belong to another poise than the mentality. Sometimes he
finds himself using it, but as a channel or instrument; it comes
to him from above. It is clear then that it is supramental, a
power of the Spirit greater than mental being which he already
knows himself to be at the summit and in the secret core of his
conscious being. To enter into identity with that Spirit must then
be his way to control and lordship. He can do it passively by a
sort of reflection and receiving in his mental consciousness, but
then he is only a mould, channel or instrument, not a possessor
or participant in the power. He can arrive at identity by an
absorption of his mentality in inner spiritual being, but then the
conscious action ceases in a trance of identity. To be active master
638
The Yoga of Self -F erf ection
of the nature he must evidently rise to some higher supramental
poise where there is possible not only a passive, but an active
identity with the controlling spirit. To find the way of rising to
this greater poise and be self-ruler, Swarat, is a condition of his
perfection.
To find the way of rising to
this greater poise and be self-ruler, Swarat, is a condition of his
perfection.
The difficulty of the ascent is due to a natural ignorance.
He is the Purusha, witness of mental and physical Nature, sdksl,
but not a complete knower of self and Nature, jhdtr. Knowl¬
edge in the mentality is enlightened by his consciousness; he is
the mental knower; but he finds that this is not a real knowl¬
edge, but only a partial seeking and partial finding, a derivative
uncertain reflection and narrow utilisation for action from a
greater light beyond which is the real knowledge. This light is
the self-awareness and all-awareness of Spirit. The essential self-
awareness he can arrive at even on the mental plane of being,
by reflection in the soul of mind or by its absorption in spirit,
as indeed it can be arrived at by another kind of reflection or
absorption in soul of life and soul of body. But for participation
in an effective all-awareness with this essential self-awareness as
the soul of its action he must rise to supermind. To be lord of
his being, he must be knower of self and Nature, jhdtd Isvarah.
Partially this may be done on a higher level of mind where it
responds directly to supermind, but really and completely this
perfection belongs not to the mental being, but to the ideal or
knowledge Soul, vijhdnamaya purusa. To draw up the mental
into the greater knowledge being and that into the Bliss-Self
of the spirit, dnandamaya purusa, is the uttermost way of this
perfection.
But no perfection, much less this perfection can be attained
without a very radical dealing with the present nature and the
abrogation of much that seems to be the fixed law of its complex
nexus of mental, vital and physical being. The law of this nexus
has been created for a definite and limited end, the temporary
maintenance, preservation, possession, aggrandisement, enjoy¬
ment, experience, need, action of the mental ego in the living
body. Other resultant uses are served, but this is the immediate
and fundamentally determining object and utility. To arrive at
The Perfection of the Mental Being
639
Other resultant uses are served, but this is the immediate
and fundamentally determining object and utility. To arrive at
The Perfection of the Mental Being
639
a higher utility and freer instrumentation this nexus must be
partly broken up, exceeded, transformed into a larger harmony
of action. The Purusha sees that the law created is that of a
partly stable, partly unstable selective determination of habitual,
yet developing experiences out of a first confused consciousness
of self and not-self, subjective being and external universe. This
determination is managed by mind, life and body acting upon
each other, in harmony and correspondence, but also in discord
and divergence, mutual interference and limitation. There is a
similar mixed harmony and discord between various activities
of the mind in itself, as also between activities of the life in itself
and of the physical being. The whole is a sort of disorderly order,
an order evolved and contrived out of a constantly surrounding
and invading confusion.
This is the first difficulty the Purusha has to deal with, a
mixed and confused action of Nature, — an action without clear
self-knowledge, distinct motive, firm instrumentation, only an
attempt at these things and a general relative success of effec¬
tuality, — a surprising effect of adaptation in some directions,
but also much distress of inadequacy. That mixed and confused
action has to be mended; purification is an essential means
towards self-perfection. All these impurities and inadequacies
result in various kinds of limitation and bondage: but there are
two or three primary knots of the bondage, — ego is the prin¬
cipal knot, — from which the others derive. These bonds must
be got rid of; purification is not complete till it brings about
liberation. Besides, after a certain purification and liberation
has been effected, there is still the conversion of the purified
instruments to the law of a higher object and utility, a large,
real and perfect order of action. By the conversion man can
arrive at a certain perfection of fullness of being, calm, power
and knowledge, even a greater vital action and more perfect
physical existence. One result of this perfection is a large and
perfected delight of being, Ananda. Thus purification, liberation,
perfection, delight of being are four constituent elements of the
Yoga, — suddhi, mukti, siddhi, bhukti.
But this perfection cannot be attained or cannot be secure
640
The Yoga of Self -F erf ection
Thus purification, liberation,
perfection, delight of being are four constituent elements of the
Yoga, — suddhi, mukti, siddhi, bhukti.
But this perfection cannot be attained or cannot be secure
640
The Yoga of Self -F erf ection
and entire in its largeness if the Purusha lays stress on individ¬
uality. To abandon identification with the physical, vital and
mental ego, is not enough; he must arrive in soul also at a true,
universalised, not separative individuality. In the lower nature
man is an ego making a clean cut in conception between himself
and all other existence; the ego is to him self, but all the rest
not self, external to his being. His whole action starts from and
is founded upon this self-conception and world-conception. But
the conception is in fact an error. However sharply he individ¬
ualises himself in mental idea and mental or other action, he is
inseparable from the universal being, his body from universal
force and matter, his life from the universal life, his mind from
universal mind, his soul and spirit from universal soul and spirit.
The universal acts on him, invades him, overcomes him, shapes
itself in him at every moment; he in his reaction acts on the uni¬
versal, invades, tries to impose himself on it, shape it, overcome
its attack, rule and use its instrumentation.
The universal acts on him, invades him, overcomes him, shapes
itself in him at every moment; he in his reaction acts on the uni¬
versal, invades, tries to impose himself on it, shape it, overcome
its attack, rule and use its instrumentation.
This conflict is a rendering of the underlying unity, which
assumes the aspect of struggle by a necessity of the original sepa¬
ration; the two pieces into which mind has cut the oneness, rush
upon each other to restore the oneness and each tries to seize on
and take into itself the separated portion. Universe seems to be
always trying to swallow up man, the infinite to resume this finite
which stands on its self-defence and even replies by aggression.
But in real fact the universal being through this apparent struggle
is working out its purpose in man, though the key and truth
of the purpose and working is lost to his superficial conscious
mind, only held obscurely in an underlying subconscient and
only known luminously in an overruling superconscient unity.
Man also is impelled towards unity by a constant impulse of
extension of his ego, which identifies itself as best it can with
other egos and with such portions of the universe as he can
physically, vitally, mentally get into his use and possession. As
man aims at knowledge and mastery of his own being, so also he
aims at knowledge and mastery of the environmental world of
nature, its objects, its instrumentation, its beings. First he tries
to effect this aim by egoistic possession, but, as he develops.
The Perfection of the Mental Being
641
the element of sympathy born of the secret oneness grows in
him and he arrives at the idea of a widening cooperation and
oneness with other beings, a harmony with universal Nature and
universal being.
The Perfection of the Mental Being
641
the element of sympathy born of the secret oneness grows in
him and he arrives at the idea of a widening cooperation and
oneness with other beings, a harmony with universal Nature and
universal being.
The witness Purusha in the mind observes that the inade¬
quacy of his effort, all the inadequacy in fact of man’s life and
nature arises from the separation and the consequent struggle,
want of knowledge, want of harmony, want of oneness. It is
essential for him to grow out of separative individuality, to uni-
versalise himself, to make himself one with the universe. This
unification can be done only through the soul by making our soul
of mind one with the universal Mind, our soul of life one with the
universal Life-soul, our soul of body one with the universal soul
of physical Nature. When this can be done, in proportion to the
power, intensity, depth, completeness, permanence with which it
can be done, great effects are produced upon the natural action.
Especially there grows an immediate and profound sympathy
and immixture of mind with mind, life with life, a lessening of
the body’s insistence on separateness, a power of direct men¬
tal and other intercommunication and effective mutual action
which helps out now the inadequate indirect communication and
action that was till now the greater part of the conscious means
used by embodied mind. But still the Purusha sees that in mental,
vital, physical nature, taken by itself, there is always a defect,
inadequacy, confused action, due to the mechanically unequal
interplay of the three modes or gunas of Nature. To transcend
it he has in the universality too to rise to the supramental and
spiritual, to be one with the supramental soul of cosmos, the uni¬
versal spirit. He arrives at the larger light and order of a higher
principle in himself and the universe which is the characteristic
action of the divine Sachchidananda. Even, he is able to impose
the influence of that light and order, not only on his own natural
being, but, within the radius and to the extent of the Spirit’s
action in him, on the world he lives in, on that which is around
him. He is svarat, self-knower, self-ruler, but he begins to be
also through this spiritual oneness and transcendence samrdt, a
knower and master of his environing world of being.
642
The Yoga of Self -F erf ection
He is svarat, self-knower, self-ruler, but he begins to be
also through this spiritual oneness and transcendence samrdt, a
knower and master of his environing world of being.
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The Yoga of Self -F erf ection
In this self-development the soul finds that it has accom¬
plished on this line the object of the whole integral Yoga, union
with the Supreme in its self and in its universalised individuality.
So long as he remains in the world-existence, this perfection must
radiate out from him, — for that is the necessity of his oneness
with the universe and its beings, — in an influence and action
which help all around who are capable of it to rise to or advance
towards the same perfection, and for the rest in an influence and
action which help, as only the self-ruler and master man can
help, in leading the human race forward spiritually towards this
consummation and towards some image of a greater divine truth
in their personal and communal existence. He becomes a light
and power of the Truth to which he has climbed and a means
for others’ ascension.
Chapter V
The Instruments of the Spirit
He becomes a light
and power of the Truth to which he has climbed and a means
for others’ ascension.
Chapter V
The Instruments of the Spirit
IF THERE is to be an active perfection of our being, the first
necessity is a purification of the working of the instruments
which it now uses for a music of discords. The being itself, the
spirit, the divine Reality in man stands in no need of purification;
it is for ever pure, not affected by the faults of its instrumentation
or the stumblings of mind and heart and body in their work, as
the sun, says the Upanishad, is not touched or stained by the
faults of the eye of vision. Mind, heart, the soul of vital desire,
the life in the body are the seats of impurity; it is they that must
be set right if the working of the spirit is to be a perfect working
and not marked by its present greater or less concession to the
devious pleasure of the lower nature. What is ordinarily called
purity of the being, is either a negative whiteness, a freedom from
sin gained by a constant inhibition of whatever action, feeling,
idea or will we think to be wrong, or else, the highest negative
or passive purity, the entire God-content, inaction, the complete
stilling of the vibrant mind and the soul of desire, which in
quietistic disciplines leads to a supreme peace; for then the spirit
appears in all the eternal purity of its immaculate essence. That
gained, there would be nothing farther to be enjoyed or done.
But here we have the more difficult problem of a total, unabated,
even an increased and more powerful action founded on perfect
bliss of the being, the purity of the soul’s instrumental as well
as the spirit’s essential nature. Mind, heart, life, body are to
do the works of the Divine, all the works which they do now
and yet more, but to do them divinely, as now they do not do
them. This is the first appearance of the problem before him
on which the seeker of perfection has to lay hold, that it is
not a negative, prohibitory, passive or quietistic, but a positive,
affirmative, active purity which is his object. A divine quietism
discovers the immaculate eternity of the Spirit, a divine kinetism
644
The Yoga of Self -F erf ection
adds to it the right pure undeviating action of the soul, mind
and body.
A divine quietism
discovers the immaculate eternity of the Spirit, a divine kinetism
644
The Yoga of Self -F erf ection
adds to it the right pure undeviating action of the soul, mind
and body.
Moreover, it is a total purification of all the complex instru¬
mentality in all the parts of each instrument that is demanded of
us by the integral perfection. It is not, ultimately, the narrower
moral purification of the ethical nature. Ethics deals only with
the desire-soul and the active outward dynamical part of our be¬
ing; its field is confined to character and action. It prohibits and
inhibits certain actions, certain desires, impulses, propensities,
— it inculcates certain qualities in the act, such as truthfulness,
love, charity, compassion, chastity. When it has got this done
and assured a base of virtue, the possession of a purified will and
blameless habit of action, its work is finished. But the Siddha
of the integral perfection has to dwell in a larger plane of the
Spirit’s eternal purity beyond good and evil. By this phrase it
is not meant, as the rash hastily concluding intellect would be
prone to imagine, that he will do good and evil indifferently and
declare that to the spirit there is no difference between them,
which would be in the plane of individual action an obvious
untruth and might serve to cover a reckless self-indulgence of
the imperfect human nature. Neither is it meant that since good
and evil are in this world inextricably entangled together, like
pain and pleasure, — a proposition which, however true at the
moment and plausible as a generalisation, need not be true of the
human being’s greater spiritual evolution, — the liberated man
will live in the spirit and stand back from the mechanical contin¬
ued workings of a necessarily imperfect nature. This, however
possible as a stage towards a final cessation of all activity, is
evidently not a counsel of active perfection. But it is meant that
the Siddha of the active integral perfection will live dynamically
in the working of the transcendent power of the divine Spirit
as a universal will through the supermind individualised in him
for action. His works will therefore be the works of an eter¬
nal Knowledge, an eternal Truth, an eternal Might, an eternal
Love, an eternal Ananda; but the truth, knowledge, force, love,
delight will be the whole essential spirit of whatever work he
will do and will not depend on its form; they will determine his
The Instruments of the Spirit
645
action from the spirit within and the action will not determine
the spirit or subject it to a fixed standard or rigid mould of
working. He will have no dominant mere habit of character,
but only a spiritual being and will with at the most a free and
flexible temperamental mould for the action. His life will be
a direct stream from the eternal fountains, not a form cut to
some temporary human pattern. His perfection will not be a
sattwic purity, but a thing uplifted beyond the gunas of Nature,
a perfection of spiritual knowledge, spiritual power, spiritual
delight, unity and harmony of unity; the outward perfection of
his works will be freely shaped as the self-expression of this inner
spiritual transcendence and universality. For this change he must
make conscient in him that power of spirit and supermind which
is now superconscient to our mentality. But that cannot work
in him so long as his present mental, vital, physical being is not
liberated from its actual inferior working. This purification is
the first necessity.
In other words, purification must not be understood in any
limited sense of a selection of certain outward kinetic move¬
ments, their regulation, the inhibition of other action or a libera¬
tion of certain forms of character or particular mental and moral
capacities. These things are secondary signs of our derivative
being, not essential powers and first forces. We have to take a
wider psychological view of the primary forces of our nature. We
have to distinguish the formed parts of our being, find out their
basic defect of impurity or wrong action and correct that, sure
that the rest will then come right naturally. We have not to doctor
symptoms of impurity, or that only secondarily, as a minor help,
— but to strike at its roots after a deeper diagnosis. We then
find that there are two forms of impurity which are at the root
of the whole confusion. One is a defect born of the nature of
our past evolution, which has been a nature of separative igno¬
rance; this defect is a radically wrong and ignorant form given
to the proper action of each part of our instrumental being. The
other impurity is born of the successive process of an evolution,
where life emerges in and depends on body, mind emerges in
and depends on life in the body, supermind emerges in and lends
646
The Yoga of Self -F erf ection
The
other impurity is born of the successive process of an evolution,
where life emerges in and depends on body, mind emerges in
and depends on life in the body, supermind emerges in and lends
646
The Yoga of Self -F erf ection
itself to instead of governing mind, soul itself is apparent only
as a circumstance of the bodily life of the mental being and veils
up the spirit in the lower imperfections. This second defect of
our nature is caused by this dependence of the higher on the
lower parts; it is an immixture of functions by which the impure
working of the lower instrument gets into the characteristic ac¬
tion of the higher function and gives to it an added imperfection
of embarrassment, wrong direction and confusion.
Thus the proper function of the life, the vital force, is enjoy¬
ment and possession, both of them perfectly legitimate, because
the Spirit created the world for Ananda, enjoyment and posses¬
sion of the many by the One, of the One by the many and of the
many too by the many; but, — this is an instance of the first kind
of defect, — the separative ignorance gives to it the wrong form
of desire and craving which vitiates the whole enjoyment and
possession and imposes on it its opposites, want and suffering.
Again, because mind is entangled in life from which it evolves,
this desire and craving get into the action of the mental will and
knowledge; that makes the will a will of craving, a force of desire
instead of a rational will and a discerning force of intelligent
effectuation, and it distorts the judgment and reason so that we
judge and reason according to our desires and prepossessions
and not with the disinterested impartiality of a pure judgment
and the rectitude of a reason which seeks only to distinguish
truth and understand rightly the objects of its workings. That
is an example of immixture. These two kinds of defect, wrong
form of action and illegitimate mixture of action, are not limited
to these signal instances, but belong to each instrument and to
each combination of their functionings. They pervade the whole
economy of our nature. They are fundamental defects of our
lower instrumental nature, and if we can set them right, we
shall get our instrumental being into a state of purity, enjoy the
clarity of a pure will, a pure heart of emotion, a pure enjoyment
of our vitality, a pure body. That will be a preliminary, a human
perfection, but it can be made the basis and open out in its effort
of self-attainment into the greater, the divine perfection.
That will be a preliminary, a human
perfection, but it can be made the basis and open out in its effort
of self-attainment into the greater, the divine perfection.
Mind, life and body are the three powers of our lower
The Instruments of the Spirit
647
nature. But they cannot be taken quite separately because the
life acts as a link and gives its character to body and to a great
extent to our mentality. Our body is a living body; the life-force
mingles in and determines all its functionings. Our mind too
is largely a mind of life, a mind of physical sensation; only in
its higher functions is it normally capable of something more
than the workings of a physical mentality subjected to life.
We may put it in this ascending order. We have first a body
supported by the physical life-force, the physical prana which
courses through the whole nervous system and gives its stamp
to our corporeal action, so that all is of the character of the
action of a living and not an inert mechanical body. Prana and
physicality together make the gross body, sthula sarira. This is
only the outer instrument, the nervous force of life acting in
the form of body with its gross physical organs. Then there is
the inner instrument, antahkarana, the conscious mentality. This
inner instrument is divided by the old system into four powers;
citta or basic mental consciousness; manas, the sense mind; bud-
dhi, the intelligence; ahankdra, the ego-idea. The classification
may serve as a starting-point, though for a greater practicality
we have to make certain farther distinctions. This mentality is
pervaded by the life-force, which becomes here an instrument
for psychic consciousness of life and psychic action on life. Every
fibre of the sense mind and basic consciousness is shot through
with the action of this psychic prana, it is a nervous or vital and
physical mentality. Even the buddhi and ego are overpowered by
it, although they have the capacity of raising the mind beyond
subjection to this vital, nervous and physical psychology. This
combination creates in us the sensational desire-soul which is the
chief obstacle to a higher human as well as to the still greater
divine perfection. Einally, above our present conscious mentality
is a secret supermind which is the proper means and native seat
of that perfection.
Einally, above our present conscious mentality
is a secret supermind which is the proper means and native seat
of that perfection.
Chitta, the basic consciousness, is largely subconscient; it
has, open and hidden, two kinds of action, one passive or re¬
ceptive, the other active or reactive and formative. As a passive
power it receives all impacts, even those of which the mind is
648
The Yoga of Self -F erf ection
unaware or to which it is inattentive, and it stores them in an
immense reserve of passive subconscient memory on which the
mind as an active memory can draw. But ordinarily the mind
draws only what it had observed and understood at the time, —
more easily what it had observed well and understood carefully,
less easily what it had observed carelessly or ill understood; at
the same time there is a power in consciousness to send up to
the active mind for use what that mind had not at all observed
or attended to or even consciously experienced. This power only
acts observably in abnormal conditions, when some part of the
subconscious chitta comes as it were to the surface or when
the subliminal being in us appears on the threshold and for a
time plays some part in the outer chamber of mentality where
the direct intercourse and commerce with the external world
takes place and our inner dealings with ourselves develop on
the surface. This action of memory is so fundamental to the
entire mental action that it is sometimes said, memory is the
man. Even in the submental action of the body and life, which
is full of this subconscient chitta, though not under the control
of the conscious mind, there is a vital and physical memory. The
vital and physical habits are largely formed by this submental
memory. For this reason they can be changed to an indefinite
extent by a more powerful action of conscious mind and will,
when that can be developed and can find means to communicate
to the subconscient chitta the will of the spirit for a new law of
vital and physical action. Even, the whole constitution of our
life and body may be described as a bundle of habits formed by
the past evolution in Nature and held together by the persistent
memory of this secret consciousness. For chitta, the primary stuff
of consciousness, is like prana and body universal in Nature, but
is subconscient and mechanical in nature of Matter.
For chitta, the primary stuff
of consciousness, is like prana and body universal in Nature, but
is subconscient and mechanical in nature of Matter.
But in fact all action of the mind or inner instrument arises
out of this chitta or basic consciousness, partly conscient, partly
subconscient or subliminal to our active mentality. When it is
struck by the world’s impacts from outside or urged by the re¬
flective powers of the subjective inner being, it throws up certain
habitual activities, the mould of which has been determined by
The Instruments of the Spirit
649
When it is
struck by the world’s impacts from outside or urged by the re¬
flective powers of the subjective inner being, it throws up certain
habitual activities, the mould of which has been determined by
The Instruments of the Spirit
649
our evolution. One of these forms of activity is the emotional
mind, — the heart, as we may call it for the sake of a convenient
brevity. Our emotions are the waves of reaction and response
which rise up from the basic consciousness, citta-vrtti. Their
action too is largely regulated by habit and an emotive memory.
They are not imperative, not laws of Necessity; there is no really
binding law of our emotional being to which we must submit
without remedy; we are not obliged to give responses of grief to
certain impacts upon the mind, responses of anger to others, to
yet others responses of hatred or dislike, to others responses of
liking or love. All these things are only habits of our affective
mentality; they can be changed by the conscious will of the
spirit; they can be inhibited; we may even rise entirely above
all subjection to grief, anger, hatred, the duality of liking and
disliking. We are subject to these things only so long as we
persist in subjection to the mechanical action of the chitta in the
emotive mentality, a thing difficult to get rid of because of the
power of past habit and especially the importunate insistence
of the vital part of mentality, the nervous life-mind or psychic
prana. This nature of the emotive mind as a reaction of chitta
with a certain close dependence upon the nervous life sensations
and the responses of the psychic prana is so characteristic that
in some languages it is called chitta and prana, the heart, the
life soul; it is indeed the most directly agitating and powerfully
insistent action of the desire-soul which the immixture of vital
desire and responsive consciousness has created in us. And yet
the true emotive soul, the real psyche in us, is not a desire-soul,
but a soul of pure love and delight; but that, like the rest of our
true being, can only emerge when the deformation created by
the life of desire is removed from the surface and is no longer the
characteristic action of our being. To get that done is a necessary
part of our purification, liberation, perfection.
To get that done is a necessary
part of our purification, liberation, perfection.
The nervous action of the psychic prana is most obvious in
our purely sensational mentality. This nervous mentality pursues
indeed all the action of the inner instrument and seems often
to form the greater part of things other than sensation. The
emotions are especially assailed and have the pranic stamp; fear
650
The Yoga of Self -F erf ection
is more even of a nervous sensation than an emotion, anger is
largely or often a sensational response translated into terms of
emotion. Other feelings are more of the heart, more inward,
but they ally themselves to the nervous and physical longings or
outward-going impulses of the psychic prana. Love is an emotion
of the heart and may be a pure feeling, — all mentality, since
we are embodied minds, must produce, even thought produces,
some kind of life effect and some response in the stuff of body,
but they need not for that reason be of a physical nature, —
but the heart’s love allies itself readily with a vital desire in the
body. This physical element may be purified of that subjection to
physical desire which is called lust, it may become love using the
body for a physical as well as a mental and spiritual nearness;
but love may, too, separate itself from all, even the most innocent
physical element, or from all but a shadow of it, and be a pure
movement to union of soul with soul, psyche with psyche. Still
the proper action of the sensational mind is not emotion, but
conscious nervous response and nervous feeling and affection,
impulse of the use of physical sense and body for some action,
conscious vital craving and desire. There is a side of receptive
response, a side of dynamic reaction. These things get their
proper normal use when the higher mind is not mechanically
subject to them, but controls and regulates their action. But a
still higher state is when they undergo a certain transformation
by the conscious will of the spirit which gives its right and no
longer its wrong or desire form of characteristic action to the
psychic prana.
But a
still higher state is when they undergo a certain transformation
by the conscious will of the spirit which gives its right and no
longer its wrong or desire form of characteristic action to the
psychic prana.
Manas, the sense mind, depends in our ordinary conscious¬
ness on the physical organs of receptive sense for knowledge
and on the organs of the body for action directed towards the
objects of sense. The superficial and outward action of the senses
is physical and nervous in its character, and they may easily be
thought to be merely results of nerve-action; they are sometimes
called in the old books pranas, nervous or life activities. But
still the essential thing in them is not the nervous excitation,
but the consciousness, the action of the chitta, which makes
use of the organ and of the nervous impact of which it is the
The Instruments of the Spirit
651
But
still the essential thing in them is not the nervous excitation,
but the consciousness, the action of the chitta, which makes
use of the organ and of the nervous impact of which it is the
The Instruments of the Spirit
651
channel. Manas, sense-mind, is the activity, emerging from the
basic consciousness, which makes up the whole essentiality of
what we call sense. Sight, hearing, taste, smell, touch are really
properties of the mind, not of the body; but the physical mind
which we ordinarily use, limits itself to a translation into sense of
so much of the outer impacts as it receives through the nervous
system and the physical organs. But the inner Manas has also
a subtle sight, hearing, power of contact of its own which is
not dependent on the physical organs. And it has, moreover, a
power not only of direct communication of mind with object —
leading even at a high pitch of action to a sense of the contents
of an object within or beyond the physical range, — but direct
communication also of mind with mind. Mind is able too to
alter, modify, inhibit the incidence, values, intensities of sense
impacts. These powers of the mind we do not ordinarily use or
develop; they remain subliminal and emerge sometimes in an
irregular and fitful action, more readily in some minds than in
others, or come to the surface in abnormal states of the being.
They are the basis of clairvoyance, clairaudience, transference of
thought and impulse, telepathy, most of the more ordinary kinds
of occult powers, — so called, though these are better described
less mystically as powers of the now subliminal action of the
Manas. The phenomena of hypnotism and many others depend
upon the action of this subliminal sense-mind; not that it alone
constitutes all the elements of the phenomena, but it is the first
supporting means of intercourse, communication and response,
though much of the actual operation belongs to an inner Buddhi.
Mind physical, mind supraphysical, — we have and can use this
double sense mentality.
Buddhi is a construction of conscious being which quite ex¬
ceeds its beginnings in the basic chitta; it is the intelligence with
its power of knowledge and will. Buddhi takes up and deals with
all the rest of the action of the mind and life and body. It is in its
nature thought-power and will-power of the Spirit turned into
the lower form of a mental activity. We may distinguish three
successive gradations of the action of this intelligence. There
is first an inferior perceptive understanding which simply takes
652
We may distinguish three
successive gradations of the action of this intelligence. There
is first an inferior perceptive understanding which simply takes
652
The Yoga of Self -F erf ection
up, records, understands and responds to the communications
of the sense-mind, memory, heart and sensational mentality. It
creates by their means an elementary thinking mind which does
not go beyond their data, but subjects itself to their mould and
rings out their repetitions, runs round and round in the habitual
circle of thought and will suggested by them or follows, with
an obedient subservience of the reason to the suggestions of life,
any fresh determinations which may be offered to its perception
and conception. Beyond this elementary understanding, which
we all use to an enormous extent, there is a power of arranging
or selecting reason and will-force of the intelligence which has
for its action and aim an attempt to arrive at a plausible, suffi¬
cient, settled ordering of knowledge and will for the use of an
intellectual conception of life.
In spite of its more purely intellectual character this sec¬
ondary or intermediate reason is really pragmatic in its intention.
It creates a certain kind of intellectual structure, frame, rule into
which it tries to cast the inner and outer life so as to use it with
a certain mastery and government for the purposes of some
kind of rational will. It is this reason which gives to our normal
intellectual being our set aesthetic and ethical standards, our
structures of opinion and our established norms of idea and
purpose. It is highly developed and takes the primacy in all men
of an at all developed understanding. But beyond it there is
a reason, a highest action of the buddhi which concerns itself
disinterestedly with a pursuit of pure truth and right knowledge;
it seeks to discover the real Truth behind life and things and our
apparent selves and to subject its will to the law of Truth. Few,
if any of us, can use this highest reason with any purity, but the
attempt to do it is the topmost capacity of the inner instrument,
the antahkarana.
Buddhi is really an intermediary between a much higher
Truth-mind not now in our active possession, which is the di¬
rect instrument of Spirit, and the physical life of the human
mind evolved in body. Its powers of intelligence and will are
drawn from this greater direct Truth-mind or supermind. Buddhi
centres its mental action round the ego-idea, the idea that I am
The Instruments of the Spirit
653
Its powers of intelligence and will are
drawn from this greater direct Truth-mind or supermind. Buddhi
centres its mental action round the ego-idea, the idea that I am
The Instruments of the Spirit
653
this mind, life and body or am a mental being determined by
their action. It serves this ego-idea whether limited by what we
call egoism or extended by sympathy with the life around us. An
ego-sense is created which reposes on the separative action of
the body, of the individualised life, of the mind-responses, and
the ego-idea in the buddhi centralises the whole action of this
ego’s thought, character, personality. The lower understanding
and the intermediary reason are instruments of its desire of ex¬
perience and self-enlargement. But when the highest reason and
will develop, we can turn towards that which these outward
things mean to the higher spiritual consciousness. The “I” can
then be seen as a mental reflection of the Self, the Spirit, the
Divine, the one existence transcendent, universal, individual in
its multiplicity; the consciousness in which these things meet,
become aspects of one being and assume their right relations, can
then be unveiled out of all these physical and mental coverings.
When the transition to supermind takes place, the powers of
the Buddhi do not perish, but have all to be converted to their
supramental values. But the consideration of the supermind and
the conversion of the buddhi belongs to the question of the
higher siddhi or divine perfection. At present we have to consider
the purification of the normal being of man, preparatory to any
such conversion, which leads to the liberation from the bonds
of our lower nature.
Chapter VI
Purification — The Lower Mentality
At present we have to consider
the purification of the normal being of man, preparatory to any
such conversion, which leads to the liberation from the bonds
of our lower nature.
Chapter VI
Purification — The Lower Mentality
WE HAVE to deal with the complex action of all these
instruments and set about their purification. And the
simplest way will be to fasten on the two kinds of
radical defect in each, distinguish clearly in what they consist
and set them right. But there is also the question where we are
to begin. Eor the entanglement is great, the complete purification
of one instrument depends on the complete purification too of
all the others, and that is a great source of difficulty, disap¬
pointment and perplexity, — as when we think we have got the
intelligence purified, only to find that it is still subject to attack
and overclouding because the emotions of the heart and the will
and sensational mind are still affected by the many impurities of
the lower nature and they get back into the enlightened buddhi
and prevent it from reflecting the pure truth for which we are
seeking. But we have on the other hand this advantage that
one important instrument sufficiently purified can be used as a
means for the purification of the others, one step firmly taken
makes easier all the others and gets rid of a host of difficulties.
Which instrument then by its purification and perfection will
bring about most easily and effectively or can aid with a most
powerful rapidity the perfection of the rest?
Since we are the spirit enveloped in mind, a soul evolved here
as a mental being in a living physical body, it must naturally
be in the mind, the antahkarana, that we must look for this
desideratum. And in the mind it is evidently by the buddhi, the
intelligence and the will of the intelligence that the human being
is intended to do whatever work is not done for him by the phys¬
ical or nervous nature as in the plant and the animal. Pending the
evolution of any higher supramental power the intelligent will
must be our main force for effectuation and to purify it becomes
a very primary necessity. Once our intelligence and will are well
Purification — The Lower Mentality
655
Pending the
evolution of any higher supramental power the intelligent will
must be our main force for effectuation and to purify it becomes
a very primary necessity. Once our intelligence and will are well
Purification — The Lower Mentality
655
purified of all that limits them and gives them a wrong action
or wrong direction, they can easily be perfected, can be made to
respond to the suggestions of Truth, understand themselves and
the rest of the being, see clearly and with a fine and scrupulous
accuracy what they are doing and follow out the right way to do
it without any hesitating or eager error or stumbling deviation.
Eventually their response can be opened up to the perfect dis-
cernings, intuitions, inspirations, revelations of the supermind
and proceed by a more and more luminous and even infallible
action. But this purification cannot be effected without a prelim¬
inary clearing of its natural obstacles in the other lower parts of
the antahkarana, and the chief natural obstacle running through
the whole action of the antahkarana, through the sense, the
mental sensation, emotion, dynamic impulse, intelligence, will, is
the intermiscence and the compelling claim of the psychic prana.
This then must be dealt with, its dominating intermiscence ruled
out, its claim denied, itself quieted and prepared for purification.
This then must be dealt with, its dominating intermiscence ruled
out, its claim denied, itself quieted and prepared for purification.
Each instrument has, it has been said, a proper and legit¬
imate action and also a deformation or wrong principle of its
proper action. The proper action of the psychic prana is pure
possession and enjoyment, bhoga. To enjoy thought, will, action,
dynamic impulse, result of action, emotion, sense, sensation, to
enjoy too by their means objects, persons, life, the world, is the
activity for which this prana gives us a psycho-physical basis.
A really perfect enjoyment of existence can only come when
what we enjoy is not the world in itself or for itself, but God
in the world, when it is not things, but the Ananda of the spirit
in things that forms the real, essential object of our enjoying
and things only as form and symbol of the spirit, waves of the
ocean of Ananda. But this Ananda can only come at all when
we can get at and reflect in our members the hidden spiritual
being, and its fullness can only be had when we climb to the
supramental ranges. Meanwhile there is a just and permissible,
a quite legitimate human enjoyment of these things, which is,
to speak in the language of Indian psychology, predominantly
sattwic in its nature. It is an enlightened enjoyment principally
by the perceptive, aesthetic and emotive mind, secondarily only
656
The Yoga of Self -F erf ection
by the sensational, nervous and physical being, but all subject to
the clear government of the buddhi, to a right reason, a right will,
a right reception of the life impacts, a right order, a right feeling
of the truth, law, ideal sense, beauty, use of things. The mind gets
the pure taste of enjoyment of them, rasa, and rejects whatever
is perturbed, troubled and perverse. Into this acceptance of the
clear and limpid rasa, the psychic prana has to bring in the
full sense of life and the occupying enjoyment by the whole
being, bhoga, without which the acceptance and possession by
the mind, rasa-grahana, would not be concrete enough, would
be too tenuous to satisfy altogether the embodied soul. This
contribution is its proper function.
This
contribution is its proper function.
The deformation which enters in and prevents the purity, is
a form of vital craving; the grand deformation which the psychic
prana contributes to our being, is desire. The root of desire is
the vital craving to seize upon that which we feel we have not,
it is the limited life’s instinct for possession and satisfaction. It
creates the sense of want, — first the simpler vital craving of
hunger, thirst, lust, then these psychical hungers, thirsts, lusts of
the mind which are a much greater and more instant and pervad¬
ing affliction of our being, the hunger which is infinite because
it is the hunger of an infinite being, the thirst which is only
temporarily lulled by satisfaction, but is in its nature insatiable.
The psychic prana invades the sensational mind and brings into
it the unquiet thirst of sensations, invades the dynamic mind
with the lust of control, having, domination, success, fulfilment
of every impulse, fills the emotional mind with the desire for the
satisfaction of liking and disliking, for the wreaking of love and
hate, brings the shrinkings and panics of fear and the strainings
and disappointments of hope, imposes the tortures of grief and
the brief fevers and excitements of joy, makes the intelligence
and intelligent will the accomplices of all these things and turns
them in their own kind into deformed and lame instruments,
the will into a will of craving and the intelligence into a partial,
a stumbling and an eager pursuer of limited, impatient, mili¬
tant prejudgment and opinion. Desire is the root of all sorrow,
disappointment, affliction, for though it has a feverish joy of
Purification — The Lower Mentality
657
pursuit and satisfaction, yet because it is always a straining of
the being, it carries into its pursuit and its getting a labour,
hunger, struggle, a rapid subjection to fatigue, a sense of limita¬
tion, dissatisfaction and early disappointment with all its gains,
a ceaseless morbid stimulation, trouble, disquiet, asdnti. To get
rid of desire is the one firm indispensable purification of the
psychical prana, — for so we can replace the soul of desire with
its pervading immiscence in all our instruments by a mental soul
of calm delight and its clear and limpid possession of ourselves
and world and Nature which is the crystal basis of the mental
life and its perfection.
The psychical prana interferes in all the higher operations
to deform them, but its defect is itself due to its being interfered
with and deformed by the nature of the physical workings in
the body which Life has evolved in its emergence from matter.
It is that which has created the separation of the individual life
in the body from the life of the universe and stamped on it the
character of want, limitation, hunger, thirst, craving for what
it has not, a long groping after enjoyment and a hampered and
baffled need of possession. Easily regulated and limited in the
purely physical order of things, it extends itself in the psychical
prana immensely and becomes, as the mind grows, a thing with
difficulty limited, insatiable, irregular, a busy creator of disorder
and disease. Moreover, the psychical prana leans on the physical
life, limits itself by the nervous force of the physical being, limits
thereby the operations of the mind and becomes the link of its
dependence on the body and its subjection to fatigue, incapacity,
disease, disorder, insanity, the pettiness, the precariousness and
even the possible dissolution of the workings of the physical
mentality. Our mind instead of being a thing powerful in its own
strength, a clear instrument of conscious spirit, free and able to
control, use and perfect the life and body, appears in the result
a mixed construction; it is a predominantly physical mentality
limited by its physical organs and subject to the demands and
to the obstructions of the life in the body. This can only be got
rid of by a sort of practical, inward psychological operation
of analysis by which we become aware of the mentality as a
658
The Yoga of Self -F erf ection
This can only be got
rid of by a sort of practical, inward psychological operation
of analysis by which we become aware of the mentality as a
658
The Yoga of Self -F erf ection
separate power, isolate it for a free working, distinguish too the
psychical and the physical prana and make them no longer a
link for dependence, but a transmitting channel for the Idea and
Will in the buddhi, obedient to its suggestions and commands;
the prana then becomes a passive means of effectuation for the
mind’s direct control of the physical life. This control, however
abnormal to our habitual poise of action, is not only possible, —
it appears to some extent in the phenomena of hypnosis, though
these are unhealthily abnormal, because there it is a foreign will
which suggests and commands, — but must become the normal
action when the higher Self within takes up the direct command
of the whole being. This control can be exercised perfectly, how¬
ever, only from the supramental level, for it is there that the true
effective Idea and Will reside and the mental thought-mind, even
spiritualised, is only a limited, though it may be made a very
powerful deputy.
Desire, it is thought, is the real motive power of human
living and to cast it out would be to stop the springs of life;
satisfaction of desire is man’s only enjoyment and to eliminate
it would be to extinguish the impulse of life by a quietistic as¬
ceticism. But the real motive power of the life of the soul is Will;
desire is only a deformation of will in the dominant bodily life
and physical mind. The essential turn of the soul to possession
and enjoyment of the world consists in a will to delight, and
the enjoyment of the satisfaction of craving is only a vital and
physical degradation of the will to delight. It is essential that
we should distinguish between pure will and desire, between the
inner will to delight and the outer lust and craving of the mind
and body. If we are unable to make this distinction practically in
the experience of our being, we can only make a choice between
a life-killing asceticism and the gross will to live or else try
to effect an awkward, uncertain and precarious compromise
between them. This is in fact what the mass of men do; a small
minority trample down the life instinct and strain after an ascetic
perfection; most obey the gross will to live with such modifi¬
cations and restraints as society imposes or the normal social
man has been trained to impose on his own mind and actions;
Purification — The Lower Mentality
659
others set up a balance between ethical austerity and temperate
indulgence of the desiring mental and vital self and see in this
balance the golden mean of a sane mind and healthy human
living. But none of these ways gives the perfection which we are
seeking, the divine government of the will in life. To tread down
altogether the prana, the vital being, is to kill the force of life by
which the large action of the embodied soul in the human being
must be supported; to indulge the gross will to live is to remain
satisfied with imperfection; to compromise between them is to
stop half way and possess neither earth nor heaven. But if we
can get at the pure will undeformed by desire, — which we shall
find to be a much more free, tranquil, steady and effective force
than the leaping, smoke-stifled, soon fatigued and baffled flame
of desire, — and at the calm inner will of delight not afflicted
or limited by any trouble of craving, we can then transform
the prana from a tyrant, enemy, assailant of the mind into an
obedient instrument. We may call these greater things, too, by
the name of desire, if we choose, but then we must suppose
that there is a divine desire other than the vital craving, a God-
desire of which this other and lower phenomenon is an obscure
shadow and into which it has to be transfigured. It is better to
keep distinct names for things which are entirely different in
their character and inner action.
To rid the prana of desire and incidentally to reverse the
ordinary poise of our nature and turn the vital being from a
troublesomely dominant power into the obedient instrument of
a free and unattached mind, is then the first step in purification.
As this deformation of the psychical prana is corrected, the pu¬
rification of the rest of the intermediary parts of the antahkarana
is facilitated, and when that correction is completed, their pu¬
rification too can be easily made absolute. These intermediary
parts are the emotional mind, the receptive sensational mind
and the active sensational mind or mind of dynamic impulse.
They all hang together in a strongly knotted interaction. The
deformation of the emotional mind hinges upon the duality
of liking and disliking, raga-dvesa, emotional attraction and
repulsion. All the complexity of our emotions and their tyranny
660
The Yoga of Self -F erf ection
The
deformation of the emotional mind hinges upon the duality
of liking and disliking, raga-dvesa, emotional attraction and
repulsion. All the complexity of our emotions and their tyranny
660
The Yoga of Self -F erf ection
over the soul arise from the habitual responses of the soul of
desire in the emotions and sensations to these attractions and
repulsions. Love and hatred, hope and fear, grief and joy all
have their founts in this one source. We like, love, welcome,
hope for, joy in whatever our nature, the first habit of our being,
or else a formed (often perverse) habit, the second nature of
our being, presents to the mind as pleasant, priyam; we hate,
dislike, fear, have repulsion from or grief of whatever it presents
to us as unpleasant, apriyam. This habit of the emotional nature
gets into the way of the intelligent will and makes it often a
helpless slave of the emotional being or at least prevents it from
exercising a free judgment and government of the nature. This
deformation has to be corrected. By getting rid of desire in the
psychic prana and its intermiscence in the emotional mind, we
facilitate the correction. For then attachment which is the strong
bond of the heart, falls away from the heart-strings; the involun¬
tary habit of raga-dvesa remains, but, not being made obstinate
by attachment, it can be dealt with more easily by the will and
the intelligence. The restless heart can be conquered and get rid
of the habit of attraction and repulsion.
The restless heart can be conquered and get rid
of the habit of attraction and repulsion.
But then if this is done, it may be thought, as with regard
to desire, that this will be the death of the emotional being.
It will certainly be so, if the deformation is eliminated but not
replaced by the right action of the emotional mind; the mind
will then pass into a neutral condition of blank indifference or
into a luminous state of peaceful impartiality with no stir or
wave of emotion. The former state is in no way desirable; the
latter may be the perfection of a quietistic discipline, but in the
integral perfection which does not reject love or shun various
movement of delight, it can be no more than a stage which has
to be overpassed, a preliminary passivity admitted as a first basis
for a right activity. Attraction and repulsion, liking and disliking
are a necessary mechanism for the normal man, they form a first
principle of natural instinctive selection among the thousand
flattering and formidable, helpful and dangerous impacts of the
world around him. The buddhi starts with this material to work
on and tries to correct the natural and instinctive by a wiser
Purification — The Lower Mentality
661
The buddhi starts with this material to work
on and tries to correct the natural and instinctive by a wiser
Purification — The Lower Mentality
661
reasoned and willed selection; for obviously the pleasant is not
always the right thing, the object to be preferred and selected,
nor the unpleasant the wrong thing, the object to be shunned
and rejected; the pleasant and the good, prey as and hey as, have
to be distinguished, and right reason has to choose and not
the caprice of emotion. But this it can do much better when
the emotional suggestion is withdrawn and the heart rests in
a luminous passivity. Then too the right activity of the heart
can be brought to the surface; for we find then that behind this
emotion-ridden soul of desire there was waiting all the while
a soul of love and lucid joy and delight, a pure psyche, which
was clouded over by the deformations of anger, fear, hatred,
repulsion and could not embrace the world with an impartial
love and joy. But the purified heart is rid of anger, rid of fear, rid
of hatred, rid of every shrinking and repulsion: it has a universal
love, it can receive with an untroubled sweetness and clarity the
various delight which God gives it in the world. But it is not the
lax slave of love and delight; it does not desire, does not attempt
to impose itself as the master of the actions. The selective process
necessary to action is left principally to the buddhi and, when
the buddhi has been overpassed, to the spirit in the supramental
will, knowledge and Ananda.
The receptive sensational mind is the nervous mental basis of
the affections; it receives mentally the impacts of things and gives
to them the responses of mental pleasure and pain which are the
starting-point of the duality of emotional liking and disliking.
All the heart’s emotions have a corresponding nervous-mental
accompaniment, and we often find that when the heart is freed of
any will to the dualities, there still survives a root of disturbance
of nervous mind, or a memory in physical mind which falls
more and more away to a quite physical character, the more it
is repelled by the will in the buddhi. It becomes finally a mere
suggestion from outside to which the nervous chords of the mind
still occasionally respond until a complete purity liberates them
into the same luminous universality of delight which the pure
heart already possesses. The active dynamic mind of impulse is
the lower organ or channel of responsive action; its deformation
662
The Yoga of Self -F erf ection
The active dynamic mind of impulse is
the lower organ or channel of responsive action; its deformation
662
The Yoga of Self -F erf ection
is a subjection to the suggestions of the impure emotional and
sensational mentality and the desire of the prana, to impulses to
action dictated by grief, fear, hatred, desire, lust, craving, and
the rest of the unquiet brood. Its right form of action is a pure
dynamic force of strength, courage, temperamental power, not
acting for itself or in obedience to the lower members, but as
an impartial channel for the dictates of the pure intelligence and
will or the supramental Purusha. When we have got rid of these
deformations and cleared the mentality for these truer forms of
action, the lower mentality is purified and ready for perfection.
But that perfection depends on the possession of a purified and
enlightened buddhi; for the buddhi is the chief power in the
mental being and the chief mental instrument of the Purusha.
Chapter VII
Purification — Intelligence and Will
To PURIFY the buddhi we must first understand its rather
complex composition. And first we have to make clear
the distinction, ignored in ordinary speech, between the
manas, mind, and buddhi, the discerning intelligence and the
enlightened will. Manas is the sense mind. Man’s initial mental¬
ity is not at all a thing of reason and will; it is an animal, physical
or sense mentality which constitutes its whole experience from
the impressions made on it by the external world and by its
own embodied consciousness which responds to the outward
stimulus of this kind of experience. The buddhi only comes in
as a secondary power which has in the evolution taken the first
place, but is still dependent on the inferior instrument it uses;
it depends for its workings on the sense mind and does what it
can on its own higher range by a difficult, elaborate and rather
stumbling extension of knowledge and action from the physical
or sense basis. A half-enlightened physical or sense mentality is
the ordinary type of the mind of man.
A half-enlightened physical or sense mentality is
the ordinary type of the mind of man.
In fact the manas is a development from the external chitta;
it is a first organising of the crude stuff of the consciousness
excited and aroused by external contacts, bdhya-sparsa. What
we are physically is a soul asleep in matter which has evolved to
the partial wakefulness of a living body pervaded by a crude stuff
of external consciousness more or less alive and attentive to the
outward impacts of the external world in which we are develop¬
ing our conscious being. In the animal this stuff of externalised
consciousness organises itself into a well-regulated mental sense
or organ of perceiving and acting mind. Sense is in fact the men¬
tal contact of the embodied consciousness with its surroundings.
This contact is always essentially a mental phenomenon; but in
fact it depends chiefly upon the development of certain physical
organs of contact with objects and with their properties to whose
664
The Yoga of Self -F erf ection
images it is able by habit to give their mental values. What we call
the physical senses have a double element, the physical-nervous
impression of the object and the mental-nervous value we give
to it, and the two together make up our seeing, hearing, smell,
taste, touch with all those varieties of sensation of which they,
and the touch chiefly, are the starting-point or first transmitting
agency. But the manas is able to receive sense impressions and
draw results from them by a direct transmission not dependent
on the physical organ. This is more distinct in the lower creation.
Man, though he has really a greater capacity for this direct sense,
the sixth sense in the mind, has let it fall into abeyance by an
exclusive reliance on the physical senses supplemented by the
activity of the buddhi.
Man, though he has really a greater capacity for this direct sense,
the sixth sense in the mind, has let it fall into abeyance by an
exclusive reliance on the physical senses supplemented by the
activity of the buddhi.
The manas is therefore in the first place an organiser of
sense experience; in addition it organises the natural reactions
of the will in the embodied consciousness and uses the body
as an instrument, uses, as it is ordinarily put, the organs of
action. This natural action too has a double element, a physico-
nervous impulse and behind it a mental-nervous power-value of
instinctive will-impulse. That makes up the nexus of first per¬
ceptions and actions which is common to all developing animal
life. But in addition there is in the manas or sense-mind a first
resulting thought-element which accompanies the operations of
animal life. Just as the living body has a certain pervading and
possessing action of consciousness, dtta, which forms into this
sense-mind, so the sense-mind has in it a certain pervading and
possessing power which mentally uses the sense data, turns them
into perceptions and first ideas, associates experience with other
experiences, and in some way or other thinks and feels and wills
on the sense basis.
This sensational thought-mind which is based upon sense,
memory, association, first ideas and resultant generalisations or
secondary ideas, is common to all developed animal life and
mentality. Man indeed has given it an immense development
and range and complexity impossible to the animal, but still,
if he stopped there, he would only be a more highly effective
animal. He gets beyond the animal range and height because he
Purification — Intelligence and Will
665
has been able to disengage and separate to a greater or less extent
his thought action from the sense mentality, to draw back from
the latter and observe its data and to act on it from above by
a separated and partially freed intelligence. The intelligence and
will of the animal are involved in the sense-mind and therefore
altogether governed by it and carried on its stream of sensations,
sense-perceptions, impulses; it is instinctive. Man is able to use
a reason and will, a self-observing, thinking and all-observing,
an intelligently willing mind which is no longer involved in the
sense-mind, but acts from above and behind it in its own right,
with a certain separateness and freedom. He is reflective, has a
certain relative freedom of intelligent will. He has liberated in
himself and has formed into a separate power the buddhi.
He is reflective, has a
certain relative freedom of intelligent will. He has liberated in
himself and has formed into a separate power the buddhi.
But what is this buddhi? From the point of view of Yogic
knowledge we may say that it is that instrument of the soul, of
the inner conscious being in nature, of the Purusha, by which it
comes into some kind of conscious and ordered possession both
of itself and its surroundings. Behind all the action of the chitta
and manas there is this soul, this Purusha; but in the lower forms
of life it is mostly subconscient, asleep or half-awake, absorbed
in the mechanical action of Nature; but it becomes more and
more awake and comes more and more forward as it rises in the
scale of life. By the activity of the buddhi it begins the process of
an entire awakening. In the lower actions of the mind the soul
suffers Nature rather than possesses her; for it is there entirely
a slave to the mechanism which has brought it into conscious
embodied experience. But in the buddhi we get to something,
still a natural instrumentation, by which yet Nature seems to
be helping and arming the Purusha to understand, possess and
master her.
Neither understanding, possession nor mastery is complete,
either because the buddhi in us is itself still incomplete, only yet
half developed and half formed, or because it is in its nature
only an intermediary instrument and before we can get com¬
plete knowledge and mastery, we must rise to something greater
than the buddhi. Still it is a movement by which we come to
the knowledge that there is a power within us greater than the
666
The Yoga of Self -F erf ection
animal life, a truth greater than the first truths or appearances
perceived by the sense-mind, and can try to get at that truth and
to labour towards a greater and more successful power of action
and control, a more effective government both of our own nature
and the nature of things around us, a higher knowledge, a higher
power, a higher and larger enjoyment, a more exalted range of
being. What then is the final object of this trend? Evidently, it
must be for the Purusha to get to the highest and fullest truth
of itself and of things, greatest truth of soul or self and greatest
truth of Nature, and to an action and a status of being which
shall be the result of or identical with that Truth, the power of
this greatest knowledge and the enjoyment of that greatest being
and consciousness to which it opens. This must be the final result
of the evolution of the conscious being in Nature.
This must be the final result
of the evolution of the conscious being in Nature.
To arrive then at the whole truth of our self and Spirit and
the knowledge, greatness, bliss of our free and complete being
must be the object of the purification, liberation and perfection
of the buddhi. But it is a common idea that this means not the full
possession of Nature by the Purusha, but a rejection of Nature.
We are to get at self by the removal of the action of Prakriti.
As the buddhi, coming to the knowledge that the sense-mind
only gives us appearances in which the soul is subject to Nature,
discovers more real truths behind them, the soul must arrive at
this knowledge that the buddhi too, when turned upon Nature,
can give us only appearances and enlarge the subjection, and
must discover behind them the pure truth of the Self. The Self is
something quite other than Nature and the buddhi must purify
itself of attachment to and preoccupation with natural things;
so only can it discern and separate from them the pure Self
and Spirit: the knowledge of the pure Self and Spirit is the only
real knowledge, Ananda of the pure Self and Spirit is the only
spiritual enjoyment, the consciousness and being of the pure Self
and Spirit are the only real consciousness and being. Action and
will must cease because all action is of the Nature; the will to be
pure Self and Spirit means the cessation of all will to action.
But while the possession of the being, consciousness, delight,
power of the Self is the condition of perfection, — for it is only
Purification — Intelligence and Will
667
But while the possession of the being, consciousness, delight,
power of the Self is the condition of perfection, — for it is only
Purification — Intelligence and Will
667
by knowing and possessing and living in the truth of itself that
the soul can become free and perfect, — we hold that Nature
is an eternal action and manifestation of the Spirit; Nature is
not a devil’s trap, a set of misleading appearances created by
desire, sense, life and mental will and intelligence, but these
phenomena are hints and indications and behind all of them is a
truth of Spirit which exceeds and uses them. We hold that there
must be an inherent spiritual gnosis and will by which the secret
Spirit in all knows its own truth, wills, manifests and governs
its own being in Nature; to arrive at that, at communion with
it or participation in it, must be part of our perfection. The
object of the purification of the buddhi will then be to arrive
at the possession of our own truth of self-being, but also at the
possession of the highest truth of our being in Nature. For that
purpose we must first purify the buddhi of all that makes it
subject to the sense-mind and, that once done, purify it from its
own limitations and convert its inferior mental intelligence and
will into the greater action of a spiritual will and knowledge.
The movement of the buddhi to exceed the limits of the
sense-mind is an effort already half accomplished in the human
evolution; it is part of the common operation of Nature in man.
The original action of the thought-mind, the intelligence and will
in man, is a subject action. It accepts the evidence of the senses,
the commands of the life-cravings, instincts, desires, emotions,
the impulses of the dynamic sense-mind and only tries to give
them a more orderly direction and effective success. But the
man whose reason and will are led and dominated by the lower
mind, is an inferior type of human nature, and the part of our
conscious being which consents to this domination is the lowest
part of our manhood. The higher action of the buddhi is to
exceed and control the lower mind, not indeed to get rid of it,
but to raise all the action of which it is the first suggestion into
the nobler plane of will and intelligence. The impressions of the
sense-mind are used by a thought which exceeds them and which
arrives at truths they do not give, ideative truths of thought,
truths of philosophy and science; a thinking, discovering, philo¬
sophic mind overcomes, rectifies and dominates the first mind of
668
The Yoga of Self -F erf ection
sense impressions. The impulsive reactive sensational mentality,
the life-cravings and the mind of emotional desire are taken
up by the intelligent will and are overcome, are rectified and
dominated by a greater ethical mind which discovers and sets
over them a law of right impulse, right desire, right emotion
and right action. The receptive, crudely enjoying sensational
mentality, the emotional mind and life mind are taken up by
the intelligence and are overcome, rectified and dominated by a
deeper, happier aesthetic mind which discovers and sets above
them a law of true delight and beauty. All these new forma¬
tions are used by a general Power of the intellectual, thinking
and willing man in a soul of governing intellect, imagination,
judgment, memory, volition, discerning reason and ideal feeling
which uses them for knowledge, self-development, experience,
discovery, creation, effectuation, aspires, strives, inwardly at¬
tains, endeavours to make a higher thing of the life of the soul in
Nature. The primitive desire-soul no longer governs the being. It
is still a desire-soul, but it is repressed and governed by a higher
power, something which has manifested in itself the godheads
of Truth, Will, Good, Beauty and tries to subject life to them.
The crude desire-soul and mind is trying to convert itself into an
ideal soul and mind, and the proportion in which some effect
and harmony of this greater conscious being has been found and
enthroned, is the measure of our increasing humanity.
But this is still a very incomplete movement. We find that
it progresses towards a greater completeness in proportion as
we arrive at two kinds of perfection; first, a greater and greater
detachment from the control of the lower suggestions; secondly,
an increasing discovery of a self-existent Being, Light, Power and
Ananda which surpasses and transforms the normal humanity.
The ethical mind becomes perfect in proportion as it detaches
itself from desire, sense suggestion, impulse, customary dictated
action and discovers a self of Right, Love, Strength and Purity
in which it can live accomplished and make it the foundation of
all its actions. The aesthetic mind is perfected in proportion as
it detaches itself from all its cruder pleasures and from outward
conventional canons of the aesthetic reason and discovers a self-
Purification — Intelligence and Will
669
The aesthetic mind is perfected in proportion as
it detaches itself from all its cruder pleasures and from outward
conventional canons of the aesthetic reason and discovers a self-
Purification — Intelligence and Will
669
existent self and spirit of pure and infinite Beauty and Delight
which gives its own light and joy to the material of the aesthesis.
The mind of knowledge is perfected when it gets away from
impression and dogma and opinion and discovers a light of self-
knowledge and intuition which illumines all the workings of
the sense and reason, all self-experience and world-experience.
The will is perfected when it gets away from and behind its
impulses and its customary ruts of effectuation and discovers
an inner power of the Spirit which is the source of an intuitive
and luminous action and an original harmonious creation. The
movement of perfection is away from all domination by the
lower nature and towards a pure and powerful reflection of the
being, power, knowledge and delight of the Spirit and Self in the
buddhi.
The Yoga of self-perfection is to make this double movement
as absolute as possible. All immiscence of desire in the buddhi
is an impurity. The intelligence coloured by desire is an impure
intelligence and it distorts Truth; the will coloured by desire is
an impure will and it puts a stamp of distortion, pain and imper¬
fection upon the soul’s activity. All immiscence of the emotions
of the soul of desire is an impurity and similarly distorts both
the knowledge and the action. All subjection of the buddhi to
the sensations and impulses is an impurity. The thought and will
have to stand back detached from desire, troubling emotion,
distracting or mastering impulse and to act in their own right
until they can discover a greater guide, a Will, Tapas or divine
Shakti which will take the place of desire and mental will and
impulse, an Ananda or pure delight of the spirit and an illumined
spiritual knowledge which will express themselves in the action
of that Shakti. This complete detachment, impossible without
an entire self-government, equality, calm, sama, samatd, sdnti,
is the surest step towards the purification of the buddhi. A calm,
equal and detached mind can alone reflect the peace or base the
action of the liberated spirit.
The buddhi itself is burdened with a mixed and impure
action. When we reduce it to its own proper forms, we find
that it has three stages or elevations of its functioning. First,
670
The Yoga of Self -F erf ection
The buddhi itself is burdened with a mixed and impure
action. When we reduce it to its own proper forms, we find
that it has three stages or elevations of its functioning. First,
670
The Yoga of Self -F erf ection
its lowest basis is a habitual, customary action which is a link
between the higher reason and the sense-mind, a kind of current
understanding. This understanding is in itself dependent on the
witness of the senses and the rule of action which the reason
deduces from the sense-mind’s perception of and attitude to life.
It is not capable of itself forming pure thought and will, but
it takes the workings of the higher reason and turns them into
coin of opinion and customary standard of thought or canon
of action. When we perform a sort of practical analysis of the
thinking mind, cut away this element and hold back the higher
reason free, observing and silent, we find that this current un¬
derstanding begins to run about in a futile circle, repeating all
its formed opinions and responses to the impressions of things,
but incapable of any strong adaptation and initiation. As it feels
more and more the refusal of sanction from the higher reason,
it begins to fail, to lose confidence in itself and its forms and
habits, to distrust the intellectual action and to fall into weak¬
ness and silence. The stilling of this current, running, circling,
repeating thought-mind is the principal part of that silencing of
the thought which is one of the most effective disciplines of Yoga.
The stilling of this current, running, circling,
repeating thought-mind is the principal part of that silencing of
the thought which is one of the most effective disciplines of Yoga.
But the higher reason itself has a first stage of dynamic,
pragmatic intellectuality in which creation, action and will are
the real motive and thought and knowledge are employed to
form basic constructions and suggestions which are used prin¬
cipally for effectuation. To this pragmatic reason truth is only a
formation of the intellect effective for the action of the inner and
the outer life. When we cut it away from the still higher reason
which seeks impersonally to reflect Truth rather than to create
personally effective truth, we find then that this pragmatic rea¬
son can originate, progress, enlarge the experience by dynamic
knowledge, but it has to depend on the current understanding
as a pedestal and base and put its whole weight on life and
becoming. It is in itself therefore a mind of the Will to life and
action, much more a mind of Will than a mind of knowledge:
it does not live in any assured and constant and eternal Truth,
but in progressing and changing aspects of Truth which serve
the shifting forms of our life and becoming or, at the highest.
Purification — Intelligence and Will
671
help life to grow and progress. By itself this pragmatic mind can
give us no firm foundation and no fixed goal; it lives in the truth
of the hour, not in any truth of eternity. But when purified of
dependence on the customary understanding, it is a great creator
and in association with the highest mental reason it becomes a
strong channel and bold servant for the effectuation of Truth
in life. The value of its work will depend on the value and the
power of the highest truth-seeking reason. But by itself it is a
sport of Time and a bondslave of Life. The seeker of the Silence
has to cast it away from him; the seeker of the integral Divinity
has to pass beyond it, to replace and transform this thinking
mind intent on Life by a greater effectuating spiritual Will, the
Truth- Will of the spirit.
