/ have m e t S pirit with spirit, S e lf with self, But I have loved too the body o f m y god.
(Sri Aurobindo, Savltri, Book X, Canto IV, p. 649) Nature shall live to m anifest secret God,
The S pirit s h a ll take up the hum an play, This e arthly life becom e life divine
(7f>/d.,Book XI, Canto I, p. 711) Eternal status a n d eternal dynam is are both true o f the R eal ity which its e lf surpasses both status a n d dynam is; the im m o bile and the m obile Brahm an are b o th ;the sam e Reality.
(Sir Aurobindo, The Life Divine, p. 459) We have... to possess consciously the active Brahm an w ith out losing po sse ssio n o f the sile n t Self. We have a preserve the inn e r silence, tranquility, p a s s iv ity as a foundation; but in p lace o f an a lo o f indifference to the w orks o f the active Brahm an we have to arrive a t an equal an d im partial delight in them ; in place o f a refusal to participate lest o u r freedom and peace be lost we have to arrive a t a conscious possession o f the active Brahm an whose jo y o f existence does n o t abrogate H is peace, n o r His lordship o f a ll workings im pair H is calm freedom in the m idst o f His works.
I'Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis o f Yoga, p. 389) The discussion in the preceding chapter has made the point clear that since our Yoga aims at the realisation of the Divine in the outer consciousness and life as well as in the inner one, the Jivanmukta with his aloof indifference to or at the best a be nevolent tolerance fo r the dynam ic w aking existence can never be our ideal.
But what are after all the essential difficulties of spiritual realisation on the gross physical plane? Why is the life of action and creation viewed with so much misgiving by most of the tra d i tional. spiritual seekers? W hat makes our present w orldly e xist ence apparently so incorrigible in its nature as to induce even Sri Krishna, the propounder of the gospel of divine action, to almost adm it at the end th a t to shun this transient and unhappy world in perhaps after all the best possible solution?
A na w h a t a b o u t th a t w o n d e rfu l d y n a m ic sa in S w am i Vivekananda? Did he not at the end give the sim ile of a god's tail in order to represent the im possibility of transform ation? Alas, straighten it as much as you like, but release it- and the moment after, the w retched thing becom es curled again! It looks alm ost an irony of situation that this dynam ic personality who did not flinch to declare in the earlier part of his Yogic life:
“ I have lost all wish for my salvation, may I be born again and again and suffers thousands of m iseries so that I may w o r ship the only God th a t exists, the only God I believe in, the sum- total of ail souls,-and above all, my God the wicked, my God the m iserable, my God the poor of all races, of all species is the special object of my worship."
-should alm ost abdicate and confess just two years before his passing away:
“ I have bundled my thing and am w aiting of the great d e liv erer.
"Shiva, 0 Shiva, carry my boat to the other shore/
"After all, I am only the boy who used to listen with rapt w onderm ent to the w onderful words of Ram akrishna under the Banyan at Dakshineswar. T hat is my true nature: w orks and a c tivities, doing good and so forth are all superim positions. Now I again hear his voice; the same old voice thrilling my soul. Bonds are breaking-love dying, w ork becom ing tasteless- the glam our
is off life. Only the voice of the M aster is calling. - I come Lord, I come'. 'Let the dead bury the dead, follow thou me.’-’ l come, my beloved Lord, I come.'
“ Yes, 1 come Nirvana is before me. I teel it at tim es-the same infinite ocean of peace, without a ripple, a breath...
‘T h e sw eetest m oments of my life have been when I was drifting; i am d rifting again-with the bright warm sun ahead and masses of vegetation around-and in the heat everything is so still, so still, so calm -and I am drifting languidly - in the warm heart of the river! I dare not m ake a splash with m y hands or feet-for fear o f breaking the m arvilous stillness, still ness that makes you fee! sure it is an illusion.
“B ehind m y w ork was ambition, behind m y love was p e rso n ality, behind m y p u rity was fear, behind my guidance the thirst for pow er! Now they are vanishing, and I drift. I come! Mother, I come! In Thy warm bosom, floating w heresoever Thou takest me, in the voiceless, in the strange, into he wondertand, I come- a spectator, no m ore an actor."
Are then actions and creations such great binding elem ents as to be obligatorily left out at the end? Did not Sri Ram akrishna give the image of a pregnant wom an whose w ork-load dim in ishes day by day?
