{"id":1221,"date":"2013-07-13T01:33:22","date_gmt":"2013-07-13T01:33:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/localhost\/?p=1221"},"modified":"2013-07-13T01:33:22","modified_gmt":"2013-07-13T01:33:22","slug":"07-the-divine-personality-vol-21-the-synthesis-of-yoga-volume-21","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/01-works-of-sri-aurobindo\/01-sabcl\/21-the-synthesis-of-yoga-volume-21\/07-the-divine-personality-vol-21-the-synthesis-of-yoga-volume-21","title":{"rendered":"-07_The Divine Personality.htm"},"content":{"rendered":"\n\n
\n
\n


\n
\nChapter V<\/span><\/font><\/b> <\/font><\/p>\n

 <\/font>The
\nDivine Personality<\/span><\/font><\/b><\/p>\n

\n <\/font><\/p>\n

        O<\/font><\/b>NE<\/font>
\nquestion rises immediately in a synthetic Yoga which must not only comprise but
\nunify knowledge and devotion, the difficult and troubling question of the
\ndivine Personality. All the trend of modern thought has been towards the
\nbelittling of personality; it has seen behind the complex facts of existence
\nonly a great impersonal force, an obscure becoming, and that too works itself
\nout through impersonal forces and impersonal laws, while personality presents
\nitself only as a subsequent, subordinate, partial, transient phenomenon upon
\nthe face of this impersonal movement. Granting even to this Force a consciousness,
\nthat seems to be impersonal, indeterminate, void in essence of all but abstract
\nqualities or energies; for everything else is only a result, a minor
\nphenomenon. Ancient Indian thought starting from quite the other end of the
\nscale arrived on most of its lines at the same generalisation. It conceived of
\nan impersonal existence as the original and eternal truth; personality is only
\nan illusion or at best a phenomenon of the mind. <\/p>\n

On the other
\nhand, the way of devotion is impossible if the personality of the Divine cannot
\nbe taken as a reality, a real reality and not a hypostasis of the illusion.
\nThere can be no love without a lover and beloved. If our personality is an
\nillusion and the Personality to whom our adoration rises only a primary aspect
\nof the illusion, and if we believe that, then love and adoration must at once
\nbe killed, or can only survive in the illogical passion of the heart denying by
\nits strong beats of life the clear and dry truths of the reason. To love and
\nadore a shadow of our minds or a bright cosmic phenomenon which vanishes from
\nthe eye of Truth, may be possible, but the way of salvation cannot be built
\nupon a foundation of wilful<\/span> self-deception. The Bhakta
\nindeed does not allow these doubts of the intellect to come in
\n <\/p>\n

\nPage \u2013 552<\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\n<\/div>\n

his way; he has the divinations
\nof his heart, and these are to him sufficient. But the sadhaka of the integral
\nYoga has to know the eternal and ultimate Truth and not to persist to the end
\nin the delight of a Shadow. If the impersonal is the sole enduring truth, then
\na firm synthesis is impossible. He can at most take the divine personality as a
\nsymbol, a powerful and effective fiction, but he will have in the end to
\noverpass it and to abandon devotion for the sole pursuit of the ultimate knowledge.
\nHe will have to empty being of all its symbols, values, contents in order to
\narrive at the featureless Reality. <\/p>\n

We have said,
\nhowever, that personality and impersonality, as our minds understand them, are
\nonly aspects of the Divine and both are contained in his being; they are one
\nthing which we see from two opposite sides and into which we enter by two
\ngates. We have to see this more clearly in order to rid ourselves of any doubts
\nwith which the intellect may seek to afflict us as we follow the impulse of
\ndevotion and the intuition of love or to pursue us into the joy of the divine union.
\nThey fall away indeed from that joy, but if we are too heavily weighted with
\nthe philosophical mind, they may follow us almost up to its threshold. It is
\nwell therefore to discharge ourselves of them as early as may be by perceiving
\nthe limits of the intellect, the rational philosophic mind, in its peculiar way
\nof approaching the truth and the limits even of the spiritual experience which
\nsets out from the approach through the intellect, to see that it need not be
\nthe whole integrality of the highest and widest spiritual experience. Spiritual
\nintuition is always a more luminous guide than the discriminating reason, and
\nspiritual intuition addresses itself to us not only through the reason, but
\nthrough the rest of our being as well, through the heart and the life also. The
\nintegral knowledge will then be that which takes account of all and unifies
\ntheir diverse truths. The intellect itself will be more deeply satisfied if it
\ndoes not confine itself to its own data, but accepts truth of the heart and the
\nlife also and gives to them their absolute spiritual value. <\/p>\n