The seeker of the Silence
has to cast it away from him; the seeker of the integral Divinity
has to pass beyond it, to replace and transform this thinking
mind intent on Life by a greater effectuating spiritual Will, the
Truth- Will of the spirit.
The third and noblest stage of the intellectual will and reason
is an intelligence which seeks for some universal reality or for
a still higher self-existent Truth for its own sake and tries to
live in that Truth. This is primarily a mind of knowledge and
only secondarily a mind of Will. In its excess of tendency it
often becomes incapable of Will except the one will to know;
for action it is dependent on the aid of the pragmatic mind and
therefore man tends in action to fall away from the purity of
the Truth his highest knowledge holds into a mixed, inferior,
inconstant and impure effectuation. The disparity, even when
it is not an opposition, between knowledge and will is one of
the principal defects of the human buddhi. But there are other
inherent limitations of all human thinking. This highest Buddhi
does not work in man in its own purity; it is assailed by the de¬
fects of the lower mentality, continually clouded by it, distorted,
veiled, and prevented or lamed in its own proper action. Purified
as much as may be from that habit of mental degradation, the
human buddhi is still a power that searches for the Truth, but is
never in full or direct possession of it; it can only reflect truth of
the spirit and try to make it its own by giving it a limited mental
value and a distinct mental body. Nor does it reflect integrally,
but seizes either an uncertain totality or else a sum of limited
particulars. First it seizes on this or that partial reflection and by
subjection to the habit of customary mind turns it into a fixed
672
The Yoga of Self -F erf ection
imprisoning opinion; all new truth it judges from the standpoint
it has thus formed and therefore puts on it the colour of a
limiting prejudgment. Release it as much as possible from this
habit of limiting opinion, still it is subject to another affliction,
the demand of the pragmatic mind for immediate effectuation,
which gives it no time to proceed to larger truth, but fixes it
by the power of effective realisation in whatever it has already
judged, known and lived. Freed from all these chains, the buddhi
can become a pure and flexible reflector of Truth, adding light to
light, proceeding from realisation to realisation. It is then limited
only by its own inherent limitations.
Freed from all these chains, the buddhi
can become a pure and flexible reflector of Truth, adding light to
light, proceeding from realisation to realisation. It is then limited
only by its own inherent limitations.
These limitations are mainly of two kinds. First, its reali¬
sations are only mental realisations; to get to the Truth itself
we have to go beyond the mental buddhi. Again, the nature
of the mind prevents it from making an effective unification
of the truths it seizes. It can only put them side by side and
see oppositions or effect some kind of partial, executive and
practical combination. But it finds finally that the aspects of
the Truth are infinite and that none of its intellectual forms are
quite valid, because the spirit is infinite and in the spirit all is
true, but nothing in the mind can give the whole truth of the
spirit. Either then the buddhi becomes a pure mirror of many
reflections, reflecting all truth that falls on it, but ineffective and
when turned to action either incapable of decision or chaotic,
or it has to make a selection and act as if that partiality were
the whole truth, though it knows otherwise. It acts in a helpless
limitation of Ignorance, though it may hold a Truth far greater
than its action. On the other hand, it may turn away from life and
thought and seek to exceed itself and pass into the Truth beyond
it. This it may do by seizing on some aspect, some principle, some
symbol or suggestion of reality and pushing that to its absolute,
all-absorbing, all-excluding term of realisation or by seizing on
and realising some idea of indeterminate Being or Non-Being
from which all thought and life fall away into cessation. The
buddhi casts itself into a luminous sleep and the soul passes
away into some ineffable height of spiritual being.
Therefore in dealing with the buddhi, we must either take
Purification — Intelligence and Will
673
The
buddhi casts itself into a luminous sleep and the soul passes
away into some ineffable height of spiritual being.
Therefore in dealing with the buddhi, we must either take
Purification — Intelligence and Will
673
one of these choices or else try the rarer adventure of lifting the
soul from the mental being into the spiritual gnosis to see what
we can find in the very core of that supernal light and power. This
gnosis contains the sun of the divine Knowledge-Will burning in
the heavens of the supreme conscious Being, to which the mental
intelligence and will are only a focus of diffused and deflected
rays and reflections. That possesses the divine unity and yet
or rather therefore can govern the multiplicity and diversity:
whatever selection, self-limitation, combination it makes is not
imposed on it by Ignorance, but is self-developed by a power of
self-possessing divine Knowledge. When the gnosis is gained, it
can then be turned on the whole nature to divinise the human
being. It is impossible to rise into it at once; if that could be done,
it would mean a sudden and violent overshooting, a breaking or
slipping through the gates of the Sun, suryasya dvara, without
near possibility of return. We have to form as a link or bridge
an intuitive or illuminated mind, which is not the direct gnosis,
but in which a first derivative body of the gnosis can form. This
illumined mind will first be a mixed power which we shall have
to purify of all its mental dependence and mental forms so as
to convert all willing and thinking into thought-sight and truth-
seeing will by an illumined discrimination, intuition, inspiration,
revelation. That will be the final purification of the intelligence
and the preparation for the siddhi of the gnosis.
Chapter VIII
The Liberation of the Spirit
That will be the final purification of the intelligence
and the preparation for the siddhi of the gnosis.
Chapter VIII
The Liberation of the Spirit
The purification of the mental being and the psychic
prana — we will leave aside for the time the question of
the physical purification, that of the body and physical
prana, though that too is necessary to an integral perfection,
— prepares the ground for a spiritual liberation. Suddhi is the
condition for mukti. All purification is a release, a delivery; for it
is a throwing away of limiting, binding, obscuring imperfections
and confusions: purification from desire brings the freedom of
the psychic prana, purification from wrong emotions and trou¬
bling reactions the freedom of the heart, purification from the
obscuring limited thought of the sense mind the freedom of the
intelligence, purification from mere intellectuality the freedom of
the gnosis. But all this is an instrumental liberation. The freedom
of the soul, mukti, is of a larger and more essential character;
it is an opening out of mortal limitation into the illimitable
immortality of the Spirit.
For certain ways of thinking liberation is a throwing off of
all nature, a silent state of pure being, a nirvana or extinction, a
dissolution of the natural existence into some indefinable Abso¬
lute, moksa. But an absorbed and immersed bliss, a wideness of
actionless peace, a release of self-extinction or a self-drowning
in the Absolute is not our aim. We shall give to the idea of lib¬
eration, mukti, only the connotation of that inner change which
is common to all experience of this kind, essential to perfection
and indispensable to spiritual freedom. We shall find that it then
implies always two things, a rejection and an assumption, a
negative and a positive side; the negative movement of freedom
is a liberation from the principal bonds, the master-knots of the
lower soul-nature, the positive side an opening or growth into
the higher spiritual existence. But what are these master-knots
— other and deeper twistings than the instrumental knots of
The Liberation of the Spirit
675
But what are these master-knots
— other and deeper twistings than the instrumental knots of
The Liberation of the Spirit
675
the mind, heart, psychic life-force? We find them pointed out
for us and insisted on with great force and a constant emphatic
repetition in the Gita; they are four, desire, ego, the dualities and
the three gunas of Nature; for to be desireless, ego-less, equal
of mind and soul and spirit and nistraigunya, is in the idea of
the Gita to be free, mukta. We may accept this description; for
everything essential is covered by its amplitude. On the other
hand, the positive sense of freedom is to be universal in soul,
transcendently one in spirit with God, possessed of the highest
divine nature, — as we may say, like to God, or one with him in
the law of our being. This is the whole and full sense of liberation
and this is the integral freedom of the spirit.
We have already had to speak of purification from the psy¬
chic desire of which the craving of the prana is the evolutionary
or, as we may put it, the practical basis. But this is in the mental
and psychic nature; spiritual desirelessness has a wider and more
essential meaning: for desire has a double knot, a lower knot in
the prana, which is a craving in the instruments, and a very
subtle knot in the soul itself with the buddhi as its first support
or pratisthd, which is the inmost origin of this mesh of our
bondage. When we look from below, desire presents itself to us
as a craving of the life force which subtilises in the emotions
into a craving of the heart and is farther subtilised in the intelli¬
gence into a craving, preference, passion of the aesthetic, ethical,
dynamic or rational turn of the buddhi. This desire is essential to
the ordinary man; he cannot live or act as an individual without
knotting up all his action into the service of some kind of lower
or higher craving, preference or passion. But when we are able
to look at desire from above, we see that what supports this
instrumental desire is a will of the spirit. There is a will, tapas,
sakti, by which the secret spirit imposes on its outer members all
their action and draws from it an active delight of its being, an
ananda, in which they very obscurely and imperfectly, if at all
consciously, partake. This tapas is the will of the transcendent
spirit who creates the universal movement, of the universal spirit
who supports and informs it, of the free individual spirit who is
the soul centre of its multiplicities. It is one will, free in all these
676
This tapas is the will of the transcendent
spirit who creates the universal movement, of the universal spirit
who supports and informs it, of the free individual spirit who is
the soul centre of its multiplicities. It is one will, free in all these
676
The Yoga of Self -F erf ection
at once, comprehensive, harmonious, unified; we find it, when
we live and act in the spirit, to be an effortless and desireless, a
spontaneous and illumined, a self-fulfilling and self-possessing,
a satisfied and blissful will of the spiritual delight of being.
But the moment the individual soul leans away from the
universal and transcendent truth of its being, leans towards ego,
tries to make this will a thing of its own, a separate personal
energy, that will changes its character: it becomes an effort,
a straining, a heat of force which may have its fiery joys of
effectuation and of possession, but has also its afflicting recoils
and pain of labour. It is this that turns in each instrument into
an intellectual, emotional, dynamic, sensational or vital will of
desire, wish, craving. Even when the instruments per se are
purified of their own apparent initiative and particular kind
of desire, this imperfect tapas may still remain, and so long as it
conceals the source or deforms the type of the inner action, the
soul has not the bliss of liberty, or can only have it by refraining
from all action; even, if allowed to persist, it will rekindle the
pranic or other desires or at least throw a reminiscent shadow
of them on the being. This spiritual seed or beginning of desire
too must be expelled, renounced, cast away: the sadhaka must
either choose an active peace and complete inner silence or lose
individual initiation, sahkalparambha, in a unity with the uni¬
versal will, the tapas of the divine Shakti. The passive way is
to be inwardly immobile, without effort, wish, expectation or
any turn to action, niscesta, aniha, nirapeksa, nivrtta; the active
way is to be thus immobile and impersonal in the mind, but
to allow the supreme Will in its spiritual purity to act through
the purified instruments. Then, if the soul abides on the level
of the spiritualised mentality, it becomes an instrument only,
but is itself without initiative or action, niskriya, sarvdrambha-
paritydgl. But if it rises to the gnosis, it is at once an instrument
and a participant in the bliss of the divine action and the bliss of
the divine Ananda; it unifies in itself the prakrti and the purusa.
But if it rises to the gnosis, it is at once an instrument
and a participant in the bliss of the divine action and the bliss of
the divine Ananda; it unifies in itself the prakrti and the purusa.
The ego turn, the separative turn of the being, is the ful¬
crum of the whole embarrassed labour of the ignorance and the
bondage. So long as one is not free from the ego sense, there
The Liberation of the Spirit
677
can be no real freedom. The seat of the ego is said to be in
the buddhi; it is an ignorance of the discriminating mind and
reason which discriminate wrongly and take the individuation
of mind, life and body for a truth of separative existence and are
turned away from the greater reconciling truth of the oneness
of all existence. At any rate in man it is the ego idea which
chiefly supports the falsehood of a separative existence; to get
rid of this idea, to dwell on the opposite idea of unity, of the
one self, the one spirit, the one being of nature is therefore
an effective remedy; but it is not by itself absolutely effective.
For the ego, though it supports itself by this ego idea, aham-
buddhi, finds its most powerful means for a certain obstinacy or
passion of persistence in the normal action of the sense-mind,
the prana and the body. To cast out of us the ego idea is not
entirely possible or not entirely effective until these instruments
have undergone purification; for, their action being persistently
egoistic and separative, the buddhi is carried away by them, —
as a boat by winds on the sea, says the Gita, — the knowledge in
the intelligence is being constantly obscured or lost temporarily
and has to be restored again, a very labour of Sisyphus. But if
the lower instruments have been purified of egoistic desire, wish,
will, egoistic passion, egoistic emotion and the buddhi itself of
egoistic idea and preference, then the knowledge of the spiritual
truth of oneness can find a firm foundation. Till then, the ego
takes all sorts of subtle forms and we imagine ourselves to be
free from it, when we are really acting as its instruments and
all we have attained is a certain intellectual poise which is not
the true spiritual liberation. Moreover, to throw away the active
sense of ego is not enough; that may merely bring an inactive
state of the mentality, a certain passive inert quietude of separate
being may take the place of the kinetic egoism, which is also not
the true liberation. The ego sense must be replaced by a oneness
with the transcendental Divine and with universal being.
The ego sense must be replaced by a oneness
with the transcendental Divine and with universal being.
This necessity arises from the fact that the buddhi is only a
pratisthd or chief support of the ego-sense in its manifold play,
ahahkdra; but in its source it is a degradation or deformation of
a truth of our spiritual being. The truth of being is that there is
678
The Yoga of Self -F erf ection
The truth of being is that there is
678
The Yoga of Self -F erf ection
a transcendent existence, supreme self or spirit, a timeless soul
of existence, an eternal, a Divine, or even we may speak of it in
relation to current mental ideas of the Godhead as a supra-
Divine, which is here immanent, all-embracing, all-initiating
and all-governing, a great universal Spirit; and the individual
is a conscious power of being of the Eternal, capable eternally
of relations with him, but one with him too in the very core
of reality of its own eternal existence. This is a truth which
the intelligence can apprehend, can, when once purified, reflect,
transmit, hold in a derivative fashion, but it can only be entirely
realised, lived and made effective in the spirit. When we live
in the spirit, then we not only know, but are this truth of our
being. The individual then enjoys in the spirit, in the bliss of the
spirit, his oneness with the universal existence, his oneness with
the timeless Divine and his oneness with all other beings and
that is the essential sense of a spiritual liberation from the ego.
But the moment the soul leans towards the mental limitation,
there is a certain sense of spiritual separativeness which has its
joys, but may at any moment lapse into the entire ego-sense,
ignorance, oblivion of oneness. To get rid of this separativeness
an attempt is made to absorb oneself in the idea and realisation
of the Divine, and this takes in certain forms of spiritual askesis
the turn of a strain towards the abolition of all individual being
and a casting away, in the trance of immersion, of all individual
or universal relations with the Divine, in others it becomes an
absorbed dwelling in him and not in this world or a contin¬
ual absorbed or intent living in his presence, sdyujya, sdlokya,
sdmlpya mukti. The way proposed for the integral Yoga is a
lifting up and surrender of the whole being to him, by which not
only do we become one with him in our spiritual existence, but
dwell too in him and he in us, so that the whole nature is full of
his presence and changed into the divine nature; we become one
spirit and consciousness and life and substance with the Divine
and at the same time we live and move in and have a various
joy of that oneness. This integral liberation from the ego into
the divine spirit and nature can only be relatively complete on
our present level, but it begins to become absolute as we open
The Liberation of the Spirit
679
to and mount into the gnosis. This is the liberated perfection.
This is the liberated perfection.
The liberation from ego, the liberation from desire together
found the central spiritual freedom. The sense, the idea, the expe¬
rience that I am a separately self-existent being in the universe,
and the forming of consciousness and force of being into the
mould of that experience are the root of all suffering, ignorance
and evil. And it is so because that falsifies both in practice and
in cognition the whole real truth of things; it limits the being,
limits the consciousness, limits the power of our being, limits
the bliss of being; this limitation again produces a wrong way
of existence, wrong way of consciousness, wrong way of using
the power of our being and consciousness, and wrong, perverse
and contrary forms of the delight of existence. The soul limited
in being and self-isolated in its environment feels itself no longer
in unity and harmony with its Self, with God, with the universe,
with all around it; but rather it finds itself at odds with the
universe, in conflict and disaccord with other beings who are
its other selves, but whom it treats as not-self; and so long as
this disaccord and disagreement last, it cannot possess its world
and it cannot enjoy the universal life, but is full of unease, fear,
afflictions of all kinds, in a painful struggle to preserve and
increase itself and possess its surroundings, — for to possess its
world is the nature of infinite spirit and the necessary urge in all
being. The satisfactions it gets from this labour and effort are of
a stinted, perverse and unsatisfying kind: for the one real satis¬
faction it has is that of growth, of an increasing return towards
itself, of some realisation of accord and harmony, of successful
self-creation and self-realisation, but the little of these things
that it can achieve on the basis of ego-consciousness is always
limited, insecure, imperfect, transitory. It is at war too with its
own self, — first because, since it is no longer in possession of the
central harmonising truth of its own being, it cannot properly
control its natural members or accord their tendencies, powers
and demands; it has not the secret of harmony, because it has not
the secret of its own unity and self-possession; and, secondly, not
being in possession of its highest self, it has to struggle towards
that, is not allowed to be at peace till it is in possession of its own
680
The Yoga of Self -F erf ection
true highest being. All this means that it is not at one with God;
for to be at one with God is to be at one with oneself, at one
with the universe and at one with all beings. This oneness is the
secret of a right and a divine existence. But the ego cannot have
it, because it is in its very nature separative and because even
with regard to ourselves, to our own psychological existence it
is a false centre of unity; for it tries to find the unity of our
being in an identification with a shifting mental, vital, physical
personality, not with the eternal self of our total existence. Only
in the spiritual self can we possess the true unity; for there the
individual enlarges to his own total being and finds himself one
with universal existence and with the transcending Divinity.
All the trouble and suffering of the soul proceeds from this
wrong egoistic and separative way of existence. The soul not
in possession of its free self-existence, andtmavdn, because it
is limited in its consciousness, is limited in knowledge; and this
limited knowledge takes the form of a falsifying knowledge. The
struggle to return to a true knowing is imposed upon it, but the
ego in the separative mind is satisfied with shows and fragments
of knowledge which it pieces together into some false or some
imperfect total or governing notion, and this knowledge fails it
and has to be abandoned for a fresh pursuit of the one thing
to be known. That one thing is the Divine, the Self, the Spirit
in whom universal and individual being find at last their right
foundation and their right harmonies. Again, because it is limited
in force, the ego-prisoned soul is full of many incapacities; wrong
knowledge is accompanied by wrong will, wrong tendencies and
impulses of the being, and the acute sense of this wrongness is
the root of the human consciousness of sin. This deficiency of
its nature it tries to set right by standards of conduct which will
help it to remove the egoistic consciousness and satisfactions of
sin by the egoistic consciousness and self-satisfaction of virtue,
the rajasic by the sattwic egoism. But the original sin has to be
cured, the separation of its being and will from the divine Being
and the divine Will; when it returns to unity with the divine
Will and Being, it rises beyond sin and virtue to the infinite
self-existent purity and the security of its own divine nature.
The Liberation of the Spirit
681
The Liberation of the Spirit
681
Its incapacities it tries to set right by organising its imperfect
knowledge and disciplining its half-enlightened will and force
and directing them by some systematic effort of the reason;
but the result must always be a limited, uncertain, mutable and
stumbling way and standard of capacity in action. Only when
it returns again to the large unity of the free spirit, bhumd, can
the action of its nature move perfectly as the instrument of the
infinite Spirit and in the steps of the Right and Truth and Power
which belong to the free soul acting from the supreme centre
of its existence. Again, because it is limited in the delight of
being, it is unable to lay hold on the secure, self-existent perfect
bliss of the spirit or the delight, the Ananda of the universe
which keeps the world in motion, but is only able to move in a
mixed and shifting succession of pleasures and pains, joys and
sorrows, or must take refuge in some conscient inconscience or
neutral indifference. The ego mind cannot do otherwise, and
the soul which has externalised itself in ego, is subjected to this
unsatisfactory, secondary, imperfect, often perverse, troubled or
annulled enjoyment of existence; yet all the time the spiritual
and universal Ananda is within, in the self, in the spirit, in its
secret unity with God and existence. To cast away the chain of
ego and go back to free self, immortal spiritual being is the soul’s
return to its own eternal divinity.
The will to the imperfect separative being, that wrong Tapas
which makes the soul in Nature attempt to individualise itself,
to individualise its being, consciousness, force of being, delight
of existence in a separative sense, to have these things as its own,
in its own right, and not in the right of God and of the universal
oneness, is that which brings about this wrong turn and creates
the ego. To turn from this original desire is therefore essential,
to get back to the will without desire whose whole enjoyment
of being and whole will in being is that of a free universal and
unifying Ananda. These two things are one, liberation from the
will that is of the nature of desire and liberation from the ego,
and the oneness which is brought about by the happy loss of the
will of desire and the ego, is the essence of Mukti.
Chapter IX
The Liberation of the Nature
Chapter IX
The Liberation of the Nature
The two sides of our being, conscious experiencing soul
and executive Nature continuously and variously offering
to the soul her experiences, determine in their meeting
all the affections of our inner status and its responses. Nature
contributes the character of the happenings and the forms of the
instruments of experience, the soul meets it by an assent to the
natural determinations of the response to these happenings or by
a will to other determination which it imposes upon the nature.
The acceptance of the instrumental ego consciousness and the
will to desire are the initial consent of the self to the lapse into the
lower ranges of experience in which it forgets its divine nature
of being; the rejection of these things, the return to free self and
the will of the divine delight in being is the liberation of the
spirit. But on the other side stand the contributions of Nature
herself to the mixed tangle, which she imposes on the soul’s
experience of her doings and makings when once that first initial
consent has been given and made the law of the whole outward
transaction. Nature’s essential contributions are two, the gunas
and the dualities. This inferior action of Nature in which we
live has certain essential qualitative modes which constitute the
whole basis of its inferiority. The constant effect of these modes
on the soul in its natural powers of mind, life and body is a dis¬
cordant and divided experience, a strife of opposites, dvandva,
a motion in all its experience and an oscillation between or a
mixture of constant pairs of contraries, of combining positives
and negatives, dualities. A complete liberation from the ego and
the will of desire must bring with it a superiority to the qualita¬
tive modes of the inferior Nature, traigunydtltya, a release from
this mixed and discordant experience, a cessation or solution of
the dual action of Nature. But on this side too there are two
kinds of freedom. A liberation from Nature in a quiescent bliss
The Liberation of the Nature
683
of the spirit is the first form of release. A farther liberation of
the Nature into a divine quality and spiritual power of world-
experience fills the supreme calm with the supreme kinetic bliss
of knowledge, power, joy and mastery. A divine unity of supreme
spirit and its supreme nature is the integral liberation.
A divine unity of supreme
spirit and its supreme nature is the integral liberation.
Nature, because she is a power of spirit, is essentially qual¬
itative in her action. One may almost say that Nature is only
the power in being and the development in action of the infinite
qualities of the spirit, anantaguna. All else belongs to her out¬
ward and more mechanical aspects; but this play of quality is
the essential thing, of which the rest is the result and mechanical
combination. Once we have set right the working of the essential
power and quality, all the rest becomes subject to the control of
the experiencing Purusha. But in the inferior nature of things the
play of infinite quality is subject to a limited measure, a divided
and conflicting working, a system of opposites and discords
between which some practical mobile system of concords has
to be found and to be kept in action; this play of concorded
discords, conflicting qualities, disparate powers and ways of
experience compelled to some just manageable, partial, mostly
precarious agreement, an unstable mutable equilibrium, is man¬
aged by a fundamental working in three qualitative modes which
conflict and combine together in all her creations. These three
modes have been given in the Sankhya system, which is gener¬
ally adopted for this purpose by all the schools of philosophic
thought and of Yoga in India, the three names, sattva, rajas
and tamasf Tamas is the principle and power of inertia; rajas is
the principle of kinesis, passion, endeavour, struggle, initiation
{arambha); sattwa the principle of assimilation, equilibrium and
harmony. The metaphysical bearing of this classification does
not concern us; but in its psychological and spiritual bearing it is
of immense practical importance, because these three principles
enter into all things, combine to give them their turn of active
nature, result, effectuation, and their unequal working in the
^ This subject has been treated in the Yoga of Works. It is restated here from the point
of view of the general type of nature and the complete liberation of the being.
684
The Yoga of Self -F erf ection
It is restated here from the point
of view of the general type of nature and the complete liberation of the being.
684
The Yoga of Self -F erf ection
soul-experience is the constituent force of our active personal¬
ity, our temperament, type of nature and cast of psychological
response to experience. All character of action and experience in
us is determined by the predominance and by the proportional
interaction of these three qualities or modes of Nature. The
soul in its personality is obliged, as it were, to run into their
moulds; mostly, too, it is controlled by them rather than has
any free control of them. The soul can only be free by rising
above and rejecting the tormented strife of their unequal action
and their insufficient concords and combinations and precarious
harmonies, whether in the sense of a complete quiescence from
the half-regulated chaos of their action or in the sense of a
superiority to this lower turn of nature and a higher control
or transformation of their working. There must be either an
emptiness of the gunas or a superiority to the gunas.
The gunas affect every part of our natural being. They have
indeed their strongest relative hold in the three different mem¬
bers of it, mind, life and body. Tamas, the principle of inertia,
is strongest in material nature and in our physical being. The
action of this principle is of two kinds, inertia of force and
inertia of knowledge. Whatever is predominantly governed by
Tamas, tends in its force to a sluggish inaction and immobility
or else to a mechanical action which it does not possess, but is
possessed by obscure forces which drive it in a mechanical round
of energy; equally in its consciousness it turns to an inconscience
or enveloped subconscience or to a reluctant, sluggish or in some
way mechanical conscious action which does not possess the idea
of its own energy, but is guided by an idea which seems external
to it or at least concealed from its active awareness. Thus the
principle of our body is in its nature inert, subconscient, inca¬
pable of anything but a mechanical and habitual self-guidance
and action: though it has like everything else a principle of
kinesis and a principle of equilibrium of its state and action,
an inherent principle of response and a secret consciousness, the
greatest portion of its rajasic motions are contributed by the life-
power and all the overt consciousness by the mental being. The
principle of rajas has its strongest hold on the vital nature. It is
The Liberation of the Nature
685
The
principle of rajas has its strongest hold on the vital nature. It is
The Liberation of the Nature
685
the Life within us that is the strongest kinetic motor power, but
the life-power in earthly beings is possessed by the force of desire,
therefore rajas turns always to action and desire; desire is the
strongest human and animal initiator of most kinesis and action,
predominant to such an extent that many consider it the father
of all action and even the originator of our being. Moreover,
rajas finding itself in a world of matter which starts from the
principle of inconscience and a mechanical driven inertia, has
to work against an immense contrary force; therefore its whole
action takes on the nature of an effort, a struggle, a besieged and
an impeded conflict for possession which is distressed in its every
step by a limiting incapacity, disappointment and suffering: even
its gains are precarious and limited and marred by the reaction
of the effort and an aftertaste of insufficiency and transience.
The principle of sattwa has its strongest hold in the mind; not
so much in the lower parts of the mind which are dominated
by the rajasic life-power, but mostly in the intelligence and the
will of the reason. Intelligence, reason, rational will are moved
by the nature of their predominant principle towards a constant
effort of assimilation, assimilation by knowledge, assimilation
by a power of understanding will, a constant effort towards
equilibrium, some stability, rule, harmony of the conflicting
elements of natural happening and experience. This satisfaction
it gets in various ways and in various degrees of acquisition.
The attainment of assimilation, equilibrium and harmony brings
with it always a relative but more or less intense and satisfying
sense of ease, happiness, mastery, security, which is other than
the troubled and vehement pleasures insecurely bestowed by the
satisfaction of rajasic desire and passion. Light and happiness
are the characteristics of the sattwic guna. The whole nature of
the embodied living mental being is determined by these three
gunas.
But these are only predominant powers in each part of our
complex system. The three qualities mingle, combine and strive
in every fibre and in every member of our intricate psychology.
The mental character is made by them, the character of our
reason, the character of our will, the character of our moral.
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The Yoga of Self -F erf ection
The mental character is made by them, the character of our
reason, the character of our will, the character of our moral.
686
The Yoga of Self -F erf ection
aesthetic, emotional, dynamic, sensational being. Tamas brings
in all the ignorance, inertia, weakness, incapacity which afflicts
our nature, a clouded reason, nescience, unintelligence, a cling¬
ing to habitual notions and mechanical ideas, the refusal to
think and know, the small mind, the closed avenues, the trotting
round of mental habit, the dark and the twilit places. Tamas
brings in the impotent will, want of faith and self-confidence and
initiative, the disinclination to act, the shrinking from endeav¬
our and aspiration, the poor and little spirit, and in our moral
and dynamic being the inertia, the cowardice, baseness, sloth,
lax subjection to small and ignoble motives, the weak yielding
to our lower nature. Tamas brings into our emotional nature
insensibility, indifference, want of sympathy and openness, the
shut soul, the callous heart, the soon spent affection and languor
of the feelings, into our aesthetic and sensational nature the
dull aesthesis, the limited range of response, the insensibility to
beauty, all that makes in man the coarse, heavy and vulgar spirit.
Rajas contributes our normal active nature with all its good
and evil; when unchastened by a sufficient element of sattwa, it
turns to egoism, self-will and violence, the perverse, obstinate
or exaggerating action of the reason, prejudice, attachment to
opinion, clinging to error, the subservience of the intelligence to
our desires and preferences and not to the truth, the fanatic or the
sectarian mind, self-will, pride, arrogance, selfishness, ambition,
lust, greed, cruelty, hatred, jealousy, the egoisms of love, all the
vices and passions, the exaggerations of the aesthesis, the mor¬
bidities and perversions of the sensational and vital being. Tamas
in its own right produces the coarse, dull and ignorant type of
human nature, rajas the vivid, restless, kinetic man, driven by the
breath of action, passion and desire. Sattwa produces a higher
type. The gifts of sattwa are the mind of reason and balance,
clarity of the disinterested truth-seeking open intelligence, a will
subordinated to the reason or guided by the ethical spirit, self-
control, equality, calm, love, sympathy, refinement, measure,
fineness of the aesthetic and emotional mind, in the sensational
being delicacy, just acceptivity, moderation and poise, a vital¬
ity subdued and governed by the mastering intelligence. The
The Liberation of the Nature
687
The
The Liberation of the Nature
687
accomplished types of the sattwic man are the philosopher, saint
and sage, of the rajasic man the statesman, warrior, forceful man
of action. But in all men there is in greater or less proportions a
mingling of the gunas, a multiple personality and in most a good
deal of shifting and alternation from the predominance of one
to the prevalence of another guna; even in the governing form
of their nature most human beings are of a mixed type. All the
colour and variety of life is made of the intricate pattern of the
weaving of the gunas.
But richness of life, even a sattwic harmony of mind and
nature does not constitute spiritual perfection. There is a relative
possible perfection, but it is a perfection of incompleteness, some
partial height, force, beauty, some measure of nobility and great¬
ness, some imposed and precariously sustained balance. There is
a relative mastery, but it is a mastery of the body by life or of the
life by mind, not a free possession of the instruments by the liber¬
ated and self-possessing spirit. The gunas have to be transcended
if we would arrive at spiritual perfection. Tamas evidently has
to be overcome, inertia and ignorance and incapacity cannot
be elements of a true perfection; but it can only be overcome
in Nature by the force of rajas aided by an increasing force
of sattwa. Rajas has to be overcome, egoism, personal desire
and self-seeking passion are not elements of the true perfection;
but it can only be overcome by force of sattwa enlightening
the being and force of tamas limiting the action. Sattwa itself
does not give the highest or the integral perfection; sattwa is
always a quality of the limited nature; sattwic knowledge is the
light of a limited mentality; sattwic will is the government of a
limited intelligent force. Moreover, sattwa cannot act by itself
in Nature, but has to rely for all action on the aid of rajas, so
that even sattwic action is always liable to the imperfections
of rajas; egoism, perplexity, inconsistency, a one-sided turn, a
limited and exaggerated will, exaggerating itself in the intensity
of its limitations, pursue the mind and action even of the saint,
philosopher and sage. There is a sattwic as well as a rajasic or
tamasic egoism, at the highest an egoism of knowledge or virtue;
but the mind’s egoism of whatever type is incompatible with
688
The Yoga of Self -F erf ection
There is a sattwic as well as a rajasic or
tamasic egoism, at the highest an egoism of knowledge or virtue;
but the mind’s egoism of whatever type is incompatible with
688
The Yoga of Self -F erf ection
liberation. All the three gunas have to be transcended. Sattwa
may bring us near to the Light, but its limited clarity falls away
from us when we enter into the luminous body of the divine
Nature.
This transcendence is usually sought by a withdrawal from
the action of the lower nature. That withdrawal brings with it a
stressing of the tendency to inaction. Sattwa when it wishes to
intensify itself, seeks to get rid of rajas and calls in the aid of the
tamasic principle of inaction; that is the reason why a certain
type of highly sattwic men live intensely in the inward being,
but hardly at all in the outward life of action, or else are there
incompetent and ineffective. The seeker of liberation goes farther
in this direction, strives by imposing an enlightened tamas on
his natural being, a tamas which by this saving enlightenment
is more of a quiescence than an incapacity, to give the sattwic
guna freedom to lose itself in the light of the spirit. A quietude
and stillness is imposed on the body, on the active life-soul of
desire and ego, on the external mind, while the sattwic nature by
stress of meditation, by an exclusive concentration of adoration,
by a will turned inward to the Supreme, strives to merge itself
in the spirit. But if this is sufficient for a quietistic release, it
is not sufficient for the freedom of an integral perfection. This
liberation depends upon inaction and is not entirely self-existent
and absolute; the moment the soul turns to action, it finds that
the activity of the nature is still the old imperfect motion. There
is a liberation of the soul from the nature which is gained by
inaction, but not a liberation of the soul in nature perfect and
self-existent whether in action or in inaction. The question then
arises whether such a liberation and perfection are possible and
what may be the condition of this perfect freedom.
The ordinary idea is that it is not possible because all action
is of the lower gunas, necessarily defective, sadosam, caused by
the motion, inequality, want of balance, unstable strife of the
gunas; but when these unequal gunas fall into perfect equilib¬
rium, all action of Nature ceases and the soul rests in its quietude.
The divine Being, we may say, may either exist in his silence or
act in Nature through her instrumentation, but in that case must
The divine Being, we may say, may either exist in his silence or
act in Nature through her instrumentation, but in that case must
The Liberation of the Nature
689
put on the appearance of her strife and imperfection. That may
be true of the ordinary deputed action of the Divine in the human
spirit with its present relations of soul to nature in an embodied
imperfect mental being, but it is not true of the divine nature of
perfection. The strife of the gunas is only a representation in the
imperfection of the lower nature; what the three gunas stand for
are three essential powers of the Divine which are not merely
existent in a perfect equilibrium of quietude, but unified in a
perfect consensus of divine action. Tamas in the spiritual being
becomes a divine calm, which is not an inertia and incapacity of
action, but a perfect power, sakti, holding in itself all its capacity
and capable of controlling and subjecting to the law of calm
even the most stupendous and enormous activity: rajas becomes
a self-effecting initiating sheer Will of the spirit, which is not
desire, endeavour, striving passion, but the same perfect power
of being, sakti, capable of an infinite, imperturbable and blissful
action. Sattwa becomes not the modified mental light, prakdsa,
but the self-existent light of the divine being, jyotih, which is the
soul of the perfect power of being and illumines in their unity
the divine quietude and the divine will of action. The ordinary
liberation gets the still divine light in the divine quietude, but
the integral perfection will aim at this greater triune unity.
When this liberation of the nature comes, there is a liber¬
ation also of all the spiritual sense of the dualities of Nature.
In the lower nature the dualities are the inevitable effect of the
play of the gunas on the soul affected by the formations of
the sattwic, rajasic and tamasic ego. The knot of this duality
is an ignorance which is unable to seize on the spiritual truth
of things and concentrates on the imperfect appearances, but
meets them not with a mastery of their inner truth, but with a
strife and a shifting balance of attraction and repulsion, capacity
and incapacity, liking and disliking, pleasure and pain, joy and
sorrow, acceptance and repugnance; all life is represented to us
as a tangle of these things, of the pleasant and the unpleasant, the
beautiful and the unbeautiful, truth and falsehood, fortune and
misfortune, success and failure, good and evil, the inextricable
double web of Nature. Attachment to its likings and repugnances
Attachment to its likings and repugnances
690
The Yoga of Self -F erf ection
keeps the soul bound in this web of good and evil, joys and
sorrows. The seeker of liberation gets rid of attachment, throws
away from his soul the dualities, but as the dualities appear to be
the whole act, stuff and frame of life, this release would seem to
be most easily compassed by a withdrawal from life, whether a
physical withdrawal, so far as that is possible while in the body,
or an inner retirement, a refusal of sanction, a liberating distaste,
vairagya, for the whole action of Nature. There is a separation
of the soul from Nature. Then the soul watches seated above
and unmoved, udastna, the strife of the gunas in the natural
being and regards as an impassive witness the pleasure and pain
of the mind and body. Or it is able to impose its indifference
even on the outer mind and watches with the impartial calm or
the impartial joy of the detached spectator the universal action
in which it has no longer an active inner participation. The end
of this movement is the rejection of birth and a departure into
the silent self, moksa.
But this rejection is not the last possible word of liberation.
The integral liberation comes when this passion for release,
mumuksutva, founded on distaste or vairagya, is itself tran¬
scended; the soul is then liberated both from attachment to the
lower action of nature and from all repugnance to the cosmic
action of the Divine. This liberation gets its completeness when
the spiritual gnosis can act with a supramental knowledge and
reception of the action of Nature and a supramental luminous
will in initiation. The gnosis discovers the spiritual sense in Na¬
ture, God in things, the soul of good in all things that have
the contrary appearance; that soul is delivered in them and out
of them, the perversions of the imperfect or contrary forms fall
away or are transformed into their higher divine truth, — even as
the gunas go back to their divine principles, — and the spirit lives
in a universal, infinite and absolute Truth, Good, Beauty, Bliss
which is the supramental or ideal divine Nature. The liberation
of the Nature becomes one with the liberation of the spirit, and
there is founded in the integral freedom the integral perfection.
Chapter X
The Elements of Perfection
The liberation
of the Nature becomes one with the liberation of the spirit, and
there is founded in the integral freedom the integral perfection.
Chapter X
The Elements of Perfection
WHEN the self is purified of the wrong and confused
action of the instrumental Nature and liberated into
its self-existent being, consciousness, power and bliss
and the Nature itself liberated from the tangle of this lower
action of the struggling gunas and the dualities into the high
truth of the divine calm and the divine action, then spiritual
perfection becomes possible. Purification and freedom are the in¬
dispensable antecedents of perfection. A spiritual self-perfection
can only mean a growing into oneness with the nature of divine
being, and therefore according to our conception of divine being
will be the aim, effort and method of our seeking after this
perfection. To the Mayavadin the highest or rather the only real
truth of being is the impassive, impersonal, self-aware Absolute
and therefore to grow into an impassive calm, impersonality
and pure self-awareness of spirit is his idea of perfection and a
rejection of cosmic and individual being and a settling into silent
self-knowledge is his way. To the Buddhist for whom the highest
truth is a negation of being, a recognition of the impermanence
and sorrow of being and the disastrous nullity of desire and a
dissolution of egoism, of the upholding associations of the Idea
and the successions of Karma are the perfect way. Other ideas
of the Highest are less negative; each according to its own idea
leads towards some likeness to the Divine, sadrsya, and each
finds its own way, such as the love and worship of the Bhakta
and the growing into the likeness of the Divine by love. But
for the integral Yoga perfection will mean a divine spirit and a
divine nature which will admit of a divine relation and action
in the world; it will mean also in its entirety a divinising of the
whole nature, a rejection of all its wrong knots of being and
action, but no rejection of any part of our being or of any field
of our action. The approach to perfection must be therefore a
692
The Yoga of Self -F erf ection
The approach to perfection must be therefore a
692
The Yoga of Self -F erf ection
large and complex movement and its results and workings will
have an infinite and varied scope. We must fix in order to find a
clue and method on certain essential and fundamental elements
and requisites of perfection, siddhi; for if these are secured, all
the rest will be found to be only their natural development or
particular working. We may cast these elements into six divi¬
sions, interdependent on each other to a great extent but still in
a certain way naturally successive in their order of attainment.
The movement will start from a basic equality of the soul and
mount to an ideal action of the Divine through our perfected
being in the largeness of the Brahmic unity.
The first necessity is some fundamental poise of the soul
both in its essential and its natural being regarding and meeting
the things, impacts and workings of Nature. This poise we shall
arrive at by growing into a perfect equality, samatd. The self,
spirit or Brahman is one in all and therefore one to all; it is, as is
said in the Gita which has developed fully this idea of equality
and indicated its experience on at least one side of equality, the
equal Brahman, samam brahma-, the Gita even goes so far in one
passage as to identify equality and yoga, samatvam yoga ucyate.
That is to say, equality is the sign of unity with the Brahman,
of becoming Brahman, of growing into an undisturbed spiri¬
tual poise of being in the Infinite. Its importance can hardly be
exaggerated; for it is the sign of our having passed beyond the
egoistic determinations of our nature, of our having conquered
our enslaved response to the dualities, of our having transcended
the shifting turmoil of the gunas, of our having entered into the
calm and peace of liberation. Equality is a term of consciousness
which brings into the whole of our being and nature the eternal
tranquillity of the Infinite. Moreover, it is the condition of a
securely and perfectly divine action; the security and largeness of
the cosmic action of the Infinite is based upon and never breaks
down or forfeits its eternal tranquillity. That too must be the
character of the perfect spiritual action; to be equal and one to
all things in spirit, understanding, mind, heart and natural con¬
sciousness, — even in the most physical consciousness, — and to
make all their workings, whatever their outward adaptation to
The Elements of Perfection
693
the thing to be done, always and imminuably full of the divine
equality and calm must be its inmost principle. That may be said
to be the passive or basic, the fundamental and receptive side of
equality, but there is also an active and possessive side, an equal
bliss which can only come when the peace of equality is founded
and which is the beatific flower of its fullness.
The next necessity of perfection is to raise all the active parts
of the human nature to that highest condition and working pitch
of their power and capacity, sakti, at which they become capa¬
ble of being divinised into true instruments of the free, perfect,
spiritual and divine action. For practical purposes we may take
the understanding, the heart, the prana and the body as the four
members of our nature which have thus to be prepared, and
we have to find the constituent terms of their perfection. Also
there is the dynamical force in us [virya) of the temperament,
character and soul nature, svabhava, which makes the power
of our members effective in action and gives them their type
and direction; this has to be freed from its limitations, enlarged,
rounded so that the whole manhood in us may become the basis
of a divine manhood, when the Purusha, the real Man in us, the
divine Soul, shall act fully in this human instrument and shine
fully through this human vessel. To divinise the perfected nature
we have to call in the divine Power or Shakti to replace our
limited human energy so that this may be shaped into the image
of and filled with the force of a greater infinite energy, daivi
prakrti, bhdgavati sakti. This perfection will grow in the measure
in which we can surrender ourselves, first, to the guidance and
then to the direct action of that Power and of the Master of our
being and our works to whom it belongs, and for this purpose
faith is the essential, faith is the great motor-power of our being
in our aspirations to perfection, — here, a faith in God and the
Shakti which shall begin in the heart and understanding, but
shall take possession of all our nature, all its consciousness, all
its dynamic motive-force. These four things are the essentials of
this second element of perfection, the full powers of the mem¬
bers of the instrumental nature, the perfected dynamis of the
soul nature, the assumption of them into the action of the divine
694
The Yoga of Self -F erf ection
Power, and a perfect faith in all our members to call and support
that assumption, sakti, virya, daivi prakrti, sraddha.
But so long as this development takes place only on the
highest level of our normal nature, we may have a reflected and
limited image of perfection translated into the lower terms of the
soul in mind, life and body, but not the possession of the divine
perfection in the highest terms possible to us of the divine Idea
and its Power. That is to be found beyond these lower principles
in the supramental gnosis; therefore the next step of perfection
will be the evolution of the mental into the gnostic being. This
evolution is effected by a breaking beyond the mental limitation,
a stride upward into the next higher plane or region of our
being hidden from us at present by the shining lid of the mental
reflections and a conversion of all that we are into the terms of
this greater consciousness. In the gnosis itself, vijhdna, there are
several gradations which open at their highest into the full and
infinite Ananda. The gnosis once effectively called into action
will progressively take up all the terms of intelligence, will, sense-
mind, heart, the vital and sensational being and translate them
by a luminous and harmonising conversion into a unity of the
truth, power and delight of a divine existence. It will lift into
that light and force and convert into their own highest sense
our whole intellectual, volitional, dynamic, ethical, aesthetic,
sensational, vital and physical being. It has the power also of
overcoming physical limitations and developing a more perfect
and divinely instrumental body. Its light opens up the fields of
the superconscient and darts its rays and pours its luminous
flood into the subconscient and enlightens its obscure hints and
withheld secrets. It admits us to a greater light of the Infinite than
is reflected in the paler luminosity even of the highest mentality.
While it perfects the individual soul and nature in the sense of
a diviner existence and makes a full harmony of the diversities
of our being, it founds all its action upon the Unity from which
it proceeds and takes up everything into that Unity. Personality
and impersonality, the two eternal aspects of existence, are made
one by its action in the spiritual being and Nature body of the
Purushottama.
The Elements of Perfection
695
Personality
and impersonality, the two eternal aspects of existence, are made
one by its action in the spiritual being and Nature body of the
Purushottama.
The Elements of Perfection
695
The gnostic perfection, spiritual in its nature, is to be ac¬
complished here in the body and takes life in the physical world
as one of its fields, even though the gnosis opens to us possession
of planes and worlds beyond the material universe. The physical
body is therefore a basis of action, pratistha, which cannot be
despised, neglected or excluded from the spiritual evolution: a
perfection of the body as the outer instrument of a complete
divine living on earth will be necessarily a part of the gnostic
conversion. The change will be effected by bringing in the law of
the gnostic Purusha, vijhdnamaya purusa, and of that into which
it opens, the Anandamaya, into the physical consciousness and
its members. Pushed to its highest conclusion this movement
brings in a spiritualising and illumination of the whole physical
consciousness and a divinising of the law of the body. For behind
the gross physical sheath of this materially visible and sensible
frame there is subliminally supporting it and discoverable by a
finer subtle consciousness a subtle body of the mental being and
a spiritual or causal body of the gnostic and bliss soul in which
all the perfection of a spiritual embodiment is to be found, a
yet unmanifested divine law of the body. Most of the physical
siddhis acquired by certain Yogins are brought about by some
opening up of the law of the subtle or a calling down of some¬
thing of the law of the spiritual body. The ordinary method is the
opening up of the cakras by the physical processes of Hathayoga
(of which something is also included in the Rajayoga) or by
the methods of the Tantric discipline. But while these may be
optionally used at certain stages by the integral Yoga, they are
not indispensable; for here the reliance is on the power of the
higher being to change the lower existence, a working is chosen
mainly from above downward and not the opposite way, and
therefore the development of the superior power of the gnosis
will be awaited as the instrumentative change in this part of the
Yoga.
There will remain, because it will then only be entirely pos¬
sible, the perfect action and enjoyment of being on the gnostic
basis. The Purusha enters into cosmic manifestation for the
variations of his infinite existence, for knowledge, action and
696
The Yoga of Self -F erf ection
The Purusha enters into cosmic manifestation for the
variations of his infinite existence, for knowledge, action and
696
The Yoga of Self -F erf ection
enjoyment; the gnosis brings the fullness of spiritual knowledge
and it will found on that the divine action and cast the enjoyment
of world and being into the law of the truth, the freedom and
the perfection of the spirit. But neither action nor enjoyment
will be the lower action of the gunas and consequent egoistic
enjoyment mostly of the satisfaction of rajasic desire which is
our present way of living. Whatever desire will remain, if that
name be given, will be the divine desire, the will to delight of the
Purusha enjoying in his freedom and perfection the action of the
perfected Prakriti and all her members. The Prakrit! will take
up the whole nature into the law of her higher divine truth and
act in that law offering up the universal enjoyment of her action
and being to the Anandamaya Ishwara, the Lord of existence
and works and Spirit of bliss, who presides over and governs
her workings. The individual soul will be the channel of this
action and offering, and it will enjoy at once its oneness with
the Ishwara and its oneness with the Prakriti and will enjoy all
relations with Infinite and finite, with God and the universe and
beings in the universe in the highest terms of the union of the
universal Purusha and Prakriti.
All the gnostic evolution opens up into the divine principle
of Ananda, which is the foundation of the fullness of spiritual
being, consciousness and bliss of Sachchidananda or eternal
Brahman. Possessed at first by reflection in the mental experi¬
ence, it will be possessed afterwards with a greater fullness and
directness in the massed and luminous consciousness, cidghana,
which comes by the gnosis. The Siddha or perfected soul will live
in union with the Purushottama in this Brahmic consciousness,
he will be conscious in the Brahman that is the All, sarvam
brahma, in the Brahman infinite in being and infinite in qual¬
ity, anantam brahma, in Brahman as self-existent consciousness
and universal knowledge, jhdnam brahma, in Brahman as the
self-existent bliss and its universal delight of being, anandam
brahma. He will experience all the universe as the manifestation
of the One, all quality and action as the play of his universal
and infinite energy, all knowledge and conscious experience as
the outflowing of that consciousness, and all in the terms of that
The Elements of Perfection
697
one Ananda. His physical being will be one with all material
Nature, his vital being with the life of the universe, his mind
with the cosmic mind, his spiritual knowledge and will with
the divine knowledge and will both in itself and as it pours
itself through these channels, his spirit with the one spirit in
all beings. All the variety of cosmic existence will be changed
to him in that unity and revealed in the secret of its spiritual
significance. For in this spiritual bliss and being he will be one
with That which is the origin and continent and inhabitant and
spirit and constituting power of all existence. This will be the
highest reach of self-perfection.
Chapter XI
The Perfection of Equality
The very first necessity for spiritual perfection is a per¬
fect equality. Perfection in the sense in which we use it
in Yoga, means a growth out of a lower undivine into a
higher divine nature. In terms of knowledge it is a putting on the
being of the higher self and a casting away of the darker bro¬
ken lower self or a transforming of our imperfect state into the
rounded luminous fullness of our real and spiritual personality.
In terms of devotion and adoration it is a growing into a likeness
of the nature or the law of the being of the Divine, to be united
with whom we aspire, — for if there is not this likeness, this
oneness of the law of the being, unity between that transcend¬
ing and universal and this individual spirit is not possible. The
supreme divine nature is founded on equality. This affirmation
is true of it whether we look on the Supreme Being as a pure
silent Self and Spirit or as the divine Master of cosmic existence.
The pure Self is equal, unmoved, the witness in an impartial
peace of all the happenings and relations of cosmic existence.
While it is not averse to them, — aversion is not equality, nor,
if that were the attitude of the Self to cosmic existence, could
the universe come at all into being or proceed upon its cycles, —
a detachment, the calm of an equal regard, a superiority to the
reactions which trouble and are the disabling weakness of the
soul involved in outward nature, are the very substance of the
silent Infinite’s purity and the condition of its impartial assent
and support to the many-sided movement of the universe. But
in that power too of the Supreme which governs and develops
these motions, the same equality is a basic condition.
But
in that power too of the Supreme which governs and develops
these motions, the same equality is a basic condition.
The Master of things cannot be affected or troubled by the
reactions of things; if he were, he would be subject to them, not
master, not free to develop them according to his sovereign will
and wisdom and according to the inner truth and necessity of
The Perfection of Equality
699
what is behind their relations, but obliged rather to act according
to the claim of temporary accident and phenomenon. The truth
of all things is in the calm of their depths, not in the shifting
inconstant wave form on the surface. The supreme conscious
Being in his divine knowledge and will and love governs their
evolution — to our ignorance so often a cruel confusion and dis¬
traction — from these depths and is not troubled by the clamour
of the surface. The divine nature does not share in our gropings
and our passions; when we speak of the divine wrath or favour
or of God suffering in man, we are using a human language
which mistranslates the inner significance of the movement we
characterise. We see something of the real truth of them when we
rise out of the phenomenal mind into the heights of the spiritual
being. For then we perceive that whether in the silence of self or
in its action in the cosmos, the Divine is always Sachchidananda,
an infinite existence, an infinite consciousness and self-founded
power of conscious being, an infinite bliss in all his existence.
We ourselves begin to dwell in an equal light, strength, joy —
the psychological rendering of the divine knowledge, will and
delight in self and things which are the active universal outpour¬
ings from those infinite sources. In the strength of that light,
power and joy a secret self and spirit within us accepts and
transforms always into food of its perfect experience the dual
letters of the mind’s transcript of life, and if there were not the
hidden greater existence even now within us, we could not bear
the pressure of the universal force or subsist in this great and
dangerous world. A perfect equality of our spirit and nature is
a means by which we can move back from the troubled and
ignorant outer consciousness into this inner kingdom of heaven
and possess the spirit’s eternal kingdoms, rdjyam samrddham, of
greatness, joy and peace. That self-elevation to the divine nature
is the complete fruit and the whole occasion of the discipline of
equality demanded from us by the self-perfecting aim in Yoga.
That self-elevation to the divine nature
is the complete fruit and the whole occasion of the discipline of
equality demanded from us by the self-perfecting aim in Yoga.
A perfect equality and peace of the soul is indispensable to
change the whole substance of our being into substance of the
self out of its present stuff of troubled mentality. It is equally
indispensable if we aspire to replace our present confused and
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ignorant action by the self-possessed and luminous works of a
free spirit governing its nature and in tune with universal being.
A divine action or even a perfect human action is impossible if we
have not equality of spirit and an equality in the motive-forces
of our nature. The Divine is equal to all, an impartial sustainer
of his universe, who views all with equal eyes, assents to the
law of developing being which he has brought out of the depths
of his existence, tolerates what has to be tolerated, depresses
what has to be depressed, raises what has to be raised, creates,
sustains and destroys with a perfect and equal understanding
of all causes and results and working out of the spiritual and
pragmatic meaning of all phenomena. God does not create in
obedience to any troubled passion of desire or maintain and
preserve through an attachment of partial preference or destroy
in a fury of wrath, disgust or aversion. The Divine deals with
great and small, just and unjust, ignorant and wise as the Self
of all who, deeply intimate and one with the being, leads all
according to their nature and need with a perfect understanding,
power and justness of proportion. But through it all he moves
things according to his large aim in the cycles and draws the
soul upward in the evolution through its apparent progress and
retrogression towards the higher and ever higher development
which is the sense of the cosmic urge. The self-perfecting indi¬
vidual who seeks to be one in will with the Divine and make his
nature an instrument of the divine purpose, must enlarge himself
out of the egoistic and partial views and motives of the human
ignorance and mould himself into an image of this supreme
equality.
This equal poise in action is especially necessary for the
sadhaka of the integral Yoga. First, he must acquire that equal
assent and understanding which will respond to the law of the
divine action without trying to impose on it a partial will and
the violent claim of a personal aspiration. A wise impersonality,
a quiescent equality, a universality which sees all things as the
manifestations of the Divine, the one Existence, is not angry,
troubled, impatient with the way of things or on the other hand
excited, over-eager and precipitate, but sees that the law must be
The Perfection of Equality
701
obeyed and the pace of time respected, observes and understands
with sympathy the actuality of things and beings, but looks also
behind the present appearance to their inner significances and
forward to the unrolling of their divine possibilities, is the first
thing demanded of those who would do works as the perfect
instruments of the Divine. But this impersonal acquiescence is
only the basis. Man is the instrument of an evolution which
wears at first the mask of a struggle, but grows more and more
into its truer and deeper sense of a constant wise adjustment
and must take on in a rising scale the deepest truth and signifi¬
cance — now only underlying the adjustment and struggle — of
a universal harmony. The perfected human soul must always be
an instrument for the hastening of the ways of this evolution.
For that a divine power acting with the royalty of the divine
will in it must be in whatever degree present in the nature. But
to be accomplished and permanent, steadfast in action, truly
divine, it has to proceed on the basis of a spiritual equality, a
calm, impersonal and equal self-identification with all beings,
an understanding of all energies. The Divine acts with a mighty
power in the myriad workings of the universe, but with the
supporting light and force of an imperturbable oneness, freedom
and peace. That must be the type of the perfected soul’s divine
works. And equality is the condition of the being which makes
possible this changed spirit in the action.
That must be the type of the perfected soul’s divine
works. And equality is the condition of the being which makes
possible this changed spirit in the action.
But even a human perfection cannot dispense with equality
as one of its chief elements and even its essential atmosphere.
The aim of a human perfection must include, if it is to deserve
the name, two things, self-mastery and a mastery of the sur¬
roundings; it must seek for them in the greatest degree of these
powers which is at all attainable by our human nature. Man’s
urge of self-perfection is to be, in the ancient language, svardt
and samrdt, self-ruler and king. But to be self-ruler is not possible
for him if he is subject to the attack of the lower nature, to the
turbulence of grief and joy, to the violent touches of pleasure
and pain, to the tumult of his emotions and passions, to the
bondage of his personal likings and dislikings, to the strong
chains of desire and attachment, to the narrowness of a personal
702
The Yoga of Self -F erf ection
and emotionally preferential judgment and opinion, to all the
hundred touches of his egoism and its pursuing stamp on his
thought, feeling and action. All these things are the slavery to
the lower self which the greater “I” in man must put under his
feet if he is to be king of his own nature. To surmount them is the
condition of self-rule; but of that surmounting again equality is
the condition and the essence of the movement. To be quite free
from all these things, — if possible, or at least to be master of and
superior to them, — is equality. Farther, one who is not self-ruler,
cannot be master of his surroundings. The knowledge, the will,
the harmony which is necessary for this outward mastery, can
come only as a crown of the inward conquest. It belongs to the
self-possessing soul and mind which follows with a disinterested
equality the Truth, the Right, the universal Largeness to which
alone this mastery is possible, — following always the great ideal
they present to our imperfection while it understands and makes
a full allowance too for all that seems to conflict with them and
stand in the way of their manifestation. This rule is true even on
the levels of our actual human mentality, where we can only get
a limited perfection. But the ideal of Yoga takes up this aim of
Swarajya and Samrajya and puts it on the larger spiritual basis.
There it gets its full power, opens to the diviner degrees of the
spirit; for it is by oneness with the Infinite, by a spiritual power
acting upon finite things, that some highest integral perfection
of our being and nature finds its own native foundation.
A perfect equality not only of the self, but in the nature is a
condition of the Yoga of self-perfection. The first obvious step
to it will be the conquest of our emotional and vital being, for
here are the sources of greatest trouble, the most rampant forces
of inequality and subjection, the most insistent claim of our
imperfection. The equality of these parts of our nature comes
by purification and freedom. We might say that equality is the
very sign of liberation. To be free from the domination of the
urge of vital desire and the stormy mastery of the soul by the
passions is to have a calm and equal heart and a life-principle
governed by the large and even view of a universal spirit. Desire
is the impurity of the Prana, the life-principle, and its chain
The Perfection of Equality
703
Desire
is the impurity of the Prana, the life-principle, and its chain
The Perfection of Equality
703
of bondage. A free Prana means a content and satisfied life-
soul which fronts the contact of outward things without desire
and receives them with an equal response; delivered, uplifted
above the servile duality of liking and disliking, indifferent to
the urgings of pleasure and pain, not excited by the pleasant, not
troubled and overpowered by the unpleasant, not clinging with
attachment to the touches it prefers or violently repelling those
for which it has an aversion, it will be opened to a greater system
of values of experience. All that comes to it from the world with
menace or with solicitation, it will refer to the higher principles,
to a reason and heart in touch with or changed by the light and
calm joy of the spirit. Thus quieted, mastered by the spirit and
no longer trying to impose its own mastery on the deeper and
finer soul in us, this life-soul will be itself spiritualised and work
as a clear and noble instrument of the diviner dealings of the
spirit with things. There is no question here of an ascetic killing
of the life-impulse and its native utilities and functions; not its
killing is demanded, but its transformation. The function of the
Prana is enjoyment, but the real enjoyment of existence is an
inward spiritual Ananda, not partial and troubled like that of
our vital, emotional or mental pleasure, degraded as they are
now by the predominance of the physical mind, but universal,
profound, a massed concentration of spiritual bliss possessed in
a calm ecstasy of self and all existence. Possession is its function,
by possession comes the soul’s enjoyment of things, but this is
the real possession, a thing large and inward, not dependent on
the outward seizing which makes us subject to what we seize. All
outward possession and enjoyment will be only an occasion of
a satisfied and equal play of the spiritual Ananda with the forms
and phenomena of its own world-being. The egoistic possession,
the making things our own in the sense of the ego’s claim on God
and beings and the world, parigraha, must be renounced in order
that this greater thing, this large, universal and perfect life, may
come. Tyaktena bhunjithah, by renouncing the egoistic sense of
desire and possession, the soul enjoys divinely its self and the
universe.
A free heart is similarly a heart delivered from the gusts and
704
The Yoga of Self -F erf ection
Tyaktena bhunjithah, by renouncing the egoistic sense of
desire and possession, the soul enjoys divinely its self and the
universe.
A free heart is similarly a heart delivered from the gusts and
704
The Yoga of Self -F erf ection
storms of the affections and the passions; the assailing touch
of grief, wrath, hatred, fear, inequality of love, trouble of joy,
pain of sorrow fall away from the equal heart, and leave it
a thing large, calm, equal, luminous, divine. These things are
not incumbent on the essential nature of our being, but the
creations of the present make of our outward active mental
and vital nature and its transactions with its surroundings. The
ego-sense which induces us to act as separate beings who make
their isolated claim and experience the test of the values of the
universe, is responsible for these aberrations. When we live in
unity with the Divine in ourselves and the spirit of the universe,
these imperfections fall away from us and disappear in the calm
and equal strength and delight of the inner spiritual existence.
Always that is within us and transforms the outward touches
before they reach it by a passage through a subliminal psychic
soul in us which is the hidden instrument of its delight of being.
By equality of the heart we get away from the troubled desire-
soul on the surface, open the gates of this profounder being,
bring out its responses and impose their true divine values on
all that solicits our emotional being. A free, happy, equal and
all-embracing heart of spiritual feeling is the outcome of this
perfection.