But the d ifficulty experienced by a spiritual seeker in guard ing the peace of the silent Self while engaged in dynam ics a ctiv ity is more incidental then intrinsic. It arises out of the mental being's exclusive concentration on its “plane of pure existence in which consciousness is at rest in passivity and delight of existence at rest in peace of existence." Because of this exclu siveness, when the Mind seeks at times to ally itself to action, >n the absence of adequate preparation it plunges headlong into the old obscuring m ovem ent of force instead of exercising a conscious m astery over it.
It is because of this ignorant relapse brought about by the dynam ic play that the m ental Purusha is so ready to condem n all action and dynam ism ,. To its judgm ent, all dynam ism must be foreign to the suprem e nature of the Absolute whose only true and whole bring m ust be a status silent and im m utable, fe ature less and quiescent. Thus cancelling the dynam is of Brahman, the Mind goes on to assert that this suprem e Reality can at all be realised only through a consciousness th a t has itself fallen nonactive and silent and, w hat is more, “ liberation m ust destroy all possibility of mental or bodily living and annihilate the indi vidual existence for ever in an im personal in fin ity ”
But we shall presently see that none of the foregoing as sum ptions is absolutely valid. As a m atter of fact, all the d iffi culty disappears if along with the plane of pure existence one can em brace the plane of conscious fo rce of existence, the Chit- Tapas, of Sachchidananda, in which “consciousness is active as power and will and delight is active as joy of existence."
And this is possible. Because Brahm an itself is integral, It has an active aspect as well asa static one and both are equally re a l. T he in te g ra l re a lis a tio n d e m a n d s th e re a lis a tio n of S achchidananda in both His aspects, in the aspect in which He is “sovereign, free, lord of things, acting out of an inalienable calm pouring itself out in infinite action and quality out of an eternal seif-concentration, the one suprem e Person holding in him self all this play of personality in a vast equal impersonality, possessing the infinite phenom enon of th e universe w ithout a t tachm ent but w ithout any inseparable aloofness, with a divine m astery and an innum erable radiation of his eternal lum inous self-delight - as a m anifestation which he holds, but by which he is not held, which he governs freely and by which therefore he is not b o u n d ” -as well as in that in w hich He is “ silent passive quiatistic, seif absorbed, self-sufficient,...one, im personal, w ith out play of qualities, turned away from the infinite phenomenon of the universe or viewing it with indifference and without partici-
patio n "
We have said that the eternal status of being as well as the eternal m ovem ent of being are both real of the suprem e Reality. But the question arises: can these two statuses co-exist? Are these sim ultaneously realisable? Or, rather, one has to withdraw from one of the statuses in order to realise the other, so much so that, depending on the status on which one concentrates at the m oment, one of these may appear to be the inertia of repose while the other the inertia of m echanical repetition of movement.
An integral spiritual realisation affirm s that the eternal sta tus and the eternal dynam is are not only both real but they are also sim ultaneous, T h e status adm its of action of dynam is and the action does not abrogate the status.’ Thus “all that is in he kinesis, the m ovem ent, the action, the creation, is the Brahman; the becom ing is a m ovem ent of the being; Tim e is a m anifesta tion of the Eternal, All is one Being, one C onsciousness, one even in infinite multiplicity, and there is no need to bisect it into an opposition of transcendent Reality and unreal cosm ic M ay"
But the difficulty is that it is often trenchantly asserted as a fact o f sp iritu a l experience that the Reality is indeed featureless and immutable and the universe of manifestation is brought about by the illusionary Maya-Power of the Supreme. Although this assertion that the only active Power the absolute Truth pos sesses is that of creating illusion and falsehood and ‘dissolving’ them in turn lacks in vraisim ilitude, the rejoinder is made that this is not a question of vraisem blance or no, nor is it an issue that can be settled by m eans of logical validation or otherwise, fo r this is the ineffable m ystery of Maya (anirvacaniya) not to be com prehended by reason or mind.
And this position is sound indeed. For, w hatever the merits or demerits, the strong or weak points, of a particular philosophi cal form ulation, the spiritual experience that it seeks to repre sent rem ains in itself eternally valid and can only be integrated
in the compass of another experience much more wide and much more lofty. For, as Sri Aurobindo has so forcefully pointed out, ‘a single decisive spiritual experience may undo a whole edifice of reasoning and conclusions erected by the logical intelligence."