The nature of
\nthe philosophical intellect is to move among ideas and to give them a sort of
\nabstract reality of their own apart from all their concrete representations
\nwhich affect our
\n <\/p>\n

\nPage \u2013 553<\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\n<\/div>\n

life and personal consciousness.
\nIts bent is to reduce these representations to their barest and most general
\nterms and to subtilise<\/span> even these if possible into
\nsome final abstraction. The pure intellectual direction travels away from life.
\nIn judging things it tries to get back from their effects on our personality and
\nto arrive at whatever general and impersonal truth may be behind them; it is
\ninclined to treat that kind of truth as the only real truth of being or at
\nleast as the one superior and permanent power of reality. Therefore it is bound
\nby its own nature to end in its extremes at an absolute impersonality and an
\nabsolute abstraction. This is where the ancient philosophies ended. They
\nreduced everything to three abstractions, existence, consciousness and bliss of
\nbeing, and they tended to get rid of the two of these three which seemed
\ndependent on the first and most abstract, and to throw all back into a pure featureless
\nexistence from which everything else had been discharged, all representations,
\nall values, except the one infinite and timeless fact of being. But the
\nintellect had still one farther possible step to take and it took it in
\nBuddhistic philosophy. It found that even this final fact of existence was only
\na representation; it abstracted that also and got to an infinite zero which might
\nbe either a void or an eternal inexpressible. <\/p>\n

The heart and
\nlife, as we know, have an exactly opposite law. They cannot live with
\nabstractions; they can find their satisfaction only in things that are concrete
\nor can be made seizable; whether physically, mentally or spiritually, their
\nobject is not something which they seek to discriminate and arrive at by
\nintellectual abstraction; a living becoming of it or a conscious possession and
\njoy of their object is what they seek. Nor is it the satisfaction of an
\nabstract mind or impersonal existence to which they respond, but the joy and
\nthe activity of a being, a conscious Person in us, whether finite or infinite,
\nto whom the delights and powers of his existence are a reality. Therefore when the
\nheart and life turn towards the Highest and the Infinite, they arrive not at an
\nabstract existence or non-existence, a Sat or else a Nirvana, but at an
\nexistent, a Sat Purusha, not merely at a consciousness, but at a conscious
\nBeing, a Chaitanya Purusha, not merely at a purely impersonal delight of the
\nIs, but at an
\n <\/p>\n

\nPage \u2013 554<\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\n<\/div>\n

infinite I Am of bliss, an
\nAnandamaya Purusha; nor can they immerge and lose his consciousness and bliss
\nin featureless existence, but must insist on all three in one, for delight of
\nexistence is their highest power and without consciousness delight cannot be possessed.
\nThat is the sense of the supreme figure of the intensest<\/span>
\nIndian religion of love, Sri Krishna, the All-blissful and All-beautiful. <\/p>\n

The
\nintelligence can also follow this trend, but it ceases then to be the pure
\nintellect; it calls in its power of imagination to its aid, it becomes the
\nimage-maker, the creator of symbols and values, a spiritual artist and poet.
\nTherefore the severest intellectual philosophy admits the Saguna, the divine
\nPerson, only as the supreme cosmic symbol; go beyond it to reality and you will
\narrive, it says, at last to the Nirguna<\/span>, the pure
\nImpersonal. The rival philosophy asserts the superiority of the Saguna; that
\nwhich is impersonal is, it will perhaps say, only the material, the stuff of
\nhis spiritual nature out of which he manifests the powers of his being,
\nconsciousness and bliss, all that expresses him; the impersonal is the apparent
\nnegative out of which he looses the temporal variations of his eternal positive
\nof personality. There are evidently here two instincts, or, if we hesitate to
\napply that word to the intellect, two innate powers of our being which are
\ndealing each in its own manner with the same Reality. <\/p>\n