In this perfection too there is no question of a severe as¬
cetic insensibility, an aloof spiritual indifference or a strained
rugged austerity of self-suppression. This is not a killing of the
emotional nature but a transformation. All that presents itself
here in our outward nature in perverse or imperfect forms has
a significance and utility which come out when we get back to
the greater truth of divine being. Love will be not destroyed,
but perfected, enlarged to its widest capacity, deepened to its
spiritual rapture, the love of God, the love of man, the love of
all things as ourselves and as beings and powers of the Divine;
a large, universal love, not at all incapable of various relation,
will replace the clamant, egoistic, self-regarding love of little joys
and griefs and insistent demands afflicted with all the chequered
pattern of angers and jealousies and satisfactions, rushings to
unity and movements of fatigue, divorce and separation on
The Perfection of Equality
705
which we now place so high a value. Grief will cease to exist,
but a universal, an equal love and sympathy will take its place,
not a suffering sympathy, but a power which, itself delivered, is
strong to sustain, to help, to liberate. To the free spirit wrath
and hatred are impossible, but not the strong Rudra energy of
the Divine which can battle without hatred and destroy without
wrath because all the time aware of the things it destroys as
parts of itself, its own manifestations and unaltered therefore in
its sympathy and understanding of those in whom are embodied
these manifestations. All our emotional nature will undergo this
high liberating transformation; but in order that it may do so, a
perfect equality is the effective condition.
The same equality must be brought into the rest of our
being. Our whole dynamic being is acting under the influence
of unequal impulses, the manifestations of the lower ignorant
nature. These urgings we obey or partially control or place on
them the changing and modifying influence of our reason, our re¬
fining aesthetic sense and mind and regulating ethical notions. A
tangled strain of right and wrong, of useful and harmful, harmo¬
nious or disordered activity is the mixed result of our endeavour,
a shifting standard of human reason and unreason, virtue and
vice, honour and dishonour, the noble and the ignoble, things
approved and things disapproved of men, much trouble of self¬
approbation and disapprobation or of self-righteousness and
disgust, remorse, shame and moral depression. These things are
no doubt very necessary at present for our spiritual evolution.
But the seeker of a greater perfection will draw back from all
these dualities, regard them with an equal eye and arrive through
equality at an impartial and universal action of the dynamic
Tapas, spiritual force, in which his own force and will are turned
into pure and just instruments of a greater calm secret of divine
working. The ordinary mental standards will be exceeded on
the basis of this dynamic equality. The eye of his will must look
beyond to a purity of divine being, a motive of divine will-power
guided by divine knowledge of which his perfected nature will
be the engine, yantra. That must remain impossible in entirety as
long as the dynamic ego with its subservience to the emotional
706
The Yoga of Self -F erf ection
That must remain impossible in entirety as
long as the dynamic ego with its subservience to the emotional
706
The Yoga of Self -F erf ection
and vital impulses and the preferences of the personal judgment
interferes in his action. A perfect equality of the will is the power
which dissolves these knots of the lower impulsion to works.
This equality will not respond to the lower impulses, but watch
for a greater seeing impulsion from the Light above the mind,
and will not judge and govern with the intellectual judgment,
but wait for enlightenment and direction from a superior plane
of vision. As it mounts upward to the supramental being and
widens inward to the spiritual largeness, the dynamic nature will
be transformed, spiritualised like the emotional and pranic, and
grow into a power of the divine nature. There will be plenty
of stumblings and errors and imperfections of adjustment of the
instruments to their new working, but the increasingly equal soul
will not be troubled overmuch or grieve at these things, since,
delivered to the guidance of the Light and Power within self and
above mind, it will proceed on its way with a firm assurance
and await with growing calm the vicissitudes and completion of
the process of transformation. The promise of the Divine Being
in the Gita will be the anchor of its resolution, “Abandon all
dharmas and take refuge in Me alone; I will deliver thee from
all sin and evil; do not grieve.”
The equality of the thinking mind will be a part and a
very important part of the perfection of the instruments in the
nature. Our present attractive self-justifying attachment to our
intellectual preferences, our judgments, opinions, imaginations,
limiting associations of the memory which makes the basis of
our mentality, to the current repetitions of our habitual mind,
to the insistences of our pragmatic mind, to the limitations
even of our intellectual truth-mind, must go the way of other
attachments and yield to the impartiality of an equal vision.
The equal thought-mind will look on knowledge and ignorance
and on truth and error, those dualities created by our limited
nature of consciousness and the partiality of our intellect and
its little stock of reasonings and intuitions, accept them both
without being bound to either twine of the skein and await a
luminous transcendence. In ignorance it will see a knowledge
which is imprisoned and seeks or waits for delivery, in error a
The Perfection of Equality
707
In ignorance it will see a knowledge
which is imprisoned and seeks or waits for delivery, in error a
The Perfection of Equality
707
truth at work which has lost itself or got thrown by the groping
mind into misleading forms. On the other side it will not hold
itself bound and limited by its knowledge or forbidden by it
to proceed to fresh illumination, nor lay too fierce a grasp on
truth, even when using it to the full, or tyrannously chain it to
its present formulations. This perfect equality of the thinking
mind is indispensable because the objective of this progress is
the greater light which belongs to a higher plane of spiritual
cognizance. This equality is the most delicate and difficult of all,
the least practised by the human mind; its perfection is impos¬
sible so long as the supramental light does not fall fully on the
upward looking mentality. But an increasing will to equality in
the intelligence is needed, before that light can work freely upon
the mental substance. This too is not an abnegation of the seek¬
ings and cosmic purposes of the intelligence, not an indifference
or impartial scepticism, nor yet a stilling of all thought in the
silence of the Ineffable. A stilling of the mental thought may be
part of the discipline, when the object is to free the mind from
its own partial workings, in order that it may become an equal
channel of a higher light and knowledge; but there must also be
a transformation of the mental substance; otherwise the higher
light cannot assume full possession and a compelling shape for
the ordered works of the divine consciousness in the human
being. The silence of the Ineffable is a truth of divine being, but
the Word which proceeds from that silence is also a truth, and it
is this Word which has to be given a body in the conscious form
of the nature.
But, finally, all this equalisation of the nature is a prepara¬
tion for the highest spiritual equality to take possession of the
whole being and make a pervading atmosphere in which the
light, power and joy of the Divine can manifest itself in man
amid an increasing fullness. That equality is the eternal equality
of Sachchidananda. It is an equality of the infinite being which
is self-existent, an equality of the eternal spirit, but it will mould
into its own mould the mind, heart, will, life, physical being. It
is an equality of the infinite spiritual consciousness which will
contain and base the blissful flowing and satisfied waves of a
708
The Yoga of Self -F erf ection
It
is an equality of the infinite spiritual consciousness which will
contain and base the blissful flowing and satisfied waves of a
708
The Yoga of Self -F erf ection
divine knowledge. It is an equality of the divine Tapas which
will initiate a luminous action of the divine will in all the nature.
It is an equality of the divine Ananda which will found the play
of a divine universal delight, universal love and an illimitable
aesthesis of universal beauty. The ideal equal peace and calm of
the Infinite will be the wide ether of our perfected being, but the
ideal, equal and perfect action of the Infinite through the nature
working on the relations of the universe will be the untroubled
outpouring of its power in our being. This is the meaning of
equality in the terms of the integral Yoga.
Chapter XII
The Way of Equality
IT WILL appear from the description of the complete and per¬
fect equality that this equality has two sides. It must therefore
be arrived at by two successive movements. One will liberate
us from the action of the lower nature and admit us to the calm
peace of the divine being; the other will liberate us into the full
being and power of the higher nature and admit us to the equal
poise and universality of a divine and infinite knowledge, will
of action, Ananda. The first may be described as a passive or
negative equality, an equality of reception which fronts impas¬
sively the impacts and phenomena of existence and negates the
dualities of the appearances and reactions which they impose on
us. The second is an active, a positive equality which accepts the
phenomena of existence, but only as the manifestation of the one
divine being and with an equal response to them which comes
from the divine nature in us and transforms them into its hidden
values. The first lives in the peace of the one Brahman and puts
away from it the nature of the active Ignorance. The second lives
in that peace, but also in the Ananda of the Divine and imposes
on the life of the soul in nature the signs of the divine knowledge,
power and bliss of being. It is this double orientation united by
the common principle which will determine the movement of
equality in the integral Yoga.
It is this double orientation united by
the common principle which will determine the movement of
equality in the integral Yoga.
The effort towards a passive or purely receptive equality
may start from three different principles or attitudes which all
lead to the same result and ultimate consequence, — endurance,
indifference and submission. The principle of endurance relies
on the strength of the spirit within us to bear all the contacts,
impacts, suggestions of this phenomenal Nature that besieges
us on every side without being overborne by them and com¬
pelled to bear their emotional, sensational, dynamic, intellectual
reactions. The outer mind in the lower nature has not this
710
The Yoga of Self -F erf ection
The outer mind in the lower nature has not this
710
The Yoga of Self -F erf ection
strength. Its strength is that of a limited force of consciousness
which has to do the best it can with all that comes in upon it or
besieges it from the greater whirl of consciousness and energy
which environs it on this plane of existence. That it can maintain
itself at all and affirm its individual being in the universe, is due
indeed to the strength of the spirit within it, but it cannot bring
forward the whole of that strength or the infinity of that force
to meet the attacks of life; if it could, it would be at once the
equal and master of its world. In fact, it has to manage as it
can. It meets certain impacts and is able to assimilate, equate
or master them partially or completely, for a time or wholly,
and then it has in that degree the emotional and sensational
reactions of joy, pleasure, satisfaction, liking, love, etc., or the
intellectual and mental reactions of acceptance, approval, un¬
derstanding, knowledge, preference, and on these its will seizes
with attraction, desire, the attempt to prolong, to repeat, to
create, to possess, to make them the pleasurable habit of its
life. Other impacts it meets, but finds them too strong for it or
too dissimilar and discordant or too weak to give it satisfaction;
these are things which it cannot bear or cannot equate with itself
or cannot assimilate, and it is obliged to give to them reactions
of grief, pain, discomfort, dissatisfaction, disliking, disapproval,
rejection, inability to understand or know, refusal of admission.
Against them it seeks to protect itself, to escape from them, to
avoid or minimise their recurrence; it has with regard to them
movements of fear, anger, shrinking, horror, aversion, disgust,
shame, would gladly be delivered from them, but it cannot get
away from them, for it is bound to and even invites their causes
and therefore the results; for these impacts are part of life, tan¬
gled up with the things we desire, and the inability to deal with
them is part of the imperfection of our nature. Other impacts
again the normal mind succeeds in holding at bay or neutralising
and to these it has a natural reaction of indifference, insensibility
or tolerance which is neither positive acceptance and enjoyment
nor rejection or suffering. To things, persons, happenings, ideas,
workings, whatever presents itself to the mind, there are always
these three kinds of reaction. At the same time, in spite of their
The Way of Equality
711
To things, persons, happenings, ideas,
workings, whatever presents itself to the mind, there are always
these three kinds of reaction. At the same time, in spite of their
The Way of Equality
711
generality, there is nothing absolute about them; they form a
scheme for a habitual scale which is not precisely the same for
all or even for the same mind at different times or in different
conditions. The same impact may arouse in it at one time and
another the pleasurable or positive, the adverse or negative or
the indifferent or neutral reactions.
The soul which seeks mastery may begin by turning upon
these reactions the encountering and opposing force of a strong
and equal endurance. Instead of seeking to protect itself from or
to shun and escape the unpleasant impacts it may confront them
and teach itself to suffer and to bear them with perseverance,
with fortitude, an increasing equanimity or an austere or calm
acceptance. This attitude, this discipline brings out three results,
three powers of the soul in relation to things. First, it is found
that what was before unbearable, becomes easy to endure; the
scale of the power that meets the impact rises in degree; it needs
a greater and greater force of it or of its protracted incidence
to cause trouble, pain, grief, aversion or any other of the notes
in the gamut of the unpleasant reactions. Secondly, it is found
that the conscious nature divides itself into two parts, one of the
normal mental and emotional nature in which the customary
reactions continue to take place, another of the higher will and
reason which observes and is not troubled or affected by the
passion of this lower nature, does not accept it as its own, does
not approve, sanction or participate. Then the lower nature
begins to lose the force and power of its reactions, to submit
to the suggestions of calm and strength from the higher reason
and will, and gradually that calm and strength take possession
of the mental and emotional, even of the sensational, vital and
physical being. This brings the third power and result, the power
by this endurance and mastery, this separation and rejection of
the lower nature, to get rid of the normal reactions and even, if
we will, to remould all our modes of experience by the strength
of the spirit. This method is applied not only to the unpleasant,
but also to the pleasant reactions; the soul refuses to give itself
up to or be carried away by them; it endures with calm the
impacts which bring joy and pleasure; refuses to be excited by
712
This method is applied not only to the unpleasant,
but also to the pleasant reactions; the soul refuses to give itself
up to or be carried away by them; it endures with calm the
impacts which bring joy and pleasure; refuses to be excited by
712
The Yoga of Self -F erf ection
them and replaces the joy and eager seeking of the mind after
pleasant things by the calm of the spirit. It can be applied too
to the thought-mind in a calm reception of knowledge and of
limitation of knowledge which refuses to be carried away by
the fascination of this attractive or repelled by dislike for that
unaccustomed or unpalatable thought-suggestion and waits on
the Truth with a detached observation which allows it to grow
on the strong, disinterested, mastering will and reason. Thus
the soul becomes gradually equal to all things, master of itself,
adequate to meet the world with a strong front in the mind and
an undisturbed serenity of the spirit.
The second way is an attitude of impartial indifference. Its
method is to reject at once the attraction or the repulsion of
things, to cultivate for them a luminous impassivity, an inhibiting
rejection, a habit of dissociation and desuetude. This attitude re¬
poses less on the will, though will is always necessary, than on the
knowledge. It is an attitude which regards these passions of the
mind as things born of the illusion of the outward mentality or
inferior movements unworthy of the calm truth of the single and
equal spirit or a vital and emotional disturbance to be rejected
by the tranquil observing will and dispassionate intelligence of
the sage. It puts away desire from the mind, discards the ego
which attributes these dual values to things, and replaces desire
by an impartial and indifferent peace and ego by the pure self
which is not troubled, excited or unhinged by the impacts of
the world. And not only is the emotional mind quieted, but the
intellectual being also rejects the thoughts of the ignorance and
rises beyond the interests of an inferior knowledge to the one
truth that is eternal and without change. This way too develops
three results or powers by which it ascends to peace.
This way too develops
three results or powers by which it ascends to peace.
First, it is found that the mind is voluntarily bound by the
petty joys and troubles of life and that in reality these can have
no inner hold on it, if the soul simply chooses to cast off its
habit of helpless determination by external and transient things.
Secondly, it is found that here too a division can be made, a
psychological partition between the lower or outward mind still
subservient to the old habitual touches and the higher reason and
The Way of Equality
713
will which stand back to live in the indifferent calm of the spirit.
There grows on us, in other words, an inner separate calm which
watches the commotion of the lower members without taking
part in it or giving it any sanction. At first the higher reason
and will may be often clouded, invaded, the mind carried away
by the incitation of the lower members, but eventually this calm
becomes inexpugnable, permanent, not to be shaken by the most
violent touches, na duhkhena gurundpi vicdlyate. This inner soul
of calm regards the trouble of the outer mind with a detached
superiority or a passing uninvolved indulgence such as might
be given to the trivial joys and griefs of a child, it does not
regard them as its own or as reposing on any permanent reality.
And, finally, the outer mind too accepts by degrees this calm
and indifferent serenity; it ceases to be attracted by the things
that attracted it or troubled by the griefs and pains to which
it had the habit of attaching an unreal importance. Thus the
third power comes, an all-pervading power of wide tranquil¬
lity and peace, a bliss of release from the siege of our imposed
fantastic self-torturing nature, the deep undisturbed exceeding
happiness of the touch of the eternal and infinite replacing by
its permanence the strife and turmoil of impermanent things,
brahmasamsparsam atyantam sukham asnute. The soul is fixed
in the delight of the self, dtmaratih, in the single and infinite
Ananda of the spirit and hunts no more after outward touches
and their griefs and pleasures. It observes the world only as the
spectator of a play or action in which it is no longer compelled
to participate.
It observes the world only as the
spectator of a play or action in which it is no longer compelled
to participate.
The third way is that of submission, which may be the Chris¬
tian resignation founded on submission to the will of God, or
an unegoistic acceptance of things and happenings as a mani¬
festation of the universal Will in time, or a complete surrender
of the person to the Divine, to the supreme Purusha. As the first
was a way of the will and the second a way of knowledge, of the
understanding reason, so this is a way of the temperament and
heart and very intimately connected with the principle of Bhakti.
If it is pushed to the end, it arrives at the same result of a perfect
equality. For the knot of the ego is loosened and the personal
714
The Yoga of Self -F erf ection
claim begins to disappear, we find that we are no longer bound
to joy in things pleasant or sorrow over the unpleasant; we
bear them without either eager acceptance or troubled rejection,
refer them to the Master of our being, concern ourselves less
and less with their personal result to us and hold only one thing
of importance, to approach God, or to be in touch and tune
with the universal and infinite Existence, or to be united with
the Divine, his channel, instrument, servant, lover, rejoicing in
him and in our relation with him and having no other object
or cause of joy or sorrow. Here too there may be for some time
a division between the lower mind of habitual emotions and
the higher psychical mind of love and self-giving, but eventually
the former yields, changes, transforms itself, is swallowed up in
the love, joy, delight of the Divine and has no other interests or
attractions. Then all within is the equal peace and bliss of that
union, the one silent bliss that passes understanding, the peace
that abides untouched by the solicitation of lower things in the
depths of our spiritual existence.
Then all within is the equal peace and bliss of that
union, the one silent bliss that passes understanding, the peace
that abides untouched by the solicitation of lower things in the
depths of our spiritual existence.
These three ways coincide in spite of their separate starting-
points, first, by their inhibition of the normal reactions of the
mind to the touches of outward things, bdhya-sparsdn, secondly,
by their separation of the self or spirit from the outward action
of Nature. But it is evident that our perfection will be greater
and more embracingly complete, if we can have a more active
equality which will enable us not only to draw back from or
confront the world in a detached and separated calm, but to
return upon it and possess it in the power of the calm and equal
Spirit. This is possible because the world. Nature, action are
not in fact a quite separate thing, but a manifestation of the
Self, the All-Soul, the Divine. The reactions of the normal mind
are a degradation of the divine values which would but for this
degradation make this truth evident to us, — a falsification, an
ignorance which alters their workings, an ignorance which starts
from the involution of the Self in a blind material nescience.
Once we return to the full consciousness of Self, of God, we can
then put a true divine value on things and receive and act on them
with the calm, joy, knowledge, seeing will of the Spirit. When
The Way of Equality
715
we begin to do that, then the soul begins to have an equal joy
in the universe, an equal will dealing with all energies, an equal
knowledge which takes possession of the spiritual truth behind
all the phenomena of this divine manifestation. It possesses the
world as the Divine possesses it, in a fullness of the infinite light,
power and Ananda.
It possesses the
world as the Divine possesses it, in a fullness of the infinite light,
power and Ananda.
All this existence can therefore be approached by a Yoga of
positive and active in place of the negative and passive equality.
This requires, first, a new knowledge which is the knowledge of
unity, — to see all things as oneself and to see all things in God
and God in all things. There is then a will of equal acceptance
of all phenomena, all events, all happenings, all persons and
forces as masks of the Self, movements of the one energy, results
of the one power in action, ruled by the one divine wisdom;
and on the foundation of this will of greater knowledge there
grows a strength to meet everything with an untroubled soul
and mind. There must be an identification of myself with the
self of the universe, a vision and a feeling of oneness with all
creatures, a perception of all forces and energies and results as
the movement of this energy of my self and therefore intimately
my own; not, obviously, of my ego-self which must be silenced,
eliminated, cast away, — otherwise this perfection cannot come,
— but of a greater impersonal or universal self with which I am
now one. For my personality is now only one centre of action of
that universal self, but a centre intimately in relation and unison
with all other personalities and also with all those other things
which are to us only impersonal objects and forces: but in fact
they also are powers of the one impersonal Person (Purusha),
God, Self and Spirit. My individuality is his and is no longer a
thing incompatible with or separated from universal being; it is
itself universalised, a knower of the universal Ananda and one
with and a lover of all that it knows, acts on and enjoys. For to
the equal knowledge of the universe and equal will of acceptance
of the universe will be added an equal delight in all the cosmic
manifestation of the Divine.
Here too we may describe three results or powers of the
method. First, we develop this power of equal acceptance in
716
The Yoga of Self -F erf ection
Here too we may describe three results or powers of the
method. First, we develop this power of equal acceptance in
716
The Yoga of Self -F erf ection
the spirit and in the higher reason and will which respond to the
spiritual knowledge. But also we find that though the nature can
be induced to take this general attitude, there is yet a struggle
between that higher reason and will and the lower mental being
which clings to the old egoistic way of seeing the world and
reacting to its impacts. Then we find that these two, though
at first confused, mingled together, alternating, acting on each
other, striving for possession, can be divided, the higher spiritual
disengaged from the lower mental nature. But in this stage, while
the mind is still subject to reactions of grief, trouble, an inferior
joy and pleasure, there is an increased difficulty which does not
act to the same extent in a more sharply individualised Yoga.
For not only does the mind feel its own troubles and difficulties,
but it shares in the joys and griefs of others, vibrates to them
in a poignant sympathy, feels their impacts with a subtle sensi¬
tiveness, makes them its own; not only so, but the difficulties of
others are added to our own and the forces which oppose the
perfection act with a greater persistence, because they feel this
movement to be an attack upon and an attempt to conquer their
universal kingdom and not merely the escape of an isolated soul
from their empire. But finally, we find too that there comes a
power to surmount these difficulties; the higher reason and will
impose themselves on the lower mind, which sensibly changes
into the vast types of the spiritual nature; it takes even a delight
in feeling, meeting and surmounting all troubles, obstacles and
difficulties until they are eliminated by its own transformation.
Then the whole being lives in a final power, the universal calm
and joy, the seeing delight and will of the Spirit in itself and its
manifestation.
To see how this positive method works, we may note very
briefly its principle in the three great powers of knowledge, will
and feeling. All emotion, feeling, sensation is a way of the soul
meeting and putting effective values on the manifestations of
the Self in nature. But what the self feels is a universal delight,
Ananda. The soul in the lower mind on the contrary gives it, as
we have seen, three varying values of pain, pleasure and neutral
indifference, which tone by gradations of less and more into each
The Way of Equality
717
The soul in the lower mind on the contrary gives it, as
we have seen, three varying values of pain, pleasure and neutral
indifference, which tone by gradations of less and more into each
The Way of Equality
717
other, and this gradation depends on the power of the individ¬
ualised consciousness to meet, sense, assimilate, equate, master
all that comes in on it from all of the greater self which it has by
separative individualisation put outside of it and made as if not-
self to its experience. But all the time, because of the greater Self
within us, there is a secret soul which takes delight in all these
things and draws strength from and grows by all that touches
it, profits as much by adverse as by favourable experience. This
can make itself felt by the outer desire soul, and that in fact is
why we have a delight in existing and can even take a certain
kind of pleasure in struggle, suffering and the harsher colours of
existence. But to get the universal Ananda all our instruments
must learn to take not any partial or perverse, but the essential
joy of all things. In all things there is a principle of Ananda,
which the understanding can seize on and the aesthesis feel as
the taste of delight in them, their rasa-, but ordinarily they put
upon them instead arbitrary, unequal and contrary values: they
have to be led to perceive things in the light of the spirit and
to transform these provisional values into the real, the equal
and essential, the spiritual rasa. The life-principle is there to
give this seizing of the principle of delight, rasa-grahana, the
form of a strong possessing enjoyment, bhoga, which makes
the whole life-being vibrate with it and accept and rejoice in
it; but ordinarily it is not, owing to desire, equal to its task,
but turns it into the three lower forms, — pain and pleasure,
sukha-bhoga duhkha-bhoga, and that rejection of both which
we call insensibility or indifference. The prana or vital being
has to be liberated from desire and its inequalities and to accept
and turn into pure enjoyment the rasa which the understanding
and aesthesis perceive. Then there is no farther obstacle in the
instruments to the third step by which all is changed into the
full and pure ecstasy of the spiritual Ananda.
Then there is no farther obstacle in the
instruments to the third step by which all is changed into the
full and pure ecstasy of the spiritual Ananda.
In the matter of knowledge, there are again three reactions
of the mind to things, ignorance, error and true knowledge.
The positive equality will accept all three of them to start with
as movements of a self-manifestation which evolves out of
ignorance through the partial or distorted knowledge which
718
The Yoga of Self -F erf ection
is the cause of error to true knowledge. It will deal with the
ignorance of the mind, as what it is psychologically, a clouded,
veiled or wrapped-up state of the substance of consciousness in
which the knowledge of the all-knowing Self is hidden as if in
a dark sheath; it will dwell on it by the mind and by the aid
of related truths already known, by the intelligence or by an
intuitive concentration deliver the knowledge out of the veil of
the ignorance. It will not attach itself only to the known or try
to force all into its little frame, but will dwell on the known
and the unknown with an equal mind open to all possibility.
So too it will deal with error; it will accept the tangled skein of
truth and error, but attach itself to no opinion, rather seeking
for the element of truth behind all opinions, the knowledge
concealed within the error, — for all error is a disfiguration of
some misunderstood fragments of truth and draws its vitality
from that and not from its misapprehension; it will accept, but
not limit itself even by ascertained truths, but will always be
ready for new knowledge and seek for a more and more integral,
a more and more extended, reconciling, unifying wisdom. This
can only come in its fullness by rising to the ideal supermind,
and therefore the equal seeker of truth will not be attached to
the intellect and its workings or think that all ends there, but
be prepared to rise beyond, accepting each stage of ascent and
the contributions of each power of his being, but only to lift
them into a higher truth. He must accept everything, but cling to
nothing, be repelled by nothing however imperfect or however
subversive of fixed notions, but also allow nothing to lay hold
on him to the detriment of the free working of the Truth-Spirit.
This equality of the intelligence is an essential condition for
rising to the higher supramental and spiritual knowledge.
This equality of the intelligence is an essential condition for
rising to the higher supramental and spiritual knowledge.
The will in us, because it is the most generally forceful
power of our being, — there is a will of knowledge, a will of
life, a will of emotion, a will acting in every part of our nature,
— takes many forms and returns various reactions to things,
such as incapacity, limitation of power, mastery, or right will,
wrong or perverted will, neutral volition, — in the ethical mind
virtue, sin and non-ethical volition, — and others of the kind.
The Way of Equality
719
These too the positive equality accepts as a tangle of provisional
values from which it must start, but which it must transform
into universal mastery, into the will of the Truth and universal
Right, into the freedom of the divine Will in action. The equal
will need not feel remorse, sorrow or discouragement over its
stumblings; if these reactions occur in the habitual mentality,
it will only see how far they indicate an imperfection and the
thing to be corrected, — for they are not always just indicators,
— and so get beyond them to a calm and equal guidance. It will
see that these stumblings themselves are necessary to experience
and in the end steps towards the goal. Behind and within all that
occurs in ourselves and in the world, it will look for the divine
meaning and the divine guidance; it will look beyond imposed
limitations to the voluntary self-limitation of the universal Power
by which it regulates its steps and gradations, — imposed on
our ignorance, self-imposed in the divine knowledge, — and go
beyond to unity with the illimitable power of the Divine. All
energies and actions it will see as forces proceeding from the
one Existence and their perversions as imperfections, inevitable
in the developing movement, of powers that were needed for that
movement; it will therefore have charity for all imperfections,
even while pressing steadily towards a universal perfection. This
equality will open the nature to the guidance of the divine and
universal Will and make it ready for that supramental action in
which the power of the soul in us is luminously full of and one
with the power of the supreme Spirit.
This
equality will open the nature to the guidance of the divine and
universal Will and make it ready for that supramental action in
which the power of the soul in us is luminously full of and one
with the power of the supreme Spirit.
The integral Yoga will make use of both the passive and
the active methods according to the need of the nature and the
guidance of the inner spirit, the Antaryamin. It will not limit
itself by the passive way, for that would lead only to some indi¬
vidual quietistic salvation or negation of an active and universal
spiritual being which would be inconsistent with the totality
of its aim. It will use the method of endurance, but not stop
short with a detached strength and serenity, but move rather
to a positive strength and mastery, in which endurance will no
longer be needed, since the self will then be in a calm and power¬
ful spontaneous possession of the universal energy and capable
720
The Yoga of Self -F erf ection
of determining easily and happily all its reactions in the oneness
and the Ananda. It will use the method of impartial indifference,
but not end in an aloof indifference to all things, but rather
move towards a high-seated impartial acceptance of life strong
to transform all experience into the greater values of the equal
spirit. It will use too temporarily resignation and submission,
but by the full surrender of its personal being to the Divine it
will attain to the all-possessing Ananda in which there is no need
of resignation, to the perfect harmony with the universal which
is not merely an acquiescence, but an embracing oneness, to the
perfect instrumentality and subjection of the natural self to the
Divine by which the Divine also is possessed by the individual
spirit. It will use fully the positive method, but will go beyond
any individual acceptance of things which would have the effect
of turning existence into a field only of the perfected individual
knowledge, power and Ananda. That it will have, but also it will
have the oneness by which it can live in the existence of others
for their sake and not only for its own and for their assistance
and as one of their means, an associated and helping force in
the movement towards the same perfection. It will live for the
Divine, not shunning world-existence, not attached to the earth
or the heavens, not attached either to a supracosmic liberation,
but equally one with the Divine in all his planes and able to live
in him equally in the Self and in the manifestation.
Chapter XIII
The Action of Equality
Chapter XIII
The Action of Equality
The distinctions that have already been made, will
have shown in sufficiency what is meant by the status
of equality. It is not mere quiescence and indifference,
not a withdrawal from experience, but a superiority to the
present reactions of the mind and life. It is the spiritual way
of replying to life or rather of embracing it and compelling it
to become a perfect form of action of the self and spirit. It
is the first secret of the soul’s mastery of existence. When we
have it in perfection, we are admitted to the very ground of the
divine spiritual nature. The mental being in the body tries to
compel and conquer life, but is at every turn compelled by it,
because it submits to the desire reactions of the vital self. To be
equal, not to be overborne by any stress of desire, is the first
condition of real mastery, self-empire is its basis. But a mere
mental equality, however great it may be, is hampered by the
tendency of quiescence. It has to preserve itself from desire by
self-limitation in the will and action. It is only the spirit which
is capable of sublime undisturbed rapidities of will as well as
an illimitable patience, equally just in a slow and deliberate or a
swift and violent, equally secure in a safely lined and limited or a
vast and enormous action. It can accept the smallest work in the
narrowest circle of cosmos, but it can work too upon the whirl of
chaos with an understanding and creative force; and these things
it can do because by its detached and yet intimate acceptance it
carries into both an infinite calm, knowledge, will and power.
It has that detachment because it is above all the happenings,
forms, ideas and movements it embraces in its scope; and it has
that intimate acceptance because it is yet one with all things. If
we have not this free unity, ekatvam anupasyatah, we have not
the full equality of the spirit.
The first business of the sadhaka is to see whether he has
722
The Yoga of Self -F erf ection
If
we have not this free unity, ekatvam anupasyatah, we have not
the full equality of the spirit.
The first business of the sadhaka is to see whether he has
722
The Yoga of Self -F erf ection
the perfect equality, how far he has gone in this direction or else
where is the flaw, and to exercise steadily his will on his nature
or invite the will of the Purusha to get rid of the defect and its
causes. There are four things that he must have; first, equality in
the most concrete practical sense of the word, samatd, freedom
from mental, vital, physical preferences, an even acceptance of
all God’s workings within and around him; secondly, a firm
peace and absence of all disturbance and trouble, sdnti; thirdly,
a positive inner spiritual happiness and spiritual ease of the nat¬
ural being which nothing can lessen, sukham; fourthly, a clear
joy and laughter of the soul embracing life and existence. To be
equal is to be infinite and universal, not to limit oneself, not to
bind oneself down to this or that form of the mind and life and
its partial preferences and desires. But since man in his present
normal nature lives by his mental and vital formations, not in
the freedom of his spirit, attachment to them and the desires
and preferences they involve is also his normal condition. To
accept them is at first inevitable, to get beyond them exceedingly
difficult and not, perhaps, altogether possible so long as we are
compelled to use the mind as the chief instrument of our action.
The first necessity therefore is to take at least the sting out of
them, to deprive them, even when they persist, of their greater
insistence, their present egoism, their more violent claim on our
nature.
The test that we have done this is the presence of an undis¬
turbed calm in the mind and spirit. The sadhaka must be on the
watch as the witnessing and willing Purusha behind or, better,
as soon as he can manage it, above the mind, and repel even
the least indices or incidence of trouble, anxiety, grief, revolt,
disturbance in his mind. If these things come, he must at once
detect their source, the defect which they indicate, the fault of
egoistic claim, vital desire, emotion or idea from which they
start and this he must discourage by his will, his spiritualised
intelligence, his soul unity with the Master of his being. On no
account must he admit any excuse for them, however natural,
righteous in seeming or plausible, or any inner or outer justifi¬
cation. If it is the prana which is troubled and clamorous, he
The Action of Equality
On no
account must he admit any excuse for them, however natural,
righteous in seeming or plausible, or any inner or outer justifi¬
cation. If it is the prana which is troubled and clamorous, he
The Action of Equality
723
must separate himself from the troubled prana, keep seated his
higher nature in the buddhi and by the buddhi school and reject
the claim of the desire-soul in him; and so too if it is the heart
of emotion that makes the clamour and the disturbance. If on
the other hand it is the will and intelligence itself that is at fault,
then the trouble is more difficult to command, because then his
chief aid and instrument becomes an accomplice of the revolt
against the divine Will and the old sins of the lower members
take advantage of this sanction to raise their diminished heads.
Therefore there must be a constant insistence on one main idea,
the self-surrender to the Master of our being, God within us and
in the world, the supreme Self, the universal Spirit. The buddhi
dwelling always in this master idea must discourage all its own
lesser insistences and preferences and teach the whole being that
the ego whether it puts forth its claim through the reason, the
personal will, the heart or the desire-soul in the prana, has no
just claim of any kind and all grief, revolt, impatience, trouble
is a violence against the Master of the being.
This complete self-surrender must be the chief mainstay of
the sadhaka because it is the only way, apart from complete
quiescence and indifference to all action, — and that has to be
avoided, — by which the absolute calm and peace can come.
The persistence of trouble, asdnti, the length of time taken for
this purification and perfection, itself must not be allowed to
become a reason for discouragement and impatience. It comes
because there is still something in the nature which responds to
it, and the recurrence of trouble serves to bring out the presence
of the defect, put the sadhaka upon his guard and bring about
a more enlightened and consistent action of the will to get rid
of it. When the trouble is too strong to be kept out, it must be
allowed to pass and its return discouraged by a greater vigilance
and insistence of the spiritualised buddhi. Thus persisting, it
will be found that these things lose their force more and more,
become more and more external and brief in their recurrence,
until finally calm becomes the law of the being. This rule persists
so long as the mental buddhi is the chief instrument; but when
the supramental light takes possession of mind and heart, then
724
The Yoga of Self -F erf ection
there can be no trouble, grief or disturbance; for that brings with
it a spiritual nature of illumined strength in which these things
can have no place. There the only vibrations and emotions are
those which belong to the anandamaya nature of divine unity.
There the only vibrations and emotions are
those which belong to the anandamaya nature of divine unity.
The calm established in the whole being must remain the
same whatever happens, in health and disease, in pleasure and
in pain, even in the strongest physical pain, in good fortune and
misfortune, our own or that of those we love, in success and
failure, honour and insult, praise and blame, justice done to us
or injustice, everything that ordinarily affects the mind. If we see
unity everywhere, if we recognise that all comes by the divine
will, see God in all, in our enemies or rather our opponents in
the game of life as well as our friends, in the powers that oppose
and resist us as well as the powers that favour and assist, in
all energies and forces and happenings, and if besides we can
feel that all is undivided from our self, all the world one with
us within our universal being, then this attitude becomes much
easier to the heart and mind. But even before we can attain or are
firmly seated in that universal vision, we have by all the means
in our power to insist on this receptive and active equality and
calm. Even something of it, alpam api asya dharmasya, is a great
step towards perfection; a first firmness in it is the beginning of
liberated perfection; its completeness is the perfect assurance
of a rapid progress in all the other members of perfection. For
without it we can have no solid basis; and by the pronounced
lack of it we shall be constantly falling back to the lower status
of desire, ego, duality, ignorance.
This calm once attained, vital and mental preference has
lost its disturbing force; it only remains as a formal habit of the
mind. Vital acceptance or rejection, the greater readiness to wel¬
come this rather than that happening, the mental acceptance or
rejection, the preference of this more congenial to that other less
congenial idea or truth, the dwelling upon the will to this rather
than to that other result, become a formal mechanism still nec¬
essary as an index of the direction in which the Shakti is meant
to turn or for the present is made to incline by the Master of our
being. But it loses its disturbing aspect of strong egoistic will.
The Action of Equality
725
But it loses its disturbing aspect of strong egoistic will.
The Action of Equality
725
intolerant desire, obstinate liking. These appearances may re¬
main for a while in a diminished form, but as the calm of equality
increases, deepens, becomes more essential and compact, ghana,
they disappear, cease to colour the mental and vital substance
or occur only as touches on the most external physical mind,
are unable to penetrate within, and at last even that recurrence,
that appearance at the outer gates of mind ceases. Then there
can come the living reality of the perception that all in us is done
and directed by the Master of our being, yathd prayukto ’smi,
tathd karomi, which was before only a strong idea and faith with
occasional and derivative glimpses of the divine action behind
the becomings of our personal nature. Now every movement is
seen to be the form given by the Shakti, the divine power in us, to
the indications of the Purusha, still no doubt personalised, still
belittled in the inferior mental form, but not primarily egoistic,
an imperfect form, not a positive deformation. We have then to
get beyond this stage even. For the perfect action and experience
is not to be determined by any kind of mental or vital preference,
but by the revealing and inspiring spiritual will which is the
Shakti in her direct and real initiation. When I say that as I am
appointed, I work, I still bring in a limiting personal element
and mental reaction. But it is the Master who will do his own
work through myself as his instrument, and there must be no
mental or other preference in me to limit, to interfere, to be a
source of imperfect working. The mind must become a silent
luminous channel for the revelations of the supramental Truth
and of the Will involved in its seeing. Then shall the action be
the action of that highest Being and Truth and not a qualified
translation or mistranslation in the mind. Whatever limitation,
selection, relation is imposed, will be self-imposed by the Divine
on himself in the individual at the moment for his own purpose,
not binding, not final, not an ignorant determination of the
mind. The thought and will become then an action from a lumi¬
nous Infinite, a formulation not excluding other formulations,
but rather putting them into their just place in relation to itself,
englobing or transforming them even and proceeding to larger
formations of the divine knowledge and action.
726
The Yoga of Self -F erf ection
726
The Yoga of Self -F erf ection
The first calm that comes is of the nature of peace, the
absence of all unquiet, grief and disturbance. As the equality
becomes more intense, it takes on a fuller substance of positive
happiness and spiritual ease. This is the joy of the spirit in it¬
self, dependent on nothing external for its absolute existence,
nirasraya, as the Gita describes it, antah-sukho antararamah,
an exceeding inner happiness, brahmasamsparsam atyantam
sukham asnute. Nothing can disturb it, and it extends itself to
the soul’s view of outward things, imposes on them too the law
of this quiet spiritual joy. For the base of it is still calm, it is an
even and tranquil neutral joy, ahaituka. And as the supramental
light grows, a greater Ananda comes, the base of the abundant
ecstasy of the spirit in all it is, becomes, sees, experiences and
of the laughter of the Shakti doing luminously the work of the
Divine and taking his Ananda in all the worlds.
The perfected action of equality transforms all the values
of things on the basis of the divine anandamaya power. The
outward action may remain what it was or may change, that
must be as the Spirit directs and according to the need of the
work to be done for the world, — but the whole inner action is
of another kind. The Shakti in its different powers of knowledge,
action, enjoyment, creation, formulation, will direct itself to the
different aims of existence, but in another spirit; they will be the
aims, the fruits, the lines of working laid down by the Divine
from his light above, not anything claimed by the ego for its
own separate sake. The mind, the heart, the vital being, the
body itself will be satisfied with whatever comes to them from
the dispensation of the Master of the being and in that find a
subtlest and yet fullest spiritualised satisfaction and delight; but
the divine knowledge and will above will work forward towards
its farther ends. Here both success and failure lose their present
meanings. There can be no failure; for whatever happens is the
intention of the Master of the worlds, not final, but a step on
his way, and if it appears as an opposition, a defeat, a denial,
even for the moment a total denial of the aim set before the
instrumental being, it is so only in appearance and afterwards it
will appear in its right place in the economy of his action, — a
The Action of Equality
727
fuller supramental vision may even see at once or beforehand its
necessity and its true relation to the eventual result to which it
seems so contrary and even perhaps its definite prohibition. Or,
if — while the light is deficient — there has been a misinterpreta¬
tion whether with regard to the aim or the course of the action
and the steps of the result, the failure comes as a rectification
and is calmly accepted without bringing discouragement or a
fluctuation of the will. In the end it is found that there is no such
thing as failure and the soul takes an equal passive or active
delight in all happenings as the steps and formulations of the
divine Will. The same evolution takes place with regard to good
fortune and ill fortune, the pleasant and the unpleasant in every
form, mahgala amahgala, priya apriya.
And as with happenings, so with persons, equality brings an
entire change of the view and the attitude. The first result of the
equal mind and spirit is to bring about an increasing charity and
inner toleration of all persons, ideas, views, actions, because it
is seen that God is in all beings and each acts according to his
nature, his svabhdva, and its present formulations. When there is
the positive equal Ananda, this deepens to a sympathetic under¬
standing and in the end an equal universal love. None of these
things need prevent various relations or different formulations
of the inner attitude according to the need of life as determined
by the spiritual will, or firm furtherings of this idea, view, ac¬
tion against that other for the same need and purpose by the
same determination, or a strong outward or inward resistance,
opposition and action against the forces that are impelled to
stand in the way of the decreed movement. And there may be
even the rush of the Rudra energy forcefully working upon or
shattering the human or other obstacle, because that is necessary
both for him and for the world purpose. But the essence of the
equal inmost attitude is not altered or diminished by these more
superficial formulations. The spirit, the fundamental soul remain
the same, even while the Shakti of knowledge, will, action, love
does its work and assumes the various forms needed for its
work. And in the end all becomes a form of a luminous spiritual
unity with all persons, energies, things in the being of God and
728
The Yoga of Self -F erf ection
And in the end all becomes a form of a luminous spiritual
unity with all persons, energies, things in the being of God and
728
The Yoga of Self -F erf ection
in the luminous, spiritual, one and universal force, in which
one’s own action becomes an inseparable part of the action of
all, is not divided from it, but feels perfectly every relation as a
relation with God in all in the complex terms of his universal
oneness. That is a plenitude which can hardly be described in
the language of the dividing mental reason for it uses all its
oppositions, yet escapes from them, nor can it be put in the
terms of our limited mental psychology. It belongs to another
domain of consciousness, another plane of our being.
Chapter XIV
The Power of the Instruments
The second member of the Yoga of self-perfection is
the heightened, enlarged and rectified power of the in¬
struments of our normal Nature. The cultivation of this
second perfection need not wait for the security of the equal
mind and spirit, but it is only in that security that it can become
complete and act in the safety of the divine leading. The object
of this cultivation is to make the nature a fit instrument for
divine works. All work is done by power, by Shakti, and since
the integral Yoga does not contemplate abandonment of works,
but rather a doing of all works from the divine consciousness
and with the supreme guidance, the characteristic powers of the
instruments, mind, life and body, must not only be purified of
defects, but raised to a capacity for this greater action. In the end
they must undergo a spiritual and supramental transfiguration.
In the end
they must undergo a spiritual and supramental transfiguration.
There are four members of this second part of the sadhana or
discipline of self-perfection and the first of them is right shakti,
the right condition of the powers of the intelligence, heart, vital
mind and body. It will only be possible at present to suggest a
preliminary perfection of the last of these four, for the full siddhi
will have to be dealt with after I have spoken of the supermind
and its influence on the rest of the being. The body is not only
the necessary outer instrument of the physical part of action, but
for the purposes of this life a base or pedestal also for all inner
action. All working of mind or spirit has its vibration in the
physical consciousness, records itself there in a kind of subordi¬
nate corporeal notation and communicates itself to the material
world partly at least through the physical machine. But the body
of man has natural limitations in this capacity which it imposes
on the play of the higher parts of his being. And, secondly, it has
a subconscient consciousness of its own in which it keeps with
an obstinate fidelity the past habits and past nature of the mental
730
The Yoga of Self -F erf ection
and vital being and which automatically opposes and obstructs
any very great upward change or at least prevents it from becom¬
ing a radical transformation of the whole nature. It is evident
that if we are to have a free divine or spiritual and supramental
action conducted by the force and fulfilling the character of
a diviner energy, some fairly complete transformation must be
effected in this outward character of the bodily nature. The phys¬
ical being of man has always been felt by the seekers of perfection
to be a great impediment and it has been the habit to turn from
it with contempt, denial or aversion and a desire to suppress
altogether or as far as may be the body and the physical life. But
this cannot be the right method for the integral Yoga. The body is
given us as one instrument necessary to the totality of our works
and it is to be used, not neglected, hurt, suppressed or abolished.
If it is imperfect, recalcitrant, obstinate, so are also the other
members, the vital being, heart and mind and reason. It has like
them to be changed and perfected and to undergo a transforma¬
tion. As we must get ourselves a new life, new heart, new mind,
so we have in a certain sense to build for ourselves a new body.
It has like
them to be changed and perfected and to undergo a transforma¬
tion. As we must get ourselves a new life, new heart, new mind,
so we have in a certain sense to build for ourselves a new body.
The first thing the will has to do with the body is to impose
on it progressively a new habit of all its being, consciousness,
force and outward and inward action. It must be taught an entire
passivity in the hands first of the higher instruments, but eventu¬
ally in the hands of the spirit and its controlling and informing
Shakti. It must be accustomed not to impose its own limits on
the nobler members, but to shape its action and its response to
their demands, to develop, one might say, a higher notation, a
higher scale of responses. At present the notation of the body and
the physical consciousness has a very large determining power
on the music made by this human harp of God; the notes we
get from the spirit, from the psychic soul, from the greater life
behind our physical life cannot come in freely, cannot develop
their high, powerful and proper strain. This condition must be
reversed; the body and the physical consciousness must develop
the habit of admitting and shaping themselves to these higher
strains and not they, but the nobler parts of the nature must
determine the music of our life and being.
The Power of the Instruments
731
The Power of the Instruments
731
The control of the body and life by the mind and its thought
and will is the first step towards this change. All Yoga implies
the carrying of that control to a very high pitch. But afterwards
the mind must itself give place to the spirit, to the spiritual force,
the supermind and the supramental force. And finally the body
must develop a perfect power to hold whatever force is brought
into it by the spirit and to contain its action without spilling and
wasting it or itself getting cracked. It must be capable of being
filled and powerfully used by whatever intensity of spiritual or
higher mind or life force without any part of the mechanical
instrument being agitated, upset, broken or damaged by the
inrush or pressure, — as the brain, vital health or moral nature
are often injured in those who unwisely attempt Yogic practice
without preparation or by undue means or rashly invite a power
they are intellectually, vitally, morally unfit to bear, — and, thus
filled, it must have the capacity to work normally, automatically,
rightly according to the will of that spiritual or other now un¬
usual agent without distorting, diminishing or mistranslating its
intention and stress. This faculty of holding, dharana-sakti, in
the physical consciousness, energy and machinery is the most
important siddhi or perfection of the body.
The result of these changes will be to make the body a
perfect instrument of the spirit. The spiritual force will be able
to do what it wills and as it wills in and through the body. It will
be able to conduct an unlimited action of the mind or at a higher
stage of the supermind without the body betraying the action by
fatigue, incapacity, inaptitude or falsification. It will be able too
to pour a full tide of the life-force into the body and conduct
a large action and joy of the perfected vital being without that
quarrel and disparity which is the relation of the normal life-
instincts and life-impulses to the insufficient physical instrument
they are obliged to use. And it will also be able to conduct a full
action of the spiritualised psychic being not falsified, degraded or
in any way marred by the lower instincts of the body and to use
physical action and expression as a free notation of the higher
psychical life. And in the body itself there will be a presence of a
greatness of sustaining force, an abounding strength, energy and
732
The Yoga of Self -F erf ection
And in the body itself there will be a presence of a
greatness of sustaining force, an abounding strength, energy and
732
The Yoga of Self -F erf ection
puissance of outgoing and managing force, a lightness, swiftness
and adaptability of the nervous and physical being, a holding
and responsive power in the whole physical machine and its
driving springs^ of which it is now even at its strongest and best
incapable.
This energy will not be in its essence an outward, phys¬
ical or muscular strength, but will be of the nature, first, of
an unbounded life-power or pranic force, secondly, sustaining
and using this pranic energy, a superior or supreme will-power
acting in the body. The play of the pranic shakti in the body or
form is the condition of all action, even of the most apparently
inanimate physical action. It is the universal Prana, as the an¬
cients knew, which in various forms sustains or drives material
energy in all physical things from the electron and atom and gas
up through the metal, plant, animal, physical man. To get this
pranic shakti to act more freely and forcibly in the body is know¬
ingly or unknowingly the attempt of all who strive for a greater
perfection of or in the body. The ordinary man tries to command
it mechanically by physical exercises and other corporeal means,
the Hathayogin more greatly and flexibly, but still mechanically
by Asana and Pranayama; but for our purpose it can be com¬
manded by more subtle, essential and pliable means; first, by
a will in the mind widely opening itself to and potently calling
in the universal pranic shakti on which we draw and fixing
its stronger presence and more powerful working in the body;
secondly, by the will in the mind opening itself rather to the spirit
and its power and calling in a higher pranic energy from above,
a supramental pranic force; thirdly, the last step, by the highest
supramental will of the spirit entering and taking up directly the
task of the perfection of the body. In fact, it is always really a will
within which drives and makes effective the pranic instrument
even when it uses what seem to be purely physical means; but at
first it is dependent on the inferior action. When we go higher,
the relation is gradually reversed; it is then able to act in its own
power or handle the rest only as a subordinate instrumentation.
^ mahattva, bala, laghutd, dhdrana-sdmarthya.
The Power of the Instruments
733
When we go higher,
the relation is gradually reversed; it is then able to act in its own
power or handle the rest only as a subordinate instrumentation.
^ mahattva, bala, laghutd, dhdrana-sdmarthya.
The Power of the Instruments
733
Most men are not conscious of this pranic force in the body
or cannot distinguish it from the more physical form of energy
which it informs and uses for its vehicle. But as the consciousness
becomes more subtle by practice of Yoga, we can come to be
aware of the sea of pranic shakti around us, feel it with the
mental consciousness, concretely with a mental sense, see its
courses and movements, and direct and act upon it immediately
by the will. But until we thus become aware of it, we have to
possess a working or at least an experimental faith in its presence
and in the power of the will to develop a greater command and
use of this prana force. There is necessary a faith, sraddha, in
the power of the mind to lay its will on the state and action of
the body, such as those have who heal disease by faith, will or
mental action; but we must seek this control not only for this
or any other limited use, but generally as a legitimate power
of the inner and greater over the outer and lesser instrument.
This faith is combated by our past habits of mind, by our actual
normal experience of its comparative helplessness in our present
imperfect system and by an opposing belief in the body and
physical consciousness. For they too have a limiting sraddha of
their own which opposes the idea in the mind when it seeks
to impose on the system the law of a higher yet unattained
perfection. But as we persist and find this power giving evidence
of itself to our experience, the faith in the mind will be able to
found itself more firmly and grow in vigour and the opposing
faith in the body will change, admit what it first denied and
not only accept in its habits the new yoke but itself call for this
higher action. Finally we shall realise the truth that this being
we are is or can become whatever it has the faith and will to be,
— for faith is only a will aiming at greater truth, — and cease to
set limits to our possibility or deny the potential omnipotence
of the Self in us, the divine Power working through the human
instrument. That however, at least as a practical force, comes in
at a later stage of high perfection.
That however, at least as a practical force, comes in
at a later stage of high perfection.
The Prana is not only a force for the action of physical
and vital energy, but supports also the mental and spiritual ac¬
tion. Therefore the full and free working of the pranic shakti
734
The Yoga of Self -F erf ection
is required not only for the lower but still necessary use, but
also for the free and full operation of mind and supermind
and spirit in the instrumentality of our complex human nature.
That is the main sense of the use of exercises of Pranayama for
control of the vital force and its motions which is so important
and indispensable a part of certain systems of Yoga. The same
mastery must be got by the seeker of the integral Yoga; but
he may arrive at it by other means and in any case he must
not be dependent on any physical or breathing exercise for its
possession and maintenance, for that will at once bring in a
limitation and subjection to Prakriti. Her instrumentation has to
be used flexibly by the Purusha, but not to be a fixed control on
the Purusha. The necessity of the pranic force, however, remains
and will be evident to our self-study and experience. It is in the
Vedic image the steed and conveyance of the embodied mind
and will, vdhana. If it is full of strength and swiftness and a
plenitude of all its powers, then the mind can go on the courses
of its action with a plenary and unhampered movement. But if
it is lame or soon tired or sluggish or weak, then an incapacity
is laid on the effectuation of the will and activity of the mind.
The same rule holds good of the supermind when it first comes
into action. There are indeed states and activities in which the
mind takes up the pranic shakti into itself and this dependence
is not felt at all; but even then the force is there, though involved
in the pure mental energy. The supermind, when it gets into full
strength, can do pretty well what it likes with the pranic shakti,
and we find that in the end this life power is transformed into
the type of a supramentalised prana which is simply one motor
power of that greater consciousness. But this belongs to a later
stage of the siddhi of the Yoga.
But this belongs to a later
stage of the siddhi of the Yoga.
Then again there is the psychic prana, pranic mind or desire
soul; this too calls for its own perfection. Here too the first
necessity is a fullness of the vital capacity in the mind, its power
to do its full work, to take possession of all the impulsions and
energies given to our inner psychic life for fulfilment in this
existence, to hold them and to be a means for carrying them
out with strength, freedom, perfection. Many of the things we
The Power of the Instruments
735
Many of the things we
The Power of the Instruments
735
need for our perfection, courage, will-power effective in life,
all the elements of what we now call force of character and
force of personality, depend very largely for their completest
strength and spring of energetic action on the fullness of the
psychic prana. But along with this fullness there must be an
established gladness, clearness and purity in the psychic life¬
being. This dynamis must not be a troubled, perfervid, stormy,
fitfully or crudely passionate strength; energy there must be,
rapture of its action it must have, but a clear and glad and pure
energy, a seated and firmly supported pure rapture. And as a
third condition of its perfection it must be poised in a complete
equality. The desire-soul must get rid of the clamour, insistence
or inequality of its desires in order that its desires may be satisfied
with justice and balance and in the right way and eventually must
rid them of the character of desire altogether and change them
into impulsions of the divine Ananda. To that end it must make
no demands nor seek to impose itself on heart, mind or spirit,
but accept with a strong passive and active equality whatever
impulsion and command come into it from the spirit through
the channel of a still mind and a pure heart. And it must accept
too whatever result of the impulse, whatever enjoyment more or
less, full or nil, is given to it by the Master of our being. At the
same time, possession and enjoyment are its law, function, use,
swadharma. It is not intended to be a slain or mortified thing,
dull in its receptive power, dreary, suppressed, maimed, inert
or null. It must have a full power of possession, a glad power
of enjoyment, an exultant power of pure and divine passion
and rapture. The enjoyment it will have will be in the essence a
spiritual bliss, but one which takes up into itself and transforms
the mental, emotional, dynamic, vital and physical joy; it must
have therefore an integral capacity for these things and must
not by incapacity or fatigue or inability to bear great intensities
fail the spirit, mind, heart, will and body. Fullness, clear purity
and gladness, equality, capacity for possession and enjoyment
are the fourfold perfection of the psychic prana. ^
^ purnata, prasannatd, samatd, bhoga-sdmarthya.
736
The Yoga of Self -F erf ection
Fullness, clear purity
and gladness, equality, capacity for possession and enjoyment
are the fourfold perfection of the psychic prana. ^
^ purnata, prasannatd, samatd, bhoga-sdmarthya.
736
The Yoga of Self -F erf ection
The next instrument which needs perfection is the dtta,
and within the complete meaning of this expression we may
include the emotional and the pure psychical being. This heart
and psychic being of man shot through with the threads of the
life instincts is a thing of mixed inconstant colours of emotion
and soul vibrations, bad and good, happy and unhappy, satis¬
fied and unsatisfied, troubled and calm, intense and dull. Thus
agitated and invaded it is unacquainted with any real peace,
incapable of a steady perfection of all its powers. By purification,
by equality, by the light of knowledge, by a harmonising of the
will it can be brought to a tranquil intensity and perfection.
The first two elements of this perfection are on one side a high
and large sweetness, openness, gentleness, calm, clarity, on the
other side a strong and ardent force and intensity. In the divine
no less than in ordinary human character and action there are
always two strands, sweetness and strength, mildness and force,
saumya and raudra, the force that bears and harmonises, the
force that imposes itself and compels, Vishnu and Ishana, Shiva
and Rudra. The two are equally necessary to a perfect world-
action. The perversions of the Rudra power in the heart are
stormy passion, wrath and fierceness and harshness, hardness,
brutality, cruelty, egoistic ambition and love of violence and
domination. These and other human perversions have to be got
rid of by the flowering of a calm, clear and sweet psychical being.
But on the other hand incapacity of force is also an imperfec¬
tion. Laxity and weakness, self-indulgence, a certain flabbiness
and limpness or inert passivity of the psychical being are the
last result of an emotional and psychic life in which energy and
power of assertion have been quelled, discouraged or killed. Nor
is it a total perfection to have only the strength that endures or
to cultivate only a heart of love, charity, tolerance, mildness,
meekness and forbearance. The other side of perfection is a self-
contained and calm and unegoistic Rudra-power armed with
psychic force, the energy of the strong heart which is capable of
supporting without shrinking an insistent, an outwardly austere
or even, where need is, a violent action. An unlimited light of
energy, force, puissance harmonised with sweetness of heart and
An unlimited light of
energy, force, puissance harmonised with sweetness of heart and
The Power of the Instruments
737
clarity, capable of being one with it in action, the lightning of
Indra starting from the orb of the nectarous moon-rays of Soma
is the double perfection. And these two things saumyatva, tejas,
must base their presence and action on a firm equality of the
temperament and of the psychical soul delivered from all crudity
and all excess or defect of the heart’s light or the heart’s power.
Another necessary element is a faith in the heart, a belief
in and will to the universal good, an openness to the universal
Ananda. The pure psychic being is of the essence of Ananda, it
comes from the delight-soul in the universe; but the superficial
heart of emotion is overborne by the conflicting appearances of
the world and suffers many reactions of grief, fear, depression,
passion, short-lived and partial joy. An equal heart is needed for
perfection, but not only a passive equality; there must be the
sense of a divine power making for good behind all experiences,
a faith and will which can turn the poisons of the world to nectar,
see the happier spiritual intention behind adversity, the mystery
of love behind suffering, the flower of divine strength and joy in
the seed of pain. This faith, kalyana-sraddha, is needed in order
that the heart and the whole overt psychic being may respond to
the secret divine Ananda and change itself into this true original
essence. This faith and will must be accompanied by and open
into an illimitable widest and intensest capacity for love. For
the main business of the heart, its true function is love. It is our
destined instrument of complete union and oneness; for to see
oneness in the world by the understanding is not enough unless
we also feel it with the heart and in the psychic being, and this
means a delight in the One and in all existences in the world in
him, a love of God and all beings. The heart’s faith and will in
good are founded on a perception of the one Divine immanent
in all things and leading the world. The universal love has to be
founded on the heart’s sight and psychical and emotional sense
of the one Divine, the one Self in all existence. All four elements
will then form a unity and even the Rudra power to do battle
for the right and the good proceed on the basis of a power of
universal love. This is the highest and the most characteristic
perfection of the heart, prema-sdmarthya.
738
The Yoga of Self -F erf ection
This is the highest and the most characteristic
perfection of the heart, prema-sdmarthya.
738
The Yoga of Self -F erf ection
The last perfection is that of the intelligence and thinking
mind, buddhi. The first need is the clarity and the purity of the
intelligence. It must be freed from the claims of the vital being
which seeks to impose the desire of the mind in place of the truth,
from the claims of the troubled emotional being which strives
to colour, distort, limit and falsify the truth with the hue and
shape of the emotions. It must be free too from its own defect,
inertia of the thought-power, obstructive narrowness and un¬
willingness to open to knowledge, intellectual unscrupulousness
in thinking, prepossession and preference, self-will in the reason
and false determination of the will to knowledge. Its sole will
must be to make itself an unsullied mirror of the truth, its essence
and its forms and measures and relations, a clear mirror, a just
measure, a fine and subtle instrument of harmony, an integral
intelligence. This clear and pure intelligence can then become
a serene thing of light, a pure and strong radiance emanating
from the sun of Truth. But, again, it must become not merely
a thing of concentrated dry or white light, but capable of all
variety of understanding, supple, rich, flexible, brilliant with all
the flame and various with all the colours of the manifestation
of the Truth, open to all its forms. And so equipped it will
get rid of limitations, not be shut up in this or that faculty or
form or working of knowledge, but an instrument ready and
capable for whatever work is demanded from it by the Purusha.
Purity, clear radiance, rich and flexible variety, integral capacity
are the fourfold perfection of the thinking intelligence, visuddhi,
prakdsa, vidtra-bodha, sarva-jhdna-sdmarthya.
The normal instruments thus perfected will act each in its
own kind without undue interference from each other and serve
the unobstructed will of the Purusha in a harmonised totality
of our natural being. This perfection must rise constantly in
its capacity for action, the energy and force of its working
and a certain greatness of the scope of the total nature. They
will then be ready for the transformation into their own supra-
mental action in which they will find a more absolute, unified
and luminous spiritual truth of the whole perfected nature. The
means of this perfection of the instruments we shall have to
The Power of the Instruments
739
The
means of this perfection of the instruments we shall have to
The Power of the Instruments
739
consider later on; but at present it will be enough to say that the
principal conditions are will, self-watching and self-knowledge
and a constant practice, abhydsa, of self-modification and trans¬
formation. The Purusha has that capacity; for the spirit within
can always change and perfect the working of its nature. But
the mental being must open the way by a clear and a watchful
introspection, an opening of itself to a searching and subtle
self-knowledge which will give it the understanding and to an in¬
creasing extent the mastery of its natural instruments, a vigilant
and insistent will of self-modification and self-transformation —
for to that will the Prakrit! must with whatever difficulty and
whatever initial or prolonged resistance eventually respond, —
and an unfailing practice which will constantly reject all defect
and perversion and replace it by right state and a right and
enhanced working. Askesis, tapasya, patience and faithfulness
and rectitude of knowledge and will are the things required
until a greater Power than our mental selves directly intervenes
to effect a more easy and rapid transformation.