So, instead of engaging in sterile intellectual debates, in this m atter of the reality o r otherw ise of the dynam is of the A bsolute, let us listen to Sri Aurobindo describing his own personal spir itual realisation:
“The solution of the m atter must rest riot upon logic, but upon a growing, ever heightening, widening spiritual experience- an experience which must of course include or have passed through that of Nirvana nad Maya, otherwise it would not be com ple te an d would have no decisive value.
“ Now to reach N irvana was the first radical result of my own Yoga, ft threw me suddenly into a condition above and w ithout through, unstained by any mental or vital m ovem ent; there was no ego, no real world- only when one looked through the im m o bile senses, som ething perceived or bore upon its sheer silence a world of empty forms, m aterialised shadows w ithout true s u b stance. There was no One or many even, only ju s t absolutely That, featureless, relationless, sheer, indescribable, unthinkable, absolute, yet suprem ely real and solely real. This was no mental re a lis a tio n nor som ething glim psed so m e w h e re a b o ve ,-n o abstraction,-it was positive, the only positive reaWy-although not a spatial physical world pervading, occupying or rather flooding and drowning this sem blance of a physical world, leaving no room or space fo r any reality but itself, allowing nothing else to seem at all actual, positive o r substantial... W hat it [the experi ence] brought was an inexpressible Peace, a stupendous Si lence, an infinity of release and freedom . I lived in that Nirvana day and night before it began to admit other things into itself or m odify itself at all, and the inner heart of experience, a constant m em ory of it and its power to return remained until in the end
it began to disappear into a g re a te r Super consciousness from above. But m eanwhile realisation added itself to realisation and fused itself with this original experience. At an early stage the aspect o f an ittusionary world gave place to one in which illusion is only a small surface phenomenon with an im m ense Divine Reality behind it and a suprem e Divine Reality above it and an intense Divine Reality in the heart of everything that had seemed at first only a cinem atic shape or shadow. And this was no reim prisonm ent in the sense, no dim inution o r fall from suprem e ex perience, it cam rather as a constant heightening and widening of the Truth; it was the Spirit that saw objects, not the senses, and the Peace, the Silence, the freedom in Infinity remained al ways with the world or all worlds only as a continuous incident in the tim eless eternity of the Divine.
“ ..Nirvana in my liberated consciousness turned out to be the beginning of my realisation, a first step towards the com plete thing, not the sole true attainm ent possible or even a culm inating finale."
The world is thus real, the Becom ing is as real as the Being, the dynam is of Sachchidananda is as much a spiritual fact as His im m obile status. Indeed, the Divine does not contain all only in 'a transcendent consciousness. He is the one Self of all, sar- vabhatantaratm a, He is the All, vasudeva sarvam , not merely in the 'unique essence’ but in the manifold names and forms. All the soul-life, mental, vital, bodily existence of all that exists [is] one indivisible m ovement and activity of the Being who is the same for ever." “ All is one Being, one consciousness, one even in infinite m u ltiplicity,"
Thus action and creation cannot in the very nature of things be incom patible with the perfect and total realisation of the Su preme; a really dynam ic living cannot go counter to the attain ment of the suprem e status of being; fo r “all that is in kinesis, the movement, the action, the creation is Brahman.
Granted that Brahman has two aspects equally real, equally true: an active one as well as a passive one. Granted that there is ample theoretical justification why the two aspects can be sim ultaneously em braced and realised. But still the question re* mains: Why is it that “in experience we find that.,.it is, normally, a quiescence that brings in the stable realisation of the eternal and the infinite: it is in silence or quietude that we feel most firm ly the Something that is behind the world shown to us by our mind and senses.?”
It is thus reasoned that, in practice if not in theory, all action, all creation, all determ ining perception must in their very nature limit and obscure the stable realisation, and hence these have to dim inish and disappear if we would seek to enter the in d ivis ible consciousness of the Real.
Here too, as well shall presently see, the reasoning is falla cious. For it is not dynam ism as such that binds and involves the soul of the seeker; it is the intrinsic incapacity of our mind- consciounsess that is at the root of the trouble.