Both the ideas
\nof the intellect, its discriminations, and the aspirations of the heart and
\nlife, their approximations, have behind them realities at which they are the
\nmeans of arriving. Both are justified by spiritual experience; both arrive at
\nthe divine absolute of that which they are seeking. But still each tends, if
\ntoo exclusively indulged, to be hampered by the limitations of its innate
\nquality and its characteristic means. We see that in our earthly living, where
\nthe heart and life followed exclusively failed to lead to any luminous issue,
\nwhile an exclusive intellectuality becomes either remote, abstract and impotent
\nor a sterile critic or dry mechanist. Their sufficient harmony and just
\nreconciliation is one of the great problems of our psychology and our action. <\/p>\n

The reconciling
\npower lies beyond in the intuition. But
\n <\/p>\n

\nPage \u2013 555<\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\n<\/div>\n

there is an intuition which
\nserves the intellect and an intuition which serves the heart and the life, and
\nif we follow either of these exclusively, we shall not get much farther than before;
\nwe shall only make more intimately real to us, but still separately, the things
\nat which the other and less seeing powers are aiming. But the fact that it can
\nlend itself impartially to all parts of our being, \u2013 for even the body has its
\nintuitions, \u2013 shows that the intuition is not exclusive, but an integral
\ntruth-finder. We have to question the intuition of our whole being, not only separately
\nin each part of it, nor in a sum of their findings, but beyond all these lower
\ninstruments, beyond even their first spiritual correspondents, by rising into
\nthe native home of the intuition which is the native home of the infinite and
\nillimitable Truth, ŗtasya<\/i><\/span> sve<\/span> dame<\/i>,
\nwhere all existence discovers its unity. That is what the ancient Veda meant
\nwhen it cried, \u201cThere is a firm truth hidden by truth (the eternal truth
\nconcealed by this other of which we have here these lower intuitions); there the
\nten hundred rays of light stand together; that is One.\u201d \u201cŗtena<\/i><\/span> ŗtam<\/span> apihitam<\/span>
\ndhruvam<\/span> . . . daśa<\/span> śatā<\/span> saha<\/span> tasthus<\/span>, tad ekam<\/span>.<\/i>\u201d (Rig Veda
\nV. 62.1.)<\/p>\n

The spiritual
\nintuition lays hold always upon the reality; it is the luminous harbinger of
\nspiritual realisation or else its illuminative light; it sees that which the
\nother powers of our being are labouring<\/span> to explore;
\nit gets at the firm truth of the abstract representations of the intellect and
\nthe phenomenal representations of the heart and life, a truth which is itself neither
\nremotely abstract nor outwardly concrete, but something else for which these
\nare only two sides of its psychological manifestation to us. What the intuition
\nof our integral being perceives, when its members no longer dispute among themselves
\nbut are illumined from above, is that the whole of our being aims at the one
\nreality. The impersonal is a truth, the personal too is a truth; they are the
\nsame truth seen from two sides of our psychological activity; neither by itself
\ngives the total account of the Reality, and yet by either we can approach it. <\/p>\n

Looked at from
\none side, it would seem as if an impersonal Thought were at work and created
\nthe fiction of the thinker for the convenience of its action, an impersonal
\nPower at work
\n <\/p>\n