Chapter XV
Soul-Force and the Fourfold
Personality
The perfecting of the normal mind, heart, prana and
body gives us only the perfection of the psycho-physical
machine we have to use and creates certain right instru¬
mental conditions for a divine life and works lived and done with
a purer, greater, clearer power and knowledge. The next question
is that of the Force which is poured into the instruments, karana,
and the One who works it for his universal ends. The force at
work in us must be the manifest divine Shakti, the supreme or
the universal Force unveiled in the liberated individual being,
para prakrtir jwabhuta, who will be the doer of all the action
and the power of this divine life, karta. The One behind this
force will be the Ishwara, the Master of all being, with whom all
our existence will be in our perfection a Yoga at once of oneness
in being and of union in various relations of the soul and its
nature with the Godhead who is seated within us and in whom
too we live, move and have our being. It is this Shakti with the
Ishwara in her or behind her whose divine presence and way we
have to call into all our being and life. For without this divine
presence and this greater working there can be no siddhi of the
power of the nature.
It is this Shakti with the
Ishwara in her or behind her whose divine presence and way we
have to call into all our being and life. For without this divine
presence and this greater working there can be no siddhi of the
power of the nature.
All the action of man in life is a nexus of the presence of
the soul and the workings of Nature, Purusha and Prakriti. The
presence and influence of the Purusha represents itself in nature
as a certain power of our being which we may call for our imme¬
diate purpose soul-force; and it is always this soul-force which
supports all the workings of the powers of the reason, the mind,
life and body and determines the cast of our conscious being and
the type of our nature. The normal ordinarily developed man
possesses it in a subdued, a modified, a mechanised, submerged
Soul-Force and the Fourfold Personality
741
The normal ordinarily developed man
possesses it in a subdued, a modified, a mechanised, submerged
Soul-Force and the Fourfold Personality
741
form as temperament and character; but that is only its most
outward mould in which Purusha, the conscious soul or being,
seems to be limited, conditioned and given some shape by the
mechanical Prakriti. The soul flows into whatever moulds of
intellectual, ethical, aesthetic, dynamic, vital and physical mind
and type the developing nature takes and can act only in the way
this formed Prakriti lays on it and move in its narrow groove
or relatively wider circle. The man is then sattwic, rajasic or
tamasic or a mixture of these qualities and his temperament is
only a sort of subtler soul-colour which has been given to the
major prominent operation of these fixed modes of his nature.
Men of a stronger force get more of the soul-power to the sur¬
face and develop what we call a strong or great personality,
they have in them something of the Vibhuti as described by the
Gita, vibhutimat sattvam himad urjitam eva vd, a higher power
of being often touched with or sometimes full of some divine
afflatus or more than ordinary manifestation of the Godhead
which is indeed present in all, even in the weakest or most
clouded living being, but here some special force of it begins
to come out from behind the veil of the average humanity, and
there is something beautiful, attractive, splendid or powerful in
these exceptional persons which shines out in their personality,
character, life and work. These men too work in the type of
their nature-force according to its gunas, but there is something
evident in them and yet not easily analysable which is in reality
a direct power of the Self and spirit using to strong purpose the
mould and direction of the nature. The nature itself thereby rises
to or towards a higher grade of its being. Much in the working
of the Force may seem egoistic or even perverse, but it is still the
touch of the Godhead behind, whatever Daivic, Asuric or even
Rakshasic form it may take, which drives the Prakriti and uses
it for its own greater purpose. A still more developed power
of the being will bring out the real character of this spiritual
presence and it will then be seen as something impersonal and
self-existent and self-empowered, a sheer soul-force which is
other than the mind-force, life-force, force of intelligence, but
drives them and, even while following to a certain extent their
742
The Yoga of Self -F erf ection
mould of working, guna, type of nature, yet puts its stamp of an
initial transcendence, impersonality, pure fire of spirit, a some¬
thing beyond the gunas of our normal nature. When the spirit
in us is free, then what was behind this soul-force comes out in
all its light, beauty and greatness, the Spirit, the Godhead who
makes the nature and soul of man his foundation and living
representative in cosmic being and mind, action and life.
The Godhead, the spirit manifested in Nature appears in a
sea of infinite quality, Ananta-guna. But the executive or me¬
chanical Prakrit! is of the threefold guna, sattwa, rajas, tamas,
and the Ananta-guna, the spiritual play of infinite quality, mod¬
ifies itself in this mechanical nature into the type of these three
gunas. And in the soul-force in man this Godhead in Nature
represents itself as a fourfold effective Power, catur-vyuha, a
Power for knowledge, a Power for strength, a Power for mu¬
tuality and active and productive relation and interchange, a
Power for works and labour and service, and its presence casts
all human life into a nexus and inner and outer operation of
these four things. The ancient thought of India conscious of
this fourfold type of active human personality and nature built
out of it the four types of the Brahmana, Kshatriya, Vaishya
and Shudra, each with its spiritual turn, ethical ideal, suitable
upbringing, fixed function in society and place in the evolution¬
ary scale of the spirit. As always tends to be the case when
we too much externalise and mechanise the more subtle truths
of our nature, this became a hard and fast system inconsistent
with the freedom and variability and complexity of the finer
developing spirit in man. Nevertheless the truth behind it exists
and is one of some considerable importance in the perfection of
our power of nature; but we have to take it in its inner aspects,
first, personality, character, temperament, soul-type, then the
soul-force which lies behind them and wears these forms, and
lastly the play of the free spiritual Shakti in which they find their
culmination and unity beyond all modes. For the crude external
idea that a man is born as a Brahmana, Kshatriya, Vaishya or
Shudra and that alone, is not a psychological truth of our being.
The psychological fact is that there are these four active powers
Soul-Force and the Fourfold Personality
743
The psychological fact is that there are these four active powers
Soul-Force and the Fourfold Personality
743
and tendencies of the Spirit and its executive Shakti within us
and the predominance of one or the other in the more well-
formed part of our personality gives us our main tendencies,
dominant qualities and capacities, effective turn in action and
life. But they are more or less present in all men, here manifest,
there latent, here developed, there subdued and depressed or
subordinate, and in the perfect man will be raised up to a fullness
and harmony which in the spiritual freedom will burst out into
the free play of the infinite quality of the spirit in the inner and
outer life and in the self-enjoying creative play of the Purusha
with his and the world’s Nature-Power.
The most outward psychological form of these things is the
mould or trend of the nature towards certain dominant tenden¬
cies, capacities, characteristics, form of active power, quality of
the mind and inner life, cultural personality or type. The turn
is often towards the predominance of the intellectual element
and the capacities which make for the seeking and finding of
knowledge and an intellectual creation or formativeness and a
preoccupation with ideas and the study of ideas or of life and
the information and development of the reflective intelligence.
According to the grade of the development there is produced
successively the make and character of the man of active, open,
inquiring intelligence, then the intellectual and, last, the thinker,
sage, great mind of knowledge. The soul-powers which make
their appearance by a considerable development of this tem¬
perament, personality, soul-type, are a mind of light more and
more open to all ideas and knowledge and incomings of Truth;
a hunger and passion for knowledge, for its growth in ourselves,
for its communication to others, for its reign in the world, the
reign of reason and right and truth and justice and, on a higher
level of the harmony of our greater being, the reign of the spirit
and its universal unity and light and love; a power of this light in
the mind and will which makes all the life subject to reason and
its right and truth or to the spirit and spiritual right and truth
and subdues the lower members to their greater law; a poise
in the temperament turned from the first to patience, steady
musing and calm, to reflection, to meditation, which dominates
744
The Yoga of Self -F erf ection
and quiets the turmoil of the will and passions and makes for
high thinking and pure living, founds the self-governed sattwic
mind, grows into a more and more mild, lofty, impersonalised
and universalised personality. This is the ideal character and
soul-power of the Brahmana, the priest of knowledge. If it is not
there in all its sides, we have the imperfections or perversions
of the type, a mere intellectuality or curiosity for ideas without
ethical or other elevation, a narrow concentration on some kind
of intellectual activity without the greater needed openness of
mind, soul and spirit, or the arrogance and exclusiveness of the
intellectual shut up in his intellectuality, or an ineffective ideal¬
ism without any hold on life, or any other of the characteristic
incompletenesses and limitations of the intellectual, religious,
scientific or philosophic mind. These are stoppings short on the
way or temporary exclusive concentrations, but a fullness of
the divine soul and power of truth and knowledge in man is
the perfection of this Dharma or Swabhava, the accomplished
Brahminhood of the complete Brahmana.
On the other hand the turn of the nature may be to the
predominance of the will-force and the capacities which make
for strength, energy, courage, leadership, protection, rule, vic¬
tory in every kind of battle, a creative and formative action, the
will-power which lays its hold on the material of life and on
the wills of other men and compels the environment into the
shapes which the Shakti within us seeks to impose on life or acts
powerfully according to the work to be done to maintain what is
in being or to destroy it and make clear the paths of the world or
to bring out into definite shape what is to be. This may be there
in lesser or greater power or form and according to its grade and
force we have successively the mere fighter or man of action, the
man of self-imposing active will and personality and the ruler,
conqueror, leader of a cause, creator, founder in whatever field
of the active formation of life. The various imperfections of the
soul and mind produce many imperfections and perversities of
this type, — the man of mere brute force of will, the worship¬
per of power without any other ideal or higher purpose, the
selfish, dominant personality, the aggressive violent rajasic man.
Soul-Force and the Fourfold Personality
745
Soul-Force and the Fourfold Personality
745
the grandiose egoist, the Titan, Asura, Rakshasa. But the soul-
powers to which this type of nature opens on its higher grades
are as necessary as those of the Brahmana to the perfection of
our human nature. The high fearlessness which no danger or
difficulty can daunt and which feels its power equal to meet and
face and bear whatever assault of man or fortune or adverse
gods, the dynamic audacity and daring which shrinks from no
adventure or enterprise as beyond the powers of a human soul
free from disabling weakness and fear, the love of honour which
would scale the heights of the highest nobility of man and stoop
to nothing little, base, vulgar or weak, but maintains untainted
the ideal of high courage, chivalry, truth, straightforwardness,
sacrifice of the lower to the higher self, helpfulness to men,
unflinching resistance to injustice and oppression, self-control
and mastery, noble leading, warriorhood and captainship of the
journey and the battle, the high self-confidence of power, capac¬
ity, character and courage indispensable to the man of action,
— these are the things that build the make of the Kshatriya. To
carry these things to their highest degree and give them a certain
divine fullness, purity and grandeur is the perfection of those
who have this Swabhava and follow this Dharma.
A third turn is one that brings out into relief the practical ar¬
ranging intelligence and the instinct of life to produce, exchange,
possess, enjoy, contrive, put things in order and balance, spend
itself and get and give and take, work out to the best advantage
the active relations of existence. In its outward action it is this
power that appears as the skilful devising intelligence, the legal,
professional, commercial, industrial, economical, practical and
scientific, mechanical, technical and utilitarian mind. This nature
is accompanied at the normal level of its fullness by a general
temperament which is at once grasping and generous, prone to
amass and treasure, to enjoy, show and use, bent upon efficient
exploitation of the world or its surroundings, but well capable
too of practical philanthropy, humanity, ordered benevolence,
orderly and ethical by rule but without any high distinction of
the finer ethical spirit, a mind of the middle levels, not straining
towards the heights, not great to break and create noble moulds
746
The Yoga of Self -F erf ection
of life, but marked by capacity, adaptation and measure. The
powers, limitations and perversions of this type are familiar to
us on a large scale, because this is the very spirit which has made
our modern commercial and industrial civilisation. But if we
look at the greater inner capacities and soul-values, we shall find
that here also there are things that enter into the completeness
of human perfection. The Power that thus outwardly expresses
itself on our present lower levels is one that can throw itself out
in the great utilities of life and at its freest and widest makes, not
for oneness and identity which is the highest reach of knowledge
or the mastery and spiritual kingship which is the highest reach
of strength, but still for something which is also essential to the
wholeness of existence, equal mutuality and the exchange of soul
with soul and life with life. Its powers are, first, a skill, kausala,
which fashions and obeys law, recognises the uses and limits
of relations, adapts itself to settled and developing movements,
produces and perfects the outer technique of creation and ac¬
tion and life, assures possession and proceeds from possession to
growth, is watchful over order and careful in progress and makes
the most of the material of existence and its means and ends;
then a power of self-spending skilful in lavishness and skilful
in economy, which recognises the great law of interchange and
amasses in order to throw out in a large return, increasing the
currents of interchange and the fruitfulness of existence; a power
of giving and ample creative liberality, mutual helpfulness and
utility to others which becomes the source in an open soul of
just beneficence, humanitarianism, altruism of a practical kind;
finally, a power of enjoyment, a productive, possessive, active
opulence luxurious of the prolific Ananda of existence. A large¬
ness of mutuality, a generous fullness of the relations of life, a
lavish self-spending and return and ample interchange between
existence and existence, a full enjoyment and use of the rhythm
and balance of fruitful and productive life are the perfection of
those who have this Swabhava and follow this Dharma.
The other turn is towards work and service. This was in the
old order the dharma or soul-type of the Shudra and the Shudra
in that order was considered as not one of the twice-born, but
Soul-Force and the Fourfold Personality
747
The other turn is towards work and service. This was in the
old order the dharma or soul-type of the Shudra and the Shudra
in that order was considered as not one of the twice-born, but
Soul-Force and the Fourfold Personality
747
an inferior type. A more recent consideration of the values of
existence lays stress on the dignity of labour and sees in its toil
the bed-rock of the relations between man and man. There is a
truth in both attitudes. For this force in the material world is
at once in its necessity the foundation of material existence or
rather that on which it moves, the feet of the creator Brahma in
the old parable, and in its primal state not uplifted by knowl¬
edge, mutuality or strength a thing which reposes on instinct,
desire and inertia. The well-developed Shudra soul-type has the
instinct of toil and the capacity of labour and service; but toil
as opposed to easy or natural action is a thing imposed on the
natural man which he bears because without it he cannot assure
his existence or get his desires and he has to force himself or be
forced by others or circumstances to spend himself in work. The
natural Shudra works not from a sense of the dignity of labour
or from the enthusiasm of service, — though that comes by the
cultivation of his dharma, — not as the man of knowledge for
the joy or gain of knowledge, not from a sense of honour, nor as
the born craftsman or artist for love of his work or ardour for the
beauty of its technique, nor from an ordered sense of mutuality
or large utility, but for the maintenance of his existence and
gratification of his primal wants, and when these are satisfied,
he indulges, if left to himself, his natural indolence, the indolence
which is normal to the tamasic quality in all of us, but comes
out most clearly in the uncompelled primitive man, the savage.
The unregenerated Shudra is born therefore for service rather
than for free labour and his temperament is prone to an inert
ignorance, a gross unthinking self-indulgence of the instincts,
a servility, an unreflective obedience and mechanical discharge
of duty varied by indolence, evasion, spasmodic revolt, an in¬
stinctive and uninformed life. The ancients held that all men
are born in their lower nature as Shudras and only regenerated
by ethical and spiritual culture, but in their highest inner self
are Brahmanas capable of the full spirit and godhead, a theory
which is not far perhaps from the psychological truth of our
nature.
And yet when the soul develops, it is in this Swabhava and
748
And yet when the soul develops, it is in this Swabhava and
748
The Yoga of Self -F erf ection
Dharma of work and service that there are found some of the
most necessary and beautiful elements of our greatest perfection
and the key to much of the secret of the highest spiritual evolu¬
tion. For the soul powers that belong to the full development of
this force in us are of the greatest importance, — the power of
service to others, the will to make our life a thing of work and
use to God and man, to obey and follow and accept whatever
great influence and needful discipline, the love which consecrates
service, a love which asks for no return, but spends itself for the
satisfaction of that which we love, the power to bring down this
love and service into the physical field and the desire to give our
body and life as well as our soul and mind and will and capacity
to God and man, and, as a result, the power of complete self¬
surrender, atma-samarpana, which transferred to the spiritual
life becomes one of the greatest most revealing keys to freedom
and perfection. In these things lies the perfection of this Dharma
and the nobility of this Swabhava. Man could not be perfect and
complete if he had not this element of nature in him to raise to
its divine power.
None of these four types of personality can be complete
even in its own field if it does not bring into it something of
the other qualities. The man of knowledge cannot serve Truth
with freedom and perfection, if he has not intellectual and moral
courage, will, audacity, the strength to open and conquer new
kingdoms, otherwise he becomes a slave of the limited intellect
or a servant or at most a ritual priest of only an established
knowledge,^ — cannot use his knowledge to the best advantage
unless he has the adaptive skill to work out its truths for the
practice of life, otherwise he lives only in the idea, — cannot
make the entire consecration of his knowledge unless he has the
spirit of service to humanity, to the Godhead in man and the
Master of his being. The man of power must illumine and uplift
and govern his force and strength by knowledge, light of reason
or religion or the spirit, otherwise he becomes the mere forceful
^ That perhaps is why it was the Kshatriya bringing his courage, audacity, spirit of con¬
quest into the fields of intuitive knowledge and spiritual experience who first discovered
the great truths of Vedanta.
Soul-Force and the Fourfold Personality
749
Soul-Force and the Fourfold Personality
749
Asura, — must have the skill which will help him best to use
and administer and regulate his strength and make it creative
and fruitful and adapted to his relations with others, otherwise
it becomes a mere drive of force across the field of life, a storm
that passes and devastates more than it constructs, — must be
capable too of obedience and make the use of his strength a
service to God and the world, otherwise he becomes a selfish
dominator, tyrant, brutal compeller of men’s souls and bodies.
The man of productive mind and work must have an open in¬
quiring mind and ideas and knowledge, otherwise he moves in
the routine of his functions without expansive growth, must
have courage and enterprise, must bring a spirit of service into
his getting and production, in order that he may not only get but
give, not only amass and enjoy his own life, but consciously help
the fruitfulness and fullness of the surrounding life by which he
profits. The man of labour and service becomes a helpless drudge
and slave of society if he does not bring knowledge and honour
and aspiration and skill into his work, since only so can he rise
by an opening mind and will and understanding usefulness to the
higher dharmas. But the greater perfection of man comes when
he enlarges himself to include all these powers, even though one
of them may lead the others, and opens his nature more and more
into the rounded fullness and universal capacity of the fourfold
spirit. Man is not cut out into an exclusive type of one of these
dharmas, but all these powers are in him at work at first in an ill-
formed confusion, but he gives shape to one or another in birth
after birth, progresses from one to the other even in the same life
and goes on towards the total development of his inner existence.
Our life itself is at once an inquiry after truth and knowledge, a
struggle and battle of our will with ourselves and surrounding
forces, a constant production, adaptation, application of skill to
the material of life and a sacrifice and service.
These things are the ordinary aspects of the soul while it
is working out its force in nature, but when we get nearer to
our inner selves, then we get too a glimpse and experience of
something which was involved in these forms and can disengage
itself and stand behind and drive them, as if a general Presence
750
The Yoga of Self -F erf ection
or Power brought to bear on the particular working of this living
and thinking machine. This is the force of the soul itself presiding
over and filling the powers of its nature. The difference is that
the first way is personal in its stamp, limited and determined
in its action and mould, dependent on the instrumentation, but
here there emerges something impersonal in the personal form,
independent and self-sufficient even in the use of the instru¬
mentation, indeterminable though determining both itself and
things, something which acts with a much greater power upon
the world and uses particular power only as one means of com¬
munication and impact on man and circumstance. The Yoga of
self-perfection brings out this soul-force and gives it its largest
scope, takes up all the fourfold powers and throws them into
the free circle of an integral and harmonious spiritual dynamis.
The godhead, the soul-power of knowledge rises to the highest
degree of which the individual nature can be the supporting
basis. A free mind of light develops which is open to every
kind of revelation, inspiration, intuition, idea, discrimination,
thinking synthesis; an enlightened life of the mind grasps at all
knowledge with a delight of finding and reception and holding, a
spiritual enthusiasm, passion, or ecstasy; a power of light full of
spiritual force, illumination and purity of working manifests its
empire, brahma-tejas, brahma-varcas; a bottomless steadiness
and illimitable calm upholds all the illumination, movement,
action as on some rock of ages, equal, unperturbed, unmoved,
acyuta.
The godhead, the soul-power of will and strength rises to a
like largeness and altitude. An absolute calm fearlessness of the
free spirit, an infinite dynamic courage which no peril, limitation
of possibility, wall of opposing force can deter from pursuing the
work or aspiration imposed by the spirit, a high nobility of soul
and will untouched by any littleness or baseness and moving
with a certain greatness of step to spiritual victory or the success
of the God-given work through whatever temporary defeat or
obstacle, a spirit never depressed or cast down from faith and
confidence in the power that works in the being, are the signs of
this perfection. There comes too to fulfilment a large godhead.
Soul-Force and the Fourfold Personality
751
There comes too to fulfilment a large godhead.
Soul-Force and the Fourfold Personality
751
a soul-power of mutuality, a free self-spending and spending
of gift and possession in the work to be done, lavished for
the production, the creation, the achievement, the possession,
gain, utilisable return, a skill that observes the law and adapts
the relation and keeps the measure, a great taking into oneself
from all beings and a free giving out of oneself to all, a divine
commerce, a large enjoyment of the mutual delight of life. And
finally there comes to perfection the godhead, the soul-power of
service, the universal love that lavishes itself without demand of
return, the embrace that takes to itself the body of God in man
and works for help and service, the abnegation that is ready to
bear the yoke of the Master and make the life a free servitude
to Him and under his direction to the claim and need of his
creatures, the self-surrender of the whole being to the Master of
our being and his work in the world. These things unite, assist
and enter into each other, become one. The full consummation
comes in the greatest souls most capable of perfection, but some
large manifestation of this fourfold soul-power must be sought
and can be attained by all who practise the integral Yoga.
These are the signs, but behind is the soul which thus ex¬
presses itself in a consummation of nature. And this soul is an
outcoming of the free self of the liberated man. That self is of
no character, being infinite, but bears and upholds the play of
all character, supports a kind of infinite, one, yet multiple per¬
sonality, nirguno guru, is in its manifestation capable of infinite
quality, anantaguna. The force that it uses is the supreme and
universal, the divine and infinite Shakti pouring herself into the
individual being and freely determining action for the divine
purpose.
Chapter XVI
The Divine Shakti
The force that it uses is the supreme and
universal, the divine and infinite Shakti pouring herself into the
individual being and freely determining action for the divine
purpose.
Chapter XVI
The Divine Shakti
The relation between the Purusha and Prakriti which
emerges as one advances in the Yoga of self-perfection is
the next thing that we have to understand carefully in this
part of the Yoga. In the spiritual truth of our being the power
which we call Nature is the power of being, consciousness and
will and therefore the power of self-expression and self-creation
of the self, soul or Purusha. But to our ordinary mind in the
ignorance and to its experience of things the force of Prakriti
has a different appearance. When we look at it in its universal
action outside ourselves, we see it first as a mechanical energy
in the cosmos which acts upon matter or in its own created
forms of matter. In matter it evolves powers and processes of life
and in living matter powers and processes of mind. Through¬
out its operations it acts by fixed laws and in each kind of
created thing displays varying properties of energy and laws
of process which give its character to the genus or species and
again in the individual develops without infringing the law of
the kind minor characteristics and variations of a considerable
consequence. It is this mechanical appearance of Prakriti which
has preoccupied the modern scientific mind and made for it its
whole view of Nature, and so much so that science still hopes
and labours with a very small amount of success to explain all
phenomena of life by laws of matter and all phenomena of mind
by laws of living matter. Here soul or spirit has no place and
nature cannot be regarded as power of spirit. Since the whole
of our existence is mechanical, physical and bounded by the
biological phenomenon of a brief living consciousness and man
is a creature and instrument of material energy, the spiritual
self-evolution of Yoga can be only a delusion, hallucination,
abnormal state of mind or self-hypnosis. In any case it cannot
be what it represents itself to be, a discovery of the eternal truth
The Divine Shakti
753
of our being and a passing above the limited truth of the mental,
vital and physical to the full truth of our spiritual nature.
In any case it cannot
be what it represents itself to be, a discovery of the eternal truth
The Divine Shakti
753
of our being and a passing above the limited truth of the mental,
vital and physical to the full truth of our spiritual nature.
But when we look, not at external mechanical Nature to
the exclusion of our personality, but at the inner subjective
experience of man the mental being, our nature takes to us a
quite different appearance. We may believe intellectually in a
purely mechanical view even of our subjective existence, but we
cannot act upon it or make it quite real to our self-experience.
For we are conscious of an I which does not seem identical
with our nature, but capable of a standing back from it, of a
detached observation and criticism and creative use of it, and
of a will which we naturally think of as a free will; and even if
this be a delusion, we are still obliged in practice to act as if we
were responsible mental beings capable of a free choice of our
actions, able to use or misuse and to turn to higher or lower ends
our nature. And even we seem to be struggling both with our
environmental and with our own present nature and striving to
get mastery over a world which imposes itself on and masters
us and at the same time to become something more than we
now are. But the difficulty is that we are only in command, if
at all, over a small part of ourselves, the rest is subconscient or
subliminal and beyond our control, our will acts only in a small
selection of our activities; the most is a process of mechanism
and habit and we must strive constantly with ourselves and
surrounding circumstances to make the least advance or self-
amelioration. There seems to be a dual being in us; Soul and
Nature, Purusha and Prakriti, seem to be half in agreement, half
at odds. Nature laying its mechanical control on the soul, the
soul attempting to change and master nature. And the question
is what is the fundamental character of this duality and what
the issue.
The Sankhya explanation is that our present existence is
governed by a dual principle. Prakriti is inert without the con¬
tact of Purusha, acts only by a junction with it and then too by
the fixed mechanism of her instruments and qualities; Purusha,
passive and free apart from Prakriti, becomes by contact with
her and sanction to her works subject to this mechanism, lives
754
The Yoga of Self -F erf ection
in her limitation of ego-sense and must get free by withdrawing
the sanction and returning to its own proper principle. Another
explanation that tallies with a certain part of our experience
is that there is a dual being in us, the animal and material, or
more widely the lower nature-bound, and the soul or spiritual
being entangled by mind in the material existence or in world-
nature, and freedom comes by escape from the entanglement,
the soul returning to its native planes or the self or spirit to its
pure existence. The perfection of the soul then is to be found
not at all in, but beyond Nature.
But in a higher than our present mental consciousness we
find that this duality is only a phenomenal appearance. The
highest and real truth of existence is the one Spirit, the supreme
Soul, Purushottama, and it is the power of being of this Spirit
which manifests itself in all that we experience as universe. This
universal Nature is not a lifeless, inert or unconscious mecha¬
nism, but informed in all its movements by the universal Spirit.
The mechanism of its process is only an outward appearance and
the reality is the Spirit creating or manifesting its own being by
its own power of being in all that is in Nature. Soul and Nature
in us too are only a dual appearance of the one existence. The
universal energy acts in us, but the soul limits itself by the ego-
sense, lives in a partial and separate experience of her workings,
uses only a modicum and a fixed action of her energy for its
self-expression. It seems rather to be mastered and used by this
energy than to use it, because it identifies itself with the ego-
sense which is part of the natural instrumentation and lives in
the ego experience. The ego is in fact driven by the mechanism
of Nature of which it is a part and the ego-will is not and cannot
be a free will. To arrive at freedom, mastery and perfection we
have to get back to the real self and soul within and arrive too
thereby at our true relations with our own and with universal
nature.
In our active being this translates itself into a replacement
of our egoistic, our personal, our separatively individual will
and energy by a universal and a divine will and energy which
determines our action in harmony with the universal action and
The Divine Shakti
755
reveals itself as the direct will and the all-guiding power of the
Purushottama. We replace the inferior action of the limited,
ignorant and imperfect personal will and energy in us by the
action of the divine Shakti. To open ourselves to the universal
energy is always possible to us, because that is all around us and
always flowing into us, it is that which supports and supplies
all our inner and outer action and in fact we have no power
of our own in any separately individual sense, but only a per¬
sonal formulation of the one Shakti. And on the other hand this
universal Shakti is within ourselves, concentrated in us, for the
whole power of it is present in each individual as in the universe,
and there are means and processes by which we can awaken its
greater and potentially infinite force and liberate it to its larger
workings.
We can become aware of the existence and presence of the
universal Shakti in the various forms of her power. At present we
are conscious only of the power as formulated in our physical
mind, nervous being and corporeal case sustaining our various
activities. But if we can once get beyond this first formation
by some liberation of the hidden, recondite, subliminal parts
of our existence by Yoga, we become aware of a greater life
force, a pranic Shakti, which supports and fills the body and
supplies all the physical and vital activities, — for the physical
energy is only a modified form of this force, — and supplies
and sustains too from below all our mental action. This force
we feel in ourselves also, but we can feel it too around us and
above, one with the same energy in us, and can draw it in and
down to aggrandise our normal action or call upon and get it
to pour into us. It is an illimitable ocean of Shakti and will
pour as much of itself as we can hold into our being. This
pranic force we can use for any of the activities of life, body
or mind with a far greater and effective power than any that
we command in our present operations, limited as they are by
the physical formula. The use of this pranic power liberates us
from that limitation to the extent of our ability to use it in
place of the body-bound energy. It can be used so to direct the
prana as to manage more powerfully or to rectify any bodily
756
The Yoga of Self -F erf ection
It can be used so to direct the
prana as to manage more powerfully or to rectify any bodily
756
The Yoga of Self -F erf ection
state or action, as to heal illness or to get rid of fatigue, and
to liberate an enormous amount of mental exertion and play of
will or knowledge. The exercises of Pranayama are the familiar
mechanical means of freeing and getting control of the pranic
energy. They heighten too and set free the psychic, mental and
spiritual energies which ordinarily depend for their opportunity
of action on the pranic force. But the same thing can be done by
mental will and practice or by an increasing opening of ourselves
to a higher spiritual power of the Shakti. The pranic Shakti can
be directed not only upon ourselves, but effectively towards
others or on things or happenings for whatever purposes the
will dictates. Its effectivity is immense, in itself illimitable, and
limited only by defect of the power, purity and universality of
the spiritual or other will which is brought to bear upon it; but
still, however great and powerful, it is a lower formulation, a
link between the mind and body, an instrumental force. There
is a consciousness in it, a presence of the spirit, of which we are
aware, but it is encased, involved in and preoccupied with the
urge to action. It is not to this action of the Shakti that we can
leave the whole burden of our activities; we have either to use
its lendings by our own enlightened personal will or else call in
a higher guidance; for of itself it will act with greater force, but
still according to our imperfect nature and mainly by the drive
and direction of the life-power in us and not according to the
law of the highest spiritual existence.
The ordinary power by which we govern the pranic energy
is that of the embodied mind. But when we get clear above
the physical mind, we can get too above the pranic force to
the consciousness of a pure mental energy which is a higher
formulation of the Shakti. There we are aware of a univer¬
sal mind consciousness closely associated with this energy in,
around and above us, — above, that is to say, the level of our
ordinary mind status, — giving all the substance and shaping all
the forms of our will and knowledge and of the psychic element
in our impulses and emotions. This mind force can be made to
act upon the pranic energy and can impose upon it the influence,
colour, shape, character, direction of our ideas, our knowledge.
The Divine Shakti
757
This mind force can be made to
act upon the pranic energy and can impose upon it the influence,
colour, shape, character, direction of our ideas, our knowledge.
The Divine Shakti
757
our more enlightened volition and thus more effectively bring
our life and vital being into harmony with our higher powers
of being, ideals and spiritual aspirations. In our ordinary state
these two, the mental and the pranic being and energies, are very
much mixed up and run into each other, and we are not able
clearly to distinguish them or get a full hold of the one on the
other and so control effectively the lower by the higher and more
understanding principle. But when we take our station above the
physical mind, we are able then to separate clearly the two forms
of energy, the two levels of our being, disentangle their action
and act with a clearer and more potent self-knowledge and an
enlightened and a purer will-power. Nevertheless the control is
not complete, spontaneous, sovereign so long as we work with
the mind as our chief guiding and controlling force. The mental
energy we find to be itself derivative, a lower and limiting power
of the conscious spirit which acts only by isolated and combined
seeings, imperfect and incomplete half-lights which we take for
full and adequate light, and with a disparity between the idea
and knowledge and the effective will-power. And we are aware
soon of a far higher power of the Spirit and its Shakti concealed
or above, superconscient to mind or partially acting through the
mind, of which all this is an inferior derivation.
The Purusha and Prakriti are on the mental level as in the
rest of our being closely joined and much involved in each other
and we are not able to distinguish clearly soul and nature. But in
the purer substance of mind we can more easily discern the dual
strain. The mental Purusha is naturally able in its own native
principle of mind to detach itself, as we have seen, from the
workings of its Prakriti and there is then a division of our being
between a consciousness that observes and can reserve its will¬
power and an energy full of the substance of consciousness that
takes the forms of knowledge, will and feeling. This detachment
gives at its highest a certain freedom from the compulsion of
the soul by its mental nature. For ordinarily we are driven and
carried along in the stream of our own and the universal ac¬
tive energy partly floundering in its waves, partly maintaining
and seeming to guide or at least propel ourselves by a collected
758
For ordinarily we are driven and
carried along in the stream of our own and the universal ac¬
tive energy partly floundering in its waves, partly maintaining
and seeming to guide or at least propel ourselves by a collected
758
The Yoga of Self -F erf ection
thought and an effort of the mental will muscle; but now there
is a part of ourselves, nearest to the pure essence of self, which is
free from the stream, can quietly observe and to a certain extent
decide its immediate movement and course and to a greater
extent its ultimate direction. The Purusha can at last act upon
the Prakrit! from half apart, from behind or from above her
as a presiding person or presence, adhyaksa, by the power of
sanction and control inherent in the spirit.
The Purusha can at last act upon
the Prakrit! from half apart, from behind or from above her
as a presiding person or presence, adhyaksa, by the power of
sanction and control inherent in the spirit.
What we shall do with this relative freedom depends on our
aspiration, our idea of the relation we must have with our highest
self, with God and Nature. It is possible for the Purusha to use
it on the mental plane itself for a constant self-observation, self¬
development, self-modification, to sanction, reject, alter, bring
out new formulations of the nature and establish a calm and
disinterested action, a high and pure sattwic balance and rhythm
of its energy, a personality perfected in the sattwic principle.
This may amount only to a highly mentalised perfection of our
present intelligence and the ethical and the psychic being or
else, aware of the greater self in us, it may impersonalise, uni-
versalise, spiritualise its self-conscious existence and the action
of its nature and arrive either at a large quietude or a large
perfection of the spiritualised mental energy of its being. It is
possible again for the Purusha to stand back entirely and by a
refusal of sanction allow the whole normal action of the mind to
exhaust itself, run down, spend its remaining impetus of habitual
action and fall into silence. Or else this silence may be imposed
on the mental energy by rejection of its action and a constant
command to quietude. The soul may through the confirmation
of this quietude and mental silence pass into some ineffable
tranquillity of the spirit and vast cessation of the activities of
Nature. But it is also possible to make this silence of the mind
and ability to suspend the habits of the lower nature a first step
towards the discovery of a superior formulation, a higher grade
of the status and energy of our being and pass by an ascent and
transformation into the supramental power of the spirit. And
this may even, though with more difficulty, be done without
resorting to the complete state of quietude of the normal mind
The Divine Shakti
759
And
this may even, though with more difficulty, be done without
resorting to the complete state of quietude of the normal mind
The Divine Shakti
759
by a persistent and progressive transformation of all the mental
into their greater corresponding supramental powers and activ¬
ities. For everything in the mind derives from and is a limited,
inferior, groping, partial or perverse translation into mentality of
something in the supermind. But neither of these movements can
be successfully executed by the sole individual unaided power of
the mental Purusha in us, but needs the help, intervention and
guidance of the divine Self, the Ishwara, the Purushottama. For
the supermind is the divine mind and it is on the supramental
plane that the individual arrives at his right, integral, luminous
and perfect relation with the supreme and universal Purusha and
the supreme and universal Para Prakriti.
As the mind progresses in purity, capacity of stillness or
freedom from absorption in its own limited action, it becomes
aware of and is able to reflect, bring into itself or enter into
the conscious presence of the Self, the supreme and universal
Spirit, and it becomes aware too of grades and powers of the
spirit higher than its own highest ranges. It becomes aware of
an infinite of the consciousness of being, an infinite ocean of all
the power and energy of illimitable consciousness, an infinite
ocean of Ananda, of the self-moved delight of existence. It may
be aware of one or other only of these things, for the mind can
separate and feel exclusively as distinct original principles what
in a higher experience are inseparable powers of the One, or it
may feel them in a trinity or fusion which reveals or arrives at
their oneness. It may become aware of it on the side of Purusha
or on the side of Prakriti. On the side of Purusha it reveals itself
as Self or Spirit, as Being or as the one sole existent Being, the
divine Purushottama, and the individual Jiva soul can enter into
entire oneness with it in its timeless self or in its universality,
or enjoy nearness, immanence, difference without any gulf of
separation and enjoy too inseparably and at one and the same
time oneness of being and delight-giving difference of relation
in active experiencing nature. On the side of Prakriti the power
and Ananda of the Spirit come into the front to manifest this
Infinite in the beings and personalities and ideas and forms and
forces of the universe and there is then present to us the divine
760
The Yoga of Self -F erf ection
Mahashakti, original Power, supreme Nature, holding in herself
infinite existence and creating the wonders of the cosmos. The
mind grows conscious of this illimitable ocean of Shakti or else
of her presence high above the mind and pouring something of
herself into us to constitute all that we are and think and will
and do and feel and experience, or it is conscious of her all
around us and our personality a wave of the ocean of power
of spirit, or of her presence in us and of her action there based
on our present form of natural existence but originated from
above and raising us towards the higher spiritual status. The
mind too can rise towards and touch her infinity or merge itself
in it in trance of samadhi or can lose itself in her universality,
and then our individuality disappears, our centre of action is
then no longer in us, but either outside our bodied selves or
nowhere; our mental activities are then no longer our own, but
come into this frame of mind, life and body from the universal,
work themselves out and pass leaving no impression on us, and
this frame of ourselves too is only an insignificant circumstance
in her cosmic vastness. But the perfection sought in the integral
Yoga is not only to be one with her in her highest spiritual
power and one with her in her universal action, but to realise
and possess the fullness of this Shakti in our individual being and
nature. For the supreme Spirit is one as Purusha or as Prakriti,
conscious being or power of conscious being, and as the Jiva in
essence of self and spirit is one with the supreme Purusha, so
on the side of Nature, in power of self and spirit it is one with
Shakti, para prakrtir jwabhuta. To realise this double oneness is
the condition of the integral self-perfection. The Jiva is then the
meeting-place of the play of oneness of the supreme Soul and
Nature.
To reach this perfection we have to become aware of the
divine Shakti, draw her to us and call her in to fill the whole
system and take up the charge of all our activities. There will
then be no separate personal will or individual energy trying
to conduct our actions, no sense of a little personal self as the
doer, nor will it be the lower energy of the three gunas, the
mental, vital and physical nature. The divine Shakti will fill
The Divine Shakti
761
The divine Shakti will fill
The Divine Shakti
761
us and preside over and take up all our inner activities, our
outer life, our Yoga. She will take up the mental energy, her
own lower formation, and raise it to its highest and purest and
fullest powers of intelligence and will and psychic action. She
will change the mechanical energies of the mind, life and body
which now govern us into delight-filled manifestations of her
own living and conscious power and presence. She will manifest
in us and relate to each other all the various spiritual experiences
of which the mind is capable. And as the crown of this process
she will bring down the supramental light into the mental levels,
change the stuff of mind into the stuff of supermind, transform
all the lower energies into energies of her supramental nature
and raise us into our being of gnosis. The Shakti will reveal
herself as the power of the Purushottama, and it is the Ishwara
who will manifest himself in his force of supermind and spirit
and be the master of our being, action, life and Yoga.
Chapter XVII
The Action of the Divine Shakti
The Shakti will reveal
herself as the power of the Purushottama, and it is the Ishwara
who will manifest himself in his force of supermind and spirit
and be the master of our being, action, life and Yoga.
Chapter XVII
The Action of the Divine Shakti
This is the nature of the divine Shakti that it is the timeless
power of the Divine which manifests itself in time as
a universal force creating, constituting, maintaining and
directing all the movements and workings of the universe. This
universal Power is apparent to us first on the lower levels of
existence as a mental, vital and material cosmic energy of which
all our mental, vital and physical activities are the operations. It
is necessary for our sadhana that we should thoroughly realise
this truth in order to escape from the pressure of the limiting
ego view and universalise ourselves even on these lower levels
where ordinarily the ego reigns in full force. To see that we are
not the originators of action but that it is rather this Power that
acts in ourselves and in all others, not I and others the doers,
but the one Prakriti, which is the rule of the Karmayoga, is
also the right rule here. The ego sense serves to limit, separate
and sharply differentiate, to make the most of the individual
form and it is there because it is indispensable to the evolution
of the lower life. But when we would rise above to a higher
divine life we must loosen the force of the ego and eventually
get rid of it — as for the lower life the development of ego, so
for the higher life this reverse movement of elimination of the
ego is indispensable. To see our actions as not our own but those
of the divine Shakti working in the form of the lower Prakriti
on the inferior levels of the conscious being, helps powerfully
towards this change. And if we can do this, then the separation
of our mental, vital and physical consciousness from that of
other beings thins and lessens; the limitations of its workings
remain indeed, but they are broadened and taken up into a large
sense and vision of the universal working; the specialising and
individualising differentiations of Nature abide for their own
proper purpose, but are no longer a prison. The individual feels
The Action of the Divine Shakti
763
his mind, life and physical existence to be one with that of others
amid all differences and one with the total power of the spirit in
Nature.
The individual feels
The Action of the Divine Shakti
763
his mind, life and physical existence to be one with that of others
amid all differences and one with the total power of the spirit in
Nature.
This however is a stage and not the whole perfection. The
existence, however comparatively large and free, is still subject
to the inferior nature. The sattwic, rajasic and tamasic ego is
diminished but not eliminated; or if it seems to disappear, it has
only sunk in our parts of action into the universal operation
of the gunas, remains involved in them and is still working
in a covert, subconscient fashion and may force itself to the
front at any time. The sadhaka has therefore first to keep the
idea and get the realisation of a one self or spirit in all behind
all these workings. He must be aware behind Prakriti of the
one supreme and universal Purusha. He must see and feel not
only that all is the self-shaping of the one Force, Prakriti or
Nature, but that all her actions are those of the Divine in all,
the one Godhead in all, however veiled, altered and as it were
perverted — for perversion comes by a conversion into lower
forms — by transmission through the ego and the gunas. This
will farther diminish the open or covert insistence of the ego
and, if thoroughly realised, it will make it difficult or impossible
for it to assert itself in such a way as to disturb or hamper
the farther progress. The ego-sense will become, so far as it
interferes at all, a foreign intrusive element and only a fringe
of the mist of the old ignorance hanging on to the outskirts of
the consciousness and its action. And, secondly, the universal
Shakti must be realised, must be seen and felt and borne in the
potent purity of its higher action, its supramental and spiritual
workings. This greater vision of the Shakti will enable us to
escape from the control of the gunas, to convert them into their
divine equivalents and dwell in a consciousness in which the
Purusha and Prakriti are one and not separated or hidden in or
behind each other. There the Shakti will be in its every movement
evident to us and naturally, spontaneously, irresistibly felt as
nothing else but the active presence of the Divine, the shape of
power of the supreme Self and Spirit.
The Shakti in this higher status reveals itself as the presence
764
The Yoga of Self -F erf ection
The Shakti in this higher status reveals itself as the presence
764
The Yoga of Self -F erf ection
or potentiality of the infinite existence, consciousness, will, de¬
light, and when it is so seen and felt, the being turns towards it
in whatever way, with its adoration or its will of aspiration or
some kind of attraction of the lesser to the greater, to know it,
to be full of and possessed by it, to be one with it in the sense
and action of the whole nature. But at first while we still live in
the mind, there is a gulf of division or else a double action. The
mental, vital and physical energy in us and the universe is felt to
be a derivation from the supreme Shakti, but at the same time
an inferior, separated and in some sense another working. The
real spiritual force may send down its messages or the light and
power of its presence above us to the lower levels or may descend
occasionally and even for a time possess, but it is then mixed with
the inferior workings and partially transforms and spiritualises
them, but is itself diminished and altered in the process. There
is an intermittent higher action or a dual working of the nature.
Or we find that the Shakti for a time raises the being to a higher
spiritual plane and then lowers it back into the inferior levels.
These alternations must be regarded as the natural vicissitudes
of a process of transformation from the normal to the spiritual
being. The transformation, the perfection cannot for the integral
Yoga be complete until the link between the mental and the
spiritual action is formed and a higher knowledge applied to
all the activities of our existence. That link is the supramental
or gnostic energy in which the incalculable infinite power of
the supreme being, consciousness, delight formulates itself as an
ordering divine will and wisdom, a light and power in the being
which shapes all the thought, will, feeling, action and replaces
the corresponding individual movements.
This supramental Shakti may form itself as a spiritualised
intuitive light and power in the mind itself, and that is a great
but still a mentally limited spiritual action. Or it may transform
altogether the mind and raise the whole being to the supramental
level. In any case this is the first necessity of this part of the
Yoga, to lose the ego of the doer, the ego idea and the sense of
one’s own power of action and initiation of action and control
of the result of action and merge it in the sense and vision of
The Action of the Divine Shakti
765
the universal Shakti originating, shaping, turning to its ends
the action of ourselves and others and of all the persons and
forces of the world. And this realisation can become absolute
and complete in all the parts of our being only if we can have
that sense and vision of it in all its forms, on all the levels of
our being and the world being, as the material, vital, mental and
supramental energy of the Divine, but all these, all the powers
of all the planes must be seen and known as self-formulations
of the one spiritual Shakti, infinite in being, consciousness and
Ananda. It is not the invariable rule that this power should first
manifest itself on the lower levels in the lower forms of energy
and then reveal its higher spiritual nature. And if it does so
come, first in its mental, vital or physical universalism, we must
be careful not to rest content there. It may come instead at once
in its higher reality, in the might of the spiritual splendour. The
difficulty then will be to bear and hold the Power until it has laid
powerful hands on and transformed the energies of the lower
levels of the being. The difficulty will be less in proportion as we
have been able to attain to a large quiet and equality, samatd,
and either to realise, feel and live in the one tranquil immutable
self in all or else to make a genuine and complete surrender of
ourselves to the divine Master of the Yoga.
It is necessary here to keep always in mind the three powers
of the Divine which are present and have to be taken account
of in all living existences. In our ordinary consciousness we see
these three as ourselves, the Jiva in the form of the ego, God —
whatever conception we may have of God, and Nature. In the
spiritual experience we see God as the supreme Self or Spirit,
or as the Being from whom we come and in whom we live and
move. We see Nature as his Power or God as Power, Spirit in
Power acting in ourselves and the world. The Jiva is then himself
this Self, Spirit, Divine, so ’ham, because he is one with him in
essence of his being and consciousness, but as the individual he
is only a portion of the Divine, a self of the Spirit, and in his
natural being a form of the Shakti, a power of God in movement
and action, para prakrtir jivabhutd. At first, when we become
conscious of God or of the Shakti, the difficulties of our relation
766
The Yoga of Self -F erf ection
At first, when we become
conscious of God or of the Shakti, the difficulties of our relation
766
The Yoga of Self -F erf ection
with them arise from the ego consciousness which we bring
into the spiritual relation. The ego in us makes claims on the
Divine other than the spiritual claim, and these claims are in a
sense legitimate, but so long as and in proportion as they take
the egoistic form, they are open to much grossness and great
perversions, burdened with an element of falsehood, undesir¬
able reaction and consequent evil, and the relation can only be
wholly right, happy and perfect when these claims become part
of the spiritual claim and lose their egoistic character. And in
fact the claim of our being upon the Divine is fulfilled absolutely
only then when it ceases at all to be a claim and is instead a
fulfilment of the Divine through the individual, when we are
satisfied with that alone, when we are content with the delight
of oneness in being, content to leave the supreme Self and Master
of existence to do whatever is the will of his absolute wisdom
and knowledge through our more and more perfected Nature.
This is the sense of the self-surrender of the individual self to
the Divine, atma-samarpana. It does not exclude a will for the
delight of oneness, for participation in the divine consciousness,
wisdom, knowledge, light, power, perfection, for the satisfaction
of the divine fulfilment in us, but the will, the aspiration is ours
because it is his will in us. At first, while there is still insistence on
our own personality, it only reflects that, but becomes more and
more indistinguishable from it, less personal and eventually it
loses all shade of separateness, because the will in us has grown
identical with the divine Tapas, the action of the divine Shakti.
And equally when we first become aware of the infinite
Shakti above us or around or in us, the impulse of the egoistic
sense in us is to lay hold on it and use this increased might
for our egoistic purpose. This is a most dangerous thing, for
it brings with it a sense and some increased reality of a great,
sometimes a titanic power, and the rajasic ego, delighting in this
sense of new enormous strength, may instead of waiting for it
to be purified and transformed throw itself out in a violent and
impure action and even turn us for a time or partially into the
selfish and arrogant Asura using the strength given him for his
own and not for the divine purpose: but on that way lies, in the
The Action of the Divine Shakti
767
end, if it is persisted in, spiritual perdition and material ruin.
And even to regard oneself as the instrument of the Divine is not
a perfect remedy; for when a strong ego meddles in the matter,
it falsifies the spiritual relation and under cover of making itself
an instrument of the Divine is really bent on making instead
God its instrument. The one remedy is to still the egoistic claim
of whatever kind, to lessen persistently the personal effort and
individual straining which even the sattwic ego cannot avoid
and instead of laying hold on the Shakti and using it for its
purpose rather to let the Shakti lay hold on us and use us for
the divine purpose. This cannot be done perfectly at once — nor
can it be done safely if it is only the lower form of the universal
energy of which we are aware, for then, as has already been said,
there must be some other control, either of the mental Purusha
or from above, — but still it is the aim which we must have
before us and which can be wholly carried out when we become
insistently aware of the highest spiritual presence and form of
the divine Shakti. This surrender too of the whole action of the
individual self to the Shakti is in fact a form of real self-surrender
to the Divine.
It has been seen that a most effective way of purification is
for the mental Purusha to draw back, to stand as the passive wit¬
ness and observe and know himself and the workings of Nature
in the lower, the normal being; but this must be combined, for
perfection, with a will to raise the purified nature into the higher
spiritual being. When that is done, the Purusha is no longer only
a witness, but also the master of his prakriti, isvara. At first it
may not be apparent how this ideal of active self-mastery can be
reconciled with the apparently opposite ideal of self-surrender
and of becoming the assenting instrument of the divine Shakti.
But in fact on the spiritual plane there is no difficulty. The Jiva
cannot really become master except in proportion as he arrives
at oneness with the Divine who is his supreme Self. And in
that oneness and in his unity with the universe he is one too in
the universal self with the will that directs all the operations of
Nature. But more directly, less transcendentally, in his individual
action too, he is a portion of the Divine and participates in the
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The Yoga of Self -F erf ection
But more directly, less transcendentally, in his individual
action too, he is a portion of the Divine and participates in the
768
The Yoga of Self -F erf ection
mastery over his nature of that to which he has surrendered
himself. Even as instrument, he is not a mechanical but a con¬
scious instrument. On the Purusha side of him he is one with
the Divine and participates in the divine mastery of the Ishwara.
On the nature side of him he is in his universality one with
the power of the Divine, while in his individual natural being
he is an instrument of the universal divine Shakti, because the
individualised power is there to fulfil the purpose of the universal
Power. The Jiva, as has been seen, is the meeting-place of the
play of the dual aspect of the Divine, Prakriti and Purusha, and
in the higher spiritual consciousness he becomes simultaneously
one with both these aspects, and there he takes up and combines
all the divine relations created by their interaction. This it is that
makes possible the dual attitude.
There is however a possibility of arriving at this result with¬
out the passage through the passivity of the mental Purusha, by
a more persistently and predominantly kinetic Yoga. Or there
may be a combination of both the methods, alternations between
them and an ultimate fusion. And here the problem of spiritual
action assumes a more simple form. In this kinetic movement
there are three stages. In the first the Jiva is aware of the supreme
Shakti, receives the power into himself and uses it under her
direction, with a certain sense of being the subordinate doer,
a sense of minor responsibility in the action, — even at first, it
may be, a responsibility for the result; but that disappears, for
the result is seen to be determined by the higher Power, and only
the action is felt to be partly his own. The sadhaka then feels that
it is he who is thinking, willing, doing, but feels too the divine
Shakti or Prakriti behind driving and shaping all his thought,
will, feeling and action: the individual energy belongs in a way
to him, but is still only a form and an instrument of the universal
divine Energy. The Master of the Power may be hidden from him
for a time by the action of the Shakti, or he may be aware of the
Ishwara sometimes or continually manifest to him. In the latter
case there are three things present to his consciousness, himself
as the servant of the Ishwara, the Shakti behind as a great Power
supplying the energy, shaping the action, formulating the results.
In the latter
case there are three things present to his consciousness, himself
as the servant of the Ishwara, the Shakti behind as a great Power
supplying the energy, shaping the action, formulating the results.
The Action of the Divine Shakti
769
the Ishwara above determining by his will the whole action.
In the second stage the individual doer disappears, but there
is not necessarily any quietistic passivity; there may be a full
kinetic action, only all is done by the Shakti. It is her power
of knowledge which takes shape as thought in the mind; the
sadhaka has no sense of himself thinking, but of the Shakti
thinking in him. The will and the feelings and action are also in
the same way nothing but a formation, operation, activity of the
Shakti in her immediate presence and full possession of all the
system. The sadhaka does not think, will, act, feel, but thought,
will, feeling, action happen in his system. The individual on
the side of action has disappeared into oneness with universal
Prakriti, has become an individualised form and action of the
divine Shakti. He is still aware of his personal existence, but it
is as the Purusha supporting and observing the whole action,
conscious of it in his self-knowledge and enabling by his partic¬
ipation the divine Shakti to do in him the works and the will of
the Ishwara. The Master of the power is then sometimes hidden
by the action of the power, sometimes appears governing it and
compelling its workings. Here too there are three things present
to the consciousness, the Shakti carrying on all the knowledge,
thought, will, feeling, action for the Ishwara in an instrumental
human form, the Ishwara, the Master of existence governing
and compelling all her action, and ourself as the soul, the Pu¬
rusha of her individual action enjoying all the relations with him
which are created by her workings. There is another form of this
realisation in which the Jiva disappears into and becomes one
with the Shakti and there is then only the play of the Shakti with
the Ishwara, Mahadeva and Kali, Krishna and Radha, the Deva
and the Devi. This is the intensest possible form of the Jiva’s
realisation of himself as a manifestation of Nature, a power of
the being of the Divine, para prakrtir jiva-bhutd.
This is the intensest possible form of the Jiva’s
realisation of himself as a manifestation of Nature, a power of
the being of the Divine, para prakrtir jiva-bhutd.
A third stage comes by the increasing manifestation of the
Divine, the Ishwara in all our being and action. This is when we
are constantly and uninterruptedly aware of him. He is felt in
us as the possessor of our being and above us as the ruler of all
its workings and they become to us nothing but a manifestation
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The Yoga of Self -F erf ection
of him in the existence of the Jiva. All our consciousness is
his consciousness, all our knowledge is his knowledge, all our
thought is his thought, all our will is his will, all our feeling is
his Ananda and form of his delight in being, all our action is
his action. The distinction between the Shakti and the Ishwara
begins to disappear; there is only the conscious activity in us of
the Divine with the great self of the Divine behind and around
and possessing it; all the world and Nature is seen to be only
that, but here it has become fully conscious, the Maya of the
ego removed, and the Jiva is there only as an eternal portion of
his being, amsa sandtana, put forth to support a divine individ¬
ualisation and living now fulfilled in the complete presence and
power of the Divine, the complete joy of the Spirit manifested
in the being. This is the highest realisation of the perfection and
delight of the active oneness; for beyond it there could be only
the consciousness of the Avatara, the Ishwara himself assuming
a human name and form for action in the Lila.
Chapter XVIII
Faith and Shakti
Chapter XVIII
Faith and Shakti
The three parts of the perfection of our instrumental
nature of which we have till now been reviewing the
general features, the perfection of the intelligence, heart,
vital consciousness and body, the perfection of the fundamental
soul powers, the perfection of the surrender of our instruments
and action to the divine Shakti, depend at every moment of their
progression on a fourth power that is covertly and overtly the
pivot of all endeavour and action, faith, sraddha. The perfect
faith is an assent of the whole being to the truth seen by it or
offered to its acceptance, and its central working is a faith of
the soul in its own will to be and attain and become and its idea
of self and things and its knowledge, of which the belief of the
intellect, the heart’s consent and the desire of the life mind to
possess and realise are the outward figures. This soul faith, in
some form of itself, is indispensable to the action of the being
and without it man cannot move a single pace in life, much less
take any step forward to a yet unrealised perfection. It is so
central and essential a thing that the Gita can justly say of it
that whatever is a man’s sraddha, that he is, yo yacchraddhah
sa eva sah, and, it may be added, whatever he has the faith to
see as possible in himself and strive for, that he can create and
become. There is one kind of faith demanded as indispensable
by the integral Yoga and that may be described as faith in God
and the Shakti, faith in the presence and power of the Divine in
us and the world, a faith that all in the world is the working of
one divine Shakti, that all the steps of the Yoga, its strivings and
sufferings and failures as well as its successes and satisfactions
and victories are utilities and necessities of her workings and that
by a firm and strong dependence on and a total self-surrender to
the Divine and to his Shakti in us we can attain to oneness and
freedom and victory and perfection.
772
The Yoga of Self -F erf ection
772
The Yoga of Self -F erf ection
The enemy of faith is doubt, and yet doubt too is a utility and
necessity, because man in his ignorance and in his progressive
labour towards knowledge needs to be visited by doubt, other¬
wise he would remain obstinate in an ignorant belief and limited
knowledge and unable to escape from his errors. This utility and
necessity of doubt does not altogether disappear when we enter
on the path of Yoga. The integral Yoga aims at a knowledge not
merely of some fundamental principle, but a knowing, a gnosis
which will apply itself to and cover all life and the world action,
and in this search for knowledge we enter on the way and are ac¬
companied for many miles upon it by the mind’s unregenerated
activities before these are purified and transformed by a greater
light: we carry with us a number of intellectual beliefs and ideas
which are by no means all of them correct and perfect and a host
of new ideas and suggestions meet us afterwards demanding our
credence which it would be fatal to seize on and always cling to
in the shape in which they come without regard to their possible
error, limitation or imperfection. And indeed at one stage in the
Yoga it becomes necessary to refuse to accept as definite and
final any kind of intellectual idea or opinion whatever in its
intellectual form and to hold it in a questioning suspension until
it is given its right place and luminous shape of truth in a spiritual
experience enlightened by supramental knowledge. And much
more must this be the case with the desires or impulsions of
the life mind, which have often to be provisionally accepted as
immediate indices of a temporarily necessary action before we
have the full guidance, but not always clung to with the soul’s
complete assent, for eventually all these desires and impulsions
have to be rejected or else transformed into and replaced by
impulsions of the divine will taking up the life movements. The
heart’s faith, emotional beliefs, assents are also needed upon
the way, but cannot be always sure guides until they too are
taken up, purified, transformed and are eventually replaced by
the luminous assents of a divine Ananda which is at one with
the divine will and knowledge. In nothing in the lower nature
from the reason to the vital will can the seeker of the Yoga put
a complete and permanent faith, but only at last in the spiritual
Faith and Shakti
773
truth, power, Ananda which become in the spiritual reason his
sole guides and luminaries and masters of action.
And yet faith is necessary throughout and at every step
because it is a needed assent of the soul and without this assent
there can be no progress. Our faith must first be abiding in
the essential truth and principles of the Yoga, and even if this
is clouded in the intellect, despondent in the heart, outwearied
and exhausted by constant denial and failure in the desire of
the vital mind, there must be something in the innermost soul
which clings and returns to it, otherwise we may fall on the path
or abandon it from weakness and inability to bear temporary
defeat, disappointment, difficulty and peril. In the Yoga as in life
it is the man who persists unwearied to the last in the face of
every defeat and disillusionment and of all confronting, hostile
and contradicting events and powers who conquers in the end
and finds his faith justified because to the soul and Shakti in man
nothing is impossible. And even a blind and ignorant faith is a
better possession than the sceptical doubt which turns its back
on our spiritual possibilities or the constant carping of the nar¬
row pettily critical uncreative intellect, asuyd, which pursues our
endeavour with a paralysing incertitude. The seeker of the inte¬
gral Yoga must however conquer both these imperfections. The
thing to which he has given his assent and set his mind and heart
and will to achieve, the divine perfection of the whole human
being, is apparently an impossibility to the normal intelligence,
since it is opposed to the actual facts of life and will for long be
contradicted by immediate experience, as happens with all far-
off and difficult ends, and it is denied too by many who have
spiritual experience but believe that our present nature is the sole
possible nature of man in the body and that it is only by throwing
off the earthly life or even all individual existence that we can
arrive at either a heavenly perfection or the release of extinction.
In the pursuit of such an aim there will for long be plenty of
ground for the objections, the carpings, asuyd, of that ignorant
but persistent criticising reason which founds itself plausibly on
the appearances of the moment, the stock of ascertained fact and
experience, refuses to go beyond and questions the validity of all
774
The Yoga of Self -F erf ection
indices and illuminations that point forward; and if he yields to
these narrow suggestions, he will either not arrive or be seriously
hampered and long delayed in his journey. On the other hand
ignorance and blindness in the faith are obstacles to a large
success, invite much disappointment and disillusionment, fasten
on false finalities and prevent advance to greater formulations
of truth and perfection. The Shakti in her workings will strike
ruthlessly at all forms of ignorance and blindness and all even
that trusts wrongly and superstitiously in her, and we must be
prepared to abandon a too persistent attachment to forms of
faith and cling to the saving reality alone. A great and wide
spiritual and intelligent faith, intelligent with the intelligence
of that larger reason which assents to high possibilities, is the
character of the sraddha needed for the integral Yoga.