\nPage \u2013 556<\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\n<\/div>\n

creating the fiction of the doer,
\nan impersonal existence in operation which uses the fiction of a personal being
\nwho has a conscious personality and a personal delight. Looked at from the
\nother side, it is the thinker who expresses himself in thoughts which without
\nhim could not exist and our general notion of thought symbolises<\/span>
\nsimply the power of the nature of the thinker; the Ishwara expresses himself by
\nwill and power and force; the Existent extends himself in all the forms
\nintegral and partial, direct, inverse and perverse of his existence,
\nconsciousness and bliss, and our abstract general notion of these things is
\nonly an intellectual representation of the triple power of his nature of being.
\nAll impersonality seems in its turn to become a fiction and existence in its
\nevery movement and its every particle nothing but the life, the consciousness,
\nthe power, the delight of the one and yet innumerable Personality, the infinite
\nGodhead, the self-aware and self-unfolding Purusha. Both views are true, except
\nthat the idea of fiction, which is borrowed from our own intellectual
\nprocesses, has to be exiled and each must be given its proper validity. The
\nintegral seeker has to see in this light that he can reach one and the same
\nReality on both lines, either successively or simultaneously, as if on two
\nconnected wheels travelling<\/span> on parallel lines, but
\nparallel lines which in defiance of intellectual logic but in obedience to
\ntheir own inner truth of unity do meet in infinity. <\/p>\n

We have to look
\nat the divine Personality from this standpoint. When we speak of personality,
\nwe mean by it at first something limited, external and separative, and our idea
\nof a personal God assumes the same imperfect character. Our personality is to
\nus at first a separate creature, a limited mind, body, character which we
\nconceive of as the person we are, a fixed quantity; for although in reality it
\nis always changing, yet there is a sufficient element of stability to give a
\nkind of practical justification to this notion of fixedness. We conceive of God
\nas such a person, only without body, a separate person different from all
\nothers with a mind and character limited by certain qualities. At first in our
\nprimitive conceptions his deity is a thing of much inconstancy, freak and
\ncaprice, an enlarged edition of our human character; but afterwards we conceive
\nof the divine
\n <\/p>\n

\nPage \u2013 557<\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\n<\/div>\n

nature of personality as a quite
\nfixed quantity and we attribute to it those qualities alone which we regard as
\ndivine and ideal, while all the others are eliminated. This limitation compels
\nus to account for all the rest by attributing them to a Devil, or by lending to
\nman an original creative capacity for all that we consider evil, or else, when
\nwe perceive that this will not quite do, by erecting a power which we call
\nNature and attributing to that all the lower quality and mass of action for which
\nwe do not wish to make the Divine responsible. At a higher pitch the
\nattribution of mind and character to God becomes less anthropomorphic and we
\nregard him as an infinite Spirit, but still a separate person, a spirit with
\ncertain fixed divine qualities as his attributes. So are conceived the ideas of
\nthe divine Personality, the personal God which vary so much in various
\nreligions. <\/p>\n

All this may
\nseem at first sight to be an original anthropomorphism terminating in an
\nintellectual notion of the Deity which is very much at variance with the
\nactualities of the world as we see it. It is not surprising that the
\nphilosophical and sceptical<\/span> mind should have found
\nlittle difficulty in destroying it all intellectually, whether in the direction
\nof the denial of a personal God and the assertion of an impersonal Force or
\nBecoming or in that of an impersonal Being or an ineffable denial of existence
\nwith all the rest as only symbols of Maya or phenomenal truths of the
\nTime-consciousness. But these are only the personifications of monotheism. Polytheistic
\nreligions, less exalted perhaps, but wider and more sensitive in their response
\nto cosmic life, have felt that all in the cosmos has a divine origin; therefore
\nthey conceived of the existence of many divine personalities with a vague sense
\nof an indefinable Divine behind, whose relations with the personal gods were not
\nvery clearly conceived. And in their more exoteric forms these gods were
\ncrudely anthropomorphic; but where the inner sense of spiritual things became
\nclearer, the various godheads assumed the appearance of personalities of the
\none Divine, \u2013 that is the declared point of view of the ancient Veda. This
\nDivine might be a supreme Being who manifests himself in various divine
\npersonalities or an impersonal existence which meets the human
\n <\/p>\n