This sraddha — the English word faith is inadequate to ex¬
press it — is in reality an influence from the supreme Spirit and
its light a message from our supramental being which is call¬
ing the lower nature to rise out of its petty present to a great
self-becoming and self-exceeding. And that which receives the
influence and answers to the call is not so much the intellect,
the heart or the life mind, but the inner soul which better knows
the truth of its own destiny and mission. The circumstances that
provoke our first entry into the path are not the real index of the
thing that is at work in us. There the intellect, the heart, or the
desires of the life mind may take a prominent place, or even more
fortuitous accidents and outward incentives; but if these are all,
then there can be no surety of our fidelity to the call and our
enduring perseverance in the Yoga. The intellect may abandon
the idea that attracted it, the heart weary or fail us, the desire of
the life mind turn to other objectives. But outward circumstances
are only a cover for the real workings of the spirit, and if it is the
spirit that has been touched, the inward soul that has received
the call, the sraddha will remain firm and resist all attempts
to defeat or slay it. It is not that the doubts of the intellect
may not assail, the heart waver, the disappointed desire of the
life mind sink down exhausted on the wayside. That is almost
inevitable at times, perhaps often, especially with us, sons of an
Faith and Shakti
775
That is almost
inevitable at times, perhaps often, especially with us, sons of an
Faith and Shakti
775
age of intellectuality and scepticism and a materialistic denial of
spiritual truth which has not yet lifted its painted clouds from
the face of the sun of a greater reality and is still opposed to
the light of spiritual intuition and inmost experience. There will
very possibly be many of those trying obscurations of which
even the Vedic Rishis so often complained, “long exiles from
the light”, and these may be so thick, the night on the soul
may be so black that faith may seem utterly to have left us. But
through it all the spirit within will be keeping its unseen hold and
the soul will return with a new strength to its assurance which
was only eclipsed and not extinguished, because extinguished
it cannot be when once the inner self has known and made its
resolution.^ The Divine holds our hand through all and if he
seems to let us fall, it is only to raise us higher. This saving
return we shall experience so often that the denials of doubt will
become eventually impossible and, when once the foundation of
equality is firmly established and still more when the sun of the
gnosis has risen, doubt itself will pass away because its cause
and utility have ended.
Moreover not only a faith in the fundamental principle,
ideas, way of the Yoga is needed, but a day to day working
faith in the power in us to achieve, in the steps we have taken
on the way, in the spiritual experiences that come to us, in the
intuitions, the guiding movements of will and impulsion, the
moved intensities of the heart and aspirations and fulfilments of
the life that are the aids, the circumstances and the stages of the
enlarging of the nature and the stimuli or the steps of the soul’s
evolution. At the same time it has always to be remembered that
we are moving from imperfection and ignorance towards light
and perfection, and the faith in us must be free from attachment
to the forms of our endeavour and the successive stages of our
realisation. There is not only much that will be strongly raised
in us in order to be cast out and rejected, a battle between the
powers of ignorance and the lower nature and the higher powers
that have to replace them, but experiences, states of thought
^ sankalpa, vyavasdya.
776
The Yoga of Self -F erf ection
776
The Yoga of Self -F erf ection
and feeling, forms of realisation that are helpful and have to
be accepted on the way and may seem to us for the time to be
spiritual finalities, are found afterwards to be steps of transition,
have to be exceeded and the working faith that supported them
withdrawn in favour of other and greater things or of more full
and comprehensive realisations and experiences, which replace
them or into which they are taken up in a completing trans¬
formation. There can be for the seeker of the integral Yoga no
clinging to resting-places on the road or to half-way houses; he
cannot be satisfied till he has laid down all the great enduring
bases of his perfection and broken out into its large and free
infinities, and even there he has to be constantly filling himself
with more experiences of the Infinite. His progress is an ascent
from level to level and each new height brings in other vistas and
revelations of the much that has still to be done, bhuri kartvam,
till the divine Shakti has at last taken up all his endeavour and he
has only to assent and participate gladly by a consenting oneness
in her luminous workings. That which will support him through
these changes, struggles, transformations which might otherwise
dishearten and baffle, — for the intellect and life and emotion
always grasp too much at things, fasten on premature certitudes
and are apt to be afflicted and unwilling when forced to abandon
that on which they rested, — is a firm faith in the Shakti that is
at work and reliance on the guidance of the Master of the Yoga
whose wisdom is not in haste and whose steps through all the
perplexities of the mind are assured and just and sound, because
they are founded on a perfectly comprehending transaction with
the necessities of our nature.
The progress of the Yoga is a procession from the mental
ignorance through imperfect formations to a perfect foundation
and increasing of knowledge and in its more satisfyingly positive
parts a movement from light to greater light, and it cannot cease
till we have the greatest light of the supramental knowledge. The
motions of the mind in its progress must necessarily be mixed
with a greater or lesser proportion of error, and we should not
allow our faith to be disconcerted by the discovery of its errors
or imagine that because the beliefs of the intellect which aided
Faith and Shakti
777
us were too hasty and positive, therefore the fundamental faith
in the soul was invalid. The human intellect is too much afraid
of error precisely because it is too much attached to a prema¬
ture sense of certitude and a too hasty eagerness for positive
finality in what it seems to seize of knowledge. As our self¬
experience increases, we shall find that our errors even were
necessary movements, brought with them and left their element
or suggestion of truth and helped towards discovery or sup¬
ported a necessary effort and that the certitudes we have now
to abandon had yet their temporary validity in the progress
of our knowledge. The intellect cannot be a sufficient guide in
the search for spiritual truth and realisation and yet it has to
be utilised in the integral movement of our nature. And while,
therefore, we have to reject paralysing doubt or mere intellectual
scepticism, the seeking intelligence has to be trained to admit a
certain large questioning, an intellectual rectitude not satisfied
with half-truths, mixtures of error or approximations and, most
positive and helpful, a perfect readiness always to move forward
from truths already held and accepted to the greater corrective,
completing or transcending truths which at first it was unable
or, it may be, disinclined to envisage. A working faith of the in¬
tellect is indispensable, not a superstitious, dogmatic or limiting
credence attached to every temporary support or formula, but a
large assent to the successive suggestions and steps of the Shakti,
a faith fixed on realities, moving from the lesser to the completer
realities and ready to throw down all scaffolding and keep only
the large and growing structure.
A constant sraddha, faith, assent of the heart and the life
too are indispensable. But while we are in the lower nature the
heart’s assent is coloured by mental emotion and the life move¬
ments are accompanied by their trail of perturbing or straining
desires, and mental emotion and desire tend to trouble, alter
more or less grossly or subtly or distort the truth, and they al¬
ways bring some limitation and imperfection into its realisation
by the heart and life. The heart too when it is troubled in its
attachments and its certitudes, perplexed by throw-backs and
failures and convictions of error or involved in the wrestlings
778
The Yoga of Self -F erf ection
The heart too when it is troubled in its
attachments and its certitudes, perplexed by throw-backs and
failures and convictions of error or involved in the wrestlings
778
The Yoga of Self -F erf ection
which attend a call to move forward from its assured positions,
has its draggings, wearinesses, sorrowings, revolts, reluctances
which hamper the progress. It must learn a larger and surer faith
giving in the place of the mental reactions a calm or a moved
spiritual acceptance to the ways and the steps of the Shakti
which is in its nature the assent of a deepening Ananda to all
necessary movements and a readiness to leave old moorings and
move always forward towards the delight of a greater perfection.
The life mind must give its assent to the successive motives,
impulsions, activities of the life imposed on it by the guiding
power as aids or fields of the development of the nature and
to the successions also of the inner Yoga, but it must not be
attached or call a halt anywhere, but must always be prepared
to abandon old urgency and accept with the same completeness
of assent new higher movements and activities, and it must learn
to replace desire by a wide and bright Ananda in all experience
and action. The faith of the heart and the life mind, like that
of the intelligence, must be capable of a constant correction,
enlarging and transformation.
This faith is essentially the secret sraddha of the soul, and
it is brought more and more to the surface and there satis¬
fied, sustained and increased by an increasing assurance and
certainty of spiritual experience. Here too the faith in us must
be unattached, a faith that waits upon Truth and is prepared to
change and enlarge its understanding of spiritual experiences, to
correct mistaken or half-true ideas about them and receive more
enlightening interpretations, to replace insufficient by more suf¬
ficient intuitions, and to merge experiences that seemed at the
time to be final and satisfying in more satisfying combinations
with new experience and greater largenesses and transcendences.
And especially in the psychical and other middle domains there
is a very large room for the possibility of misleading and often
captivating error, and here even a certain amount of positive
scepticism has its use and at all events a great caution and scrupu¬
lous intellectual rectitude, but not the scepticism of the ordinary
mind which amounts to a disabling denial. In the integral Yoga
psychical experience, especially of the kind associated with what
Faith and Shakti
779
In the integral Yoga
psychical experience, especially of the kind associated with what
Faith and Shakti
779
is often called occultism and savours of the miraculous, should
be altogether subordinated to spiritual truth and wait upon that
for its own interpretation, illumination and sanction. But even
in the purely spiritual domain, there are experiences which are
partial and, however attractive, only receive their full validity,
significance or right application when we can advance to a fuller
experience. And there are others which are in themselves quite
valid and full and absolute, but if we confine ourselves to them,
will prevent other sides of the spiritual truth from manifestation
and mutilate the integrality of the Yoga. Thus the profound and
absorbing quietude of impersonal peace which comes by the
stilling of the mind is a thing in itself complete and absolute, but
if we rest in that alone, it will exclude the companion absolute,
not less great and needed and true, of the bliss of the divine
action. Here too our faith must be an assent that receives all
spiritual experience, but with a wide openness and readiness
for always more light and truth, an absence of limiting attach¬
ment and no such clinging to forms as would interfere with the
forward movement of the Shakti towards the integrality of the
spiritual being, consciousness, knowledge, power, action and the
wholeness of the one and the multiple Ananda.
The faith demanded of us both in its general principle and
its constant particular application amounts to a large and ever
increasing and a constantly purer, fuller and stronger assent of
the whole being and all its parts to the presence and guidance
of God and the Shakti. The faith in the Shakti, as long as we
are not aware of and filled with her presence, must necessarily
be preceded or at least accompanied by a firm and virile faith
in our own spiritual will and energy and our power to move
successfully towards unity and freedom and perfection. Man
is given faith in himself, his ideas and his powers that he may
work and create and rise to greater things and in the end bring
his strength as a worthy offering to the altar of the Spirit. This
spirit, says the Scripture, is not to be won by the weak, ndyam
dtmd balahinena labhyah. All paralysing self-distrust has to be
discouraged, all doubt of our strength to accomplish, for that
is a false assent to impotence, an imagination of weakness and
780
The Yoga of Self -F erf ection
All paralysing self-distrust has to be
discouraged, all doubt of our strength to accomplish, for that
is a false assent to impotence, an imagination of weakness and
780
The Yoga of Self -F erf ection
a denial of the omnipotence of the spirit. A present incapacity,
however heavy may seem its pressure, is only a trial of faith and
a temporary difficulty and to yield to the sense of inability is
for the seeker of the integral Yoga a non-sense, for his object
is a development of a perfection that is there already, latent
in the being, because man carries the seed of the divine life in
himself, in his own spirit, the possibility of success is involved
and implied in the effort and victory is assured because behind
is the call and guidance of an omnipotent power. At the same
time this faith in oneself must be purified from all touch of
rajasic egoism and spiritual pride. The sadhaka should keep as
much as possible in his mind the idea that his strength is not
his own in the egoistic sense but that of the divine universal
Shakti and whatever is egoistic in his use of it must be a cause of
limitation and in the end an obstacle. The power of the divine
universal Shakti which is behind our aspiration is illimitable,
and when it is rightly called upon it cannot fail to pour itself
into us and to remove whatever incapacity and obstacle, now
or later; for the times and durations of our struggle while they
depend at first, instrumentally and in part, on the strength of our
faith and our endeavour, are yet eventually in the hands of the
wisely determining secret Spirit, alone the Master of the Yoga,
the Ishwara.
The faith in the divine Shakti must be always at the back
of our strength and when she becomes manifest, it must be or
grow implicit and complete. There is nothing that is impossible
to her who is the conscious Power and universal Goddess all-
creative from eternity and armed with the Spirit’s omnipotence.
All knowledge, all strengths, all triumph and victory, all skill and
works are in her hands and they are full of the treasures of the
Spirit and of all perfections and siddhis. She is Maheshwari, god¬
dess of the supreme knowledge, and brings to us her vision for all
kinds and widenesses of truth, her rectitude of the spiritual will,
the calm and passion of her supramental largeness, her felicity of
illumination: she is Mahakali, goddess of the supreme strength,
and with her are all mights and spiritual force and severest
austerity of tapas and swiftness to the battle and the victory and
Faith and Shakti
781
the laughter, the attahdsya, that makes light of defeat and death
and the powers of the ignorance: she is Mahalakshmi, the god¬
dess of the supreme love and delight, and her gifts are the spirit’s
grace and the charm and beauty of the Ananda and protection
and every divine and human blessing: she is Mahasaraswati, the
goddess of divine skill and of the works of the Spirit, and hers is
the Yoga that is skill in works, yogah karmasu kausalam, and the
utilities of divine knowledge and the self-application of the spirit
to life and the happiness of its harmonies. And in all her powers
and forms she carries with her the supreme sense of the masteries
of the eternal Ishwari, a rapid and divine capacity for all kinds
of action that may be demanded from the instrument, oneness,
a participating sympathy, a free identity, with all energies in all
beings and therefore a spontaneous and fruitful harmony with
all the divine will in the universe. The intimate feeling of her
presence and her powers and the satisfied assent of all our being
to her workings in and around it is the last perfection of faith in
the Shakti.
And behind her is the Ishwara and faith in him is the most
central thing in the sraddha of the integral Yoga. This faith we
must have and develop to perfection that all things are the work¬
ings under the universal conditions of a supreme self-knowledge
and wisdom, that nothing done in us or around us is in vain or
without its appointed place and just significance, that all things
are possible when the Ishwara as our supreme Self and Spirit
takes up the action and that all that has been done before and
all that he will do hereafter was and will be part of his infallible
and foreseeing guidance and intended towards the fruition of
our Yoga and our perfection and our life work. This faith will
be more and more justified as the higher knowledge opens, we
shall begin to see the great and small significances that escaped
our limited mentality and faith will pass into knowledge. Then
we shall see beyond the possibility of doubt that all happens
within the working of the one Will and that that will was also
wisdom because it develops always the true workings in life of
the self and nature. The highest state of the assent, the sraddha
of the being will be when we feel the presence of the Ishwara
782
The Yoga of Self -F erf ection
The highest state of the assent, the sraddha
of the being will be when we feel the presence of the Ishwara
782
The Yoga of Self -F erf ection
and feel all our existence and consciousness and thought and
will and action in his hand and consent in all things and with
every part of our self and nature to the direct and immanent and
occupying will of the Spirit. And that highest perfection of the
sraddha will also be the opportunity and perfect foundation of
a divine strength: it will base, when complete, the development
and manifestation and the works of the luminous supramental
Shakti.
Chapter XIX
The Nature of the Supermind
Chapter XIX
The Nature of the Supermind
The object of Yoga is to raise the human being from
the consciousness of the ordinary mind subject to the
control of vital and material Nature and limited wholly
by birth and death and Time and the needs and desires of the
mind, life and body to the consciousness of the spirit free in
its self and using the circumstances of mind, life and body as
admitted or self-chosen and self-figuring determinations of the
spirit, using them in a free self-knowledge, a free will and power
of being, a free delight of being. This is the essential difference
between the ordinary mortal mind in which we live and the
spiritual consciousness of our divine and immortal being which
is the highest result of Yoga. It is a radical conversion as great
as and greater than the change which we suppose evolutionary
Nature to have made in its transition from the vital animal to
the fully mentalised human consciousness. The animal has the
conscious vital mind, but whatever beginnings there are in it
of anything higher are only a primary glimpse, a crude hint
of the intelligence which in man becomes the splendour of the
mental understanding, will, emotion, aesthesis and reason. Man
elevated in the heights and deepened by the intensities of the
mind becomes aware of something great and divine in himself
towards which all this tends, something he is in possibility but
which he has not yet become, and he turns the powers of his
mind, his power of knowledge, his power of will, his power of
emotion and aesthesis to seek out this, to seize and comprehend
all that it may be, to become it and to exist wholly in its greater
consciousness, delight, being and power of highest becoming.
But what he gets of this higher state in his normal mind is only
an intimation, a primary glimpse, a crude hint of the splendour,
the light, the glory and divinity of the spirit within him. A com¬
plete conversion of all the parts of his being into moulds and
784
The Yoga of Self -F erf ection
instruments of the spiritual consciousness is demanded of him
before he can make quite real, constant, present to himself this
greater thing that he can be and entirely live in what is now to
him at the best a luminous aspiration. He must seek to develop
and grow altogether into a greater divine consciousness by an
integral Yoga.
He must seek to develop
and grow altogether into a greater divine consciousness by an
integral Yoga.
The Yoga of perfection necessary to this change has, so
far as we have been considering it, consisted in a preparatory
purification of the mental, vital and physical nature, a liberation
from the knots of the lower Prakriti, a consequent replacement
of the egoistic state always subject to the ignorant and trou¬
bled action of the desire soul by a large and luminous static
equality which quiets the reason, the emotional mind, the life
mind and the physical nature and brings into us the peace and
freedom of the spirit, and a dynamical substitution of the action
of the supreme and universal divine Shakti under the control of
the Ishwara for that of the lower Prakriti, — an action whose
complete operation must be preceded by the perfection of the
natural instruments. And all these things together, though not as
yet the whole Yoga, constitute already a much greater than the
present normal consciousness, spiritual in its basis and moved
by a greater light, power and bliss, and it might be easy to rest
satisfied with so much accomplished and think that all has been
done that was needed for the divine conversion.
A momentous question however arises as light grows, the
question through what medium is the divine Shakti to act in
the human being? Is it to be always through the mind only and
on the mind plane or in some greater supramental formulation
which is more proper to a divine action and which will take
up and replace the mental functions? If the mind is to be al¬
ways the instrument, then although we shall be conscious of a
diviner Power initiating and conducting all our inner and outer
human action, yet it will have to formulate its knowledge, will,
Ananda and all things else in the mental figure, and that means
to translate them into an inferior kind of functioning other than
the supreme workings native to the divine consciousness and
its Shakti. The mind spiritualised, purified, liberated, perfected
The Nature of the Supermind
785
The mind spiritualised, purified, liberated, perfected
The Nature of the Supermind
785
within its own limits may come as near as possible to a faithful
mental translation, but we shall find that this is after all a relative
fidelity and an imperfect perfection. The mind by its very nature
cannot render with an entirely right rightness or act in the unified
completeness of the divine knowledge, will and Ananda because
it is an instrument for dealing with the divisions of the finite on
the basis of division, a secondary instrument therefore and a sort
of delegate for the lower movement in which we live. The mind
can reflect the Infinite, it can dissolve itself into it, it can live in
it by a large passivity, it can take its suggestions and act them
out in its own way, a way always fragmentary, derivative and
subject to a greater or less deformation, but it cannot be itself
the direct and perfect instrument of the infinite Spirit acting in
its own knowledge. The divine Will and Wisdom organising the
action of the infinite consciousness and determining all things
according to the truth of the spirit and the law of its manifesta¬
tion is not mental but supramental and even in its formulation
nearest to mind as much above the mental consciousness in its
light and power as the mental consciousness of man above the
vital mind of the lower creation. The question is how far the
perfected human being can raise himself above mind, enter into
some kind of fusing union with the supramental and build up in
himself a level of supermind, a developed gnosis by the form and
power of which the divine Shakti can directly act, not through
a mental translation, but organically in her supramental nature.
It is here necessary in a matter so remote from the ordinary
lines of our thought and experience to state first what is the
universal gnosis or divine supermind, how it is represented in
the actual movement of the universe and what are its relations
to the present psychology of the human being. It will then be
evident that though the supermind is suprarational to our intelli¬
gence and its workings occult to our apprehension, it is nothing
irrationally mystic, but rather its existence and emergence is a
logical necessity of the nature of existence, always provided we
grant that not matter or mind alone but spirit is the fundamental
reality and everywhere a universal presence. All things are a
manifestation of the infinite spirit out of its own being, out of
786
The Yoga of Self -F erf ection
All things are a
manifestation of the infinite spirit out of its own being, out of
786
The Yoga of Self -F erf ection
its own consciousness and by the self-realising, self-determining,
self-fulfilling power of that consciousness. The Infinite, we may
say, organises by the power of its self-knowledge the law of its
own manifestation of being in the universe, not only the material
universe present to our senses, but whatever lies behind it on
whatever planes of existence. All is organised by it not under
any inconscient compulsion, not according to a mental fantasy
or caprice, but in its own infinite spiritual freedom according
to the self-truth of its being, its infinite potentialities and its
will of self-creation out of those potentialities, and the law of
this self-truth is the necessity that compels created things to act
and evolve each according to its own nature. The Intelligence —
to give it an inadequate name — the Logos that thus organises
its own manifestation is evidently something infinitely greater,
more extended in knowledge, compelling in self-power, large
both in the delight of its self-existence and the delight of its
active being and works than the mental intelligence which is to
us the highest realised degree and expression of consciousness.
It is to this intelligence infinite in itself but freely organising and
self-determiningly organic in its self-creation and its works that
we may give for our present purpose the name of the divine
supermind or gnosis.
The fundamental nature of this supermind is that all its
knowledge is originally a knowledge by identity and oneness
and even when it makes numberless apparent divisions and dis¬
criminating modifications in itself, still all the knowledge that
operates in its workings, even in these divisions, is founded upon
and sustained and lit and guided by this perfect knowledge by
identity and oneness. The Spirit is one everywhere and it knows
all things as itself and in itself, so sees them always and therefore
knows them intimately, completely, in their reality as well as
their appearance, in their truth, their law, the entire spirit and
sense and figure of their nature and their workings. When it
sees anything as an object of knowledge, it yet sees it as itself
and in itself, and not as a thing other than or divided from it
about which therefore it would at first be ignorant of the nature,
constitution and workings and have to learn about them, as the
The Nature of the Supermind
787
mind is at first ignorant of its object and has to learn about it
because the mind is separated from its object and regards and
senses and meets it as something other than itself and external
to its own being. The mental awareness we have of our own
subjective existence and its movements, though it may point to,
is not the same thing as this identity and self-knowledge, because
what it sees are mental figures of our being and not the inmost
or the whole and it is only a partial, derivative and superficial
action of our self that appears to us while the largest and most
secretly determining parts of our own existence are occult to our
mentality. The supramental Spirit has, unlike the mental being,
the real because the inmost and total knowledge of itself and
of all its universe and of all things that are its creations and
self-figurings in the universe.
This is the second character of the supreme Supermind that
its knowledge is a real because a total knowledge. It has in the
first place a transcendental vision and sees the universe not only
in the universal terms, but in its right relation to the supreme
and eternal reality from which it proceeds and of which it is an
expression. It knows the spirit and truth and whole sense of the
universal expression because it knows all the essentiality and all
the infinite reality and all the consequent constant potentiality
of that which in part it expresses. It knows rightly the relative
because it knows the Absolute and all its absolutes to which the
relatives refer back and of which they are the partial or modified
or suppressed figures. It is in the second place universal and sees
all that is individual in the terms of the universal as well as in
its own individual terms and holds all these individual figures
in their right and complete relation to the universe. It is in the
third place, separately with regard to individual things, total in
its view because it knows each in its inmost essence of which all
else is the resultant, in its totality which is its complete figure and
in its parts and their connections and dependences, — as well as
in its connections with and its dependences upon other things
and its nexus with the total implications and the explicits of the
universe.
The mind on the contrary is limited and incapable in all these
788
The Yoga of Self -F erf ection
The mind on the contrary is limited and incapable in all these
788
The Yoga of Self -F erf ection
directions. Mind cannot arrive at identity with the Absolute even
when by a stretch of the intellect it conceives the idea, but can
only disappear into it in a swoon or extinction: it can only have
a kind of sense or an intimation of certain absolutes which it
puts by the mental idea into a relative figure. It cannot grasp the
universal, but only arrives at some idea of it through an exten¬
sion of the individual or a combination of apparently separate
things and so sees it either as a vague infinite or indeterminate or
a half-determined largeness or else only in an external scheme or
constructed figure. The indivisible being and action of the univer¬
sal, which is its real truth, escapes the apprehension of the mind,
because the mind thinks it out analytically by taking its own divi¬
sions for units and synthetically by combinations of these units,
but cannot seize on and think entirely in the terms, though it
may get at the idea and certain secondary results, of the essential
oneness. It cannot, either, know truly and thoroughly even the
individual and apparently separate thing, because it proceeds
in the same way, by an analysis of parts and constituents and
properties and a combination by which it erects a scheme of it
which is only its external figure. It can get an intimation of the
essential inmost truth of its object, but cannot live constantly
and luminously in that essential knowledge and work out on
the rest from within outward so that the outward circumstances
appear in their intimate reality and meaning as inevitable result
and expression and form and action of the spiritual something
which is the reality of the object. And all this which is impossible
for the mind to do, but possible only to strive towards and figure,
is inherent and natural to the supramental knowledge.
The third characteristic of the supermind arising from this
difference, which brings us to the practical distinction between
the two kinds of knowledge, is that it is directly truth-conscious,
a divine power of immediate, inherent and spontaneous knowl¬
edge, an Idea holding luminously all realities and not depending
on indications and logical or other steps from the known to the
unknown like the mind which is a power of the Ignorance. The
supermind contains all its knowledge in itself, is in its highest
divine wisdom in eternal possession of all truth and even in its
The Nature of the Supermind
789
The
supermind contains all its knowledge in itself, is in its highest
divine wisdom in eternal possession of all truth and even in its
The Nature of the Supermind
789
lower, limited or individualised forms has only to bring the latent
truth out of itself, — the perception which the old thinkers tried
to express when they said that all knowing was in its real ori¬
gin and nature only a memory of inwardly existing knowledge.
The supermind is eternally and on all levels truth-conscious and
exists secretly even in mental and material being, surveys and
knows the things, even obscurest, of the mental ignorance and
understands and is behind and governs its processes, because
everything in the mind derives from the supermind — and must
do so because everything derives from the spirit. All that is men¬
tal is but a partial, a modified, a suppressed or half-suppressed
figure of the supramental truth, a deformation or a derived and
imperfect figure of its greater knowledge. The mind begins with
ignorance and proceeds towards knowledge. As an actual fact, in
the material universe, it appears out of an initial and universal
inconscience which is really an involution of the all-conscient
spirit in its own absorbed self-oblivious force of action; and
it appears therefore as part of an evolutionary process, first a
vital feeling towards overt sensation, then an emergence of a
vital mind capable of sensation and, evolving out of it, a mind
of emotion and desire, a conscious will, a growing intelligence.
And each stage is an emergence of a greater suppressed power
of the secret supermind and spirit.
The mind of man, capable of reflection and a coordinated
investigation and understanding of itself and its basis and sur¬
roundings, arrives at truth but against a background of original
ignorance, a truth distressed by a constant surrounding mist of
incertitude and error. Its certitudes are relative and for the most
part precarious certainties or else are the assured fragmentary
certitudes only of an imperfect, incomplete and not an essential
experience. It makes discovery after discovery, gets idea after
idea, adds experience to experience and experiment to experi¬
ment, — but losing and rejecting and forgetting and having to
recover much as it proceeds, — and it tries to establish a rela¬
tion between all that it knows by setting up logical and other
sequences, a series of principles and their dependences, gener¬
alisations and their application, and makes out of its devices a
790
The Yoga of Self -F erf ection
structure in which mentally it can live, move and act and enjoy
and labour. This mental knowledge is always limited in extent:
not only so, but in addition the mind even sets up other willed
barriers, admitting by the mental device of opinion certain parts
and sides of truth and excluding all the rest, because if it gave
free admission and play to all ideas, if it suffered truth’s infinities,
it would lose itself in an unreconciled variety, an undetermined
immensity and would be unable to act and proceed to practical
consequences and an effective creation. And even when it is
widest and most complete, mental knowing is still an indirect
knowledge, a knowledge not of the thing in itself but of its fig¬
ures, a system of representations, a scheme of indices, — except
indeed when in certain movements it goes beyond itself, beyond
the mental idea to spiritual identity, but it finds it extremely
difficult to go here beyond a few isolated and intense spiritual
realisations or to draw or work out or organise the right practi¬
cal consequences of these rare identities of knowledge. A greater
power than the reason is needed for the spiritual comprehension
and effectuation of this deepest knowledge.
This is what the supermind, intimate with the Infinite, alone
can do. The supermind sees directly the spirit and essence, the
face and body, the result and action, the principles and depen¬
dences of the truth as one indivisible whole and therefore can
work out the circumstantial results in the power of the essential
knowledge, the variations of the spirit in the light of its identities,
its apparent divisions in the truth of its oneness. The supermind
is a knower and creator of its own truth, the mind of man only
a knower and creator in the half light and half darkness of
a mingled truth and error, and creator too of a thing which it
derives altered, translated, lessened from something greater than
and beyond it. Man lives in a mental consciousness between a
vast subconscient which is to his seeing a dark inconscience
and a vaster superconscient which he is apt to take for another
but a luminous inconscience, because his idea of consciousness
is confined to his own middle term of mental sensation and
intelligence. It is in that luminous superconscience that there lie
the ranges of the supermind and the spirit.
The Nature of the Supermind
791
It is in that luminous superconscience that there lie
the ranges of the supermind and the spirit.
The Nature of the Supermind
791
The supermind is again, because it acts and creates as well as
knows, not only a direct truth-consciousness, but an illumined,
direct and spontaneous truth-will. There is not and cannot be
in the will of the self-knowing spirit any contradiction, division
or difference between its will and its knowledge. The spiritual
will is the Tapas or enlightened force of the conscious being of
the spirit effecting infallibly what is there within it, and it is
this infallible operation of things acting according to their own
nature, of energy producing result and event according to the
force within it, of action bearing the fruit and event involved in
its own character and intention which we call variously in its dif¬
ferent aspects law of Nature, Karma, Necessity and Fate. These
things are to mind the workings of a power outside or above it
in which it is involved and intervenes only with a contributory
personal effort which partly arrives and succeeds, partly fails and
stumbles and which even in succeeding is largely overruled for
issues different from or at any rate greater and more far-reaching
than its own intention. The will of man works in the ignorance
by a partial light or more often flickerings of light which mislead
as much as they illuminate. His mind is an ignorance striving to
erect standards of knowledge, his will an ignorance striving to
erect standards of right, and his whole mentality as a result very
much a house divided against itself, idea in conflict with idea,
the will often in conflict with the ideal of right or the intellectual
knowledge. The will itself takes different shapes, the will of
the intelligence, the wishes of the emotional mind, the desires
and the passion of the vital being, the impulsions and blind
or half-blind compulsions of the nervous and the subconscient
nature, and all these make by no means a harmony, but at best
a precarious concord among discords. The will of the mind and
life is a stumbling about in search of right force, right Tapas
which can wholly be attained in its true and complete light and
direction only by oneness with the spiritual and supramental
being.
The supramental nature on the contrary is just, harmonious
and one, will and knowledge there only light of the spirit and
power of the spirit, the power effecting the light, the light
792
The Yoga of Self -F erf ection
The supramental nature on the contrary is just, harmonious
and one, will and knowledge there only light of the spirit and
power of the spirit, the power effecting the light, the light
792
The Yoga of Self -F erf ection
illumining the power. In the highest supramentality they are
intimately fused together and do not even wait upon each other
but are one movement, will illumining itself, knowledge fulfilling
itself, both together a single jet of the being. The mind knows
only the present and lives in an isolated movement of it though
it tries to remember and retain the past and forecast and compel
the future. The supermind has the vision of the three times,
trikaladrsp; it sees them as an indivisible movement and sees
too each containing the others. It is aware of all tendencies,
energies and forces as the diverse play of unity and knows their
relation to each other in the single movement of the one spirit.
The supramental will and action are therefore a will and action
of the spontaneous self-fulfilling truth of the spirit, the right
and at the highest the infallible movement of a direct and total
knowledge.
The supreme and universal Supermind is the active Light and
Tapas of the supreme and universal Self as the Lord and Creator,
that which we come to know in Yoga as the divine Wisdom and
Power, the eternal knowledge and will of the Ishwara. On the
highest planes of Being where all is known and all manifests
as existences of the one existence, consciousnesses of the one
consciousness, delight’s self-creations of the one Ananda, many
truths and powers of the one Truth, there is the intact and in¬
tegral display of its spiritual and supramental knowledge. And
in the corresponding planes of our own being the Jiva shares
in the spiritual and supramental nature and lives in its light
and power and bliss. As we descend nearer to what we are
in this world, the presence and action of this self-knowledge
narrows but retains always the essence and character when not
the fullness of the supramental nature and its way of knowing
and willing and acting, because it still lives in the essence and
body of the spirit. The mind, when we trace the descent of
the self towards matter, we see as a derivation which travels
away from the fullness of self, the fullness of its light and being
and which lives in a division and diversion, not in the body
of the sun, but first in its nearer and then in its far-off rays.
There is a highest intuitive mind which receives more nearly the
The Nature of the Supermind
793
There is a highest intuitive mind which receives more nearly the
The Nature of the Supermind
793
supramental truth, but even this is a formation which conceals
the direct and greater real knowledge. There is an intellectual
mind which is a luminous half-opaque lid which intercepts and
reflects in a radiantly distorting and suppressively modifying
atmosphere the truth known to the supermind. There is a still
lower mind built on the foundation of the senses between which
and the sun of knowledge there is a thick cloud, an emotional
and a sensational mist and vapour with here and there lightnings
and illuminations. There is a vital mind which is shut away even
from the light of intellectual truth, and lower still in submental
life and matter the spirit involves itself entirely as if in a sleep
and a night, a sleep plunged in a dim and yet poignant nervous
dream, the night of a mechanical somnambulist energy. It is a
re-evolution of the spirit out of this lowest state in which we
find ourselves at a height above the lower creation having taken
it up all in us and reaching so far in our ascent only the light
of the well-developed mental reason. The full powers of self-
knowledge and the illumined will of the spirit are still beyond
us above the mind and reason in supramental Nature.
If the spirit is everywhere, even in matter — in fact matter
itself is only an obscure form of the spirit — and if the supermind
is the universal power of the spirit’s omnipresent self-knowledge
organising all the manifestation of the being, then in matter and
everywhere there must be present a supramental action and,
however concealed it may be by another, lower and obscurer
kind of operation, yet when we look close we shall find that it
is really the supermind which organises matter, life, mind and
reason. And this actually is the knowledge towards which we
are now moving. There is even a quite visible intimate action of
the consciousness, persistent in life, matter and mind, which is
clearly a supramental action subdued to the character and need
of the lower medium and to which we now give the name of
intuition from its most evident characteristics of direct vision
and self-acting knowledge, really a vision born of some secret
identity with the object of the knowledge. What we call the intu¬
ition is however only a partial indication of the presence of the
supermind, and if we take this presence and power in its widest
794
The Yoga of Self -F erf ection
What we call the intu¬
ition is however only a partial indication of the presence of the
supermind, and if we take this presence and power in its widest
794
The Yoga of Self -F erf ection
character, we shall see that it is a concealed supramental force
with a self-conscient knowledge in it which informs the whole
action of material energy. It is that which determines what we
call law of nature, maintains the action of each thing according
to its own nature and harmonises and evolves the whole, which
would otherwise be a fortuitous creation apt at any moment to
collapse into chaos. All the law of nature is a thing precise in its
necessities of process, but is yet in the cause of that necessity and
of its constancy of rule, measure, combination, adaptation, re¬
sult a thing inexplicable, meeting us at every step with a mystery
and a miracle, and this must be either because it is irrational and
accidental even in its regularities or because it is suprarational,
because the truth of it belongs to a principle greater than that
of our intelligence. That principle is the supramental; that is to
say, the hidden secret of Nature is the organisation of something
out of the infinite potentialities of the self-existent truth of the
spirit the nature of which is wholly evident only to an original
knowledge born of and proceeding by a fundamental identity,
the spirit’s constant self-perception. All the action of life too
is of this character and all the action of mind and reason, —
reason which is the first to perceive everywhere the action of
a greater reason and law of being and try to render it by its
own conceptional structures, though it does not always perceive
that it is something other than a mental Intelligence which is at
work, other than an intellectual Logos. All these processes are
actually spiritual and supramental in their secret government,
but mental, vital and physical in their overt process.
All these processes are
actually spiritual and supramental in their secret government,
but mental, vital and physical in their overt process.
The outward matter, life, mind do not possess this occult
action of the supermind, even while possessed and compelled by
the necessity it imposes on their workings. There is what we are
sometimes moved to call an intelligence and will operating in
the material force and the atom (although the words ring false
because it is not actually the same thing as our own will and
intelligence), — let us say, a covert intuition of self-existence at
work, — but the atom and force are not aware of it and are only
the obscure body of matter and of power created by its first effort
of self-manifestation. The presence of such an intuition becomes
The Nature of the Supermind
795
more evident to us in all the action of life because that is nearer
to our own scale. And as life develops overt sense and mind,
as in the animal creation, we can speak more confidently of a
vital intuition which is behind its operations and which emerges
in the animal mind in the clear form of instinct, — instinct, an
automatic knowledge implanted in the animal, sure, direct, self-
existent, self-guided, which implies somewhere in its being an
accurate knowing of purpose, relation and the thing or object.
It acts in the life force and mind, but yet the surface life and
mind do not possess it and cannot give an account of what it
does or control or extend the power at its will and pleasure.
Here we observe two things, first, that the overt intuition acts
only for a limited necessity and purpose, and that in the rest of
the operations of the nature there is a double action, one un¬
certain and ignorant of the surface consciousness and the other
subliminal implying a secret subconscient direction. The surface
consciousness is full of a groping and seeking which increases
rather than diminishes as life rises in its scale and widens in the
scope of its conscious powers; but the secret self within assures in
spite of the groping of the vital mind the action of the nature and
the result needed for the necessity, the purpose and the destiny
of the being. This continues on a higher and higher scale up to
the human reason and intelligence.
This continues on a higher and higher scale up to
the human reason and intelligence.
The being of man also is full of physical, vital, emotional,
psychical and dynamic instincts and intuitions, but he does not
rely on them as the animal does, — though they are capable in
him of a far larger scope and greater action than in the animal
and lower creation by reason of his greater actual evolutionary
development and his yet greater potentiality of development
of the being. He has suppressed them, discontinued their full
and overt action by atrophy, — not that these capacities are de¬
stroyed but rather held back or cast back into the subliminal
consciousness, — and consequently this lower part of his being
is much less sure of itself, much less confident of the directions
of his nature, much more groping, errant and fallible in its larger
scope than that of the animal in his lesser limits. This happens
because man’s real dharma and law of being is to seek for a
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This happens
because man’s real dharma and law of being is to seek for a
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The Yoga of Self -F erf ection
greater self-aware existence, a self-manifestation no longer ob¬
scure and governed by an ununderstood necessity, but illumined,
conscious of that which is expressing itself and able to give it a
fuller and more perfect expression. And finally his culmination
must be to identify himself with his greatest and real self and act
or rather let it act (his natural existence being an instrumental
form of the expression of the spirit) in its spontaneous perfect
will and knowledge. His first instrument for this transition is
the reason and the will of the rational intelligence and he is
moved to depend upon that to the extent of its development for
his knowledge and guidance and give it the control of the rest
of his being. And if the reason were the highest thing and the
greatest all-sufficient means of the self and spirit, he could by
it know perfectly and guide perfectly all the movements of his
nature. This he cannot do entirely because his self is a larger
thing than his reason and if he limits himself by the rational
will and intelligence, he imposes an arbitrary restriction both
in extent and in kind on his self-development, self-expression,
knowledge, action, Ananda. The other parts of his being demand
too a complete expression in the largeness and perfection of the
self and cannot have it if their expression is changed in kind and
carved, cut down and arbitrarily shaped and mechanised in ac¬
tion by the inflexible machinery of the rational intelligence. The
godhead of the reason, the intellectual Logos, is only a partial
representative and substitute for the greater supramental Logos,
and its function is to impose a preliminary partial knowledge
and order upon the life of the creature, but the real, final and
integral order can only be founded by the spiritual supermind in
its emergence.
The supermind in the lower nature is present most strongly
as intuition and it is therefore by a development of an intuitive
mind that we can make the first step towards the self-existent
spontaneous and direct supramental knowledge. All the physi¬
cal, vital, emotional, psychic, dynamic nature of man is a surface
seizing of suggestions which rise out of a subliminal intuitive
self-being of these parts, and an attempt usually groping and
often circuitous to work them out in the action of a superficial
The Nature of the Supermind
797
embodiment and power of the nature which is not overtly en¬
lightened by the inner power and knowledge. An increasingly
intuitive mind has the best chance of discovering what they are
seeking for and leading them to the desired perfection of their
self-expression. The reason itself is only a special kind of appli¬
cation, made by a surface regulating intelligence, of suggestions
which actually come from a concealed, but sometimes partially
overt and active power of the intuitive spirit. In all its action there
is at the covered or half-covered point of origination something
which is not the creation of the reason, but given to it either
directly by the intuition or indirectly through some other part of
the mind for it to shape into intellectual form and process. The
rational judgment in its decisions and the mechanical process
of the logical intelligence, whether in its more summary or in
its more developed operations, conceals while it develops the
true origin and native substance of our will and thinking. The
greatest minds are those in which this veil wears thin and there
is the largest part of intuitive thinking, which often no doubt
but not always brings with it a great accompanying display of
intellectual action. The intuitive intelligence is however never
quite pure and complete in the present mind of man, because it
works in the medium of mind and is at once seized on and coated
over with a mixed stuff of mentality. It is as yet not brought out,
not developed and perfected so as to be sufficient for all the
operations now performed by the other mental instruments, not
trained to take them up and change them into or replace them
by its own fullest, most direct, assured and sufficient workings.
This can indeed only be done if we make the intuitive mind
a transitional means for bringing out the secret supermind it¬
self of which it is a mental figure and forming in our frontal
consciousness a body and instrument of supermind which will
make it possible for the self and spirit to display itself in its own
largeness and splendour.
It must be remembered that there is always a difference be¬
tween the supreme Supermind of the omniscient and omnipotent
Ishwara and that which can be attained by the Jiva. The human
being is climbing out of the ignorance and when he ascends into
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The Yoga of Self -F erf ection
The human
being is climbing out of the ignorance and when he ascends into
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The Yoga of Self -F erf ection
the supramental nature, he will find in it grades of its ascension,
and he must first form the lower grades and limited steps before
he rises to higher summits. He will enjoy there the full essential
light, power, Ananda of the infinite self by oneness with the
Spirit, but in the dynamical expression it must determine and
individualise itself according to the nature of the self-expression
which the transcendent and universal Spirit seeks in the Jiva.
It is God-realisation and God-expression which is the object of
our Yoga and more especially of its dynamic side, it is a divine
self-expression in us of the Ishwara, but under the conditions of
humanity and through the divinised human nature.
Chapter XX
The Intuitive Mind
The original nature of supermind is the self-conscience
and all-conscience of the Infinite, of the universal Spirit
and Self in things, organising on the foundation and
according to the character of a direct self-knowledge its own
wisdom and effective omnipotence for the unfolding and the
regulated action of the universe and of all things in the universe.
It is, we might say, the gnosis of the Spirit master of its own
cosmos, dtmd jndtd isvarah. As it knows itself, so too it knows
all things — for all are only becomings of itself — directly, totally
and from within outward, spontaneously in detail and arrange¬
ment, each thing in the truth of itself and its nature and in its
relation to all other things. And it knows similarly all action of
its energy in antecedent or cause and occasion of manifestation
and effect or consequence, all things in infinite and in limited
potentiality and in selection of actuality and in their succession
of past, present and future. The organising supermind of a divine
being in the universe would be a delegation of this omnipotence
and omniscience for the purpose and within the scope of his
own action and nature and of all that comes into its province.
The supermind in an individual would be a similar delegation
on whatever scale and within whatever province. But while in
the god this would be a direct and an immediate delegation
of a power illimitable in itself and limited only in action, but
otherwise unaltered in operation, natural to the being and full
and free always, in man any emergence of the supermind must be
a gradual and at first an imperfect creation and to his customary
mind the activity of an exceptional and supernormal will and
knowledge.
present physical or mental system: he has either to evolve a new
organ for it or else to adopt or transform existing ones and make
them utilisable for the purpose. He has not merely to uncover
the hidden sun of the supermind in the subliminal cavern of his
secret being or remove the cloud of his mental ignorance from
its face in the spiritual skies so that it shall at once shine out in
all its glory. His task is much more complex and difficult because
he is an evolutionary being and by the evolution of Nature of
which he is a part he has been constituted with an inferior kind
of knowledge, and this inferior, this mental power of knowledge
forms by its persistent customary action an obstacle to a new for¬
mation greater than its own nature. A limited mental intelligence
enlightening a limited mind of sense and the capacity not always
well used of a considerable extension of it by the use of the reason
are the powers by which he is at present distinguished from all
other terrestrial creatures. This sense mind, this intelligence, this
reason, however inadequate, are the instruments in which he
has learned to put his trust and he has erected by their means
certain foundations which he is not over willing to disturb and
has traced limits outside of which he feels all to be confusion,
uncertainty and a perilous adventure. Moreover the transition
to the higher principle means not only a difficult conversion of
his whole mind and reason and intelligence, but in a certain
sense a reversal of all their methods. The soul climbing above
a certain critical line of change sees all its former operations as
an inferior and ignorant action and has to effect another kind
of working which sets out from a different starting-point and
has quite another kind of initiation of the energy of the being.
If an animal mind were called upon to leave consciently the safe
ground of sense impulse, sense understanding and instinct for
the perilous adventure of a reasoning intelligence, it might well
turn back alarmed and unwilling from the effort. The human
mind would here be called upon to make a still greater change
and, although self-conscious and adventurous in the circle of its
possibility, might well hold this to be beyond the circle and reject
the adventure. In fact the change is only possible if there is first a
spiritual development on our present level of consciousness and
The Intuitive Mind
801
In fact the change is only possible if there is first a
spiritual development on our present level of consciousness and
The Intuitive Mind
801
it can only be undertaken securely when the mind has become
aware of the greater self within, enamoured of the Infinite and
confident of the presence and guidance of the Divine and his
Shakti.
The problem of this conversion resolves itself at first into
a passage through a mediary status and by the help of the one
power already at work in the human mind which we can recog¬
nise as something supramental in its nature or at least in its
origin, the faculty of intuition, a power of which we can feel
the presence and the workings and are impressed, when it acts,
by its superior efficiency, light, direct inspiration and force, but
cannot understand or analyse it as we understand or analyse the
workings of our reason. The reason understands itself, but not
what is beyond it, — of that it can only make a general figure or
representation; the supermind alone can discern the method of
its own workings. The power of intuition acts in us at present for
the most part in a covert manner secret and involved in or mostly
veiled by the action of the reason and the normal intelligence; so
far as it emerges into a clear separate action, it is still occasional,
partial, fragmentary and of an intermittent character. It casts a
sudden light, it makes a luminous suggestion or it throws out
a solitary brilliant clue or scatters a small number of isolated
or related intuitions, lustrous discriminations, inspirations or
revelations, and it leaves the reason, will, mental sense or intel¬
ligence to do what each can or pleases with this seed of succour
that has come to them from the depths or the heights of our
being. The mental powers immediately proceed to lay hold on
these things and to manipulate and utilise them for our mental
or vital purposes, to adapt them to the forms of the inferior
knowledge, to coat them up in or infiltrate them with the mental
stuff and suggestion, often altering their truth in the process and
always limiting their potential force of enlightenment by these
accretions and by this subdual to the exigencies of the inferior
agent, and almost always they make at once too little and too
much of them, too little by not allowing them time to settle and
extend their full power for illumination, too much by insisting
on them or rather on the form into which the mentality casts
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The Yoga of Self -F erf ection
them to the exclusion of the larger truth that the more consistent
use of the intuitive faculty might have given. Thus the intuition
intervening in the ordinary mental operations acts in lightning
flashes that make lustrous a space of truth, but is not a steady
sunlight illumining securely the whole reach and kingdom of our
thought and will and feeling and action.
It appears at once that there are two necessary lines of
progress which we must follow, and the first is to extend the ac¬
tion of the intuition and make it more constant, more persistent
and regular and all-embracing until it is so intimate and normal
to our being that it can take up all the action now done by the
ordinary mind and assume its place in the whole system. This
cannot wholly be done so long as the ordinary mind continues
to assert its power of independent action and intervention or its
habit of seizing on the light of the intuition and manipulating it
for its own purposes. The higher mentality cannot be complete
or secure so long as the inferior intelligence is able to deform it or
even to bring in any of its own intermixture. And either then we
must silence altogether the intellect and the intellectual will and
the other inferior activities and leave room only for the intuitive
action or we must lay hold on and transform the lower action
by the constant pressure of the intuition. Or else there must be
an alternation and combination of the two methods if that be
the most natural way or at all possible. The actual process and
experience of Yoga manifests the possibility of several methods
or movements none of which by itself produces the entire result
in practice, however it may seem at first sight that logically each
should or might be adequate. And when we learn to insist on
no particular method as exclusively the right one and leave the
whole movement to a greater guidance, we find that the divine
Lord of the Yoga commissions his Shakti to use one or the other
at different times and all in combination according to the need
and turn of the being and the nature.
At first it might seem the straight and right way to silence the
mind altogether, to silence the intellect, the mental and personal
will, the desire mind and the mind of emotion and sensation,
and to allow in that perfect silence the Self, the Spirit, the Divine
The Intuitive Mind
803
to disclose himself and leave him to illuminate the being by the
supramental light and power and Ananda. And this is indeed
a great and powerful discipline. It is the calm and still mind
much more readily and with a much greater purity than the
mind in agitation and action that opens to the Infinite, reflects
the Spirit, becomes full of the Self and awaits like a consecrated
and purified temple the unveiling of the Lord of all our being
and nature. It is true also that the freedom of this silence gives
a possibility of a larger play of the intuitive being and admits
with less obstruction and turmoil of mental groping and seizing
the great intuitions, inspirations, revelations which emerge from
within or descend from above. It is therefore an immense gain if
we can acquire the capacity of always being able at will to com¬
mand an absolute tranquillity and silence of the mind free from
any necessity of mental thought or movement and disturbance
and, based in that silence, allow thought and will and feeling to
happen in us only when the Shakti wills it and when it is needful
for the divine purpose. It becomes easier then to change the
manner and character of the thought and will and feeling. Never¬
theless it is not the fact that by this method the supramental light
will immediately replace the lower mind and reflective reason.
When the inner action proceeds after the silence, even if it be
then a more predominatingly intuitive thought and movement,
the old powers will yet interfere, if not from within, then by
a hundred suggestions from without, and an inferior mentality
will mix in, will question or obstruct or will try to lay hold
on the greater movement and to lower or darken or distort or
minimise it in the process. Therefore the necessity of a process of
elimination or transformation of the inferior mentality remains
always imperative, — or perhaps both at once, an elimination of
all that is native to the lower being, its disfiguring accidents, its
depreciations of value, its distortions of substance and all else
that the greater truth cannot harbour, and a transformation of
the essential things our mind derives from the supermind and
spirit but represents in the manner of the mental ignorance.
A second movement is one which comes naturally to those
who commence the Yoga with the initiative that is proper to
804
The Yoga of Self -F erf ection
A second movement is one which comes naturally to those
who commence the Yoga with the initiative that is proper to
804
The Yoga of Self -F erf ection
the way of Bhakti. It is natural to them to reject the intellect
and its action and to listen for the voice, wait for the impulsion
or the command, the adesa, obey only the idea and will and
power of the Lord within them, the divine Self and Purusha in
the heart of the creature, Uvarah sarvabhutdndm hrddese. This
is a movement which must tend more and more to intuitivise the
whole nature, for the ideas, the will, the impulsions, the feelings
which come from the secret Purusha in the heart are of the direct
intuitive character. This method is consonant with a certain truth
of our nature. The secret Self within us is an intuitive self and this
intuitive self is seated in every centre of our being, the physical,
the nervous, the emotional, the volitional, the conceptual or cog¬
nitive and the higher more directly spiritual centres. And in each
part of our being it exercises a secret intuitive initiation of our
activities which is received and represented imperfectly by our
outer mind and converted into the movements of the ignorance
in the external action of these parts of our nature. The heart or
emotional centre of the thinking desire mind is the strongest in
the ordinary man, gathers up or at least affects the presentation
of things to the consciousness and is the capital of the system.
It is from there that the Lord seated in the heart of all creatures
turns them mounted on the machine of Nature by the Maya of
the mental ignorance. It is possible then by referring back all the
initiation of our action to this secret intuitive Self and Spirit, the
ever-present Godhead within us, and replacing by its influences
the initiations of our personal and mental nature to get back
from the inferior external thought and action to another, internal
and intuitive, of a highly spiritualised character. Nevertheless
the result of this movement cannot be complete, because the
heart is not the highest centre of our being, is not supramental
nor directly moved from the supramental sources. An intuitive
thought and action directed from it may be very luminous and
intense but is likely to be limited, even narrow in its intensity,
mixed with a lower emotional action and at the best excited and
troubled, rendered unbalanced or exaggerated by a miraculous
or abnormal character in its action or at least in many of its
accompaniments which is injurious to the harmonised perfection
The Intuitive Mind
805
of the being. The aim of our effort at perfection must be to make
the spiritual and supramental action no longer a miracle, even if
a frequent or constant miracle, or only a luminous intervention
of a greater than our natural power, but normal to the being and
the very nature and law of all its process.
The highest organised centre of our embodied being and of
its action in the body is the supreme mental centre figured by
the yogic symbol of the thousand-petalled lotus, sahasradala,
and it is at its top and summit that there is the direct com¬
munication with the supramental levels. It is then possible to
adopt a different and a more direct method, not to refer all our
thought and action to the Lord secret in the heart-lotus but to
the veiled truth of the Divinity above the mind and to receive all
by a sort of descent from above, a descent of which we become
not only spiritually but physically conscious. The siddhi or full
accomplishment of this movement can only come when we are
able to lift the centre of thought and conscious action above the
physical brain and feel it going on in the subtle body. If we can
feel ourselves thinking no longer with the brain but from above
and outside the head in the subtle body, that is a sure physical
sign of a release from the limitations of the physical mind, and
though this will not be complete at once nor of itself bring
the supramental action, for the subtle body is mental and not
supramental, still it is a subtle and pure mentality and makes an
easier communication with the supramental centres. The lower
movements must still come, but it is then found easier to arrive at
a swift and subtle discrimination telling us at once the difference,
distinguishing the intuitional thought from the lower intellec¬
tual mixture, separating it from its mental coatings, rejecting
the mere rapidities of the mind which imitate the form of the
intuition without being of its true substance. It will be easier to
discern rapidly the higher planes of the true supramental being
and call down their power to effect the desired transformation
and to refer all the lower action to the superior power and
light that it may reject and eliminate, purify and transform and
select among them its right material for the Truth that has to be
organised within us. This opening up of a higher level and of
806
The Yoga of Self -F erf ection
This opening up of a higher level and of
806
The Yoga of Self -F erf ection
higher and higher planes of it and the consequent re-formation
of our whole consciousness and its action into their mould and
into the substance of their power and luminous capacity is found
in practice to be the greater part of the natural method used by
the divine Shakti.
A fourth method is one which suggests itself naturally to
the developed intelligence and suits the thinking man. This is
to develop our intellect instead of eliminating it, but with the
will not to cherish its limitations, but to heighten its capacity,
light, intensity, degree and force of activity until it borders on
the thing that transcends it and can easily be taken up and trans¬
formed into that higher conscious action. This movement also is
founded on the truth of our nature and enters into the course and
movement of the complete Yoga of self-perfection. That course,
as I have described it, included a heightening and greatening
of the action of our natural instruments and powers till they
constitute in their purity and essential completeness a prepara¬
tory perfection of the present normal movement of the Shakti
that acts in us. The reason and intelligent will, the buddhi, is
the greatest of these powers and instruments, the natural leader
of the rest in the developed human being, the most capable of
aiding the development of the others. The ordinary activities
of our nature are all of them of use for the greater perfection
we seek, are meant to be turned into material for them, and
the greater their development, the richer the preparation for the
supramental action.
The intellectual being too has to be taken up by the Shakti
in the Yoga and raised to its fullest and its most heightened
powers. The subsequent transformation of the intellect is pos¬
sible because all the action of the intellect derives secretly from
the supermind, each thought and will contains some truth of
it however limited and altered by the inferior action of the
intelligence. The transformation can be brought about by the
removal of the limitation and the elimination of the distorting or
perverting element. This however cannot be done by the height¬
ening and greatening of the intellectual activity alone; for that
must always be limited by the original inherent defects of the
The Intuitive Mind
807
This however cannot be done by the height¬
ening and greatening of the intellectual activity alone; for that
must always be limited by the original inherent defects of the
The Intuitive Mind
807
mental intelligence. An intervention of the supramental energy is
needed that can light up and get rid of its deficiencies of thought
and will and feeling. This intervention too cannot be completely
effective unless the supramental plane is manifested and acts
above the mind no longer from behind a lid or veil, however
thin the veil may have grown, but more constantly in an open
and luminous action till there is seen the full sun of Truth with
no cloud to moderate its splendour. It is not necessary, either, to
develop the intellect fully in its separateness before calling down
this intervention or opening up by it the supramental levels.
The intervention may come in earlier and at once develop the
intellectual action and turn it, as it develops, into the higher
intuitive form and substance.
The widest natural action of the Shakti combines all these
methods. It creates, sometimes at first, sometimes at some later,
perhaps latest stage, the freedom of the spiritual silence. It opens
the secret intuitive being within the mind itself and accustoms us
to refer all our thought and our feeling and will and action to the
initiation of the Divine, the Splendour and Power who is now
concealed in the heart of its recesses. It raises, when we are ready,
the centre of its operations to the mental summit and opens up
the supramental levels and proceeds doubly by an action from
above downward filling and transforming the lower nature and
an action from below upwards raising all the energies to that
which is above them till the transcendence is completed and
the change of the whole system integrally effected. It takes and
develops the intelligence and will and other natural powers, but
brings in constantly the intuitive mind and afterwards the true
supramental energy to change and enlarge their action. These
things it does in no fixed and mechanically invariable order,
such as the rigidity of the logical intellect might demand, but
freely and flexibly according to the needs of its work and the
demand of the nature.
The first result will not be the creation of the true supermind,
but the organisation of a predominantly or even a completely
intuitive mentality sufficiently developed to take the place of the
ordinary mentality and of the logical reasoning intellect of the
808
The Yoga of Self -F erf ection
developed human being. The most prominent change will be the
transmutation of the thought heightened and filled by that sub¬
stance of concentrated light, concentrated power, concentrated
joy of the light and the power and that direct accuracy which
are the marks of a true intuitive thinking. It is not only primary
suggestions or rapid conclusions that this mind will give, but
it will conduct too with the same light, power, joy of sureness
and direct spontaneous seeing of the truth the connecting and
developing operations now conducted by the intellectual rea¬
son. The will also will be changed into this intuitive character,
proceed directly with light and power to the thing to be done,
kartavyam karma, and dispose with a rapid sight of possibilities
and actualities the combinations necessary to its action and its
purpose. The feelings also will be intuitive, seizing upon right
relations, acting with a new light and power and a glad sureness,
retaining only right and spontaneous desires and emotions, so
long as these things endure, and, when they pass away, replacing
them by a luminous and spontaneous love and an Ananda that
knows and seizes at once on the right rasa of its objects. All the
other mental movements will be similarly enlightened and even
too the pranic and sense movements and the consciousness of
the body. And usually there will be some development also of
the psychic faculties, powers and perceptions of the inner mind
and its senses not dependent on the outer sense and the reason.
The intuitive mentality will be not only a stronger and a more
luminous thing, but usually capable of a much more extensive
operation than the ordinary mind of the same man before this
development of the Yoga.
This intuitive mentality, if it could be made perfect in its
nature, unmixed with any inferior element and yet unconscious
of its own limitations and of the greatness of the thing beyond
it, might form another definite status and halting place like the
instinctive mind of the animal or the reasoning mind of man.
But the intuitive mentality cannot be made abidingly perfect and
self-sufficient except by the opening power of the supermind
above it and that at once reveals its limitations and makes of
it a secondary action transitional between the intellectual mind
The Intuitive Mind
809
and the true supramental nature. The intuitive mentality is still
mind and not gnosis. It is indeed a light from the supermind,
but modified and diminished by the stuff of mind in which it
works, and stuff of mind means always a basis of ignorance.
The intuitive mind is not yet the wide sunlight of truth, but a
constant play of flashes of it keeping lighted up a basic state of
ignorance or of half-knowledge and indirect knowledge. As long
as it is imperfect, it is invaded by a mixture of ignorant mentality
which crosses its truth with a strain of error. After it has acquired
a larger native action more free from this intermixture, even then
so long as the stuff of mind in which it works is capable of the
old intellectual or lower mental habit, it is subject to accre¬
tion of error, to clouding, to many kinds of relapse. Moreover
the individual mind does not live alone and to itself but in the
general mind and all that it has rejected is discharged into the
general mind atmosphere around it and tends to return upon
and invade it with the old suggestions and many promptings of
the old mental character. The intuitive mind, growing or grown,
has therefore to be constantly on guard against invasion and
accretion, on the watch to reject and eliminate immixtures, busy
intuitivising more and still more the whole stuff of mind, and
this can only end by itself being enlightened, transformed, lifted
up into the full light of the supramental being.
Moreover, this new mentality is in each man a development
of the present power of his being and, however new and remark¬
able its developments, its organisation is within a certain range
of capacity. Adventuring beyond that border — it may indeed
limit itself to the work in hand and its present range of realised
capacity, but the nature of a mind opened to the infinite is to
progress and change and enlarge — it there becomes liable to
a return, however modified by the new intuitive habit, of the
old intellectual seeking in the ignorance, — unless and until it
is constantly overtopped and led by the manifested action of
a fuller supramental luminous energy. This is indeed its nature
that it is a link and transition between present mind and the
supermind and, so long as the transition is not complete, there
is sometimes a gravitation downward, sometimes a tendency
810
The Yoga of Self -F erf ection
This is indeed its nature
that it is a link and transition between present mind and the
supermind and, so long as the transition is not complete, there
is sometimes a gravitation downward, sometimes a tendency
810
The Yoga of Self -F erf ection
upward, an oscillation, an invasion and attraction from below,
an invasion and attraction from above, and at best an uncertain
and limited status between the two poles. As the higher intel¬
ligence of man is situated between his animal and customary
human mind below and his evolving spiritual mind above, so
this first spiritual mind is situated between the intellectualised
human mentality and the greater supramental knowledge.
The nature of mind is that it lives between half-lights
and darkness, amid probabilities and possibilities, amid partly
grasped aspects, amid incertitudes and half certitudes: it is
an ignorance grasping at knowledge, striving to enlarge itself
and pressing against the concealed body of true gnosis. The
supermind lives in the light of spiritual certitudes: it is to man
knowledge opening the actual body of its own native effulgence.
The intuitive mind appears at first a lightening up of the mind’s
half-lights, its probabilities and possibilities, its aspects, its
uncertain certitudes, its representations, and a revealing of the
truth concealed or half concealed and half manifested by these
things, and in its higher action it is a first bringing of the
supramental truth by a nearer directness of seeing, a luminous
indication or memory of the spirit’s knowledge, an intuition
or looking in through the gates of the being’s secret universal
self-vision and knowledge. It is a first imperfect organisation
of that greater light and power, imperfect because done in the
mind, not based on its own native substance of consciousness,
a constant communication, but not a quite immediate and
constant presence. The perfect perfection lies beyond on the
supramental levels and must be based on a more decisive and
complete transformation of the mentality and of our whole
nature.
Chapter XXI
The Gradations of the Supermind
The perfect perfection lies beyond on the
supramental levels and must be based on a more decisive and
complete transformation of the mentality and of our whole
nature.
Chapter XXI
The Gradations of the Supermind
The intuitive mind is an immediate translation of
truth into mental terms half transformed by a radiant
supramental substance, a translation of some infinite self-
knowledge that acts above mind in the superconscient spirit.
That spirit becomes conscient to us as a greater self at once above
and in and around us of which our present self, our mental, vital
and physical personality and nature, is an imperfect portion or
a partial derivation or an inferior and inadequate symbol, and
as the intuitive mind grows in us, as our whole being grows
more moulded to an intuitive substance, we feel a sort of half
transformation of our members into the nature of this greater
self and spirit. All our thought, will, impulse, feeling, even in
the end our more outward vital and physical sensations become
more and more direct transmissions from the spirit and are of
another and a more and more pure, untroubled, powerful and
luminous nature. This is one side of the change: the other is that
whatever belongs still to the lower being, whatever still seems to
us to come from outside or as a survival of the action of our old
inferior personality, feels the pressure of the change and increas¬
ingly tends to modify and transform itself to the new substance
and nature. The higher comes down and largely takes the place
of the lower, but also the lower changes, transforms itself into
material of the action and becomes part of the substance of the
higher being.
The greater spirit above the mind appears at first as a
presence, a light, a power, a source, an infinite, but all that
is knowable to us in it is at first an infinite identity of being,
consciousness, power of consciousness, Ananda. The rest comes
from it, but takes no determinate shape of thought, will or feeling
above us, but only in the intuitive mind and on its level. Or we
feel and are manifoldly aware of a great and infinite Purusha who
812
The Yoga of Self -F erf ection
The rest comes
from it, but takes no determinate shape of thought, will or feeling
above us, but only in the intuitive mind and on its level. Or we
feel and are manifoldly aware of a great and infinite Purusha who
812
The Yoga of Self -F erf ection
is the eternally living truth of that being and presence, a great
and infinite knowledge which is the potency of that light and
consciousness, a great and infinite will which is the potency of
that power of consciousness, a great and infinite love which is the
potency of that Ananda. But all these potencies are only known
to us in any definite manner, apart from the strong reality and
effect of their essential presence, in so far as they are translated
to our intuitive mental being and on its level and within its limits.
As however we progress or as we grow into a more luminous and
dynamic union with that spirit or Purusha, a greater action of
knowledge and will and spiritual feeling manifests and seems to
organise itself above the mind and this we recognise as the true
supermind and the real native play of the infinite knowledge,
will and Ananda. The intuitive mentality then becomes a sec¬
ondary and inferior movement waiting upon this higher power,
responding and assenting to all its illuminations and dictates,
transmitting them to the lower members, and, when they do
not arrive or are not in immediate evidence, often attempting
to supply its place, imitate its action and do as best it can the
works of the supramental nature. It takes in fact the same place
and relation with regard to it as was taken with regard to itself
by the ordinary intelligence at an earlier stage of the Yoga.
It takes in fact the same place
and relation with regard to it as was taken with regard to itself
by the ordinary intelligence at an earlier stage of the Yoga.
This double action on the two planes of our being at first
strengthens the intuitive mentality as a secondary operation and
assists it to expel or transform more completely the survivals or
invasions or accretions of the ignorance. And more and more it
intensifies the intuitive mentality itself in its light of knowledge
and eventually transforms it into the image of the supermind
itself, but at first, ordinarily, in the more limited action of the
gnosis when it takes the form of what we might call a luminous
supramental or divine reason. It is as this divine reason that
the supermind itself at the beginning may manifest its action
and then, when it has changed the mind into its own image,
it descends and takes the place of the ordinary intelligence
and reason. Meanwhile a higher supramental power of a much
greater character has been revealing itself above which takes
the supreme lead of the divine action in the being. The divine
The Gradations of the Supermind
813
reason is of a more limited character because, although not of
the mental stamp and although an operation of the direct truth
and knowledge, it is a delegated power for a range of purposes
greater in light, but still to a certain extent analogous to those
of the ordinary human will and reason; it is in the yet greater
supermind that there comes the direct, altogether revealed and
immediate action of the Ishwara in the human being. These
distinctions between the intuitive mind, the divine reason and
the greater supermind, and others within these gradations them¬
selves, have to be made because eventually they become of great
importance. At first the mind takes all that comes from beyond
it without distinction as the sufficient spiritual illumination and
accepts even initial states and first enlightenments as a finality,
but afterwards it finds that to rest here would be to rest in a
partial realisation and that one has to go on heightening and
enlarging till at least there is reached a certain completeness of
divine breadth and stature.
It is difficult for the intellect to grasp at all what is meant by
these supramental distinctions: the mental terms in which they
can be rendered are lacking or inadequate and they can only
be understood after a certain sight or certain approximations
in experience. A number of indications are all that at present it
can be useful to give. And first it will be enough to take certain
clues from the thinking mind; for it is there that some of the
nearest keys to the supramental action are discoverable. The
thought of the intuitive mind proceeds wholly by four powers
that shape the form of the truth, an intuition that suggests its
idea, an intuition that discriminates, an inspiration that brings in
its word and something of its greater substance and a revelation
that shapes to the sight its very face and body of reality. These
things are not the same as certain movements of the ordinary
mental intelligence that look analogous and are easily mistaken
for the true intuition in our first inexperience. The suggestive in¬
tuition is not the same thing as the intellectual insight of a quick
intelligence or the intuitive discrimination as the rapid judgment
of the reasoning intellect; the intuitive inspiration is not the
same as the inspired action of the imaginative intelligence, nor
814
The Yoga of Self -F erf ection
the intuitive revelation as the strong light of a purely mental
close seizing and experience.
It would perhaps be accurate to say that these latter activities
are mental representations of the higher movements, attempts
of the ordinary mind to do the same things or the best possible
imitations the intellect can offer of the functionings of the higher
nature. The true intuitions differ from these effective but insuffi¬
cient counterfeits in their substance of light, their operation, their
method of knowledge. The intellectual rapidities are dependent
on awakenings of the basic mental ignorance to mental figures
and representations of truth that may be quite valid in their
own field and for their own purpose but are not necessarily
and by their very nature reliable. They are dependent for their
emergence on the suggestions given by mental and sense data or
on the accumulation of past mental knowledge. They search for
the truth as a thing outside, an object to be found and looked
at and stored as an acquisition and, when found, scrutinise its
surfaces, suggestions or aspects. This scrutiny can never give a
quite complete and adequate truth idea. However positive they
may seem at the time, they may at any moment have to be passed
over, rejected and found inconsistent with fresh knowledge.
The intuitive knowledge on the contrary, however limited it
may be in its field or application, is within that scope sure with
an immediate, a durable and especially a self-existent certitude.
It may take for starting-point or rather for a thing to light up
and disclose in its true sense the data of mind and sense or else
fire a train of past thought and knowledge to new meanings and
issues, but it is dependent on nothing but itself and may leap out
of its own field of lustres, independent of previous suggestion
or data, and this kind of action becomes progressively more
common and adds itself to the other to initiate new depths and
ranges of knowledge. In either case there is always an element
of self-existent truth and a sense of absoluteness of origination
suggestive of its proceeding from the spirit’s knowledge by iden¬
tity. It is the disclosing of a knowledge that is secret but already
existent in the being: it is not an acquisition, but something
that was always there and revealable. It sees the truth from
The Gradations of the Supermind
815
It is the disclosing of a knowledge that is secret but already
existent in the being: it is not an acquisition, but something
that was always there and revealable. It sees the truth from
The Gradations of the Supermind
815
within and illumines with that inner vision the outsides and it
harmonises, too, readily — provided we keep intuitively awake
— with whatever fresh truth has yet to arrive. These character¬
istics become more pronounced and intense in the higher, the
proper supramental ranges: in the intuitive mind they may not
be always recognisable in their purity and completeness, because
of the mixture of mental stuff and its accretion, but in the divine
reason and greater supramental action they become free and
absolute.
The suggestive intuition acting on the mental level suggests
a direct and illumining inner idea of the truth, an idea that is
its true image and index, not as yet the entirely present and
whole sight, but rather of the nature of a bright memory of
some truth, a recognition of a secret of the self’s knowledge. It
is a representation, but a living representation, not an ideative
symbol, a reflection, but a reflection that is lit up with some¬
thing of the truth’s real substance. The intuitive discrimination
is a secondary action setting this idea of the truth in its right
place and its relation to other ideas. And so long as there is
the habit of mental interference and accretion it works also
to separate the mental from the higher seeing, to discrete the
inferior mental stuff that embarrasses with its alloy the pure
truth substance, and labours to unravel the mingled skein of
ignorance and knowledge, falsehood and error. As the intuition
is of the nature of a memory, a luminous remembering of the
self-existent truth, so the inspiration is of the nature of truth
hearing: it is an immediate reception of the very voice of the
truth, it readily brings the word that perfectly embodies it and it
carries something more than the light of its idea; there is seized
some stream of its inner reality and vivid arriving movement
of its substance. The revelation is of the nature of direct sight,
pratyaksa-drsti, and makes evident to a present vision the thing
in itself of which the idea is the representation. It brings out the
very spirit and being and reality of the truth and makes it part
of the consciousness and the experience.
In the actual process of the development of the supramental
nature, supposing it to follow a regular gradation, it may be seen
816
The Yoga of Self -F erf ection
In the actual process of the development of the supramental
nature, supposing it to follow a regular gradation, it may be seen
816
The Yoga of Self -F erf ection
that the two lower powers come out first, though not necessarily
void of all action of the two higher powers, and as they increase
and become a normal action, they make a sort of lower intuitive
gnosis. The combination of the two together is necessary for
its completeness. If the intuitive discrimination works by itself,
it creates a sort of critical illumination that acts on the ideas
and perceptions of the intellect and turns them on themselves
in such a way that the mind can separate their truth from their
error. It creates in the end in place of the intellectual judgment
a luminous intuitive judgment, a sort of critical gnosis: but it is
likely to be deficient in fresh illuminative knowledge or to create
only so much extension of truth as is the natural consequence
of the separation of error. On the other hand, if the suggestive
intuition works by itself without this discrimination, there is in¬
deed a constant accession of new truths and new lights, but they
are easily surrounded and embarrassed by the mental accretions
and their connections and relation or harmonious development
out of each other are clouded and broken by the interference. A
normalised power of active intuitive perception is created, but
not any complete and coherent mind of intuitive gnosis. The
two together supply the deficiencies of each other’s single action
and build up a mind of intuitive perception and discrimination
which can do the work and more than the work of the stumbling
mental intelligence and do it with the greater light, surety and
power of a more direct and unfaltering ideation.
The two higher powers in the same way make a higher intu¬
itive gnosis. Acting as separate powers in the mentality they too
are not in themselves sufficient without the companion activities.
The revelation may indeed present the reality, the identities of
the thing in itself and add something of great power to the experi¬
ence of the conscious being, but it may lack the embodying word,
the out-bringing idea, the connected pursuit of its relations and
consequences and may remain a possession in the self but not
a thing communicated to and through the members. There may
be the presence of the truth but not its full manifestation. The
inspiration may give the word of the truth and the stir of its
dynamis and movement, but this is not a complete thing and sure
The Gradations of the Supermind
817
There may
be the presence of the truth but not its full manifestation. The
inspiration may give the word of the truth and the stir of its
dynamis and movement, but this is not a complete thing and sure
The Gradations of the Supermind
817
in its effect without the full revelation of all that it bears in itself
and luminously indicates and the ordering of it in its relations.
The inspired intuitive mind is a mind of lightnings lighting up
many things that were dark, but the light needs to be canalised
and fixed into a stream of steady lustres that will be a constant
power for lucidly ordered knowledge. The higher gnosis by itself
in its two sole powers would be a mind of spiritual splendours
living too much in its own separate domain, producing perhaps
invisibly its effect on the outside world, but lacking the link of a
more close and ordinary communication with its more normal
movements that is provided by the lower ideative action. It is
the united or else the fused and unified action of the four powers
that makes the complete and fully armed and equipped intuitive
gnosis.
A regular development would at first, allowing for some
simultaneous manifestation of the four powers, yet create on
a sufficiently extensive scale the lower suggestive and critical
intuitive mind and then develop above it the inspired and the
revelatory intuitive mentality. Next it would take up the two
lower powers into the power and field of the inspiration and
make all act as one harmony doing simultaneously the united
— or, at a higher intensity, indistinguishably as one light the
unified — action of the three. And last it would execute a simi¬
lar movement of taking up into and fusion with the revelatory
power of the intuitive gnosis. As a matter of fact in the human
mind the clear process of the development is likely always to
be more or less disturbed, confused and rendered irregular in its
course, subjected to relapses, incomplete advances, returns upon
things unaccomplished or imperfectly accomplished owing to
the constant mixture and intervention of the existing movements
of the mental half-knowledge and the obstruction of the stuff
of the mental ignorance. In the end however a time can come
when the process, so far as it is possible in the mind itself, is
complete and a clear formation of a modified supramental light
is possible composed of all these powers, the highest leading or
absorbing into its own body the others. It is at this point, when
the intuitive mind has been fully formed in the mental being and
818
It is at this point, when
the intuitive mind has been fully formed in the mental being and
818
The Yoga of Self -F erf ection
is strong enough to dominate if not yet wholly to occupy the
various mental activities, that a farther step becomes possible,
the lifting of the centre and level of action above the mind and
the predominance of the supramental reason.
The first character of this change is a complete reversal, a
turning over, one might almost say, upside down of the whole
activity. At present we live in the mind and mostly in the physical
mind, but still not entirely involved like the animal in the phys¬
ical, vital and sensational workings. On the contrary we have
attained to a certain mental elevation from which we can look
down on the action of the life, sense and body, turn the higher
mental light on them, reflect, judge, use our will to modify the
action of the inferior nature. On the other hand we look up too
from that elevation more or less consciously to something above
and receive from it either directly or through our subconscient
or subliminal being some secret superconscient impulsion of
our thought and will and other activities. The process of this
communication is veiled and obscure and men are not ordinarily
aware of it except in certain highly developed natures: but when
we advance in self-knowledge, we find that all our thought and
will originate from above though formed in the mind and there
first overtly active. If we release the knots of the physical mind
which binds us to the brain instrument and identifies us with the
bodily consciousness and can move in the pure mentality, this
becomes constantly clear to the perception.
The development of the intuitive mentality makes this com¬
munication direct, no longer subconscient and obscure; but we
are still in the mind and the mind still looks upward and receives
the supramental communication and passes it on to the other
members. In doing so it no longer wholly creates its own form
for the thought and will that come down to it, but still it modifies
and qualifies and limits them and imposes something of its own
method. It is still the receiver and the transmitter of the thought
and will, — though not formative of them now except by a subtle
influence, because it provides them or at least surrounds them
with a mental stuff or a mental setting and framework and
atmosphere. When however the supramental reason develops.
The Gradations of the Supermind
819
When however the supramental reason develops.
The Gradations of the Supermind
819
the Purusha rises above the mental elevation and now looks
down on the whole action of mind, life, sense, body from quite
another light and atmosphere, sees and knows it with quite a
different vision and, because he is no longer involved in the mind,
with a free and true knowledge. Man is at present only partly
liberated from the animal involution, — for his mind is partially
lifted above, partially immerged and controlled by the life, sense
and body, — and he is not at all liberated from the mental forms
and limits. But after he rises to the supramental elevation, he
is delivered from the nether control and governor of his whole
nature — essentially and initially only at first and in his highest
consciousness, for the rest remains still to be transformed, —
but when or in proportion as that is done, he becomes a free
being and master of his mind, sense, life and body.
The second character of the change is that the formation of
the thought and will can take place now wholly on the supra¬
mental level and therefore there is initiated an entirely luminous
and effective will and knowledge. The light and the power are
not indeed complete at the beginning because the supramental
reason is only an elementary formulation of the supermind and
because the mind and other members have yet to be changed
into the mould of the supramental nature. The mind, it is true,
no longer acts as the apparent originator, formulator or judge
of the thought and will or anything else, but it still acts as
the transmitting channel and therefore in that degree as a re¬
cipient and to a certain extent an obstructor and qualifier in
transmission of the power and light that comes from above.
There is a disparateness between the supramental consciousness
in which the Purusha now stands, thinks and wills and the men¬
tal, vital and physical consciousness through which he has to
effectuate its light and knowledge. He lives and sees with an
ideal consciousness, but he has yet in his lower self to make
it entirely practical and effective. Otherwise he can only act
with a greater or less spiritual effectiveness through an internal
communication with others on the spiritual level and on the
higher mental level that is most easily affected by it, but the
effect is diminished and is retarded by the inferiority or lack of
820
The Yoga of Self -F erf ection
the integral play of the being. This can only be remedied by the
supermind taking hold of and supramentalising the mental, the
vital and the physical consciousness, — transforming them, that
is to say, into moulds of the supramental nature. This is much
more easily done if there has been that Yogic preparation of the
instruments of the lower nature of which I have already spoken;
otherwise there is much difficulty in getting rid of the discord or
disparateness between the ideal supramentality and the mental
transmitting instruments, the mind channel, the heart, the sense,
the nervous and the physical being. The supramental reason can
do the first and a fairly ample, though not the entire work of
this transformation.
The supramental reason is of the nature of a spiritual, di¬
rect, self-luminous, self-acting will and intelligence, not mental,
mdnasa buddhi, but supramental, vijhdna buddhi. It acts by the
same four powers as the intuitive mind, but these powers are here
active in an initial fullness of body not modified by the mental
stuff of the intelligence, not concerned mainly with an illumining
of the mind, but at work in their own proper manner and for
their own native purpose. And of these four the discrimination
here is hardly recognisable as a separate power, but is constantly
inherent in the three others and is their own determination of
the scope and relations of their knowledge. There are three ele¬
vations in this reason, one in which the action of what we may
call a supramental intuition gives the form and the predominant
character, one in which a rapid supramental inspiration and
one in which a large supramental revelation leads and imparts
the general character, and each of these raises us to a more
concentrated substance and a higher light, sufficiency and scope
of the truth will and the truth knowledge.
The work of the supramental reason covers and goes beyond
all that is done by the mental reason, but it starts from the other
end and has a corresponding operation. The essential truths of
self and the spirit and the principle of things are not to the
spiritual reason abstract ideas or subtle unsubstantial experi¬
ences to which it arrives by a sort of overleaping of limits, but
a constant reality and the natural background of all its ideation
The Gradations of the Supermind
821
and experience. It does not like the mind arrive at, but discloses
directly both the general and total and the particular truths
of being and consciousness, of spiritual and other sensation and
Ananda and of force and action, — reality and phenomenon and
symbol, actuality and possibility and eventuality, that which
is determined and that which determines, and all with a self-
luminous evidence. It formulates and arranges the relations of
thought and thought, of force and force, of action and action and
of all these with each other and throws them into a convincing
and luminous harmony. It includes the data of sense, but gives
to them another meaning in the light of what is behind them,
and treats them only as outermost indications: the inner truth is
known to a greater sense which it already possesses. And it is not
dependent on them alone even in their own field of objects or
limited by their range. It has a spiritual sense and sensation of its
own and it takes and relates to that the data too of a sixth sense,
the inner mind sense. And it takes also the illuminations and
the living symbols and images familiar to the psychic experience
and relates these too to the truths of the self and spirit.
The spiritual reason takes also the emotions and psychic
sensations, relates them to their spiritual equivalents and im¬
parts to them the values of the higher consciousness and Ananda
from which they derive and are its modifications in an inferior
nature and it corrects their deformations. It takes similarly the
movements of the vital being and consciousness and relates them
to the movements and imparts to them the significances of the
spiritual life of the self and its power of Tapas. It takes the
physical consciousness, delivers it from its darkness and tamas
of inertia and makes it a responsive recipient and a sensitive
instrument of the supramental light and power and Ananda. It
deals with life and action and knowledge like the mental will and
reason, but not starting from matter, life and sense and their data
and relating to them through the idea the truth of higher things,
but it starts on the contrary from truth of self and spirit and
relates to that through a direct spiritual experience assuming all
other experience as its forms and instruments the things of mind
and soul and life and sense and matter. It commands a far vaster
822
The Yoga of Self -F erf ection
It commands a far vaster
822
The Yoga of Self -F erf ection
range than the ordinary embodied mind shut up in the prison of
the physical senses and vaster too than the pure mentality, even
when that is free in its own ranges and operates with the aid of
the psychical mind and inner senses. And it has that power which
the mental will and reason do not possess, because they are not
truly self-determined and originally determinative of things, the
power of transforming the whole being in all its parts into a
harmonious instrument and manifestation of the spirit.
At the same time the spiritual reason acts mainly by the
representative idea and will in the spirit, though it has a greater
and more essential truth as its constant source and supporter and
reference. It is, then, a power of light of the Ishwara, but not the
very self-power of his immediate presence in the being; it is his
surya-sakti, not his whole dtma-sakti or para svd prakrti, that
works in the spiritual reason. The immediate self-power begins
its direct operation in the greater supermind, and that takes up
all that has hitherto been realised in body, life and mind and in
the intuitive being and by the spiritual reason and shapes all that
has been created, all that has been gathered, turned into stuff
of experience and made part of the consciousness, personality
and nature by the mental being, into a highest harmony with the
high infinite and universal life of the spirit. The mind can have
the touch of the infinite and the universal and can reflect and
even lose itself in them, but the supermind alone can enable the
individual to be completely one in action with the universal and
transcendent spirit.
Here the one thing that is always and constantly present,
that which one has grown to and in which one lives always, is
infinite being and all that is is seen, felt, known, existed in as
only substance of the one being; it is infinite consciousness and
all that is conscious and acts and moves is seen, felt, received,
known, lived in as self-experience and energy of the one being;
it is infinite Ananda and all that feels and is felt is seen and felt
and known, received and lived in as forms of the one Ananda.
Everything else is only manifestation and circumstance of this
one truth of our existence. This is no longer merely the seeing or
knowing, but the very condition of the self in all and all in the
The Gradations of the Supermind
823
Everything else is only manifestation and circumstance of this
one truth of our existence. This is no longer merely the seeing or
knowing, but the very condition of the self in all and all in the
The Gradations of the Supermind
823
self, God in all and all in God and all seen as God, and that condi¬
tion is now not a thing offered to the reflecting spiritualised mind
but held and lived by an integral, always present, always active
realisation in the supramental nature. There is thought here and
will and sensation and everything that belongs to our nature,
but it is transfigured and elevated into a higher consciousness.
All thought is here seen and experienced as a luminous body of
substance, a luminous movement of force, a luminous wave of
Ananda of the being; it is not an idea in the void air of mind,
but experienced in the reality and as the light of a reality of the
infinite being. The will and impulsions are similarly experienced
as a real power and substance of the Sat, the Chit, the Ananda
of the Ishwara. All the spiritualised sensation and emotion are
experienced as pure moulds of the consciousness and Ananda.
The physical being itself is experienced as a conscious form and
the vital being as an outpouring of the power and possession of
the life of the spirit.
The physical being itself is experienced as a conscious form and
the vital being as an outpouring of the power and possession of
the life of the spirit.
The action of the supermind in the development is to man¬
ifest and organise this highest consciousness so as to exist and
act no longer only in the infinite above with some limited or
veiled or lower and deformed manifestations in the individual
being and nature, but largely and totally in the individual as
a conscious and self-knowing spiritual being and a living and
acting power of the infinite and universal spirit. The character
of this action, so far as it can be expressed, may be spoken of
more fitly afterwards when we come to speak of the Brahmic
consciousness and vision. In the succeeding chapters we shall
only deal with so much of it as concerns the thought, will and
psychic and other experience in the individual nature. At present
all that is necessary to note is that here too there is in the field
of the thought and the will a triple action. The spiritual reason
is lifted and broadened into a greater representative action that
formulates to us mainly the actualities of the existence of the self
in and around us. There is then a higher interpretative action
of the supramental knowledge, a greater scale less insistent on
actualities, that opens out yet greater potentialities in time and
space and beyond. And lastly there is a highest knowledge by
824
The Yoga of Self -F erf ection
identity that is a gate of entrance to the essential self-awareness
and the omniscience and omnipotence of the Ishwara.
And lastly there is a highest knowledge by
824
The Yoga of Self -F erf ection
identity that is a gate of entrance to the essential self-awareness
and the omniscience and omnipotence of the Ishwara.
It must not however be supposed that these superimposed
stages are shut off in experience from each other. I have placed
them in what might be a regular order of ascending development
for the better possibility of understanding in an intellectual state¬
ment. But the infinite even in the normal mind breaks through
its own veils and across its own dividing lines of descent and
ascension and gives often intimations of itself in one manner
or another. And while we are still in the intuitive mentality,
the things above open and come to us in irregular visitations,
then form as we grow a more frequent and regularised action
above it. These anticipations are still more large and frequent the
moment we enter on the supramental level. The universal and
infinite consciousness can always seize on and surround the mind
and it is when it does so with a certain continuity, frequency or
persistence that the mind can most easily transform itself into the
intuitive mentality and that again into the supramental move¬
ment. Only as we rise we grow more intimately and integrally
into the infinite consciousness and it becomes more fully our
own self and nature. And also, on the other, the lower side of
existence which it might seem would then be not only beneath
but quite alien to us, even when we live in the supramental being
and even when the whole nature has been formed into its mould,
that need not cut us off from the knowledge and feeling of others
who live in the ordinary nature. The lower or more limited may
have a difficulty in understanding and feeling the higher, but the
higher and less limited can always, if it will, understand and
identify itself with the lower nature. The supreme Ishwara too
is not aloof from us; he knows, lives in, identifies himself with
all and yet is not subjugated by the reactions or limited in his
knowledge, power and Ananda by the limitations of the mind
and life and physical being in the universe.
Chapter XXII
The Supramental Thought
and Knowledge
Chapter XXII
The Supramental Thought
and Knowledge
The transition from mind to supermind is not only
the substitution of a greater instrument of thought and
knowledge, but a change and conversion of the whole
consciousness. There is evolved not only a supramental thought,
but a supramental will, sense, feeling, a supramental substitute
for all the activities that are now accomplished by the mind.
All these higher activities are first manifested in the mind itself
as descents, irruptions, messages or revelations of a superior
power. Mostly they are mixed up with the more ordinary action
of the mind and not easily distinguishable from them in our first
inexperience except by their superior light and force and joy,
the more so as the mind greatened or excited by their frequent
coming quickens its own action and imitates the external char¬
acteristics of the supramental activity: its own operation is made
more swift, luminous, strong and positive and it arrives even at
a kind of imitative and often false intuition that strives to be
but is not really the luminous, direct and self-existent truth. The
next step is the formation of a luminous mind of intuitive expe¬
rience, thought, will, feeling, sense from which the intermixture
of the lesser mind and the imitative intuition are progressively
eliminated: this is a process of purification, suddhi, necessary to
the new formation and perfection, siddhi. At the same time there
is the disclosure above the mind of the source of the intuitive
action and a more and more organised functioning of a true
supramental consciousness acting not in the mind but on its own
higher plane. This draws up into itself in the end the intuitive
mentality it has created as its representative and assumes the
charge of the whole activity of the consciousness. The process
is progressive and for a long time chequered by admixture and
826
The Yoga of Self -F erf ection
The process
is progressive and for a long time chequered by admixture and
826
The Yoga of Self -F erf ection
the necessity of a return upon the lower movements in order to
correct and transform them. The higher and the lower power
act sometimes alternately, — the consciousness descending back
from the heights it had attained to its former level but always
with some change, — but sometimes together and with a sort
of mutual reference. The mind eventually becomes wholly intu-
itivised and exists only as a passive channel for the supramental
action; but this condition too is not ideal and presents, besides,
still a certain obstacle, because the higher action has still to pass
through a retarding and diminishing conscious substance, —
that of the physical consciousness. The final stage of the change
will come when the supermind occupies and supramentalises the
whole being and turns even the vital and physical sheaths into
moulds of itself, responsive, subtle and instinct with its powers.
Man then becomes wholly the superman. This is at least the
natural and integral process.
It would be to go altogether outside present limits to attempt
anything like an adequate presentation of the whole character of
the supermind; and it would not be possible to give a complete
presentation, since the supermind carries in it the unity, but also
the largeness and multiplicities of the infinite. All that need now
be done is to present some salient characters from the point
of view of the actual process of the conversion in the Yoga,
the relation to the action of mind and the principle of some of
the phenomena of the change. This is the fundamental relation
that all the action of the mind is a derivation from the secret
supermind, although we do not know this until we come to
know our higher self, and draws from that source all it has
of truth and value. All our thoughts, willings, feelings, sense
representations have in them or at their roots an element of
truth, which originates and sustains their existence, however in
the actuality they may be perverted or false, and behind them
a greater ungrasped truth, which if they could grasp it, would
make them soon unified, harmonious and at least relatively com¬
plete. Actually, however, such truth as they have is diminished
in scope, degraded into a lower movement, divided and falsi¬
fied by fragmentation, afflicted with incompleteness, marred by
The Supramental Thought and Knowledge
827
Actually, however, such truth as they have is diminished
in scope, degraded into a lower movement, divided and falsi¬
fied by fragmentation, afflicted with incompleteness, marred by
The Supramental Thought and Knowledge
827
perversion. Mental knowledge is not an integral but always a
partial knowledge. It adds constantly detail to detail, but has
a difficulty in relating them aright; its wholes too are not real
but incomplete wholes which it tends to substitute for the more
real and integral knowledge. And even if it arrived at a kind of
integral knowledge, it would still be by a sort of putting together,
a mental and intellectual arrangement, an artificial unity and not
an essential and real oneness. If that were all, the mind might
conceivably arrive at some kind of half reflection half translation
of an integral knowledge, but the radical malady would still be
that it would not be the real thing, but only at best an intellec¬
tual representation. That the mental truth must always be, an
intellectual, emotional and sensational representation, not the
direct truth, not truth itself in its body and essence.
That the mental truth must always be, an
intellectual, emotional and sensational representation, not the
direct truth, not truth itself in its body and essence.
The supermind can do all that the mind does, present and
combine details and what might be called aspects or subordinate
wholes, but it does it in a different way and on another basis.
It does not like the mind bring in the element of deviation, false
extension and imposed error, but even when it gives a partial
knowledge, gives it in a firm and exact light, and always there
is behind implied or opened to the consciousness the essential
truth on which the details and subordinate wholes or aspects
depend. The supermind has also a power of representation, but
its representations are not of the intellectual kind, they are filled
with the body and substance of light of the truth in its essence,
they are its vehicles and not substituted figures. There is such
an infinite power of representation of the supermind and that is
the divine power of which the mental action is a sort of fallen
representative. This representative supermind has a lower action
in what I have called the supramental reason, nearest to the
mental and into which the mental can most easily be taken up,
and a higher action in the integral supermind that sees all things
in the unity and infinity of the divine consciousness and self¬
existence. But on whatever level, it is a different thing from
the corresponding mental action, direct, luminous, secure. The
whole inferiority of the mind comes from its being the action of
the soul after it has fallen into the nescience and the ignorance
828
The Yoga of Self -F erf ection
and is trying to get back to self-knowledge but doing it still on
the basis of the nescience and the ignorance. The mind is the
ignorance attempting to know or it is the ignorance receiving a
derivative knowledge: it is the action of Avidya. The supermind is
always the disclosure of an inherent and self-existent knowledge;
it is the action of Vidya.
The mind is the
ignorance attempting to know or it is the ignorance receiving a
derivative knowledge: it is the action of Avidya. The supermind is
always the disclosure of an inherent and self-existent knowledge;
it is the action of Vidya.
A second difference that we experience is a greater and a
spontaneous harmony and unity. All consciousness is one, but in
action it takes on many movements and each of these fundamen¬
tal movements has many forms and processes. The forms and
processes of the mind consciousness are marked by a disturbing
and perplexing division and separateness of the mental energies
and movements in which the original unity of the conscious mind
does not at all or only distractedly appears. Constantly we find
in our mentality a conflict or else a confusion and want of combi¬
nation between different thoughts or a patched up combination
and the same phenomenon applies to the various movements of
our will and desire and to our emotions and feelings. Again our
thought and our will and our feeling are not in a state of natural
harmony and unison with each other, but act in their separate
power even when they have to act together and are frequently in
conflict or to some degree at variance. There is too an unequal
development of one at the expense of another. The mind is a
thing of discords in which some kind of practical arrangement
rather than a satisfying concord is established for the purposes of
life. The reason tries to arrive at a better arrangement, aims at a
better control, a rational or an ideal harmony, and in this attempt
it is a delegate or substitute of the supermind and is trying to do
what only the supermind can do in its own right: but actually
it is not able wholly to control the rest of the being and there is
usually a considerable difference between the rational or ideal
harmony we create in our thoughts and the movement of the
life. Even at the best the arrangement made by the reason has
always in it something of artificiality and imposition, for in the
end there are only two spontaneous harmonic movements, that
of the life, inconscient or largely subconscient, the harmony that
we find in the animal creation and in lower Nature, and that of
The Supramental Thought and Knowledge
829
the spirit. The human condition is a stage of transition, effort
and imperfection between the one and the other, between the
natural and the ideal or spiritual life and it is full of uncertain
seeking and disorder. It is not that the mental being cannot find
or rather construct some kind of relative harmony of its own,
but that it cannot render it stable because it is under the urge
of the spirit. Man is obliged by a Power within him to be the
labourer of a more or less conscious self-evolution that shall lead
him to self-mastery and self-knowledge.
The supermind in its action is on the contrary a thing of
unity and harmony and inherent order. At first when the pressure
from above falls on the mentality, this is not realised and even
a contrary phenomenon may for a time appear. That is due to
several causes. First, there may be a disturbance, even a derange¬
ment created by impact of the greater hardly measurable power
on an inferior consciousness which is not capable of responding
to it organically or even perhaps of bearing the pressure. The
very fact of the simultaneous and yet uncoordinated activity
of two quite different forces, especially if the mind insists on
its own way, if it tries obstinately or violently to profit by the
supermind instead of giving itself up to it and its purpose, if it
is not sufficiently passive and obedient to the higher guidance,
may lead to a great excitation of power but also an increased
disorder. It is for this reason that a previous preparation and long
purification, the more complete the better, and a tranquillising
and ordinarily a passivity of the mind calmly and strongly open
to the spirit are necessities of the Yoga.
Again the mind, accustomed to act in limits, may try to
supramentalise itself on the line of any one of its energies. It may
develop a considerable power of intuitive half-supramentalised
thought and knowledge, but the will may remain untransformed
and out of harmony with this partial half-supramental devel¬
opment of the thinking mind, and the rest of the being too,
emotional and nervous, may continue to be equally or more
unregenerate. Or there may be a very great development of in¬
tuitive or strongly inspired will, but no corresponding uplifting
of the thought mind or the emotional and psychic being, or only
830
The Yoga of Self -F erf ection
Or there may be a very great development of in¬
tuitive or strongly inspired will, but no corresponding uplifting
of the thought mind or the emotional and psychic being, or only
830
The Yoga of Self -F erf ection
at most so much as is specially needed in order not wholly to
obstruct the will action. The emotional or psychic mind may
try to intuitivise and supramentalise itself and to a great extent
succeed, and yet the thinking mind remain ordinary, poor in stuff
and obscure in its light. There may be a development of intuitiv-
ity in the ethical or aesthetic being, but the rest may remain very
much as it was. This is the reason of the frequent disorder or
one-sidedness which we mark in the man of genius, poet, artist,
thinker, saint or mystic. A partially intuitivised mentality may
present an appearance of much less harmony and order outside
its special activity than the largely developed intellectual mind.
An integral development is needed, a wholesale conversion of
the mind; otherwise the action is that of the mind using the
supramental influx for its own profit and in its own mould,
and that is allowed for the immediate purpose of the Divine in
the being and may even be considered as a stage sufficient for
the individual in this one life: but it is a state of imperfection
and not the complete and successful evolution of the being. If
however there is an integral development of the intuitive mind,
it will be found that a great harmony has begun to lay its own
foundations. This harmony will be other than that created by
the intellectual mind and indeed may not be easily perceptible
or, if it is felt, yet not intelligible to the logical man, because
not arrived at or analysable by his mental process. It will be a
harmony of the spontaneous expression of the spirit.
As soon as we arise above mind to the supermind, this ini¬
tial harmony will be replaced by a greater and a more integral
unity. The thoughts of the supramental reason meet together
and understand each other and fall into a natural arrangement
even when they have started from quite opposite quarters. The
movements of will that are in conflict in the mind, come in the
supermind to their right place and relation to each other. The
supramental feelings also discover their own affinities and fall
into a natural agreement and harmony. At a higher stage this har¬
mony intensifies towards unity. The knowledge, will, feeling and
all else become a single movement. This unity reaches its greatest
completeness in the highest supermind. The harmony, the unity
At a higher stage this har¬
mony intensifies towards unity. The knowledge, will, feeling and
all else become a single movement. This unity reaches its greatest
completeness in the highest supermind. The harmony, the unity
The Supramental Thought and Knowledge
831
are inevitable because the base in the supermind is knowledge
and characteristically self-knowledge, the knowledge of the self
in all its aspects. The supramental will is the dynamic expression
of this self-knowledge, the supramental feeling the expression of
the luminous joy of the self and all else in supermind a part of
this one movement. At its highest range it becomes something
greater than what we call knowledge; there it is the essential
and integral self-awareness of the Divine in us, his being, con¬
sciousness, Tapas, Ananda, and all is the harmonious, unified,
luminous movement of that one existence.
This supramental knowledge is not primarily or essentially a
thought knowledge. The intellect does not consider that it knows
a thing until it has reduced its awareness of it to the terms of
thought, not, that is to say, until it has put it into a system of rep¬
resentative mental concepts, and this kind of knowledge gets its
most decisive completeness when it can be put into clear, precise
and defining speech. It is true that the mind gets its knowledge
primarily by various kinds of impression beginning from the
vital and the sense impressions and rising to the intuitive, but
these are taken by the developed intelligence only as data and
seem to it uncertain and vague in themselves until they have
been forced to yield up all their content to the thought and have
taken their place in some intellectual relation or in an ordered
thought sequence. It is true again that there is a thought and a
speech which are rather suggestive than definitive and have in
their own way a greater potency and richness of content, and this
kind already verges on the intuitive: but still there is a demand
in the intellect to bring out in clear sequence and relation the
exact intellectual content of these suggestions and until that is
done it does not feel satisfied that its knowledge is complete. The
thought labouring in the logical intellect is that which normally
seems best to organise the mental action and gives to the mind
a sense of sure definiteness, security and completeness in its
knowledge and its use of knowledge. Nothing of this is at all
true of the supramental knowledge.
Nothing of this is at all
true of the supramental knowledge.
The supermind knows most completely and securely not by
thought but by identity, by a pure awareness of the self-truth
832
The Yoga of Self -F erf ection
of things in the self and by the self, dtmani dtmdnam dtmand.
I get the supramental knowledge best by becoming one with
the truth, one with the object of knowledge; the supramental
satisfaction and integral light is most there when there is no
further division between the knower, knowledge and the known,
jhdtd, jndnam, jheyam. I see the thing known not as an object
outside myself, but as myself or a part of my universal self
contained in my most direct consciousness. This leads to the
highest and completest knowledge; thought and speech being
representations and not this direct possession in the conscious¬
ness are to the supermind a lesser form and, if not filled with
the spiritual awareness, thought becomes in fact a diminution
of knowledge. For it would be, supposing it to be a supramental
thought, only a partial manifestation of a greater knowledge
existing in the self but not at the time present to the immediately
active consciousness. In the highest ranges of the infinite there
need be no thought at all because all would be experienced
spiritually, in continuity, in eternal possession and with an ab¬
solute directness and completeness. Thought is only one means
of partially manifesting and presenting what is hidden in this
greater self-existent knowledge. This supreme kind of knowing
will not indeed be possible to us in its full extent and degree
until we can rise through many grades of the supermind to
that infinite. But still as the supramental power emerges and
enlarges its action, something of this highest way of knowledge
appears and grows and even the members of the mental being,
as they are intuitivised and supramentalised, develop more and
more a corresponding action upon their own level. There is
an increasing power of a luminous vital, psychic, emotional,
dynamic and other identification with all the things and beings
that are the objects of our consciousness and these transcendings
of the separative consciousness bring with them many forms and
means of a direct knowledge.
The supramental knowledge or experience by identity car¬
ries in it as a result or as a secondary part of itself a supramental
vision that needs the support of no image, can concretise what
is to the mind abstract and has the character of sight though its
The Supramental Thought and Knowledge
833
object may be the invisible truth of that which has form or the
truth of the formless. This vision can come before there is any
identity, as a sort of previous emanation of light from it, or may
act detached from it as a separate power. The truth or the thing
known is then not altogether or not yet one with myself, but
an object of my knowledge: but still it is an object subjectively
seen in the self or at least, even if it is still farther separated and
object! vised to the knower, by the self, not through any interme¬
diate process, but by a direct inner seizing or a penetrating and
enveloping luminous contact of the spiritual consciousness with
its object. It is this luminous seizing and contact that is the spir¬
itual vision, drsp, — “pasyati”, says the Upanishad continually
of the spiritual knowledge, “he sees”; and of the Self conceiving
the idea of creation, where we should expect “he thought”, it
says instead “he saw”. It is to the spirit what the eyes are to the
physical mind and one has the sense of having passed through
a subtly analogous process. As the physical sight can present
to us the actual body of things of which the thought had only
possessed an indication or mental description and they become
to us at once real and evident, pratyaksa, so the spiritual sight
surpasses the indications or representations of thought and can
make the self and truth of all things present to us and directly
evident, pratyaksa.
The sense can only give us the superficial image of things
and it needs the aid of thought to fill and inform the image;
but the spiritual sight is capable of presenting to us the thing
in itself and all truth about it. The seer does not need the aid
of thought in its process as a means of knowledge, but only as
a means of representation and expression, — thought is to him
a lesser power and used for a secondary purpose. If a further
extension of knowledge is required, he can come at it by new
seeing without the slower thought processes that are the staff of
support of the mental search and its feeling out for truth, — even
as we scrutinise with the eye to find what escaped our first obser¬
vation. This experience and knowledge by spiritual vision is the
second in directness and greatness of the supramental powers.
It is something much more near, profound and comprehensive
834
The Yoga of Self -F erf ection
This experience and knowledge by spiritual vision is the
second in directness and greatness of the supramental powers.
It is something much more near, profound and comprehensive
834
The Yoga of Self -F erf ection
than mental vision, because it derives direct from the knowledge
by identity, and it has this virtue that we can proceed at once
from the vision to the identity, as from the identity to the vision.
Thus when the spiritual vision has seen God, Self or Brahman,
the soul can next enter into and become one with the Self, God
or Brahman.
This can only be done integrally on or above the supramen-
tal level, but at the same time the spiritual vision can take on
mental forms of itself that can help towards this identification
each in its own way. A mental intuitive vision or a spiritualised
mental sight, a psychic vision, an emotional vision of the heart,
a vision in the sense mind are parts of the Yogic experience. If
these seeings are purely mental, then they may but need not be
true, for the mind is capable of both truth and error, both of
a true and of a false representation. But as the mind becomes
intuitivised and supramentalised, these powers are purified and
corrected by the more luminous action of the supermind and
become themselves forms of a supramental and a true seeing.
The supramental vision, it may be noted, brings with it a sup¬
plementary and completing experience that might be called a
spiritual hearing and touch of the truth, — of its essence and
through that of its significance, — that is to say, there is a seizing
of its movement, vibration, rhythm and a seizing of its close
presence and contact and substance. All these powers prepare
us to become one with that which has thus grown near to us
through knowledge.
The supramental thought is a form of the knowledge by
identity and a development, in the idea, of the truth presented to
the supramental vision. The identity and the vision give the truth
in its essence, its body and its parts in a single view: the thought
translates this direct consciousness and immediate power of the
truth into idea-knowledge and will. It adds or need add other¬
wise nothing new, but reproduces, articulates, moves round the
body of the knowledge. Where, however, the identity and the
vision are still incomplete, the supramental thought has a larger
office and reveals, interprets or recalls as it were to the soul’s
memory what they are not yet ready to give. And where these
The Supramental Thought and Knowledge
835
And where these
The Supramental Thought and Knowledge
835
greater states and powers are still veiled, the thought comes
in front and prepares and to a certain extent effects a partial
rending or helps actively in the removal of the veil. Therefore in
the development out of the mental ignorance into the supramen¬
tal knowledge this illumined thought comes to us often though
not always first, to open the way to the vision or else to give
first supports to the growing consciousness of identity and its
greater knowledge. This thought is also an effective means of
communication and expression and helps to an impression or
fixation of the truth whether on one’s own lower mind and
being or on that of others. The supramental thought differs from
the intellectual not only because it is the direct truth idea and
not a representation of truth to the ignorance, — it is the truth
consciousness of the spirit always presenting to itself its own
right forms, the satyam and rtam of the Veda, — but because of
its strong reality, body of light and substance.
The intellectual thought refines and sublimates to a rarefied
abstractness; the supramental thought as it rises in its height
increases to a greater spiritual concreteness. The thought of the
intellect presents itself to us as an abstraction from something
seized by the mind sense and is as if supported in a void and
subtle air of mind by an intangible force of the intelligence. It
has to resort to a use of the mind’s power of image if it wishes to
make itself more concretely felt and seen by the soul sense and
soul vision. The supramental thought on the contrary presents
always the idea as a luminous substance of being, luminous stuff
of consciousness taking significative thought form and it there¬
fore creates no such sense of a gulf between the idea and the real
as we are liable to feel in the mind, but is itself a reality, it is real-
idea and the body of a reality. It has as a result, associated with
it when it acts according to its own nature, a phenomenon of
spiritual light other than the intellectual clarity, a great realising
force and a luminous ecstasy. It is an intensely sensible vibration
of being, consciousness and Ananda.
The supramental thought, as has already been indicated,
has three elevations of its intensity, one of direct thought vision,
another of interpretative vision pointing to and preparing the
836
The Yoga of Self -F erf ection
The supramental thought, as has already been indicated,
has three elevations of its intensity, one of direct thought vision,
another of interpretative vision pointing to and preparing the
836
The Yoga of Self -F erf ection
greater revelatory idea-sight, a third of representative vision
recalling as it were to the spirit’s knowledge the truth that is
called out more directly by the higher powers. In the mind these
things take the form of the three ordinary powers of the intuitive
mentality, — the suggestive and discriminating intuition, the in¬
spiration and the thought that is of the nature of revelation.
Above they correspond to three elevations of the supramental
being and consciousness and, as we ascend, the lower first calls
down into itself and is then taken up into the higher, so that
on each level all the three elevations are reproduced, but always
there predominates in the thought essence the character that
belongs to that level’s proper form of consciousness and spiritual
substance. It is necessary to bear this in mind; for otherwise the
mentality, looking up to the ranges of the supermind as they
reveal themselves, may think it has got the vision of the highest
heights when it is only the highest range of the lower ascent that
is being presented to its experience. At each height, sdnoh sdnum
druhat, the powers of the supermind increase in intensity, range
and completeness.
There is also a speech, a supramental word, in which the
higher knowledge, vision or thought can clothe itself within us
for expression. At first this may come down as a word, a message
or an inspiration that descends to us from above or it may even
seem a voice of the Self or of the Ishwara, vdm, ddesa. After¬
wards it loses that separate character and becomes the normal
form of the thought when it expresses itself in the form of an
inward speech. The thought may express itself without the aid
of any suggestive or developing word and only — but still quite
completely, explicitly and with its full contents — in a luminous
substance of supramental perception. It may aid itself when it is
not so explicit by a suggestive inward speech that attends it to
bring out its whole significance. Or the thought may come not
as silent perception but as speech self-born out of the truth and
complete in its own right and carrying in itself its own vision and
knowledge. Then it is the word revelatory, inspired or intuitive
or of a yet greater kind capable of bearing the infinite intention
or suggestion of the higher supermind and spirit. It may frame
Then it is the word revelatory, inspired or intuitive
or of a yet greater kind capable of bearing the infinite intention
or suggestion of the higher supermind and spirit. It may frame
The Supramental Thought and Knowledge
837
itself in the language now employed to express the ideas and
perceptions and impulses of the intellect and the sense mind,
but it uses it in a different way and with an intense bringing
out of the intuitive or revelatory significances of which speech is
capable. The supramental word manifests inwardly with a light,
a power, a rhythm of thought and a rhythm of inner sound
that make it the natural and living body of the supramental
thought and vision and it pours into the language, even though
the same as that of mental speech, another than the limited
intellectual, emotional or sensational significance. It is formed
and heard in the intuitive mind or supermind and need not at
first except in certain highly gifted souls come out easily into
speech and writing, but that too can be freely done when the
physical consciousness and its organs have been made ready, and
this is a part of the needed fullness and power of the integral
perfection.
The range of knowledge covered by the supramental
thought, experience and vision will be commensurate with
all that is open to the human consciousness, not only on the
earthly but on all planes. It will however act increasingly in
an inverse sense to that of the mental thinking and experience.
The centre of mental thinking is the ego, the person of the
individual thinker. The supramental man on the contrary will
think more with the universal mind or even may rise above it,
and his individuality will rather be a vessel of radiation and
communication to which the universal thought and knowledge
of the Spirit will converge than a centre. The mental man thinks
and acts in a radius determined by the smallness or largeness of
his mentality and of its experience. The range of the supramental
man will be all the earth and all that lies behind it on other planes
of existence. And finally the mental man thinks and sees on the
level of the present life, though it may be with an upward
aspiration, and his view is obstructed on every side. His main
basis of knowledge and action is the present with a glimpse into
the past and ill-grasped influence from its pressure and a blind
look towards the future. He bases himself on the actualities of
the earthly existence, first on the facts of the outward world, —
838
The Yoga of Self -F erf ection
He bases himself on the actualities of
the earthly existence, first on the facts of the outward world, —
838
The Yoga of Self -F erf ection
to which he is ordinarily in the habit of relating nine tenths if
not the whole of his inner thinking and experience, — then on
the changing actualities of the more superficial part of his inner
being. As he increases in mind, he goes more freely beyond these
to potentialities which arise out of them and pass beyond them;
his mind deals with a larger field of possibilities: but these for
the most part get to him a full reality only in proportion as they
are related to the actual and can be made actual here, now or
hereafter. The essence of things he tends to see, if at all, only
as a result of his actualities, in a relation to and dependence on
them, and therefore he sees them constantly in a false light or
in a limited measure. In all these respects the supramental man
must proceed from the opposite principle of truth vision.
The supramental being sees things from above in large
spaces and at the highest from the spaces of the infinite. His view
is not limited to the standpoint of the present but can see in the
continuities of time or from above time in the indivisibilities of
the Spirit. He sees truth in its proper order first in the essence,
secondly in the potentialities that derive from it and only last in
the actualities. The essential truths are to his sight self-existent,
self-seen, not dependent for their proof on this or that actuality;
the potential truths are truths of the power of being in itself
and in things, truths of the infinity of force and real apart from
their past or present realisation in this or that actuality or the
habitual surface forms that we take for the whole of Nature;
the actualities are only a selection from the potential truths he
sees, dependent on them, limited and mutable. The tyranny of
the present, of the actual, of the immediate range of facts, of
the immediate urge and demand of action has no power over
his thought and his will and he is therefore able to have a larger
will-power founded on a larger knowledge. He sees things not
as one on the levels surrounded by the jungle of present facts
and phenomena but from above, not from outside and judged
by their surfaces, but from within and viewed from the truth
of their centre; therefore he is nearer the divine omniscience.
He wills and acts from a dominating height and with a longer
movement in time and a larger range of potencies, therefore
He wills and acts from a dominating height and with a longer
movement in time and a larger range of potencies, therefore
The Supramental Thought and Knowledge
839
he is nearer to the divine omnipotence. His being is not shut
into the succession of the moments, but has the full power of
the past and ranges seeingly through the future: not shut in the
limiting ego and personal mind, but lives in the freedom of the
universal, in God and in all beings and all things; not in the dull
density of the physical mind, but in the light of the self and the
infinity of the spirit. He sees soul and mind only as a power and
a movement and matter only as a resultant form of the spirit.
All his thought will be of a kind that proceeds from knowledge.
He perceives and enacts the things of the phenomenal life in the
light of the reality of the spiritual being and the power of the
dynamic spiritual essence.
At first, at the beginning of the conversion into this greater
status, the thought will continue to move for a shorter or a longer
time to a greater or a less extent on the lines of the mind but
with a greater light and increasing flights and spaces and move¬
ments of freedom and transcendence. Afterwards the freedom
and transcendence will begin to predominate; the inversion of
the thought view and the conversion of the thought method will
take place in different movements of the thought mind one after
the other, subject to whatever difficulties and relapses, until it
has gained on the whole and effected a complete transformation.
Ordinarily the supramental knowledge will be organised first
and with the most ease in the processes of pure thought and
knowledge, jhdna, because here the human mind has already
the upward tendency and is the most free. Next and with less
ease it will be organised in the processes of applied thought and
knowledge because there the mind of man is at once most active
and most bound and wedded to its inferior methods. The last
and most difficult conquest, because this is now to his mind a
field of conjecture or a blank, will be the knowledge of the three
times, trikaladrsti. In all these there will be the same character
of a spirit seeing and willing directly above and around and not
only in the body it possesses and there will be the same action of
the supramental knowledge by identity, the supramental vision,
the supramental thought and supramental word, separately or
in a united movement.
840
The Yoga of Self -F erf ection
840
The Yoga of Self -F erf ection
This then will be the general character of the supramental
thought and knowledge and these its main powers and action.
It remains to consider its particular instrumentation, the change
that the supermind will make in the different elements of the
present human mentality and the special activities that give to
the thought its constituents, motives and data.
Chapter XXIII
The Supramental Instruments —
Thought-Process
The supermind, the divine gnosis, is not something
entirely alien to our present consciousness: it is a superior
instrumentation of the spirit and all the operations of our
normal consciousness are limited and inferior derivations from
the supramental, because these are tentatives and constructions,
that the true and perfect, the spontaneous and harmonious na¬
ture and action of the spirit. Accordingly when we rise from
mind to supermind, the new power of consciousness does not
reject, but uplifts, enlarges and transfigures the operations of
our soul and mind and life. It exalts and gives to them an ever
greater reality of their power and performance. It does not limit
itself either to the transformation of the superficial powers and
action of the mind and psychic parts and the life, but it man¬
ifests and transforms also those rarer powers and that larger
force and knowledge proper to our subliminal self that appear
now to us as things occult, curiously psychic, abnormal. These
things become in the supramental nature not at all abnormal
but perfectly natural and normal, not separately psychic but
spiritual, not occult and strange, but a direct, simple, inherent
and spontaneous action. The spirit is not limited like the waking
material consciousness, and the supermind when it takes pos¬
session of the waking consciousness, dematerialises it, delivers
it from its limits, converts the material and the psychic into the
nature of the spiritual being.
The mental activity that can be most readily organised is, as
has been already indicated, that of pure ideative knowledge. This
is transformed on the higher level to the true jndna, supramen¬
tal thought, supramental vision, the supramental knowledge by
identity. The essential action of this supramental knowledge has
842
The Yoga of Self -F erf ection
This
is transformed on the higher level to the true jndna, supramen¬
tal thought, supramental vision, the supramental knowledge by
identity. The essential action of this supramental knowledge has
842
The Yoga of Self -F erf ection
been described in the preceding chapter. It is necessary however
to see also how this knowledge works in outward application
and how it deals with the data of existence. It differs from the
action of the mind first in this respect that it works naturally
with those operations that are to the mind the highest and the
most difficult, acting in them or on them from above downward
and not with the hampered straining upward of the mind or
with its restriction to its own and the inferior levels. The higher
operations are not dependent on the lower assistance, but rather
the lower operations depend on the higher not only for their
guidance but for their existence. The lower mental operations
are therefore not only changed in character by the transforma¬
tion, but are made entirely subordinate. And the higher mental
operations too change their character, because, supramentalised,
they begin to derive their light directly from the highest, the
self-knowledge or infinite knowledge.
The normal thought-action of the mind may for this purpose
be viewed as constituted of a triple motion. First and lowest and
most necessary to the mental being in the body is the habit¬
ual thought mind that founds its ideas upon the data given by
the senses and by the surface experiences of the nervous and
emotional being and on the customary notions formed by the
education and the outward life and environment. This habitual
mind has two movements, one a kind of constant undercurrent
of mechanically recurrent thought always repeating itself in the
same round of physical, vital, emotional, practical and summar¬
ily intellectual notion and experience, the other more actively
working upon all new experience that the mind is obliged to
admit and reducing it to formulas of habitual thinking. The
mentality of the average man is limited by this habitual mind
and moves very imperfectly outside its circle.
A second grade of the thinking activity is the pragmatic idea
mind that lifts itself above life and acts creatively as a mediator
between the idea and the life-power, between truth of life and
truth of the idea not yet manifested in life. It draws material from
life and builds out of it and upon it creative ideas that become
dynamic for farther life development: on the other side it receives
It draws material from
life and builds out of it and upon it creative ideas that become
dynamic for farther life development: on the other side it receives
The Supramental Instruments — Thought-Process 843
new thought and mental experience from the mental plane or
more fundamentally from the idea power of the Infinite and
immediately turns it into mental idea force and a power for ac¬
tual being and living. The whole turn of this pragmatic idea mind
is towards action and experience, inward as well as outward,
the inward casting itself outward for the sake of a completer
satisfaction of reality, the outward taken into the inward and
returning upon it assimilated and changed for fresh formations.
The thought is only or mainly interesting to the soul on this men¬
tal level as a means for a large range of action and experience.
A third gradation of thinking opens in us the pure ideative
mind which lives disinterestedly in truth of the idea apart from
any necessary dependence on its value for action and experience.
It views the data of the senses and the superficial inner experi¬
ence, but only to find the idea, the truth to which they bear
witness and to reduce them into terms of knowledge. It observes
the creative action of mind in life in the same way and for the
same purpose. Its preoccupation is with knowledge, its whole
object is to have the delight of ideation, the search for truth, the
effort to know itself and the world and all that may lie behind
its own action and the world action. This ideative mind is the
highest reach of the intellect acting for itself, characteristically,
in its own power and for its own purpose.
It is difficult for the human mind to combine rightly and har¬
monise these three movements of the intelligence. The ordinary
man lives mainly in the habitual, has a comparatively feeble
action of the creative and pragmatic and experiences a great
difficulty in using at all or entering into the movement of the
pure ideative mentality. The creative pragmatic mind is com¬
monly too much occupied with its own motion to move freely
and disinterestedly in the atmosphere of pure ideative order
and on the other hand has often an insufficient grasp on the
actualities imposed by the habitual mentality and the obstacles
it imposes as also on other movements of pragmatic thought
and action than that which it is itself interested in building. The
pure ideative mentality tends to construct abstract and arbitrary
systems of truth, intellectual sections and ideative edifices, and
844
The
pure ideative mentality tends to construct abstract and arbitrary
systems of truth, intellectual sections and ideative edifices, and
844
The Yoga of Self -F erf ection
either misses the pragmatic movement necessary to life and lives
only or mainly in ideas, or cannot act with sufficient power and
directness in the life field and is in danger of being divorced from
or weak in the world of the practical and habitual mentality. An
accommodation of some kind is made, but the tyranny of the
predominant tendency interferes with the wholeness and unity
of the thinking being. Mind fails to be assured master even of its
own totality, because the secret of that totality lies beyond it in
the free unity of the self, free and therefore capable of an infinite
multiplicity and diversity, and in the supramental power that
can alone bring out in a natural perfection the organic multiple
movement of the self’s unity.
The supermind in its completeness reverses the whole order
of the mind’s thinking. It lives not in the phenomenal, but in
the essential, in the self, and sees all as being of the self and
its power and form and movement, and all the thought and
the process of the thought in the supermind must also be of
that character. All its fundamental ideation is a rendering of the
spiritual knowledge that acts by identity with all being and of
the supramental vision. It moves therefore primarily among the
eternal, the essential and the universal truths of self and being
and consciousness and infinite power and delight of being (not
excluding all that seems to our present consciousness non-being),
and all its particular thinking originates from and depends upon
the power of these eternal verities; but in the second place it is at
home too with infinite aspects and applications, sequences and
harmonies of the truths of being of the Eternal. It lives therefore
at its heights in all that which the action of the pure ideative
mind is an effort to reach and discover, and even on its lower
ranges these things are to its luminous receptivity present, near
or easily grasped and available.
But while the highest truths or the pure ideas are to the
ideative mind abstractions, because mind lives partly in the phe¬
nomenal and partly in intellectual constructions and has to use
the method of abstraction to arrive at the higher realities, the
supermind lives in the spirit and therefore in the very substance
of what these ideas and truths represent or rather fundamentally
The Supramental Instruments — Thought-Process 845
are and truly realises them, not only thinks but in the act of
thinking feels and identifies itself with their substance, and to it
they are among the most substantial things that can be. Truths
of consciousness and of essential being are to the supermind the
very stuff of reality, more intimately and, as one might almost
say, densely real than outward movement and form of being,
although these too are to it movement and form of the reality
and not, as they are to a certain action of the spiritualised mind,
an illusion. The idea too is to it real-idea, stuff of the reality of
conscious being, full of power for the substantial rendering of
the truth and therefore for creation.
And again, while the pure ideative mind tends to build up
arbitrary systems which are mental and partial constructions
of the truth, the supermind is not bound by any representa¬
tion or system, though it is perfectly able to represent and to
arrange and construct in the living substance of the truth for the
pragmatic purposes of the Infinite. The mind when it gets free
from its exclusivenesses, systematising, attachment to its own
constructions, is at a loss in the infiniteness of the infinite, feels
it as a chaos, even if a luminous chaos, is unable any longer
to formulate and therefore to think and act decisively because
all, even the most diverse or contradictory things, point at some
truth in this infinity and yet nothing it can think is entirely
true and all its formulations break down under the test of new
suggestions from the infinite. It begins to look on the world as
a phantasmagory and thought as a chaos of scintillations out
of the luminous indefinite. The mind assailed by the vastness
and freedom of the supramental loses itself and finds no firm
footing in the vastness. The supermind on the contrary can in its
freedom construct harmonies of its thought and expression of
being on the firm ground of reality while still holding its infinite
liberty and rejoicing in its self of infinite vastness. All that it
thinks, as all that it is and does and lives, belongs to the truth,
the right, the vast, satyam, rtam, brhat.
The result of this wholeness is that there is no division
or incompatibility between the free essential ideation of the
supermind corresponding to the mind’s pure ideation, free.
846
The Yoga of Self -F erf ection
The result of this wholeness is that there is no division
or incompatibility between the free essential ideation of the
supermind corresponding to the mind’s pure ideation, free.
846
The Yoga of Self -F erf ection
disinterested, illimitable, and its creative, pragmatic ideation
purposeful and determinative. The infinity of being results natu¬
rally in a freedom of the harmonies of becoming. The supermind
perceives always action as a manifestation and expression of the
Self and creation as a revelation of the Infinite. All its creative
and pragmatic thought is an instrument of the self’s becoming, a
power of illumination for that purpose, an intermediary between
the eternal identity and infinite novelty and variety of illimitable
Being and its self-expression in the worlds and life. It is this
that the supermind constantly sees and embodies and while its
ideative vision and thought interpret to it the illimitable unity
and variety of the Infinite, which it is by a perpetual identity
and in which it lives in all its power of being and becoming,
there is constantly too a special creative thought, associated
with an action of the infinite will, Tapas, power of being, which
determines what it shall present, manifest or create out of the
infinite in the course of Time, what it shall make — here and now
or in any range of Time or world — of the perpetual becoming
of the self in the universe.
The supermind is not limited by this pragmatic movement
and does not take the partial motion or the entire stream of what
it so becomes and creates in its thought and life for the whole
truth of its self or of the Infinite. It does not live only in what it
is and thinks and does selectively in the present or on one plane
only of being; it does not feed its existence only on the present
or the continual succession of moments to whose beats we give
that name. It does not see itself only as a movement of Time or
of the consciousness in time or as a creature of the perpetual
becoming. It is aware of a timeless being beyond manifestation
and of which all is a manifestation, it is aware of what is eternal
even in Time, it is aware of many planes of existence; it is aware
of past truth of manifestation and of much truth of being yet
to be manifested in the future, but already existing in the self¬
view of the Eternal. It does not mistake the pragmatic reality
which is the truth of action and mutation for the sole truth, but
sees it as a constant realisation of that which is eternally real.
It knows that creation whether on the plane of matter or of life
The Supramental Instruments — Thought-Process 847
or of mind or of supermind is and can be only a self-determined
presentation of eternal truth, a revelation of the Eternal, and it
is intimately aware of the pre-existence of the truth of all things
in the Eternal. This seeing conditions all its pragmatic thought
and its resultant action. The maker in it is a selective power of
the seer and thinker, the self-builder a power of the self-seer, the
self-expressing soul a power of the infinite spirit. It creates freely,
and all the more surely and decisively for that freedom, out of
the infinite self and spirit.
It creates freely,
and all the more surely and decisively for that freedom, out of
the infinite self and spirit.
It is therefore not prisoned in its special becoming or shut
up in its round or its course of action. It is open, in a way and
a degree to which the mind cannot attain, to the truth of other
harmonies of creative becoming even while in its own it puts
forth a decisive will and thought and action. When it is engaged
in action that is of the nature of a struggle, the replacing of past
or other thought and form and becoming by that which it is
appointed to manifest, it knows the truth of what it displaces
and fulfils even in displacing as well as the truth of what it sub¬
stitutes. It is not bound by its manifesting, selecting, pragmatic
conscious action, but it has at the same time all the joy of a
specially creative thought and selective precision of action, the
Ananda of the truth of the forms and movements equally of its
own and of others’ becoming. All its thought and will of life and
action and creation, rich, manifold, focussing the truth of many
planes, is liberated and illumined with the illimitable truth of
the Eternal.
This creative or pragmatic movement of the supramental
thought and consciousness brings with it an action which cor¬
responds to that of the habitual or mechanical mentality but
is yet of a very different character. The thing that is created is
the self-determination of a harmony and all harmony proceeds
upon seen or given lines and carries with it a constant pulsation
and rhythmic recurrence. The supramental thought, organising
the harmony of manifested existence of the supramental being,
founds it on eternal principles, casts it upon the right lines of the
truth that is to be manifested, keeps sounding as characteristic
notes the recurrence of the constant elements in the experience
848
The Yoga of Self -F erf ection
and the action which are necessary to constitute the harmony.
There is an order of the thought, a cycle of the will, a stability
in the motion. At the same time its freedom prevents it from
being shut up by the recurrence into a groove of habitual action
turning always mechanically round a limited stock of thinking.
It does not like the habitual mind refer and assimilate all new
thought and experience to a fixed customary mould of thinking,
taking that for its basis. Its basis, that to which all is referred, is
above, upari budhne, in the largeness of the self, in the supreme
foundation of the supramental truth, budhne rtasya. Its order of
thought, its cycle of will, its stable movement of action does not
crystallise into a mechanism or convention, but is always alive
with the spirit, does not live by exclusiveness or hostility to other
coexistent or possible order and cycle, but absorbs sustenance
from all that it contacts and assimilates it to its own principle.
The spiritual assimilation is practicable because all is referred
to the largeness of the self and its free vision above. The order
of the supramental thought and will is constantly receiving new
light and power from above and has no difficulty in accepting it
into its movement; it is, as is proper to an order of the Infinite,
even in its stability of motion indescribably supple and plastic,
capable of perceiving and rendering the relation of all things to
each other in the One, capable of expressing always more and
more of the Infinite, at its fullest of expressing in its own way
all that is actually expressible of the Infinite.
Thus there is no discord, disparity or difficulty of adjustment
in the complex motion of the supramental jhdna, but a simplicity
in the complexity, an assured ease in a many-sided abundance
that comes from the spontaneous sureness and totality of the
self-knowledge of the spirit. Obstacle, inner struggle, dispar¬
ity, difficulty, discord of parts and movements continues in the
transformation of mind to supermind only so long as the action,
influence or pressure of the mind insisting on its own methods
of construction continues or its process of building knowledge
or thought and will of action on the foundation of a primal
ignorance resists the opposite process of supermind organising
all as a luminous manifestation out of the self and its inherent
The Supramental Instruments — Thought-Process 849
and eternal self-knowledge. It is thus that the supermind acting
as a representative, interpretative, revealingly imperative power
of the spirit’s knowledge by identity, turning the light of the
infinite consciousness freely and illimitably into substance and
form of real-idea, creating out of power of conscious being and
power of real-idea, stabilising a movement which obeys its own
law but is still a supple and plastic movement of the infinite, uses
its thought and knowledge and a will identical in substance and
light with the knowledge to organise in each supramental being
his own right manifestation of the one self and spirit.
The action of the supramental jhdna so constituted evidently
surpasses the action of the mental reason and we have to see
what replaces the reason in the supramental transformation.
The thinking mind of man finds its most clear and characteristic
satisfaction and its most precise and effective principle of organ¬
isation in the reasoning and logical intelligence. It is true that
man is not and cannot be wholly governed either in his thought
or his action by the reason alone. His mentality is inextricably
subjected to a joint, mixed and intricate action of the reasoning
intelligence with two other powers, an intuition, actually only
half luminous in the human mentality, operating behind the
more visible action of the reason or veiled and altered in the
action of the normal intelligence, and the life-mind of sensation,
instinct, impulse, which is in its own nature a sort of obscure in¬
volved intuition and which supplies the intelligence from below
with its first materials and data. And each of these other powers
is in its own kind an intimate action of the spirit operating in
mind and life and has a more direct and spontaneous character
and immediate power for perception and action than the rea¬
soning intelligence. But yet neither of these powers is capable of
organising for man his mental existence.
His life-mind — its instincts, its impulses, — is not and can¬
not be self-sufficient and predominant as it is in the lower cre¬
ation. It has been seized upon by the intelligence and profoundly
altered by it even where the development of the intelligence is
imperfect and itself most insistent in its prominence. It has lost
most of its intuitive character, is indeed now infinitely richer as
850
The Yoga of Self -F erf ection
It has lost
most of its intuitive character, is indeed now infinitely richer as
850
The Yoga of Self -F erf ection
a supplier of materials and data, but no longer quite itself or at
ease in its action because half rationalised, dependent at least on
some infused element however vague of reasoning or intelligent
activity and incapable of acting to good purpose without the
aid of the intelligence. Its roots and place of perfection are in
the subconscient from which it emerges and man’s business is to
increase in the sense of a more and more conscient knowledge
and action. Man reverting to a governance of his being by the
life mind would become either irrational and erratic or dull and
imbecile and would lose the essential character of manhood.
The intuition on the other hand has its roots and its place of
perfection in the supramental which is now to us the supercon-
scient, and in mind it has no pure and no organised action, but is
immediately mixed with the action of the reasoning intelligence,
is not quite itself, but limited, fragmentary, diluted and impure,
and depends for the ordered use and organisation of its sugges¬
tions on the aid of the logical reason. The human mind is never
quite sure of its intuitions until they have been viewed and con¬
firmed by the judgment of the rational intelligence: it is there that
it feels most well founded and secure. Man surmounting reason
to organise his thought and life by the intuitive mind would be
already surpassing his characteristic humanity and on the way
to the development of supermanhood. This can only be done
above: for to attempt it below is only to achieve another kind
of imperfection: there the mental reason is a necessary factor.
The reasoning intelligence is an intermediate agent between
the life mind and the yet undeveloped supramental intuition. Its
business is that of an intermediary, on the one side to enlighten
the life mind, to make it conscient and govern and regulate as
much as may be its action until Nature is ready to evolve the
supramental energy which will take hold of life and illumine
and perfect all its movements by converting its obscurely in¬
tuitive motions of desire, emotion, sensation and action into a
spiritually and luminously spontaneous life manifestation of the
self and spirit. On the other higher side its mission is to take the
rays of light which come from above and translate them into
terms of intelligent mentality and to accept, examine, develop.
The Supramental Instruments — Thought-Process 851
On the other higher side its mission is to take the
rays of light which come from above and translate them into
terms of intelligent mentality and to accept, examine, develop.
The Supramental Instruments — Thought-Process 851
intellectually utilise the intuitions that escape the barrier and
descend into mind from the superconscience. It does this until
man, becoming more and more intelligently conscient of himself
and his environment and his being, becomes also aware that
he cannot really know these things by his reason, but can only
make a mental representation of them to his intelligence.
The reason, however, tends in the intellectual man to ignore
the limitations of its power and function and attempts to be
not an instrument and agent but a substitute for the self and
spirit. Made confident by success and predominance, by the
comparative greatness of its own light, it regards itself as a thing
primary and absolute, assures itself of its own entire truth and
sufficiency and endeavours to become the absolute ruler of mind
and life. This it cannot do successfully, because it depends on the
lower life intuition and on the covert supermind and its intuitive
messages for its own real substance and existence. It can only
appear to itself to succeed because it reduces all its experience
to rational formulas and blinds itself to half the real nature of
the thought and action that is behind it and to the infinite deal
that breaks out of its formulas. The excess of the reason only
makes life artificial and rationally mechanical, deprives it of its
spontaneity and vitality and prevents the freedom and expansion
of the spirit. The limited and limiting mental reason must make
itself plastic and flexible, open itself to its source, receive the light
from above, exceed itself and pass by an euthanasia of transfor¬
mation into the body of the supramental reason. Meanwhile
it is given power and leading for an organisation of thought
and action on the characteristically human scale intermediate
between the subconscient power of the spirit organising the
life of the animal and the superconscient power of the spirit
which becoming conscient can organise the existence and life of
a spiritual supermanhood.
The characteristic power of the reason in its fullness is a
logical movement assuring itself first of all available materials
and data by observation and arrangement, then acting upon
them for a resultant knowledge gained, assured and enlarged
by a first use of the reflective powers, and lastly assuring itself
852
The Yoga of Self -F erf ection
of the correctness of its results by a more careful and formal
action, more vigilant, deliberate, severely logical which tests,
rejects or confirms them according to certain secure standards
and processes developed by reflection and experience. The first
business of the logical reason is therefore a right, careful and
complete observation of its available material and data. The
first and easiest field of data open to our knowledge is the world
of Nature, of the physical objects made external to it by the
separative action of mind, things not ourself and therefore only
indirectly knowable by an interpreting of our sense perceptions,
by observation, accumulated experience, inference and reflective
thinking. Another field is our own internal being and its move¬
ments which one knows naturally by an internally acting mental
sense, by intuitive perception and constant experience and by
reflective thought on the evidences of our nature. The reason
with regard even to these inner movements acts best and knows
them most correctly by detaching itself and regarding them quite
impersonally and objectively, a movement which in the Yoga of
knowledge ends in viewing our own active being too as not
self, a mechanism of Nature like the rest of the world-existence.
The knowledge of other thinking and conscious beings stands
between these two fields, but is gained, too, indirectly by obser¬
vation, by experience, by various means of communication and,
acting on these, by reflection and inference largely founded on
analogy from our knowledge of our own nature. Another field
of data which the reason has to observe is its own action and the
action of the whole human intelligence, for without that study it
cannot be assured of the correctness of its knowledge or of right
method and process. Finally, there are other fields of knowledge
for which the data are not so easily available and which need
the development of abnormal faculties, — the discovery of things
and ranges of existence behind the appearances of the physical
world and the discovery of the secret self or principle of being of
man and of Nature. The first the logical reason can attempt to
deal with, accepting subject to its scrutiny whatever data become
available, in the same way as it deals with the physical world,
but ordinarily it is little disposed to deal with them, finding it
The Supramental Instruments — Thought-Process 853
more easy to question and deny, and its action here is seldom
assured or effective. The second it usually attempts to discover
by a constructive metaphysical logic founded on its analytic and
synthetic observation of the phenomena of life, mind and matter.
The operation of the logical reason is the same in all these
fields of its data. At first the intelligence amasses a store of
observations, associations, percepts, recepts, concepts, makes a
more or less obvious arrangement and classification of relations
and of things according to their likenesses and differences, and
works upon them by an accumulating store and a constant addi¬
tion of ideas, memories, imaginations, judgments; these make up
primarily the nature of activity of our knowledge. There is a kind
of natural enlargement of this intelligent activity of the mind
progressing by its own momentum, an evolution aided more
and more by a deliberate culture, the increase of faculties gained
by the culture becoming in its turn a part of the nature as they
settle into a more spontaneous action, — the result a progression
not of the character and essential power of the intelligence, but
of its degree of power, flexibility, variety of capacity, fineness.
There is a correction of errors, an accumulating of assured ideas
and judgments, a reception or formation of fresh knowledge. At
the same time a necessity arises for a more precise and assured
action of the intelligence which will get rid of the superficiality
of this ordinary method of the intelligence, test every step, scru¬
tinise severely every conclusion and reduce the mind’s action to
a well-founded system and order.
This movement develops the complete logical mind and
raises to its acme the acuteness and power of the intelligence. The
rougher and more superficial observation is replaced or supple¬
mented by a scrutinising analysis of all the process, properties,
constituents, energies making up or related to the object and a
synthetic construction of it as a whole which is added to or in
great part substituted for the mind’s natural conception of it.
The object is more precisely distinguished from all others and
at the same time there is a completer discovery of its relations
with others. There is a fixing of sameness or likeness and kinship
and also of divergences and differences resulting on one side in
854
The Yoga of Self -F erf ection
There is a fixing of sameness or likeness and kinship
and also of divergences and differences resulting on one side in
854
The Yoga of Self -F erf ection
the perception of the fundamental unity of being and Nature
and the similarity and continuity of their processes, on the other
in a clear precision and classification of different energies and
kinds of beings and objects. The amassing and ordering of the
materials and data of knowledge are carried to perfection as far
as is possible to the logical intelligence.
Memory is the indispensable aid of the mind to preserve
its past observations, the memory of the individual but also of
the race, whether in the artificial form of accumulated records
or the general race memory preserving its gains with a sort of
constant repetition and renewal and, an element not sufficiently
appreciated, a latent memory that can under the pressure of
various kinds of stimulation repeat under new conditions past
movements of knowledge for judgment by the increased infor¬
mation and intelligence. The developed logical mind puts into
order the action and resources of the human memory and trains
it to make the utmost use of its materials. The human judgment
naturally works on these materials in two ways, by a more or
less rapid and summary combination of observation, inference,
creative or critical conclusion, insight, immediate idea — this is
largely an attempt of the mind to work in a spontaneous manner
with the directness that can only be securely achieved by the
higher faculty of the intuition, for in the mind it produces much
false confidence and unreliable certitude, — and a slower but
in the end intellectually surer seeking, considering and testing
judgment that develops into the careful logical action.
The memory and judgment are both aided by the imagina¬
tion which, as a function of knowledge, suggests possibilities not
actually presented or justified by the other powers and opens the
doors to fresh vistas. The developed logical intelligence uses the
imagination for suggesting new discovery and hypothesis, but is
careful to test its suggestions fully by observation and a sceptical
or scrupulous judgment. It insists too on testing, as far as may
be, all the action of the judgment itself, rejects hasty inference
in favour of an ordered system of deduction and induction and
makes sure of all its steps and of the justice, continuity, compati¬
bility, cohesion of its conclusions. A too formalised logical mind
The Supramental Instruments — Thought-Process 855
A too formalised logical mind
The Supramental Instruments — Thought-Process 855
discourages, but a free use of the whole action of the logical
intelligence may rather heighten a certain action of immediate
insight, the mind’s nearest approach to the higher intuition, but
it does not place on it an unqualified reliance. The endeavour
of the logical reason is always by a detached, disinterested and
carefully founded method to get rid of error, of prejudgment, of
the mind’s false confidence and arrive at reliable certitudes.
And if this elaborated method of the mind were really suf¬
ficient for truth, there would be no need of any higher step
in the evolution of knowledge. In fact, it increases the mind’s
hold on itself and on the world around it and serves great and
undeniable utilities: but it can never be sure whether its data
supply it with the frame of a real knowledge or only a frame
useful and necessary for the human mind and will in its own
present form of action. It is more and more perceived that the
knowledge of phenomena increases, but the knowledge of reality
escapes this laborious process. A time must come, is already
coming when the mind perceives the necessity of calling to its
aid and developing fully the intuition and all the great range
of powers that lie concealed behind our vague use of the word
and uncertain perception of its significance. In the end it must
discover that these powers can not only aid and complete but
even replace its own proper action. That will be the beginning
of the discovery of the supramental energy of the spirit.
The supermind, as we have seen, lifts up the action of the
mental consciousness towards and into the intuition, creates an
intermediate intuitive mentality insufficient in itself but greater
in power than the logical intelligence, and then lifts up and
transforms that too into the true supramental action. The first
well-organised action of the supermind in the ascending order
is the supramental reason, not a higher logical intellect, but
a directly luminous organisation of intimately subjective and
intimately objective knowledge, the higher buddhi, the logical
or rather the logos Vijnana. The supramental reason does all
the work of the reasoning intelligence and does much more, but
with a greater power and in a different fashion. It is then itself
taken up into a higher range of the power of knowledge and in
856
The Yoga of Self -F erf ection
that too nothing is lost, but all farther heightened, enlarged in
scope, transformed in power of action.
It is then itself
taken up into a higher range of the power of knowledge and in
856
The Yoga of Self -F erf ection
that too nothing is lost, but all farther heightened, enlarged in
scope, transformed in power of action.
The ordinary language of the intellect is not sufficient to
describe this action, for the same words have to be used, indi¬
cating a certain correspondence, but actually to connote inad¬
equately a different thing. Thus the supermind uses a certain
sense action, employing but not limited by the physical organs,
a thing which is in its nature a form consciousness and a contact
consciousness, but the mental idea and experience of sense can
give no conception of the essential and characteristic action of
this supramentalised sense consciousness. Thought too in the
supramental action is a different thing from the thought of the
mental intelligence. The supramental thinking is felt at its basis
as a conscious contact or union or identity of the substance
of being of the knower with the substance of being of the thing
known and its figure of thought as the power of awareness of the
self revealing through the meeting or the oneness, because car¬
rying in itself, a certain knowledge form of the object’s content,
action, significance. Therefore observation, memory, judgment
too mean each a different thing in the supermind from what it
is in the process of the mental intelligence.
The supramental reason observes all that the intelligence
observes — and much more; it makes, that is to say, the thing
to be known the field of a perceptual action, in a certain way
objective, that causes to emerge its nature, character, quality,
action. But this is not that artificial objectivity by which the
reason in its observation tries to extrude the element of personal
or subjective error. The supermind sees everything in the self
and its observation must therefore be subjectively objective and
much nearer to, though not the same as the observation of our
own internal movements regarded as an object of knowledge. It
is not in the separatively personal self or by its power that it sees
and therefore it has not to be on guard against the element of
personal error: that interferes only while a mental substratum
or environing atmosphere yet remains and can still throw in its
influence or while the supermind is still acting by descent into
the mind to change it. And the supramental method with error
The Supramental Instruments — Thought-Process 857
And the supramental method with error
The Supramental Instruments — Thought-Process 857
is to eliminate it, not by any other device, but by an increasing
spontaneity of the supramental discrimination and a constant
heightening of its own energy. The consciousness of supermind
is a cosmic consciousness and it is in this self of universal con¬
sciousness, in which the individual knower lives and with which
he is more or less closely united, that it holds before him the
object of knowledge.
The knower is in his observation a witness and this relation
would seem to imply an otherness and difference, but the point
is that it is not an entirely separative difference and does not
bring an excluding idea of the thing observed as completely not
self, as in the mental seeing of an external object. There is always
a basic feeling of oneness with the thing known, for without this
oneness there can be no supramental knowledge. The knower
carrying the object in his universalised self of consciousness as a
thing held before his station of witness vision includes it in his
own wider being. The supramental observation is of things with
which we are one in the being and consciousness and are capable
of knowing them even as we know ourselves by the force of that
oneness: the act of observation is a movement towards bringing
out the latent knowledge.
There is, then, first a fundamental unity of consciousness
that is greater or less in its power, more or less completely and
immediately revelatory of its contents of knowledge according
to our progress and elevation and intensity of living, feeling
and seeing in the supramental ranges. There is set up between
the knower and the object of knowledge, as a result of this
fundamental unity, a stream or bridge of conscious connection
— one is obliged to use images, however inadequate — and as
a consequence a contact or active union enabling one to see,
feel, sense supramentally what is to be known in the object or
about it. Sometimes this stream or bridge of connection is not
sensibly felt at the moment, only the results of the contact are
noted, but it is always really there and an after memory can
always make us aware that it was really all the time present: as
we grow in supramentality, it becomes an abiding factor. The
necessity of this stream or this bridge of connection ceases when
858
The Yoga of Self -F erf ection
The
necessity of this stream or this bridge of connection ceases when
858
The Yoga of Self -F erf ection
the fundamental oneness becomes a complete active oneness.
This process is the basis of what Patanjali calls samyama, a
concentration, directing or dwelling of the consciousness, by
which, he says, one can become aware of all that is in the object.
But the necessity of concentration becomes slight or nil when the
active oneness grows; the luminous consciousness of the object
and its contents becomes more spontaneous, normal, facile.
There are three possible movements of this kind of supra-
mental observation. First, the knower may project himself in
consciousness on the object, feel his cognition in contact or
enveloping or penetrating it and there, as it were in the object
itself, become aware of what he has to know. Or he may by the
contact become aware of that which is in it or belongs to it,
as for example the thought or feeling of another, coming from
it and entering into himself where he stands in his station of
the witness. Or he may simply know in himself by a sort of
supramental cognition in his own witness station without any
such projection or entrance. The starting-point and apparent
basis of the observation may be the presence of the object to the
physical or other senses, but to the supermind this is not indis¬
pensable. It may be instead an inner image or simply the idea of
the object. The simple will to know may bring to the supramental
consciousness the needed knowledge — or, it may be, the will to
be known or communicate itself of the object of knowledge.
The elaborate process of analytical observation and synthet¬
ical construction adopted by the logical intelligence is not the
method of the supermind and yet there is a corresponding action.
The supermind distinguishes by a direct seeing and without any
mental process of taking to pieces the particularities of the thing,
form, energy, action, quality, mind, soul that it has in view, and
it sees too with an equal directness and without any process of
construction the significant totality of which these particularities
are the incidents. It sees also the essentiality, the Swabhava, of the
thing in itself of which the totality and the particularities are the
manifestation. And again it sees, whether apart from or through
the essentiality or swabhava, the one self, the one existence,
consciousness, power, force of which it is the basic expression.
The Supramental Instruments — Thought-Process 859
And again it sees, whether apart from or through
the essentiality or swabhava, the one self, the one existence,
consciousness, power, force of which it is the basic expression.
The Supramental Instruments — Thought-Process 859
It may be observing at the time only the particularities, but the
whole is implied, and vice versa, — as for an example, the total
state of mind out of which a thought or a feeling arises, — and
the cognition may start from one or the other and proceed at
once by immediate suggestion to the implied knowledge. The
essentiality is similarly implied in the whole and in each or all of
the particulars and there may be the same rapid or immediate
alternative or alternate process. The logic of the supermind is
different from that of the mind: it sees always the self as what is,
the essentiality of the thing as a fundamental expression of the
being and power of the self, and the whole and particulars as a
consequent manifestation of this power and its active expression.
In the fullness of the supramental consciousness and cognition
this is the constant order. All perception of unity, similarity, dif¬
ference, kind, uniqueness arrived at by the supramental reason
is consonant with and depends on this order.
In the fullness of the supramental consciousness and cognition
this is the constant order. All perception of unity, similarity, dif¬
ference, kind, uniqueness arrived at by the supramental reason
is consonant with and depends on this order.
This observing action of supermind applies to all things. Its
view of physical objects is not and cannot be only a surface or
outward view, even when concentrated on the externals. It sees
the form, action, properties, but it is aware at the same time
of the qualities or energies, guna, sakti, of which the form is a
translation, and it sees them not as an inference or deduction
from the form or action, but feels and sees them directly in
the being of the object and quite as vividly, — one might say,
with a subtle concreteness and fine substantiality, — as the
form or sensible action. It is aware too of the consciousness
that manifests itself in quality, energy, form. It can feel, know,
observe, see forces, tendencies, impulsions, things abstract to us
quite as directly and vividly as the things we now call visible and
sensible. It observes in just the same way persons and beings.
It can take as its starting-point or first indication the speech,
action, outward signs, but it is not limited by or dependent
on them. It can know and feel and observe the very self and
consciousness of another, can either proceed to that directly
through the sign or can in its more powerful action begin with
it and at once, instead of seeking to know the inner being
through the evidence of the outer expression, understand rather
860
The Yoga of Self -F erf ection
all the outer expression in the light of the inner being. Even
so, completely, the supramental being knows his own inner
being and nature. The supermind can too act with equal power
and observe with direct experience what is hidden behind the
physical order; it can move in other planes than the material
universe. It knows the self and reality of things by identity, by
experience of oneness or contact of oneness and a vision, a seeing
and realising ideation and knowledge dependent on or derived
from these things, and its thought presentation of the truths of
the spirit is an expression of this kind of sight and experience.
The supramental memory is different from the mental, not
a storing up of past knowledge and experience, but an abiding
presence of knowledge that can be brought forward or, more
characteristically, offers itself, when it is needed: it is not depen¬
dent on attention or on conscious reception, for the things of the
past not known actually or not observed can be called up from
latency by an action which is yet essentially a remembrance.
Especially on a certain level all knowledge presents itself as
a remembering, because all is latent or inherent in the self of
supermind. The future like the past presents itself to knowledge
in the supermind as a memory of the preknown. The imagination
transformed in the supermind acts on one side as a power of true
image and symbol, always an image or index of some value or
significance or other truth of being, on the other as an inspiration
or interpretative seeing of possibilities and potentialities not less
true than actual or realised things. These are put in their place
either by an attendant intuitive or interpretative judgment or by
one inherent in the vision of the image, symbol or potentiality, or
by a supereminent revelation of that which is behind the image
or symbol or which determines the potential and the actual and
their relations and, it may be, overrides and overpasses them,
imposing ultimate truths and supreme certitudes.
The supramental judgment acts inseparably from the supra¬
mental observation or memory, inherent in it as a direct seeing
or cognition of values, significances, antecedents, consequences,
relations, etc.; or it supervenes on the observation as a luminous
disclosing idea or suggestion; or it may go before, independent
The Supramental Instruments — Thought-Process 861
of any observation, and then the object called up and observed
confirms visibly the truth of the idea. But in each case it is
sufficient in itself for its own purpose, is its own evidence and
does not really depend for its truth on any aid or confirmation.
There is a logic of the supramental reason, but its function is
not to test or scrutinise, to support and prove or to detect and
eliminate error. Its function is simply to link knowledge with
knowledge, to discover and utilise harmonies and arrangement
and relations, to organise the movement of the supramental
knowledge. This it does not by any formal rule or construction
of inferences but by a direct, living and immediate seeing and
placing of connection and relation. All thought in the supermind
is in the nature of intuition, inspiration or revelation and all
deficiency of knowledge is to be supplied by a farther action
of these powers; error is prevented by the action of a spon¬
taneous and luminous discrimination; the movement is always
from knowledge to knowledge. It is not rational in our sense but
suprarational, — it does sovereignly what is sought to be done
stumblingly and imperfectly by the mental reason.
The ranges of knowledge above the supramental reason,
taking it up and exceeding it, cannot well be described, nor is it
necessary here to make the endeavour. It is sufficient to say that
the process here is more sufficient, intense and large in light,
imperative, instantaneous, the scope of the active knowledge
larger, the way nearer to the knowledge by identity, the thought
more packed with the luminous substance of self-awareness and
all-vision and more evidently independent of any other inferior
support or assistance.
These characteristics, it must be remembered, do not fully
apply even to the strongest action of the intuitive mentality, but
are there seen only in their first glimpses. Nor can they be entirely
or unmixedly evident so long as supramentality is only forming
with an undercurrent, a mixture or an environment of mental
action. It is only when mentality is overpassed and drops away
into a passive silence that there can be the full disclosure and the
sovereign and integral action of the supramental gnosis.
Chapter XXIV
The Supramental Sense
It is only when mentality is overpassed and drops away
into a passive silence that there can be the full disclosure and the
sovereign and integral action of the supramental gnosis.
Chapter XXIV
The Supramental Sense
All the instruments, all the activities of the mind have
their corresponding powers in the action of the supra¬
mental energy and are there exalted and transfigured, but
have there a reverse order of priority and necessary importance.
As there is a supramental thought and essential consciousness,
so too there is a supramental sense. Sense is fundamentally
not the action of certain physical organs, but the contact of
consciousness with its objects, samjndna.
When the consciousness of the being is withdrawn wholly
into itself, it is aware only of itself, of its own being, its own
consciousness, its own delight of existence, its own concentrated
force of being, and of these things not in their forms but in their
essence. When it comes out of this self-immersion, it becomes
aware of or it releases or develops out of its self-immersion its
activities and forms of being, of consciousness, of delight and
force. Then too, on the supramental plane, its primary awareness
still remains of a kind native to and entirely characteristic of the
self-awareness of the spirit, the self-knowledge of the one and
infinite; it is a knowledge that knows all its objects, forms and
activities comprehensively by being aware of them in its own
infinite self, intimately by being aware in them as their self,
absolutely by being aware of them as one in self with its own
being. All its other ways of knowledge are projected from this
knowledge by identity, are parts or movements of it, or at the
lowest depend on it for their truth and light, are touched and
supported by it even in their own separate way of action and
refer back to it overtly or implicitly as their authority and origin.
The activity which is nearest to this essential knowledge by
identity is the large embracing consciousness, especially charac¬
teristic of the supramental energy, which takes into itself all truth
and idea and object of knowledge and sees them at once in their
The Supramental Sense
863
essence, totality and parts or aspects, — vijhdna. Its movement is
a total seeing and seizing; it is a comprehension and possession in
the self of knowledge; and it holds the object of consciousness
as a part of the self or one with it, the unity being sponta¬
neously and directly realised in the act of knowledge. Another
supramental activity puts the knowledge by identity more into
the background and stresses more the objectivity of the thing
known. Its characteristic movement, descending into the mind,
becomes the source of the peculiar nature of our mental knowl¬
edge, intelligence, prajhdna. In the mind the action of intelligence
involves, at the outset, separation and otherness between the
knower, knowledge and the known; but in the supermind its
movement still takes place in the infinite identity or at least in
the cosmic oneness. Only, the self of knowledge indulges the
delight of putting the object of consciousness away from the
more immediate nearness of the original and eternal unity, but
always in itself, and of knowing it again in another way so as
to establish with it a variety of relations of interaction which
are so many minor chords in the harmony of the play of the
consciousness. The movement of this supramental intelligence,
prajhdna, becomes a subordinate, a tertiary action of the supra¬
mental for the fullness of which thought and word are needed.
The primary action, because it is of the nature of knowledge by
identity or of a comprehensive seizing in the consciousness, is
complete in itself and has no need of these means of formulation.
The supramental intelligence is of the nature of a truth seeing,
truth hearing and truth remembering and, though capable of
being sufficient to itself in a certain way, still feels itself more
richly fulfilled by the thought and word that give it a body of
expression.
Finally, a fourth action of the supramental consciousness
completes the various possibilities of the supramental knowl¬
edge. This still farther accentuates the objectivity of the thing
known, puts it away from the station of experiencing conscious¬
ness and again brings it to nearness by a uniting contact effected
either in a direct nearness, touch, union or less closely across
the bridge or through the connecting stream of consciousness
864
The Yoga of Self -F erf ection
of which there has already been mention. It is a contacting
of existence, presences, things, forms, forces, activities, but a
contacting of them in the stuff of the supramental being and
energy, not in the divisions of matter and through the physical
instruments, that creates the supramental sense, samjhdna.
It is a little difficult to make the nature of the supramen¬
tal sense understood to a mentality not yet familiar with it
by enlarged experience, because our idea of sense action is
governed by the limiting experience of the physical mind and
we suppose that the fundamental thing in it is the impression
made by an external object on the physical organ of sight, hear¬
ing, smell, touch, taste, and that the business of the mind, the
present central organ of our consciousness, is only to receive the
physical impression and its nervous translation and so become
intelligently conscious of the object. In order to understand the
supramental change we have to realise first that the mind is the
only real sense even in the physical process: its dependence on the
physical impressions is the result of the conditions of the material
evolution, but not a thing fundamental and indispensable. Mind
is capable of a sight that is independent of the physical eye, a
hearing that is independent of the physical ear, and so with the
action of all the other senses. It is capable too of an awareness,
operating by what appears to us as mental impressions, of things
not conveyed or even suggested by the agency of the physical
organs, — an opening to relations, happenings, forms even and
the action of forces to which the physical organs could not have
borne evidence. Then, becoming aware of these rarer powers,
we speak of the mind as a sixth sense; but in fact it is the only
true sense organ and the rest are no more than its outer conve¬
niences and secondary instruments, although by its dependence
on them they have become its limitations and its too imperative
and exclusive conveyors. Again we have to realise — and this is
more difficult to admit for our normal ideas in the matter — that
the mind itself is only the characteristic instrument of sense, but
the thing itself, sense in its purity, samjhdna, exists behind and
beyond the mind it uses and is a movement of the self, a direct
and original activity of the infinite power of its consciousness.
The Supramental Sense
865
The pure action of sense is a spiritual action and pure sense is
itself a power of the spirit.
The Supramental Sense
865
The pure action of sense is a spiritual action and pure sense is
itself a power of the spirit.
The spiritual sense is capable of knowing in its own char¬
acteristic way, which is other than that of supramental thought
or of the intelligence or spiritual comprehension, vijhdna, or
knowledge by identity, all things whatsoever, things material and
what is to us immaterial, all forms and that which is formless.
For all is spiritual substance of being, substance of conscious¬
ness and force, substance of delight; and the spiritual sense, pure
samjhdna, is the conscious being’s contactual, substantial aware¬
ness of its own extended substance of self and in it of all that is of
the infinite or universal substance. It is possible for us not only
to know by conscious identity, by a spiritual comprehension
of self, of principles and aspects, force, play and action, by a
direct spiritual, supramental and intuitive thought knowledge,
by the heart’s spiritually and supramentally illumined feeling,
love, delight, but also to have in a very literal significance the
sense — sense-knowledge or sensation — of the spirit, the self,
the Divine, the Infinite. The state described by the Upanishad
in which one sees, hears, feels, touches, senses in every way
the Brahman and the Brahman only, for all things have become
to the consciousness only that and have no other, separate or
independent existence, is not a mere figure of speech, but the
exact description of the fundamental action of the pure sense,
the spiritual object of the pure samjhdna. And in this original
action, — to our experience a transfigured, glorified, infinitely
blissful action of the sense, a direct feeling out inward, around,
everywhere of the self to embrace and touch and be sensible of
all that is in its universal being, — we can become aware in a
most moving and delightful way of the Infinite and of all that is
in it, cognizant, by intimate contact of our being with all being,
of whatever is in the universe.
The action of the supramental sense is founded on this true
truth of sense; it is an organisation of this pure, spiritual, infinite,
absolute samjhdna. The supermind acting through sense feels all
as God and in God, all as the manifest touch, sight, hearing,
taste, perfume, all as the felt, seen, directly experienced substance
866
The Yoga of Self -F erf ection
The supermind acting through sense feels all
as God and in God, all as the manifest touch, sight, hearing,
taste, perfume, all as the felt, seen, directly experienced substance
866
The Yoga of Self -F erf ection
and power and energy and movement, play, penetration, vibra¬
tion, form, nearness, pressure, substantial interchange of the
Infinite. Nothing exists independently to its sense, but all is felt
as one being and movement and each thing as indivisible from
the rest and as having in it all the Infinite, all the Divine. This
supramental sense has the direct feeling and experience, not only
of forms, but of forces and of the energy and the quality in things
and of a divine substance and presence which is within them and
round them and into which they open and expand themselves
in their secret subtle self and elements, extending themselves in
oneness into the illimitable. Nothing to the supramental sense is
really finite: it is founded on a feeling of all in each and of each
in all: its sense definition, although more precise and complete
than the mental, creates no walls of limitation; it is an oceanic
and ethereal sense in which all particular sense knowledge and
sensation is a wave or movement or spray or drop that is yet
a concentration of the whole ocean and inseparable from the
ocean. Its action is a result of the extension and vibration of
being and consciousness in a supra-ethereal ether of light, ether
of power, ether of bliss, the Ananda Akasha of the Upanishads,
which is the matrix and continent of the universal expression
of the Self, — here in body and mind experienced only in lim¬
ited extensions and vibrations, — and the medium of its true
experience. This sense even at its lowest power is luminous
with a revealing light that carries in it the secret of the thing
it experiences and can therefore be a starting-point and basis
of all the rest of the supramental knowledge, — the supramen¬
tal thought, spiritual intelligence and comprehension, conscious
identity, — and on its highest plane or at its fullest intensity
of action it opens into or contains and at once liberates these
things. It is strong with a luminous power that carries in it the
force of self-realisation and an intense or infinite effectiveness,
and this sense-experience can therefore be the starting-point of
impulsion for a creative or fulfilling action of the spiritual and
supramental will and knowledge. It is rapturous with a powerful
and luminous delight that makes of it, makes of all sense and
sensation a key to or a vessel of the divine and infinite Ananda.
It is rapturous with a powerful
and luminous delight that makes of it, makes of all sense and
sensation a key to or a vessel of the divine and infinite Ananda.
The Supramental Sense
867
The supramental sense can act in its own power and is inde¬
pendent of the body and the physical life and outer mind and it
is above too the inner mind and its experiences. It can be aware
of all things in whatever world, on whatever plane, in whatever
formation of universal consciousness. It can be aware of the
things of the material universe even in the trance of samadhi,
aware of them as they are or appear to the physical sense, even
as it is of other states of experience, of the pure vital, the mental,
the psychical, the supramental presentation of things. It can in
the waking state of the physical consciousness present to us the
things concealed from the limited receptivity or beyond the range
of the physical organs, distant forms, scenes and happenings,
things that have passed out of physical existence or that are not
yet in physical existence, scenes, forms, happenings, symbols of
the vital, psychical, mental, supramental, spiritual worlds and all
these in their real or significant truth as well as their appearance.
It can use all the other states of sense consciousness and their
appropriate senses and organs adding to them what they have
not, setting right their errors and supplying their deficiencies: for
it is the source of the others and they are only inferior derivations
from this higher sense, this true and illimitable samjhdna.
The lifting of the level of consciousness from the mind to the
supermind and the consequent transformation of the being from
the state of the mental to that of the supramental Purusha must
bring with it to be complete a transformation of all the parts of
the nature and all its activities. The whole mind is not merely
made into a passive channel of the supramental activities, a
channel of their downflow into the life and body and of their
outflow or communication with the outward world, the material
existence, — that is only the first stage of the process, — but is
itself supramentalised along with all its instruments. There is
accordingly a change, a profound transformation in the physical
sense, a supramentalising of the physical sight, hearing, touch,
etc., that creates or reveals to us a quite different view, not merely
868
The Yoga of Self -F erf ection
There is
accordingly a change, a profound transformation in the physical
sense, a supramentalising of the physical sight, hearing, touch,
etc., that creates or reveals to us a quite different view, not merely
868
The Yoga of Self -F erf ection
of life and its meaning, but even of the material world and all
its forms and aspects. The supermind uses the physical organs
and confirms their way of action, but it develops behind them
the inner and deeper senses which see what are hidden from the
physical organs and farther transforms the new sight, hearing,
etc. thus created by casting it into its own mould and way of
sensing. The change is one that takes nothing from the physical
truth of the object, but adds to it its supraphysical truth and takes
away by the removal of the physical limitation the element of
falsehood in the material way of experience.
The supramentalising of the physical sense brings with it
a result similar in this field to that which we experience in the
transmutation of the thought and consciousness. As soon as the
sight, for example, becomes altered under the influence of the
supramental seeing, the eye gets a new and transfigured vision
of things and of the world around us. Its sight acquires an ex¬
traordinary totality and an immediate and embracing precision
in which the whole and every detail stand out at once in the
complete harmony and vividness of the significance meant by
Nature in the object and its realisation of the idea in form,
executed in a triumph of substantial being. It is as if the eye of
the poet and artist had replaced the vague or trivial unseeing
normal vision, but singularly spiritualised and glorified, — as if
indeed it were the sight of the supreme divine Poet and Artist
in which we were participating and there were given to us the
full seeing of his truth and intention in his design of the universe
and of each thing in the universe. There is an unlimited intensity
which makes all that is seen a revelation of the glory of quality
and idea and form and colour. The physical eye seems then to
carry in itself a spirit and a consciousness which sees not only
the physical aspect of the object but the soul of quality in it, the
vibration of energy, the light and force and spiritual substance of
which it is made. Thus there comes through the physical sense
to the total sense consciousness within and behind the vision
a revelation of the soul of the thing seen and of the universal
spirit that is expressing itself in this objective form of its own
conscious being.
Thus there comes through the physical sense
to the total sense consciousness within and behind the vision
a revelation of the soul of the thing seen and of the universal
spirit that is expressing itself in this objective form of its own
conscious being.
The Supramental Sense
869
There is at the same time a subtle change which makes the
sight see in a sort of fourth dimension, the character of which is
a certain internality, the seeing not only of the superficies and the
outward form but of that which informs it and subtly extends
around it. The material object becomes to this sight something
different from what we now see, not a separate object on the
background or in the environment of the rest of Nature, but
an indivisible part and even in a subtle way an expression of
the unity of all that we see. And this unity that we see becomes
not only to the subtler consciousness but to the mere sense,
to the illumined physical sight itself, that of the identity of the
Eternal, the unity of the Brahman. For to the supramentalised
seeing the material world and space and material objects cease
to be material in the sense in which we now on the strength
of the sole evidence of our limited physical organs and of the
physical consciousness that looks through them receive as our
gross perception and understand as our conception of matter. It
and they appear and are seen as spirit itself in a form of itself
and a conscious extension. The whole is a unity — the oneness
unaffected by any multitudinousness of objects and details —
held in and by the consciousness in a spiritual space and all sub¬
stance there is conscious substance. This change and this totality
of the way of seeing comes from the exceeding of the limitations
of our present physical sense, because the power of the subtle or
psychical eye has been infused into the physical and there has
again been infused into this psycho-physical power of vision the
spiritual sight, the pure sense, the supramental samjhdna.
All the other senses undergo a similar transformation. All
that the ear listens to, reveals the totality of its sound body
and sound significance and all the tones of its vibration and
reveals also to the single and complete hearing the quality, the
rhythmic energy, the soul of the sound and its expression of the
one universal spirit. There is the same internality, the going of
the sense into the depths of the sound and the finding there of
that which informs it and extends it into unity with the harmony
of all sound and no less with the harmony of all silence, so that
the ear is always listening to the infinite in its heard expression
870
The Yoga of Self -F erf ection
and the voice of its silence. All sounds become to the supramen-
talised ear the voice of the Divine, himself born into sound, and
a rhythm of the concord of the universal symphony. And there
is too the same completeness, vividness, intensity, the revelation
of the self of the thing heard and the spiritual satisfaction of
the self in hearing. The supramentalised touch also contacts or
receives the touch of the Divine in all things and knows all
things as the Divine through the conscious self in the contact:
and there is too the same totality, intensity, revelation of all that
is in and behind the touch to the experiencing consciousness.
There comes a similar transformation of the other senses.
There comes a similar transformation of the other senses.
There is at the same time an opening of new powers in
all the senses, an extension of range, a stretching out of the
physical consciousness to an undreamed capacity. The supra-
mental transformation extends too the physical consciousness
far beyond the limits of the body and enables it to receive with a
perfect concreteness the physical contact of things at a distance.
And the physical organs become capable of serving as channels
for the psychic and other senses so that we can see with the
physical waking eye what is ordinarily revealed only in the ab¬
normal states and to the psychical vision, hearing or other sense
knowledge. It is the spirit or the inner soul that sees and senses,
but the body and its powers are themselves spiritualised and
share directly in the experience. The entire material sensation
is supramentalised and it becomes aware, directly and with a
physical participation and, finally, a unity with the subtler in¬
strumentation, of forces and movements and the physical, vital,
emotional, mental vibrations of things and beings and feels them
all not only spiritually or mentally but physically in the self and
as movements of the one self in these many bodies. The wall that
the limitations of the body and its senses have built around us is
abolished even in the body and the senses and there is in its place
the free communication of the eternal oneness. All sense and
sensation becomes full of the divine light, the divine power and
intensity of experience, a divine joy, the delight of the Brahman.
And even that which is now to us discordant and jars on the
senses takes its place in the universal concord of the universal
The Supramental Sense
871
movement, reveals its rasa, meaning, design and, by delight in
its intention in the divine consciousness and its manifestation
of its law and dharma, its harmony with the total self, its place
in the manifestation of the divine being, becomes beautiful and
happy to the soul experience. All sensation becomes Ananda.
All sensation becomes Ananda.
The embodied mind in us is ordinarily aware only through
the physical organs and only of their objects and of subjective
experiences which seem to start from the physical experience
and to take them alone, however remotely, for their foundation
and mould of construction. All the rest, all that is not consistent
with or part of or verified by the physical data, seems to it
rather imagination than reality and it is only in abnormal states
that it opens to other kinds of conscious experience. But in fact
there are immense ranges behind of which we could be aware if
we opened the doors of our inner being. These ranges are there
already in action and known to a subliminal self in us, and much
even of our surface consciousness is directly projected from them
and without our knowing it influences our subjective experience
of things. There is a range of independent vital or pranic experi¬
ences behind, subliminal to and other than the surface action of
the vitalised physical consciousness. And when this opens itself
or acts in any way, there are made manifest to the waking mind
the phenomena of a vital consciousness, a vital intuition, a vital
sense not dependent on the body and its instruments, although
it may use them as a secondary medium and a recorder. It is
possible to open completely this range and, when we do so, we
find that its operation is that of the conscious life force individu¬
alised in us contacting the universal life force and its operations
in things, happenings and persons. The mind becomes aware of
the life consciousness in all things, responds to it through our
life consciousness with an immediate directness not limited by
the ordinary communication through the body and its organs,
records its intuitions, becomes capable of experiencing existence
as a translation of the universal Life or Prana. The field of which
the vital consciousness and the vital sense are primarily aware
is not that of forms but, directly, that of forces: its world is
a world of the play of energies, and form and event are sensed
872
The Yoga of Self -F erf ection
The field of which
the vital consciousness and the vital sense are primarily aware
is not that of forms but, directly, that of forces: its world is
a world of the play of energies, and form and event are sensed
872
The Yoga of Self -F erf ection
only secondarily as a result and embodiment of the energies. The
mind working through the physical senses can only construct a
view and knowledge of this nature as an idea in the intelligence,
but it cannot go beyond the physical translation of the energies,
and it has therefore no real or direct experience of the true nature
of life, no actual realisation of the life force and the life spirit. It
is by opening this other level or depth of experience within and
by admission to the vital consciousness and vital sense that the
mind can get the true and direct experience. Still, even then, so
long as it is on the mental level, the experience is limited by the
vital terms and their mental renderings and there is an obscurity
even in this greatened sense and knowledge. The supramental
transformation supravitalises the vital, reveals it as a dynamics
of the spirit, makes a complete opening and a true revelation of
all the spiritual reality behind and within the life force and the
life spirit and of all its spiritual as well as its mental and purely
vital truth and significance.
The supermind in its descent into the physical being awak¬
ens, if not already wakened by previous yogic sadhana, the
consciousness — veiled or obscure in most of us — which sup¬
ports and forms there the vital sheath, the prana kosa. When this
is awakened, we no longer live in the physical body alone, but
also in a vital body which penetrates and envelops the physical
and is sensitive to impacts of another kind, to the play of the
vital forces around us and coming in on us from the universe
or from particular persons or group lives or from things or else
from the vital planes and worlds which are behind the material
universe. These impacts we feel even now in their result and
in certain touches and affectations, but not at all or very little
in their source and their coming. An awakened consciousness
in the pranic body immediately feels them, is aware of a per¬
vading vital force other than the physical energy, and can draw
upon it to increase the vital strength and support the physical
energies, can deal directly with the phenomena and causes of
health and disease by means of this vital influx or by directing
pranic currents, can be aware of the vital and the vital-emotional
atmosphere of others and deal with its interchanges, along with
The Supramental Sense
873
a host of other phenomena which are unfelt by or obscure to our
outward consciousness but here become conscient and sensible.
It is acutely aware of the life soul and life body in ourself and
others. The supermind takes up this vital consciousness and
vital sense, puts it on its right foundation and transforms it
by revealing the life-force here as the very power of the spirit
dynamised for a near and direct operation on and through subtle
and gross matter and for formation and action in the material
universe.
The first result is that the limitations of our individual life
being break down and we live no longer with a personal life
force, or not with that ordinarily, but in and by the universal
life energy. It is all the universal Prana that comes consciently
streaming into and through us, keeps up there a dynamic con¬
stant eddy, an unseparated centre of its power, a vibrant station
of storage and communication, constantly fills it with its forces
and pours them out in activity upon the world around us. This
life energy, again, is felt by us not merely as a vital ocean and its
streams, but as the vital way and form and body and outpouring
of a conscious universal Shakti, and that conscient Shakti reveals
itself as the Chit Shakti of the Divine, the Energy of the tran¬
scendent and universal Self and Purusha of which — or rather of
whom — our universalised individuality becomes an instrument
and channel. As a result we feel ourselves one in life with all
others and one with the life of all Nature and of all things in
the universe. There is a free and conscious communication of
the vital energy working in us with the same energy working
in others. We are aware of their life as of our own or, at the
least, of the touch and pressure and communicated movements
of our life being on them and theirs upon us. The vital sense in
us becomes powerful, intense, capable of bearing all the small
or large, minute or immense vibrations of this life world on all
its planes physical and supraphysical, vital and supravital, thrills
with all its movement and Ananda and is aware of and open to all
forces. The supermind takes possession of all this great range of
experience, and makes it all luminous, harmonious, experienced
not obscurely and fragmentarily and subject to the limitations
874
The Yoga of Self -F erf ection
and errors of its handling by the mental ignorance, but revealed,
it and each movement of it, in its truth and totality of power and
delight, and directs the great and now hardly limitable powers
and capacities of the life dynamis on all its ranges according to
the simple and yet complex, the sheer and spontaneous and yet
unfalteringly intricate will of the Divine in our life. It makes the
vital sense a perfect means of the knowledge of the life forces
around us, as the physical of the forms and sensations of the
physical universe, and a perfect channel too of the reactions
of the active life force through us working as an instrument of
self-manifestation.
The phenomena of this vital consciousness and sense, this direct
sensation and perception of and response to the play of subtler
forces than the physical, are often included without distinction
under the head of psychical phenomena. In a certain sense it is
an awakening of the psyche, the inner soul now hidden, clogged
wholly or partially covered up by the superficial activity of the
physical mind and senses that brings to the surface the sub¬
merged or subliminal inner vital consciousness and also an inner
or subliminal mental consciousness and sense capable of perceiv¬
ing and experiencing directly, not only the life forces and their
play and results and phenomena, but the mental and psychical
worlds and all they contain and the mental activities, vibrations,
phenomena, forms, images of this world also and of establishing
a direct communication between mind and mind without the aid
of the physical organs and the limitations they impose on our
consciousness. There are however two different kinds of action
of these inner ranges of the consciousness. The first is a more
outer and confused activity of the awakening subliminal mind
and life which is clogged with and subject to the grosser desires
and illusions of the mind and vital being and vitiated in spite of
its wider range of experience and powers and capacities by an
enormous mass of error and deformations of the will and knowl¬
edge, full of false suggestions and images, false and distorted
The Supramental Sense
875
intuitions and inspirations and impulses, the latter often even
depraved and perverse, and vitiated too by the interference of
the physical mind and its obscurities. This is an inferior activity
to which clairvoyants, psychists, spiritists, occultists, seekers of
powers and siddhis are very liable and to which all the warnings
against the dangers and errors of this kind of seeking are more
especially applicable. The seeker of spiritual perfection has to
pass as quickly as possible, if he cannot altogether avoid, this
zone of danger, and the safe rule here is to be attached to none
of these things, but to make spiritual progress one’s sole real
objective and to put no sure confidence in other things until
the mind and life soul are purified and the light of the spirit
and supermind or at least of the spiritually illumined mind and
soul are shed on these inner ranges of experience. For when the
mind is tranquillised and purified and the pure psyche liberated
from the insistence of the desire soul, these experiences are free
from any serious danger, — except indeed that of limitation and
a certain element of error which cannot be entirely eliminated
so long as the soul experiences and acts on the mental level. For
there is then a pure action of the true psychical consciousness
and its powers, a reception of psychical experience pure in itself
of the worse deformations, although subject to the limitations of
the representing mind, and capable of a high spiritualisation and
light. The complete power and truth, however, can only come
by the opening of the supermind and the supramentalising of
the mental and psychical experience.
The range of the psychic consciousness and its experiences
is almost illimitable and the variety and complexity of its phe¬
nomena almost infinite. Only some of the broad lines and main
features can be noted here. The first and most prominent is
the activity of the psychic senses of which the sight is the most
developed ordinarily and the first to manifest itself with any
largeness when the veil of the absorption in the surface con¬
sciousness which prevents the inner vision is broken. But all the
physical senses have their corresponding powers in the psychical
being, there is a psychical hearing, touch, smell, taste: indeed
the physical senses are themselves in reality only a projection of
876
The Yoga of Self -F erf ection
But all the
physical senses have their corresponding powers in the psychical
being, there is a psychical hearing, touch, smell, taste: indeed
the physical senses are themselves in reality only a projection of
876
The Yoga of Self -F erf ection
the inner sense into a limited and externalised operation in and
through and upon the phenomena of gross matter. The psychical
sight receives characteristically the images that are formed in the
subtle matter of the mental or psychical ether, dttdkdsa. These
may be transcriptions there or impresses of physical things, per¬
sons, scenes, happenings, whatever is, was or will be or may be in
the physical universe. These images are very variously seen and
under all kinds of conditions; in samadhi or in the waking state,
and in the latter with the bodily eyes closed or open, projected
on or into a physical object or medium or seen as if materialised
in the physical atmosphere or only in a psychical ether revealing
itself through this grosser physical atmosphere; seen through
the physical eyes themselves as a secondary instrument and as if
under the conditions of the physical vision or by the psychical
vision alone and independently of the relations of our ordinary
sight to space. The real agent is always the psychical sight and the
power indicates that the consciousness is more or less awake,
intermittently or normally and more or less perfectly, in the
psychical body. It is possible to see in this way the transcriptions
or impressions of things at any distance beyond the range of the
physical vision or the images of the past or the future.
It is possible to see in this way the transcriptions
or impressions of things at any distance beyond the range of the
physical vision or the images of the past or the future.
Besides these transcriptions or impresses the psychical vision
receives thought images and other forms created by constant
activity of consciousness in ourselves or in other human beings,
and these may be according to the character of the activity im¬
ages of truth or falsehood or else mixed things, partly true, partly
false, and may be too either mere shells and representations or
images inspired with a temporary life and consciousness and,
it may be, carrying in them in one way or another some kind
of beneficent or maleficent action or some willed or unwilled
effectiveness on our minds or vital being or through them even
on the body. These transcriptions, impresses, thought images,
life images, projections of the consciousness may also be repre¬
sentations or creations not of the physical world, but of vital,
psychic or mental worlds beyond us, seen in our own minds
or projected from other than human beings. And as there is
this psychical vision of which some of the more external and
The Supramental Sense
877
ordinary manifestations are well enough known by the name of
clairvoyance, so there is a psychical hearing and psychical touch,
taste, smell — clairaudience, clairsentience are the more external
manifestations, — with precisely the same range each in its own
kind, the same fields and manner and conditions and varieties
of their phenomena.
These and other phenomena create an indirect, a represen¬
tative range of psychical experience; but the psychical sense has
also the power of putting us in a more direct communication
with earthly or supraterrestrial beings through their psychical
selves or their psychical bodies or even with things, for things
also have a psychical reality and souls or presences supporting
them which can communicate with our psychical consciousness.
The most notable of these more powerful but rarer phenomena
are those which attend the power of exteriorisation of our con¬
sciousness for various kinds of action otherwise and elsewhere
than in the physical body, communication in the psychical body
or some emanation or reproduction of it, oftenest, though by no
means necessarily, during sleep or trance and the setting up of
relations or communication by various means with the denizens
of another plane of existence.
For there is a continuous scale of the planes of conscious¬
ness, beginning with the psychical and other belts attached to
and dependent on the earth plane and proceeding through the
true independent vital and psychical worlds to the worlds of the
gods and the highest supramental and spiritual planes of exis¬
tence. And these are in fact always acting upon our subliminal
selves unknown to our waking mind and with considerable effect
on our life and nature. The physical mind is only a little part of
us and there is a much more considerable range of our being in
which the presence, influence and powers of the other planes are
active upon us and help to shape our external being and its activ¬
ities. The awakening of the psychical consciousness enables us to
become aware of these powers, presences and influences in and
around us; and while in the impure or yet ignorant and imperfect
mind this unveiled contact has its dangers, it enables us too, if
rightly used and directed, to be no longer their subject but their
878
The Yoga of Self -F erf ection
master and to come into conscious and self-controlled possession
of the inner secrets of our nature. The psychical consciousness
reveals this interaction between the inner and the outer planes,
this world and others, partly by an awareness, which may be very
constant, vast and vivid, of their impacts, suggestions, communi¬
cations to our inner thought and conscious being and a capacity
of reaction upon them there, partly also through many kinds of
symbolic, transcriptive or representative images presented to the
different psychical senses. But also there is the possibility of a
more direct, concretely sensible, almost material, sometimes ac¬
tively material communication — a complete though temporary
physical materialisation seems to be possible — with the powers,
forces and beings of other worlds and planes. There may even be
a complete breaking of the limits of the physical consciousness
and the material existence.
There may even be
a complete breaking of the limits of the physical consciousness
and the material existence.
The awakening of the psychical consciousness liberates in
us the direct use of the mind as a sixth sense, and this power
may be made constant and normal. The physical consciousness
can only communicate with the minds of others or know the
happenings of the world around us through external means and
signs and indications, and it has beyond this limited action only a
vague and haphazard use of the mind’s more direct capacities, a
poor range of occasional presentiments, intuitions and messages.
Our minds are indeed constantly acting and acted upon by the
minds of others through hidden currents of which we are not
aware, but we have no knowledge or control of these agencies.
The psychical consciousness, as it develops, makes us aware of
the great mass of thoughts, feelings, suggestions, will impacts,
influences of all kinds that we are receiving from others or send¬
ing to others or imbibing from and throwing into the general
mind atmosphere around us. As it evolves in power, precision
and clearness, we are able to trace these to their source or feel
immediately their origin and transit to us and direct consciously
and with an intelligent will our own messages. It becomes possi¬
ble to be aware, more or less accurately and discerningly, of the
activities of minds whether near to us physically or at a distance,
to understand, feel or identify ourselves with their temperament.
The Supramental Sense
879
character, thoughts, feelings, reactions, whether by a psychic
sense or a direct mental perception or by a very sensible and
often intensely concrete reception of them into our mind or on
its recording surface. At the same time we can consciously make
at least the inner selves and, if they are sufficiently sensitive,
the surface minds of others aware of our own inner mental or
psychic self and plastic to its thoughts, suggestions, influences or
even cast it or its active image in influence into their subjective,
even into their vital and physical being to work there as a helping
or moulding or dominating power and presence.
All these powers of the psychic consciousness need have and
often have no more than a mental utility and significance, but it
can also be used with a spiritual sense and light and intention
in it and for a spiritual purpose. This can be done by a spiritual
meaning and use in our psychical interchange with others, and
it is largely by a psycho-spiritual interchange of this kind that
a master in Yoga helps his disciple. The knowledge of our in¬
ner subliminal and psychic nature, of the powers and presences
and influences there and the capacity of communication with
other planes and their powers and beings can also be used for
a higher than any mental or mundane object, for the possession
and mastering of our whole nature and the overpassing of the
intermediate planes on the way to the supreme spiritual heights
of being. But the most direct spiritual use of the psychic con¬
sciousness is to make it an instrument of contact, communication
and union with the Divine. A world of psycho-spiritual symbols
is readily opened up, illuminating and potent and living forms
and instruments, which can be made a revelation of spiritual
significances, a support for our spiritual growth and the evo¬
lution of spiritual capacity and experience, a means towards
spiritual power, knowledge or Ananda. The mantra is one of
these psycho-spiritual means, at once a symbol, an instrument
and a sound body for the divine manifestation, and of the same
kind are the images of the Godhead and of its personalities
or powers used in meditation or for adoration in Yoga. The
great forms or bodies of the Divine are revealed through which
he manifests his living presence to us and we can more easily
880
The Yoga of Self -F erf ection
The
great forms or bodies of the Divine are revealed through which
he manifests his living presence to us and we can more easily
880
The Yoga of Self -F erf ection
by their means intimately know, adore and give ourselves to
him and enter into the different lokas, worlds of his habitation
and presence, where we can live in the light of his being. His
word, command, Adesha, presence, touch, guidance can come
to us through our spiritualised psychic consciousness and, as
a subtly concrete means of transmission from the spirit, it can
give us a close communication and nearness to him through all
our psychic senses. These and many more are the spiritual uses
of the psychic consciousness and sense and, although capable
of limitation and deformation, — for all secondary instruments
can be also by our mental capacity of exclusive self-limitation
means of a partial but at the same time hindrances to a more
integral realisation, — they are of the greatest utility on the road
to the spiritual perfection and afterwards, liberated from the
limitation of our minds, transformed and supramentalised, an
element of rich detail in the spiritual Ananda.
As the physical and vital, the psychical consciousness and
sense also are capable of a supramental transformation and
receive by it their own integral fullness and significance. The
supermind lays hold on the psychical being, descends into it,
changes it into the mould of its own nature and uplifts it to be
a part of the supramental action and state, the supra-psychic
being of the Vijnana Purusha. The first result of this change is
to base the phenomena of the psychical consciousness on their
true foundation by bringing into it the permanent sense, the
complete realisation, the secure possession of the oneness of our
mind and soul with the minds and souls of others and the mind
and soul of universal Nature. For always the effect of the supra¬
mental growth is to universalise the individual consciousness. As
it makes us live, even in our individual vital movement and its
relations with all around us, with the universal life, so it makes us
think and feel and sense, although through an individual centre
or instrument, with the universal mind and psychical being. This
has two results of great importance.
First, the phenomena of the psychical sense and mind lose
the fragmentariness and incoherence or else difficult regulation
and often quite artificial order which pursues them even more
The Supramental Sense
881
This
has two results of great importance.
First, the phenomena of the psychical sense and mind lose
the fragmentariness and incoherence or else difficult regulation
and often quite artificial order which pursues them even more
The Supramental Sense
881
than it pursues our more normal mental activities of the surface,
and they become the harmonious play of the universal inner
mind and soul in us, assume their true law and right forms and
relations and reveal their just significances. Even on the mental
plane one can get by the spiritualising of the mind at some
realisation of soul oneness, but it is never really complete, at
least in its application, and does not acquire this real and entire
law, form, relation, complete and unfailing truth and accuracy
of its significances. And, secondly, the activity of the psychical
consciousness loses all character of abnormality, of an excep¬
tional, irregular and even a perilously supernormal action, often
bringing a loss of hold upon life and a disturbance or an injury
to other parts of the being. It not only acquires its own right
order within itself but its right relation with the physical life on
one side and with the spiritual truth of being on the other and
the whole becomes a harmonious manifestation of the embodied
spirit. It is always the originating supermind that contains within
itself the true values, significances and relations of the other parts
of our being and its unfolding is the condition of the integral
possession of our self and nature.
It is always the originating supermind that contains within
itself the true values, significances and relations of the other parts
of our being and its unfolding is the condition of the integral
possession of our self and nature.
The complete transformation comes on us by a certain
change, not merely of the poise or level of our regarding con¬
scious self or even of its law and character, but also of the
whole substance of our conscious being. Till that is done, the
supramental consciousness manifests above the mental and psy¬
chical atmosphere of being — in which the physical has already
become a subordinate and to a large extent a dependent method
of our self’s expression, — and it sends down its power, light, and
influence into it to illumine it and transfigure. But only when the
substance of the lower consciousness has been changed, filled
potently, wonderfully transformed, swallowed up as it were
into the greater energy and sense of being, mahdn, brhat, of
which it is a derivation and projection, do we have the perfected,
entire and constant supramental consciousness. The substance,
the conscious ether of being in which the mental or psychic
consciousness and sense live and see and feel and experience is
something subtler, freer, more plastic than that of the physical
882
The Yoga of Self -F erf ection
The substance,
the conscious ether of being in which the mental or psychic
consciousness and sense live and see and feel and experience is
something subtler, freer, more plastic than that of the physical
882
The Yoga of Self -F erf ection
mind and sense. As long as we are dominated by the latter,
psychical phenomena may seem to us less real, hallucinatory
even, but the more we acclimatise ourselves to the psychical and
to the ether of being which it inhabits, the more we begin to
see the greater truth and to sense the more spiritually concrete
substance of all to which its larger and freer mode of experience
bears witness. Even, the physical may come to seem to itself
unreal and hallucinatory — but this is an exaggeration and new
misleading exclusiveness due to a shifting of the centre and a
change of action of the mind and sense — or else may seem at
any rate less powerfully real. When, however, the psychical and
physical experiences are well combined in their true balance, we
live at once in two complementary worlds of our being each
with its own reality, but the psychical revealing all that is behind
the physical, the soul view and experience taking precedence
and enlightening and explaining the physical view and experi¬
ence. The supramental transformation again changes the whole
substance of our consciousness; it brings in an ether of greater
being, consciousness, sense, life, which convicts the psychical
also of insufficiency and makes it appear by itself an incomplete
reality and only a partial truth of all that we are and become
and witness.
All the experiences of the psychical are accepted and held
up indeed in the supramental consciousness and its energy, but
they are filled with the light of a greater truth, the substance of
a greater spirit. The psychical consciousness is first supported
and enlightened, then filled and occupied with the supramental
light and power and the revealing intensity of its vibrations.
Whatever exaggeration, whatever error born of isolated inci¬
dence, insufficiently illumined impression, personal suggestion,
misleading influence and intention or other cause of limitation or
deformation interferes in the truth of the mental and psychical
experience and knowledge, is revealed and cured or vanishes,
failing to stand in the light of the self-truth — satyam, rtam — of
things, persons, happenings, indications, representations proper
to this greater largeness. All the psychical communications, tran¬
scriptions, impresses, symbols, images receive their true value.
The Supramental Sense
883
All the psychical communications, tran¬
scriptions, impresses, symbols, images receive their true value.
The Supramental Sense
883
take their right place, are put into their proper relations. The psy¬
chical intelligence and sensation are lit up with the supramental
sense and knowledge, their phenomena, intermediate between
the spiritual and material worlds, begin to reveal automatically
their own truth and meaning and also the limitations of their
truth and significance. The images presented to the inner sight,
hearing, sensation of all kinds are occupied by or held in a larger
and more luminous mass of vibrations, a greater substance of
light and intensity which brings into them the same change as
in the things of the physical sense, a greater totality, precision,
revealing force of sense knowledge carried in the image. And
finally all is lifted up and taken into the supermind and made
a part of the infinitely luminous consciousness, knowledge and
experience of the supramental being, the Vijnana Purusha.
The state of the being after this supramental transformation
will be in all its parts of consciousness and knowledge that of
an infinite and cosmic consciousness acting through the univer-
salised individual Purusha. The fundamental power will be an
awareness of identity, a knowledge by identity, — an identity of
being, of consciousness, of force of being and consciousness,
of delight of being, an identity with the Infinite, the Divine,
and with all that is in the Infinite, all that is the expression
and manifestation of the Divine. This awareness and knowledge
will use as its means and instruments a spiritual vision of all
that the knowledge by identity can found, a supramental real
idea and thought of the nature of direct thought vision, thought
hearing, thought memory that reveals, interprets or represents
to the awareness the truth of all things, and an inner truth speech
that expresses it, and finally a supramental sense that provides
a relation of contact in substance of being with all things and
persons and powers and forces in all the planes of existence.
The supramental will not depend on the instrumentation,
for example, of the sense, as the physical mind is dependent
on the evidence of our senses, although it will be capable of
making them a starting-point for the higher forms of knowledge,
as it will also be capable of proceeding directly through these
higher forms and making the sense only a means of formation
884
The Yoga of Self -F erf ection
and objective expression. The supramental being will transform
at the same time and take up into itself the present thinking
of the mind transfigured into an immensely larger knowledge
by identity, knowledge by total comprehension, knowledge by
intimate perception of detail and relation, all direct, immediate,
spontaneous, all the expression of the self’s already existent
eternal knowledge. It will take up, transform, supramentalise
the physical sense, the sixth sense capacities of the mind and the
psychic consciousness and senses and use them as the means of
an extreme inner objectivisation of experience. Nothing will be
really external to it, for it will experience all in the unity of the
cosmic consciousness which will be its own, the unity of being
of the infinite which will be its own being. It will experience
matter, not only gross matter but the subtle and the most subtle,
as substance and form of the spirit, experience life and all kinds
of energy as the dynamics of the spirit, supramentalised mind as
a means or channel of knowledge of the spirit, supermind as the
infinite self of knowledge and power of knowledge and Ananda
of knowledge of the spirit.
Chapter XXV
Towards the Supramental
Time Vision
All being, consciousness, knowledge moves, secretly
for our present surface awareness, openly when we rise
beyond it to the spiritual and supramental ranges, be¬
tween two states and powers of existence, that of the timeless
Infinite and that of the Infinite deploying in itself and organ¬
ising all things in time. These two states are opposed to and
incompatible with each other only for our mental logic with its
constant embarrassed stumbling around a false conception of
contradictions and a confronting of eternal opposites. In reality,
as we find when we see things with a knowledge founded on
the supramental identity and vision and think with the great,
profound and flexible logic proper to that knowledge, the two
are only coexistent and concurrent status and movement of the
same truth of the Infinite. The timeless Infinite holds in itself,
in its eternal truth of being, beyond this manifestation, all that
it manifests in Time. Its time consciousness too is itself infinite
and maintains in itself at once in a vision of totalities and of
particularities, of mobile succession or moment sight and of
total stabilising vision or abiding whole sight what appears to
us as the past of things, their present and their future.
The consciousness of the timeless Infinite can be brought
home to us in various ways, but is most ordinarily imposed on
our mentality by a reflection of it and a powerful impression or
else made present to us as something above the mind, something
of which it is aware, towards which it lifts, but into which it
cannot enter because itself lives only in the time sense and in the
succession of the moments. If our present mind untransformed
by the supramental influence tries to enter into the timeless, it
must either disappear and be lost in the trance of Samadhi or
886
The Yoga of Self -F erf ection
else, remaining awake, it feels itself diffused in an Infinite where
there is perhaps a sense of supra-physical space, a vastness, a
boundless extension of consciousness, but no time self, time
movement or time order. And if then the mental being is still
mechanically aware of things in time, it is yet unable to deal
with them in its own manner, unable to establish a truth relation
between the timeless and things in time and unable to act and
will out of its indefinite Infinite. The action that then remains
possible to the mental Purusha is the mechanical action of the
instruments of the Prakriti continuing by force of old impulsion
and habit or continued initiation of past energy, prarabdha, or
else an action chaotic, unregulated, uncoordinated, a confused
precipitate from an energy which has no longer a conscious
centre.
The supramental consciousness on the other hand is founded
upon the supreme consciousness of the timeless Infinite, but has
too the secret of the deployment of the infinite Energy in time.
It can either take its station in the time consciousness and keep
the timeless infinite as its background of supreme and original
being from which it receives all its organising knowledge, will
and action, or it can, centred in its essential being, live in the
timeless but live too in a manifestation in time which it feels
and sees as infinite and as the same Infinite, and can bring out,
sustain and develop in the one what it holds supernally in the
other. Its time consciousness therefore will be different from
that of the mental being, not swept helplessly on the stream
of the moments and clutching at each moment as a stay and a
swiftly disappearing standpoint, but founded first on its eternal
identity beyond the changes of time, secondly on a simultaneous
eternity of Time in which past, present and future exist together
for ever in the self-knowledge and self-power of the Eternal,
thirdly, in a total view of the three times as one movement singly
and indivisibly seen even in their succession of stages, periods,
cycles, last — and that only in the instrumental consciousness —
in the step by step evolution of the moments. It will therefore
have the knowledge of the three times, trikaladrsti, — held of
old to be a supreme sign of the seer and the Rishi, — not as an
Towards the Supramental Time Vision
887
abnormal power, but as its normal way of time knowledge.
It will therefore
have the knowledge of the three times, trikaladrsti, — held of
old to be a supreme sign of the seer and the Rishi, — not as an
Towards the Supramental Time Vision
887
abnormal power, but as its normal way of time knowledge.
This unified and infinite time consciousness and this vision
and knowledge are the possession of the supramental being in
its own supreme region of light and are complete only on the
highest levels of the supramental nature. But in the ascent of
the human consciousness through the uplifting and transmut¬
ing evolutionary — that is to say, self-unveiling, self-developing,
progressively self-perfecting — process of Yoga, we have to take
account of three successive conditions all of which have to be
overpassed before we are able to move on the highest levels. The
first condition of our consciousness, that in which we now move,
is this mind of ignorance that has arisen out of the inconscience
and nescience of material Nature, — ignorant but capable of
seeking for knowledge and finding it at least in a series of mental
representations which may be made clues to the true truth and,
more and more refined and illuminated and rendered transparent
by the influence, the infiltration and the descent of the light from
above, prepare the intelligence for opening to the capacity of true
knowledge. All truth is to this mind a thing it originally had not
and has had to acquire or has still to acquire, a thing external to
it and to be gathered by experience or by following certain as¬
certained methods and rules of enquiry, calculation, application
of discovered law, interpretation of signs and indices. Its very
knowledge implies an antecedent nescience; it is the instrument
of Avidya.
The second condition of consciousness is potential only to
the human being and gained by an inner enlightening and trans¬
formation of the mind of ignorance; it is that in which the mind
seeks for its source of knowledge rather within than without
and becomes to its own feeling and self- experience, by whatever
means, a mind, not of original ignorance, but of self-forgetful
knowledge. This mind is conscious that the knowledge of all
things is hidden within it or at least somewhere in the being,
but as if veiled and forgotten, and the knowledge comes to it
not as a thing acquired from outside, but always secretly there
and now remembered and known at once to be true, — each
thing in its own place, degree, manner and measure. This is
888
The Yoga of Self -F erf ection
This is
888
The Yoga of Self -F erf ection
its attitude to knowledge even when the occasion of knowing
is some external experience, sign or indication, because that
is to it only the occasion and its reliance for the truth of the
knowledge is not on the external indication or evidence but on
the inner confirming witness. The true mind is the universal
within us and the individual is only a projection on the surface,
and therefore this second state of consciousness we have either
when the individual mind goes more and more inward and is
always consciously or subconsciously near and sensitive to the
touches of the universal mentality in which all is contained,
received, capable of being made manifest, or, still more power¬
fully, when we live in the consciousness of universal mind with
the personal mentality only as a projection, a marking board or
a communicating switch on the surface.
The third state of consciousness is that of the mind of
knowledge in which all things and all truths are perceived and
experienced as already present and known and immediately
available by merely turning the inner light upon it, as when
one turns the eye upon things in a room already known and
familiar, — though not always present to the vision because that
is not attentive, — and notes them as objects of a pre-existent
knowledge. The difference from the second self-forgetful state of
consciousness is that there is here no effort or seeking needed but
simply a turning or opening of the inner light on whatever field of
knowledge, and therefore it is not a recalling of things forgotten
and self-hidden from the mind, but a luminous presentation of
things already present, ready and available. This last condition
is only possible by a partial supramentalising of the intuitive
mentality and its full openness to any and every communica¬
tion from the supramental ranges. This mind of knowledge is
in its essentiality a power of potential omnipotence, but in its
actual working on the level of mind it is limited in its range and
province. The character of limitation applies to the supermind
itself when it descends into the mental level and works in the
lesser substance of mentality, though in its own manner and
body of power and light, and it persists even in the action of
the supramental reason. It is only the higher supramental Shakti
Towards the Supramental Time Vision
889
It is only the higher supramental Shakti
Towards the Supramental Time Vision
889
acting on its own ranges whose will and knowledge work al¬
ways in a boundless light or with a free capacity of illimitable
extension of knowledge subject only to such limitations as are
self-imposed for its own purposes and at its own will by the
spirit.
The human mind developing into supermind has to pass
through all these stages and in its ascent and expansion it may
experience many changes and various dispositions of the powers
and possibilities of its time consciousness and time knowledge.
At first man in the mind of ignorance can neither live in the
infinite time consciousness nor command any direct and real
power of the triple time knowledge. The mind of ignorance
lives, not in the indivisible continuity of time, but successively in
each moment. It has a vague sense of the continuity of self and of
an essential continuity of experience, a sense of which the source
is the deeper self within us, but as it does not live in that self,
also it does not live in a true time continuity, but only uses this
vague but still insistent awareness as a background, support and
assurance in what would otherwise be to it a constant baseless
flux of its being. In its practical action its only support other
than its station in the present is the line left behind by the past
and preserved in memory, the mass of impressions deposited by
previous experience and, for the future, an assurance of the reg¬
ularity of experience and a power of uncertain forecast founded
partly upon repeated experience and well-founded inference and
partly on imaginative construction and conjecture. The mind of
ignorance relies on a certain foundation or element of relative
or moral certainties, but for the rest a dealing with probabilities
and possibilities is its chief resource.
This is because the mind in the Ignorance lives in the mo¬
ment and moves from hour to hour like a traveller who sees
only what is near and visible around his immediate standpoint
and remembers imperfectly what he has passed through before,
but all in front beyond his immediate view is the unseen and
unknown of which he has yet to have experience. Therefore
man in his self-ignorance moving in time exists, as the Buddhists
saw, only in the succession of thoughts and sensations and of
890
The Yoga of Self -F erf ection
Therefore
man in his self-ignorance moving in time exists, as the Buddhists
saw, only in the succession of thoughts and sensations and of
890
The Yoga of Self -F erf ection
the external forms present to his thought and sense. His present
momentary self is alone real to him, his past self is dead or van¬
ishing or only preserved in memory, result and impression, his
future self is entirely non-existent or only in process of creation
or preparation of birth. And the world around him is subject
to the same rule of perception. Only its actual form and sum
of happenings and phenomena is present and quite real to him,
its past is no longer in existence or abides only in memory and
record and in so much of it as has left its dead monuments or still
survives into the present, the future is not yet at all in existence.
It must be noted however that if our knowledge of the
present were not limited by our dependence on the physical
mind and sense, this result would not be altogether inevitable. If
we could be aware of all the present, all the action of physical,
vital, mental energies at work in the moment, it is conceivable
that we would be able to see their past too involved in them and
their latent future or at least to proceed from present to past
and future knowledge. And under certain conditions this might
create a sense of real and ever present time continuity, a living
in the behind and the front as well as the immediate, and a step
farther might carry us into an ever present sense of our existence
in infinite time and in our timeless self, and its manifestation in
eternal time might then become real to us and also we might feel
the timeless Self behind the worlds and the reality of his eternal
world manifestation. In any case the possibility of another kind
of time consciousness than we have at present and of a triple
time knowledge rests upon the possibility of developing another
consciousness than that proper to the physical mind and sense
and breaking our imprisonment in the moment and in the mind
of ignorance with its limitation to sensation, memory, inference
and conjecture.
Actually man is not content solely with living in the present,
though it is that he does with the most pressing vividness and
insistence: he is moved to look before and after, to know as
much as he can of the past and try to penetrate as far as he
can, however obscurely, into the future. And he has certain aids
towards this endeavour of which some depend on his surface
Towards the Supramental Time Vision
891
And he has certain aids
towards this endeavour of which some depend on his surface
Towards the Supramental Time Vision
891
mind, while others open to intimations from another subliminal
or superconscient self which has a greater, subtler and more
certain knowledge. His first aid is that of the reason proceed¬
ing forward from cause to effect and backward from effect to
cause, discovering the law of energies and their assured mechanic
process, assuming the perpetual sameness of the movements of
Nature, fixing her time measures and thus calculating on the
basis of a science of general lines and assured results the past
and the future. A certain measure of limited but sufficiently
striking success has been gained by this method in the province
of physical Nature and it might seem that the same process might
eventually be applied to the movements of mind and life and that
at any rate this alone is man’s one reliable means in any field of
looking with precision back and forwards. But as a matter of fact
the happenings of vital and still more of mental nature escape to
a very great degree the means of inference and calculation from
assured law that apply in the field of physical knowledge: it can
apply there only to a limited range of regularised happenings
and phenomena and for the rest leaves us where we were amid
a mixed mass of relative certainties, uncertain probabilities and
incalculable possibilities.
This is because mind and life bring in a great subtlety and
intricacy of movement, each realised movement carries in it a
complex of forces, and even if we could disengage all these,
all, that is to say, that are simply actualised and on or near the
surface, we should still be baffled by all the rest that is obscure or
latent, — concealed and yet potent contributory causes, hidden
motion and motive force, undeployed possibilities, uncalculated
and incalculable chances of variation. It ceases to be practicable
here for our limited intelligence to calculate accurately and with
certitude as in the physical field from precise cause to precise
effect, that is to say, from a given apparent set of existing con¬
ditions to an inevitable resultant of subsequent or a necessary
precedence of antecedent conditions. It is for this reason that
the predictions and previsions of the human intelligence are
constantly baffled and contradicted by the event, even when
largest in their view of the data and most careful in their survey
892
The Yoga of Self -F erf ection
It is for this reason that
the predictions and previsions of the human intelligence are
constantly baffled and contradicted by the event, even when
largest in their view of the data and most careful in their survey
892
The Yoga of Self -F erf ection
of possible consequence. Life and mind are a constant flux of
possibles intervening between spirit and matter and at each step
bring in, if not an infinite, at least an indefinite of possibles, and
this would be enough to make all logical calculation uncertain
and relative. But in addition there reigns behind them a supreme
factor incalculable by human mind, the will of the soul and
secret spirit, the first indefinitely variable, fluid and elusive, the
second infinite and inscrutably imperative, bound, if at all, only
by itself and the Will in the Infinite. It is therefore only by going
back from the surface physical mind to the psychic and spiritual
consciousness that a vision and knowledge of the triple time,
a transcendence of our limitation to the standpoint and view
range of the moment, can be wholly possible.
Meanwhile there are certain doors opening from the inner
on to the outer consciousness which make an occasional but
insufficient power of direct retro-vision of the past, circumvision
of the present, prevision of the future even in the physical mind
at least potentially feasible. First, there are certain movements
of the mind sense and the vital consciousness that are of this
character — of which one kind, that which has most struck our
perceptions, has been called presentiment. These movements are
instinctive perceptions, obscure intuitions of the sense mind and
the vital being, and like all that is instinctive in man have been
suppressed, rendered rare or discredited as unreliable by the
engrossing activity of the mental intelligence. If allowed a free
scope, these could develop and supply data not available to the
ordinary reason and the senses. But still they would not be of
themselves perfectly useful or reliable indices unless their obscu¬
rity were enlightened by an interpretation and guidance which
the ordinary intelligence cannot give, but a higher intuition
could provide. Intuition, then, is the second and more important
possible means available to us, and actually intuition can and
does sometimes give us in this difficult field an occasional light
and guidance. But acting in our present mentality it is subject
to the disadvantage that it is uncertain in operation, imperfect
in its functioning, obscured by false imitative movements of the
imagination and fallible mental judgment and continually seized
Towards the Supramental Time Vision
893
on and alloyed and distorted by the normal action of mind with
its constant liability to error. The formation of an organised intu¬
itive mentality purified from these deficiencies would be needed
to enlarge and assure this possibility of the functioning of a
higher luminous intelligence.
The formation of an organised intu¬
itive mentality purified from these deficiencies would be needed
to enlarge and assure this possibility of the functioning of a
higher luminous intelligence.
Man, confronted by this incapacity of the intelligence and
yet avid of the knowledge of the future, has fallen back on other
and external means, omens, sortileges, dreams, astrology and
many other alleged data for a past and future knowledge that
have been in less sceptical times formulated as veridical sciences.
Challenged and discredited by the sceptical reason these still
persist in attracting our minds and hold their own, supported
by desire and credulity and superstition, but also by the frequent
though imperfect evidence we get of a certain measure of truth in
their pretensions. A higher psychical knowledge shows us that
in fact the world is full of many systems of correspondences
and indices and that these things, however much misused by the
human intelligence, can in their place and under right conditions
give us real data of a supraphysical knowledge. It is evident,
however, that it is only an intuitive knowledge that can discover
and formulate them, — as it was in fact the psychical and in¬
tuitive mind that originally formulated these ways of veridical
knowledge, — and it will be found in practice that only an in¬
tuitive knowledge, not the mere use either of a traditional or a
haphazard interpretation or of mechanical rule and formula, can
ensure a right employment of these indices. Otherwise, handled
by the surface intelligence, they are liable to be converted into a
thick jungle of error.
The true and direct knowledge or vision of past, present
and future begins with the opening of the psychical conscious¬
ness and the psychical faculties. The psychical consciousness is
that of what is now often called the subliminal self, the subtle
or dream self of Indian psychology, and its range of potential
knowledge, almost infinite as has been pointed out in the last
chapter, includes a very large power and many forms of insight
into both the possibilities and the definite actualities of past,
present and future. Its first faculty, that which most readily
894
The Yoga of Self -F erf ection
Its first faculty, that which most readily
894
The Yoga of Self -F erf ection
attracts attention, is its power of seeing by the psychical sense
images of all things in time and space. As exercised by clair¬
voyants, mediums and others this is often, and indeed usually,
a specialised faculty limited though often precise and accurate
in action, and implies no development of the inner soul or the
spiritual being or the higher intelligence. It is a door opened
by chance or by an innate gift or by some kind of pressure
between the waking and the subliminal mind and admitting
only to the surface or the outskirts of the latter. All things in
a certain power and action of the secret universal mind are
represented by images — not only visual but, if one may use the
phrase, auditory and other images, — and a certain development
of the subtle or psychical senses makes it possible, — if there is
no interference of the constructing mind and its imaginations,
if, that is to say, artificial or falsifying mental images do not
intervene, if the psychical sense is free, sincere and passive, —
to receive these representations or transcriptions with a perfect
accuracy and not so much predict as see in its correct images
the present beyond the range of the physical sense, the past and
the future. The accuracy of this kind of seeing depends on its
being confined to a statement of the thing seen and the attempt
to infer, interpret or otherwise go beyond the visual knowledge
may lead to much error unless there is at the same time a strong
psychical intuition fine, subtle and pure or a high development
of the luminous intuitive intelligence.
A completer opening of the psychical consciousness leads
us far beyond this faculty of vision by images and admits us
not indeed to a new time consciousness, but to many ways of
the triple time knowledge. The subliminal or psychic self can
bring back or project itself into past states of consciousness and
experience and anticipate or even, though this is less common,
strongly project itself into future states of consciousness and
experience. It does this by a temporary entering into or identifi¬
cation of its being or its power of experiencing knowledge with
either permanences or representations of the past and the future
that are maintained in an eternal time consciousness behind
our mentality or thrown up by the eternity of supermind into
Towards the Supramental Time Vision
895
an indivisible continuity of time vision. Or it may receive the
impress of these things and construct a transcriptive experience
of them in the subtle ether of psychical being. Or it may call
up the past from the subconscious memory where it is always
latent and give it in itself a living form and a kind of renewed
memorative existence, and equally it may call up from the depths
of latency, where it is already shaped in the being, and similarly
form to itself and experience the future. It may by a kind of
psychical thought vision or soul intuition — not the same thing
as the subtler and less concrete thought vision of the luminous
intuitive intelligence — foresee or foreknow the future or flash
this soul intuition into the past that has gone behind the veil
and recover it for present knowledge. It can develop a symbolic
seeing which conveys the past and the future through a vision
of the powers and significances that belong to supraphysical
planes but are powerful for creation in the material universe.
It can feel the intention of the Divine, the mind of the gods, all
things and their signs and indices that descend upon the soul and
determine the complex movement of forces. It can feel too the
movement of forces that represent or respond to the pressure —
as it can perceive the presence and the action — of the beings of
the mental, vital and other worlds who concern themselves with
our lives. It can gather on all hands all kinds of indications of
happenings in past, present and future time. It can receive before
its sight the etheric writing, dkdsa lipi, that keeps the record of
all things past, transcribes all that is in process in the present,
writes out the future.
All these and a multitude of other powers are concealed
in our subliminal being and with the waking of the psychical
consciousness can be brought to the surface. The knowledge of
our past lives, — whether of past soul states or personalities or
scenes, occurrences, relations with others, — of the past lives of
others, of the past of the world, of the future, of present things
that are beyond the range of our physical senses or the reach
of any means of knowledge open to the surface intelligence, the
intuition and impressions not only of physical things, but of the
working of a past and present and future mind and life and soul
896
The Yoga of Self -F erf ection
in ourselves and others, the knowledge not only of this world but
of other worlds or planes of consciousness and their manifesta¬
tions in time and of their intervention and workings and effects
on the earth and its embodied souls and their destinies, lies open
to our psychical being, because it is close to the intimations of
the universal, not engrossed only or mainly with the immediate
and not shut up into the narrow circle of the purely personal
and physical experience.
At the same time these powers are subject to this disad¬
vantage that they are not by any means free from liability to
confusion and error, and especially the lower ranges and more
outer workings of the psychical consciousness are subject to
dangerous influences, strong illusions, misleading, perverting
and distorting suggestions and images. A purified mind and heart
and a strong and fine psychical intuition may do much to protect
from perversion and error, but even the most highly developed
psychical consciousness cannot be absolutely safe unless the psy¬
chical is illumined and uplifted by a higher force than itself and
touched and strengthened by the luminous intuitive mind and
that again raised towards the supramental energy of the spirit.
The psychical consciousness does not derive its time knowledge
from a direct living in the indivisible continuity of the spirit and
it has not to guide it a perfect intuitive discrimination or the
absolute light of the higher truth consciousness. It receives its
time perceptions, like the mind, only in part and detail, is open
to all kinds of suggestions, and as its consequent range of truth
is wider, more manifold too are its sources of error. And it is not
only that which was but that which might have been or tried
and failed to be that comes to it out of the past, not only that
which is but that which may be or wishes to be that crowds on
it from the present and not only things to be but suggestions,
intuitions, visions and images of many kinds of possibility that
visit it from the future. And always too there is the possibility of
mental constructions and mental images interfering with the true
truth of things in the presentations of the psychical experience.
The coming of the intimations of the subliminal self to the
surface and the activity of the psychical consciousness tend to
Towards the Supramental Time Vision
897
The coming of the intimations of the subliminal self to the
surface and the activity of the psychical consciousness tend to
Towards the Supramental Time Vision
897
turn the mind of ignorance, with which we begin, increasingly
though not perfectly into a mind of self-forgetful knowledge
constantly illuminated with intimations and upsurgings from the
inner being, antardtman, rays from the still concealed awareness
of its whole self and infinite contents and from the awareness —
representing itself here as a sort of memory, a recalling or a bring¬
ing out — of an inherent and permanent but hidden knowledge
of past, present and future that is always carried within itself by
the eternal spirit. But embodied as we are and founded on the
physical consciousness, the mind of ignorance still persists as
a conditioning environment, an intervening power and limiting
habitual force obstructing and mixing with the new formation
or, even in moments of large illumination, at once a boundary
wall and a strong substratum, and it imposes its incapacities and
errors. And to remedy this persistence the first necessity would
seem to be the development of the power of a luminous intuitive
intelligence seeing the truth of time and its happenings as well
as all other truth by intuitive thought and sense and vision and
detecting and extruding by its native light of discernment the
intrusions of misprision and error.
All intuitive knowledge comes more or less directly from
the light of the self-aware spirit entering into the mind, the spirit
concealed behind mind and conscious of all in itself and in all
its selves, omniscient and capable of illumining the ignorant or
the self-forgetful mind whether by rare or constant flashes or
by a steady instreaming light, out of its omniscience. This all
includes all that was, is or will be in time and this omniscience
is not limited, impeded or baffled by our mental division of
the three times and the idea and experience of a dead and no
longer existent and ill-remembered or forgotten past and a not
yet existent and therefore unknowable future which is so im¬
perative for the mind in the ignorance. Accordingly the growth
of the intuitive mind can bring with it the capacity of a time
knowledge which comes to it not from outside indices, but from
within the universal soul of things, its eternal memory of the
past, its unlimited holding of things present and its prevision or,
as it has been paradoxically but suggestively called, its memory
898
The Yoga of Self -F erf ection
of the future. But this capacity works at first sporadically and
uncertainly and not in an organised manner. As the force of in¬
tuitive knowledge grows, it becomes more possible to command
the use of the capacity and to regularise to a certain degree its
functioning and various movements. An acquired power can be
established of commanding the materials and the main or the
detailed knowledge of things in the triple time, but this usually
forms itself as a special or abnormal power and the normal
action of the mentality or a large part of it remains still that of
the mind of ignorance. This is obviously an imperfection and
limitation and it is only when the power takes its place as a
normal and natural action of the wholly intuitivised mind that
there can be said to be a perfection of the capacity of the triple
time knowledge so far as that is possible in the mental being.
It is by the progressive extrusion of the ordinary action of the
intelligence, the acquiring of a complete and total reliance on the
intuitive self and a consequent intuitivising of all the parts of the
mental being that the mind of ignorance can be, more success¬
fully, if not as yet wholly, replaced by the mind of self-contained
knowledge. But, — and especially for this kind of knowledge, —
what is needed is the cessation of mental constructions built on
the foundation of the mind of ignorance. The difference between
the ordinary mind and the intuitive is that the former, seeking
in the darkness or at most by its own unsteady torchlight, first,
sees things only as they are presented in that light and, secondly,
where it does not know, constructs by imagination, by uncer¬
tain inference, by others of its aids and makeshifts things which
it readily takes for truth, shadow projections, cloud edifices,
unreal prolongations, deceptive anticipations, possibilities and
probabilities which do duty for certitudes. The intuitive mind
constructs nothing in this artificial fashion, but makes itself a
receiver of the light and allows the truth to manifest in it and
organise its own constructions. But so long as there is a mixed ac¬
tion and the mental constructions and imaginations are allowed
to operate, this passivity of the intuitive mind to the higher
light, the truth light, cannot be complete or securely dominate
and there cannot therefore be a firm organisation of the triple
Towards the Supramental Time Vision
899
time knowledge. It is because of this obstruction and mixture
that that power of time vision, of back-sight and around-sight
and foresight, which sometimes marks the illuminated mind, is
not only an abnormal power among others rather than part of
the very texture of the mental action, but also occasional, very
partial and marred often by an undetected intermixture or a
self-substituting intervention of error.
The mental constructions that interfere are mainly of two
kinds, and the first and most powerfully distorting are those
which proceed from the stresses of the will claiming to see
and determine, interfering with knowledge and not allowing
the intuition to be passive to the truth light and its impartial and
pure channel. The personal will, whether taking the shape of the
emotions and the heart’s wishes or of vital desires or of strong
dynamic volitions or the wilful preferences of the intelligence, is
an evident source of distortion when these try, as they usually
do try with success, to impose themselves on the knowledge and
make us take what we desire or will for the thing that was, is or
must be. For either they prevent the true knowledge from acting
or if it at all presents itself, they seize upon it, twist it out of shape
and make the resultant deformation a justifying basis for a mass
of will-created falsehood. The personal will must either be put
aside or else its suggestions must be kept in their place until a
supreme reference has been made to the higher impersonal light
and then must be sanctioned or rejected according to the truth
that comes from deeper within than the mind or from higher
above. But even if the personal will is held in abeyance and
the mind passive for reception, it may be assailed and imposed
on by suggestions from all sorts of forces and possibilities that
strive in the world for realisation and come representing the
things cast up by them on the stream of their will-to-be as the
truth of past, present or future. And if the mind lends itself to
these impostor suggestions, accepts their self-valuations, does
not either put them aside or refer them to the truth light, the
same result of prevention or distortion of the truth is inevitable.
There is a possibility of the will element being entirely excluded
and the mind being made a silent and passive register of a higher
900
The Yoga of Self -F erf ection
There is a possibility of the will element being entirely excluded
and the mind being made a silent and passive register of a higher
900
The Yoga of Self -F erf ection
luminous knowledge, and in that case a much more accurate
reception of time intuitions becomes possible. The integrality of
the being demands however a will action and not only an inactive
knowing, and therefore the larger and more perfect remedy is to
replace progressively the personal by a universalised will which
insists on nothing that is not securely felt by it to be an intuition,
inspiration or revelation of what must be from that higher light
in which will is one with knowledge.
The second kind of mental construction belongs to the very
nature of our mind and intelligence and its dealing with things in
time. All is seen here by mind as a sum of realised actualities with
their antecedents and natural consequences, an indeterminate of
possibilities and, conceivably, although of this it is not certain,
a determining something behind, a will, fate or Power, which
rejects some and sanctions or compels others out of many pos¬
sibles. Its constructions therefore are made partly of inferences
from the actual, both past and present, partly of a volitional
or an imaginative and conjectural selection and combining of
possibilities and partly of a decisive reasoning or preferential
judgment or insistent creative will-intelligence that tries to fix
among the mass of actuals and possibles the definitive truth it is
labouring to discover or determine. All this which is indispens¬
able to our thought and action in mind, has to be excluded or
transformed before the intuitive knowledge can have a chance of
organising itself on a sound basis. A transformation is possible
because the intuitive mind has to do the same work and cover
the same field, but with a different handling of the materials and
another light upon their significance. An exclusion is possible be¬
cause all is really contained in the truth consciousness above and
a silencing of the mind of ignorance and a pregnant receptivity is
not beyond our compass in which the intuitions descending from
the truth consciousness can be received with a subtle or strong
exactitude and all the materials of the knowledge seen in their
right place and true proportion. As a matter of practice it will
be found that both methods are used alternatively or together to
effect the transition from the one kind of mentality to the other.
The intuitive mind dealing with the triple time movement
Towards the Supramental Time Vision
901
The intuitive mind dealing with the triple time movement
Towards the Supramental Time Vision
901
has to see rightly in thought sense and vision three things,
actualities, possibles and imperatives. There is first a primary
intuitive action developed which sees principally the stream of
successive actualities in time, even as the ordinary mind, but with
an immediate directness of truth and spontaneous accuracy of
which the ordinary mind is not capable. It sees them first by a
perception, a thought action, a thought sense, a thought vision,
which at once detects the forces at work on persons and things,
the thoughts, intentions, impulsions, energies, influences in and
around them, those already formulated in them and those in
process of formation, those too that are coming or about to
come into or upon them from the environment or from secret
sources invisible to the normal mind, distinguishes by a rapid
intuitive analysis free from seeking or labour or by a synthetic
total view the complex of these forces, discerns the effective from
the ineffective or partly effective and sees too the result that is
to emerge. This is the integral process of the intuitive vision of
actualities, but there are others that are less complete in their
character. For there may be developed a power of seeing the
result without any previous or simultaneous perception of the
forces at work or the latter may be seen only afterwards and the
result alone leap at once and first into the knowledge. On the
other hand there may be a partial or complete perception of the
complex of forces, but an incertitude of the definitive result or
only a slowly arriving or relative certitude. These are stages in
the development of the capacity for a total and unified vision of
actualities.
This kind of intuitive knowledge is not an entirely perfect
instrument of time knowledge. It moves normally in the stream
of the present and sees rightly from moment to moment only the
present, the immediate past and the immediate future. It may, it
is true, project itself backward and reconstruct correctly by the
same power and process a past action or project itself forward
and reconstruct correctly something in the more distant future.
But this is for the normal power of the thought vision a more
rare and difficult effort and usually it needs for a freer use of
this self-projection the aid and support of the psychical seeing.
902
The Yoga of Self -F erf ection
But this is for the normal power of the thought vision a more
rare and difficult effort and usually it needs for a freer use of
this self-projection the aid and support of the psychical seeing.
902
The Yoga of Self -F erf ection
Moreover it can see only what will arrive in the undisturbed
process of the actualities and its vision no longer applies if some
unforeseen rush of forces or intervening power comes down
from regions of a larger potentiality altering the complex of
conditions, and this is a thing that constantly happens in the
action of forces in the time movement. It may help itself by the
reception of inspirations that illumine to it these potentialities
and of imperative revelations that indicate what is decisive in
them and its sequences and by these two powers correct the
limitations of the intuitive mind of actuality. But the capacity
of this first intuitive action to deal with these greater sources of
vision is never quite perfect, as must always be the case with an
inferior power in its treatment of the materials given to it from
a greater consciousness. A considerable limitation of vision by
its stress on the stream of immediate actualities must be always
its character.
It is possible however to develop a mind of luminous inspira¬
tion which will be more at home among the greater potentialities
of the time movement, see more easily distant things and at
the same time take up into itself, into its more brilliant, wide
and powerful light, the intuitive knowledge of actualities. This
inspired mind will see things in the light of the world’s larger
potentialities and note the stream of actuality as a selection and
result from the mass of forceful possibles. It will be liable, how¬
ever, if it is not attended with a sufficient revelatory knowledge
of imperatives, to a hesitation or suspension of determining view
as between various potential lines of the movement or even to a
movement away from the line of eventual actuality and follow¬
ing another not yet applicable sequence. The aid of imperative
revelations from above will help to diminish this limitation, but
here again there will be the difficulty of an inferior power dealing
with the materials given to it from the treasury of a higher light
and force. But it is possible to develop too a mind of luminous
revelation which taking into itself the two inferior movements
sees what is determined behind the play of potentialities and
actualities and observes these latter as its means of deploying
its imperative decisions. An intuitive mind thus constituted and
An intuitive mind thus constituted and
Towards the Supramental Time Vision
903
aided by an active psychic consciousness may be in command of
a very remarkable power of time knowledge.
At the same time it will be found that it is still a limited in¬
strument. In the first place it will represent a superior knowledge
working in the stuff of mind, cast into mental forms and still
subject to mental conditions and limitations. It will always lean
chiefly on the succession of present moments as a foundation for
its steps and successions of knowledge, however far it may range
backward or forward, — it will move in the stream of Time even
in its higher revelatory action and not see the movement from
above or in the stabilities of eternal time with their large ranges
of vision, and therefore it will always be bound to a secondary
and limited action and to a certain dilution, qualification and
relativity in its activities. Moreover, its knowing will be not a
possession in itself but a reception of knowledge. It will at most
create in place of the mind of ignorance a mind of self-forgetful
knowledge constantly reminded and illumined from a latent self-
awareness and all-awareness. The range, the extent, the normal
lines of action of the knowledge will vary according to the de¬
velopment, but it can never be free from very strong limitations.
And this limitation will give a tendency to the still environing or
subconsciously subsisting mind of ignorance to reassert itself, to
rush in or up, acting where the intuitive knowledge refuses or
is unable to act and bringing in with it again its confusion and
mixture and error. The only security will be a refusal to attempt
to know or at least a suspension of the effort of knowledge until
or unless the higher light descends and extends its action. This
self-restraint is difficult to mind and, too contentedly exercised,
may limit the growth of the seeker. If on the other hand the mind
of ignorance is allowed again to emerge and seek in its own
stumbling imperfect force, there may be a constant oscillation
between the two states or a mixed action of the two powers in
place of a definite though relative perfection.
The issue out of this dilemma is to a greater perfection
towards which the formation of the intuitive, inspired and rev¬
elatory mind is only a preparatory stage, and that comes by
a constant instreaming and descent of more and more of the
904
The Yoga of Self -F erf ection
supramental light and energy into the whole mental being and
a constant raising of the intuition and its powers towards their
source in the open glories of the supramental nature. There is
then a double action of the intuitive mind aware of, open to and
referring its knowledge constantly to the light above it for sup¬
port and confirmation and of that light itself creating a highest
mind of knowledge, — really the supramental action itself in a
more and more transformed stuff of mind and a less and less
insistent subjection to mental conditions. There is thus formed a
lesser supramental action, a mind of knowledge tending always
to change into the true supermind of knowledge. The mind of ig¬
norance is more and more definitely excluded, its place taken by
the mind of self-forgetful knowledge illumined by the intuition,
and the intuition itself more perfectly organised becomes capable
of answering to a larger and larger call upon it. The increasing
mind of knowledge acts as an intermediary power and, as it
forms itself, it works upon the other, transforms or replaces it
and compels the farther change which effects the transition from
mind to supermind. It is here that a change begins to take place in
the time consciousness and time knowledge which finds its base
and complete reality and significance only on the supramental
levels. It is therefore in relation to the truth of supermind that
its workings can be more effectively elucidated: for the mind
of knowledge is only a projection and a last step in the ascent
towards the supramental nature.
Appendix
to Part IV
Sri Aurobindo began another chapter of “The Yoga
of Self-Perfection” before deciding to discontinue the
publication of the Arya. He wrote two versions of the
opening of this chapter, which are reproduced here from
his typescript.
Chapter XXVI
The Supramental Time
Consciousness
[Version A]
He wrote two versions of the
opening of this chapter, which are reproduced here from
his typescript.
Chapter XXVI
The Supramental Time
Consciousness
[Version A]
The supermind in its supreme status is the truth-consciousness
of the Infinite, the inherent light and power of self-knowledge
and all-knowledge of the Supreme who is the self of all, the
living eternal truth of all that is and of whom all objects and
beings, all the universe and motion of things and happenings
in time is a partial continually proceeding manifestation. The
Supreme organises through the power of self-realisation and
self-manifestation that resides in this self-knowledge and all¬
knowledge all truth of his being that he has the will and delight to
put forth in his universal existence, — to create, as we say from
our standpoint. But this creation is not a making or bringing into
being of that which was non-existent, neither is it a construc¬
tion of illusory phenomena in a self of dream, but a revelation
in condition of being, substance of consciousness, movement of
force, name, form, idea, significance, of the truths of being of the
Eternal. All that manifests itself in time, is the coming into play,
effective disclosure, result, form, power, evolution, movement
of some truth of being, a truth of Sat, of the eternal existence of
the Supreme and Eternal.
The power that brings it into play is the infinite conscious¬
ness of the Supreme aware of itself and all that is itself, not
a limited mental consciousness like ours but supramental and
illimitable, not bound by this or that condition, but determining
out of an infinite truth of self-existence its own conditions, nor
by this or that relation or step and sequence, but capable of all
possible relations and steps and sequences. It is a power or force
inherent in that consciousness which spontaneously, sovereignly
908
The Yoga of Self -F erf ection
It is a power or force
inherent in that consciousness which spontaneously, sovereignly
908
The Yoga of Self -F erf ection
and imperatively compels into manifestation the truth it sees and
dwells on and evolves its play, combinations, sequences, not a
limited mental will and power like ours, but a conscious force
supramental and illimitable, Tapas, Chit-shakti, not bound to
this or that movement and result of energy, but ordering out of
the infinite truth of self-existence the movement and result of
all possible energies. And it is finally an Ananda of the being
that deploys itself, that ranges at will among the infinities of
consciousness and of its power of manifestation, not a limited
mental joy or pleasure like our chequered delight of being and
action and feeling, but supramental and illimitable, not subject
to a given set of reactions, but embracing and taking a free and
sovereign and compelling delight of all that is possible in the
truth of the infinite consciousness and existence.
[Version B]
It is necessary in order to understand the phenomena of the
supramental time consciousness to realise very firmly certain
truths which are strange to our ordinary mentality or presented
to it only as constructions of the metaphysical intellect, intel¬
ligible but unsubstantial abstractions as all mere philosophical
statements must be, but to the supermind are realised experience
and the normal and natural truth of the consciousness in which it
lives, moves, acts and manifests its being. It is only in their light
that we can grasp the truth and reality and the manifestation
of things in time, otherwise only an illusion or else a flux of
transient, inexplicable and incalculable actualities, and the law,
source and order of their manifestation, otherwise only a process
of inscrutable Law or else a play of chance and probabilities and
possibilities. The truths that reveal the inner meaning and way
of the universe are of a spiritual and supramental order. It is
difficult however to express them at all in a language adapted to
the mental intellect and one can at most try to indicate.
The first of the truths that thus becomes real to the con¬
sciousness is the truth of infinite being, a thing abstract to
The Supramental Time Consciousness
909
The first of the truths that thus becomes real to the con¬
sciousness is the truth of infinite being, a thing abstract to
The Supramental Time Consciousness
909
our present sense and intelligence to which only phenomena
are concrete and real, but to the supramental being always
and absolutely and intimately present and real. This indeed is
that which to its knowledge, sense, vision, idea, feeling is most
concretely real and the phenomena which are now so close and
all-important to us, are to it less concrete, not self-existent at
all but dependent on the support of the infinite consciousness
and its force of presentation: there is thus a complete reversal
of the order in the conception of realities. It is not that the
phenomena in their turn become abstract, unreal, unsubstantial
creations of consciousness, — that is only the result of a certain
exclusive realisation, when there is an identification with the
essence of absolute being to the exclusion of its power, — but
that they are felt as existing here only in a certain movement of
the infinite, real only because they are made, as it were, out of
the substance of infinite being. That which determines them, the
truth of their essence and nature, svarupa, svabhdva, that which
gives them the power to be, is not originally here, but above in
the supreme being and consciousness of the infinite. All their true
truth, all their real reality is there in that supreme consciousness
and here only hidden in the inmost heart of their existence,
guhdydm, but not fully expressed in their overt outward phe¬
nomena. Therefore to know them only through the externals
or through superficial inner movements which is all that our
mind now does, is to miss their true truth and reality and to
know them only with a partial and mistaken knowledge subject
to the limitations, errors, incapacities of the mental ignorance.
All that determines their manifestation in our time and space is
also beyond and here only in the hidden secrecy within them,
and therefore the mind following their line of manifestation
misses that which determines them and can only see a part of
the actually present outward executive play of forces that help to
give them their immediate character and direction. It is only the
consciousness that reigns above, that of the supreme Ishwara,
and is present in their secret heart, hrddese tisthati, that knows
and determines all their true truth and their manifestation in
eternal time.
910
The Yoga of Self -F erf ection
It is only the
consciousness that reigns above, that of the supreme Ishwara,
and is present in their secret heart, hrddese tisthati, that knows
and determines all their true truth and their manifestation in
eternal time.
910
The Yoga of Self -F erf ection
This supreme of infinite being is supreme in the sense of be¬
ing above the manifestation in time, its eternal origin, support,
control, itself beyond time and space. It is this of which the
supermind, itself a luminous power of this supreme of infinite
being, is always and fundamentally conscious.
Note on the Text
Note on the Text
THE SYNTHESIS OE YOGA first appeared in seventy-seven monthly
instalments in the philosophical review Arya, beginning with its first is¬
sue, August 1914, and continuing until its last, January 1921. The Arya
text of the Synthesis consisted of five introductory chapters numbered
I-V and seventy-two other chapters numbered I-II and IV-LXXIII
(the number III was inadvertently omitted). Each of the instalments
was written immediately before its publication.
In the Arya the division of the main series of chapters into four
parts, corresponding to the yogas of Works, Knowledge, Devotion and
Self-Perfection, was not marked explicitly until the fifth year, when the
heading “The Yoga of Self-Perfection” began to be added above the
chapter numbers.
The Synthesis of Yoga was left incomplete when the Arya
ceased publication in January 1921. Before abandoning the work,
Sri Aurobindo wrote part of a chapter entitled “The Supramental
Time Consciousness”, which was meant to follow the last published
chapter of “The Yoga of Self-Perfection”. He never completed this
chapter and never published the portion that he had written.
A letter that Sri Aurobindo wrote in 1936 gives some idea of his
purpose in writing The Synthesis of Yoga and his overall plan for the
work:
The Synthesis of Yoga was not meant to give a method for all
to follow. Each side of the Yoga was dealt with separately with
all its possibilities, and an indication [was given] as to how
they meet so that one starting from knowledge could realise
Karma and Bhakti also and so with each path. It was intended
when the Self-Perfection was finished, to suggest a way in
which all could be combined, but this was never written.
One can gauge how much of The Synthesis of Yoga remained to be
written by comparing the actually completed chapters of “The Yoga
914
The Synthesis of Yoga
One can gauge how much of The Synthesis of Yoga remained to be
written by comparing the actually completed chapters of “The Yoga
914
The Synthesis of Yoga
of Self-Perfection” with the outline of this part found in chapter X of
Part rV. The “elements and requisites of perfection, siddhi” which are
set forth discursively in that chapter are listed more explicitly in Sapta
Chatusthaya, a text of 1913 published along with Record of Yoga in
volume 10 of The Complete Works of Sri Aurobindo. The system
of seven (sapta) sets of four elements (catustaya) evidently underlies the
structure of Part IV of The Synthesis of Yoga. The last and most general
catustaya, the siddhi catustaya, is taken up first, in chapters I to IX.
Chapters XI to XVIII correspond to the sdnti and samatd catustayas,
the first two of the seven. Chapters XIX to XXV, and the incomplete
chapter “The Supramental Time Consciousness”, correspond to the
first two elements of the third or vijhdna catustaya. By breaking off at
this point, Sri Aurobindo left untreated the rest of the third and all of
the fourth catustayas. He had covered the fifth and sixth catustayas to
some degree in the rest of the Synthesis, but undoubtedly intended to
deal with them in more depth before concluding.
When Sri Aurobindo turned his attention to The Synthesis of Yoga
during the 1930s after a gap of more than a decade, he made no effort
to complete “The Yoga of Self-Perfection”. Instead he applied himself
to the revision of already existing chapters.
The Revision of The Synthesis of Yoga
Sri Aurobindo revised the text of The Synthesis of Yoga during three
distinct periods, referred to below as Period 1, Period 2, and Period 3.
Period 1. At various times after the printed text of the Arya began
to appear, perhaps up to the end of the 1920s, Sri Aurobindo made
corrections to certain chapters of The Synthesis of Yoga while reading
over his own copies of the journal. Most of these chapters received
only sporadic and minor revision; two chapters of Part II, however,
were substantially altered.
Period 2. During 1932, and possibly somewhat before and after, Sri
Aurobindo undertook a full-scale revision of The Synthesis of Yoga
with a view to publishing it as a book. At this time he revised all the
chapters of what became Part I, “The Yoga of Divine Works”, and nine
chapters of what became Part II, “The Yoga of Integral Knowledge”
Note on the Text
915
At this time he revised all the
chapters of what became Part I, “The Yoga of Divine Works”, and nine
chapters of what became Part II, “The Yoga of Integral Knowledge”
Note on the Text
915
(the addition of part-titles was part of the revision). He began this
work by marking up pages torn from the Arya and then continued on
copies handwritten or typed by disciples.
Period 3. During the early 1940s, Sri Aurobindo did further work on
the later chapters of Part I, using typed copies of the pages from the
Arya revised during Period 2. At the same time he began to write two
new chapters, which he apparently intended to add to this part, but
which he abandoned before completion.
During the later part of the 1940s, Sri Aurobindo lightly revised
the entire first part of the Synthesis while preparing it for publication.
What follows is a brief part-by-part description of the revision.
Introduction: The Conditions of the Synthesis
Sri Aurobindo made sporadic minor changes to these five chapters dur¬
ing Period 1 and possibly also Period 2 of the revision. His alterations
and additions, marked in issues of the Arya and a set of pages torn
from the journal, were not discovered until the 1970s, and appear as
part of the text for the first time in the present edition.
Part I : T he Yoga of D ivine Works
The twelve chapters of this part correspond to eleven Arya chapters:
I-II and IV -XII. (There was no chapter numbered III in the Arya-,
the present chapters V and VI correspond to Arya chapter VI.) Sri
Aurobindo revised each of these chapters during Period 2. The work
done ranges from the light retouching of some pages to the rewriting or
new-writing of long passages. During Period 3 he continued the work
of revision begun in Period 2, concentrating on the last six chapters,
and prepared the entire part for publication.
C hapter I. Moderately revised during Period 2.
C hapters II - IV. Heavily revised during Period 2. Sri Aurobindo added
the entire second half of chapter IV at this time. He also made stylistic
changes and added new material to all three chapters, but did not
fundamentally alter their structure.
C hapters V and VI. Completely rewritten during Period 2 on the basis
of Arya chapter VI, little of which remains in the final text.
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The Synthesis of Yoga
C hapters V and VI. Completely rewritten during Period 2 on the basis
of Arya chapter VI, little of which remains in the final text.
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The Synthesis of Yoga
C hapters VII - X II. Extensively revised during Periods 2 and 3. The
typed sheets containing the later stages of the Period 2 revision of
chapters VII and VIII were misplaced before the start of Period 3,
obliging Sri Aurobindo to work on transcripts of the Arya pages con¬
taining only the earlier stages of the revision. The unused versions from
Period 2 have since been found, and are reproduced in the reference
volume (volume 35).
Appendix: Chapter XIII. During Period 3, Sri Aurobindo wrote this
draft of a chapter meant to follow the last complete chapter of Part
I, but did not prepare it for publication in the 1948 edition of the
Synthesis. Found among his papers after his passing, it was published
for the first time in the 1955 edition of the book.
Around the same time that Sri Aurobindo worked on the chapter
published as “Appendix: Chapter XIII”, he produced several drafts of
a chapter entitled “The Yogic Consciousness and Works”, which he
also intended to place at the end of Part I. None of these drafts are
sufficiently well worked out to be published as part of the text of The
Synthesis of Yoga. The most important of them are reproduced in the
reference volume (volume 35).
Part II: The Yoga of Integral Knowledge
These twenty-eight chapters correspond to Arya chapters XIII -XL. Sri
Aurobindo revised eleven of these chapters during Periods 1 and 2, but
did not prepare any of them for publication. The Period 2 revision was
incorporated into the text of the 1955 edition; the Period 1 revision
was not discovered until the 1970s and appears in print for the first
time in the present edition.
C hapter I. Extensively revised during Period 2.
C hapter II. First four paragraphs revised significantly during Period 2.
Chapters III -VIII. Never revised.
C hapter IX . Extensively revised during Period 2.
ChaptersX -XIV. Never revised.
C hapter XV. Moderately revised during Period 1.
Chapter XVI. One page lightly revised during Period 1.
ChapterXVIl . Some of the later paragraphs revised significantly during
Note on the Text
917
Period 1; the first paragraph separately revised during Period 2. The
present text includes both sets of revision, which do not overlap.
Chapters XVIII -XX . Never revised.
C hapters X X I - X X IV. Extensively revised during Period 2.
The
present text includes both sets of revision, which do not overlap.
Chapters XVIII -XX . Never revised.
C hapters X X I - X X IV. Extensively revised during Period 2.
Chapter XXV. Never revised.
C hapter XXVI. Lightly revised during Period 2.
ChaptersXXVIl and XXVIII. Never revised.
Part III: The Yoga of Divine Love
No chapter in this part was ever revised by Sri Aurobindo. The texts
of these eight chapters are identical to those of Arya chapters XLI-
XLVIII. They were renumbered I -VIII and the part-title was added by
the editors of the 1955 edition.
Part IV: The Yoga of Self-Perfection
No chapter in this part was ever revised by Sri Aurobindo. The texts
of these twenty-five chapters are identical to those of Arya chapters
XLIX-LXXIII. They were renumbered I -XXV by the editors of the
1955 edition. The Appendix consists of two incomplete versions of a
chapter Sri Aurobindo began to write in 1920 or 1921, just before he
discontinued the Arya.
Publishing History
The revised versions of chapters VII -XII of Part I of The Synthesis of
Yoga were published in the quarterly review Advent between August
1946 and April 1948. The entire first part was published by the Sri
Aurobindo Library, Madras, in October 1948. In 1950, and again in
1953, the same text was brought out by the Sri Aurobindo Library,
New York. In each of these editions, the title of the book was given as
The Synthesis of Yoga. A half-title specified that the contents consisted
only of Part I (“Book One” in the American edition) of the complete
work. Separate publication of the other parts had been planned, but
this plan was never carried out.
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The Synthesis of Yoga
In 1955, the Arya text of the Introduction, the 1948 text of Part I,
a text of Part II incorporating Sri Aurobindo’s revisions from Period 2,
and the Arya texts of the chapters comprising Part III and Part IV,
were published by the Sri Aurobindo International University Centre
as On Yoga I: The Synthesis of Yoga. (On Yoga 11, published in 1958,
consisted of a selection of Sri Aurobindo’s letters on yoga.) The in¬
complete chapter “The Supermind and the Yoga of Works” appeared
in this edition for the first time as chapter XIII of Part 1. The SAIUC
edition was reprinted, with corrections, in 1957. The same publisher
(under the new name Sri Aurobindo International Centre of Education)
issued a new edition of the same text in 1965.
In 1970 The Synthesis of Yoga was published as volumes 20 and
21 of the Sri Aurobindo Birth Centenary Library. This edition was
reprinted many times.
In 1970 The Synthesis of Yoga was published as volumes 20 and
21 of the Sri Aurobindo Birth Centenary Library. This edition was
reprinted many times.
The present edition has been thoroughly checked against all re¬
lated manuscripts and printed texts. Many typographical and other
errors have been corrected. The edition includes for the first time Sri
Aurobindo’s scattered revisions in the Introduction and substantial
revision of chapters XV -XVII of Part II. It is the first edition of the
book to include the text of “The Supramental Time Consciousness”,
the incomplete chapter Sri Aurobindo wrote for Part IV before setting
aside “The Yoga of Self-Perfection”.