\nPage \u2013 558<\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\n<\/div>\n

mind in these forms; or both
\nviews might be held simultaneously without any intellectual attempt to
\nreconcile them, since both were felt to be true to spiritual experience. <\/p>\n

If we subject
\nthese notions of the divine Personality to the discrimination of the intellect,
\nwe shall be inclined to reduce them, according to our bent, to fictions of the
\nimagination or to psychological symbols, in any case, the response of our sensitive
\npersonality to something which is not this at all, but is purely impersonal. We
\nmay say that That is in reality the very opposite of our humanity and our
\npersonality and therefore in order to enter into relations with it we are
\nimpelled to set up these human fictions and these personal symbols so as to
\nmake it nearer to us. But we have to judge by spiritual experience, and in a
\ntotal spiritual experience we shall find that these things are not fictions and
\nsymbols, but truths of divine being in their essence, however imperfect may
\nhave been our representations of them. Even our first idea of our own personality
\nis not an absolute error, but only an incomplete and superficial view beset by
\nmany mental errors. Greater self-knowledge shows us that we are not
\nfundamentally the particular formulation of form, powers, properties, qualities
\nwith a conscious I identifying itself with them, which we at first appear to
\nbe. That is only a temporary fact, though still a fact, of our partial being on
\nthe surface of our active consciousness. We find within an infinite being with
\nthe potentiality of all qualities, of infinite quality, anantaguņa<\/i><\/span>, which can be
\ncombined in any number of possible ways, and each combination is a revelation
\nof our being. For all this personality is the self-manifestation of a Person,
\nthat is to say of a being who is conscious of his manifestation. <\/p>\n

But we see too that
\nthis being does not seem to be composed even of infinite quality, but has a
\nstatus of his complex reality in which he seems to stand back from it and to
\nbecome an indefinable conscious existence, anirdeśyam<\/i><\/span>. Even consciousness
\nseems to be drawn back and leave merely a timeless pure existence. And again
\neven this pure self of our being seems at a certain pitch to deny its own
\nreality, or to be a projection from a self-less\u00b9 baseless unknowable, which we
\nmay conceive of <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\u00b9 anātmyam<\/span><\/span> anilayanam<\/span>. Taittiriya<\/span> Upanishad<\/span>.<\/p>\n

\nPage \u2013 559<\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\n<\/div>\n

either as a nameless somewhat, or
\nas a Nihil. It is when we would fix upon this exclusively and forget all that
\nit has withdrawn into itself that we speak of pure impersonality or the void
\nNihil as the highest truth. But a more integral vision shows us that it is the
\nPerson and the personality and all that it had manifested which has thus cast
\nitself upward into its own unexpressed absolute. And if we carry up our heart
\nas well as our reasoning mind to the Highest, we shall find that we can reach
\nit through the absolute Person as well as through an absolute impersonality.
\nBut all this self-knowledge is only the type within ourselves of the
\ncorresponding truth of the Divine in his universality. There too we meet him in
\nvarious forms of divine personality; in formulations of quality which variously
\nexpress him to us in his nature; in infinite quality, the Ananta-guna; in the
\ndivine Person who expresses himself through infinite quality; in absolute
\nimpersonality, an absolute existence or an absolute non-existence, which is yet
\nall the time the unexpressed Absolute of this divine Person, this conscious
\nBeing who manifests himself through us and through the universe. <\/p>\n

Even on the
\ncosmic plane we are constantly approaching the Divine on either of these sides.
\nWe may think, feel and say that God is Truth, Justice, Righteousness, Power,
\nLove, Delight, Beauty; we may see him as a universal force or as a universal
\nconsciousness. But this is only the abstract way of experience. As we ourselves
\nare not merely a number of qualities or powers or a psychological quantity, but
\na being, a person who so expresses his nature, so is the Divine a Person, a
\nconscious Being who thus expresses his nature to us. And we can adore him
\nthrough different forms of this nature, a God of righteousness, a God of love
\nand mercy, a God of peace and purity; but it is evident that there are other
\nthings in the divine nature which we have put outside the form of personality
\nin which we are thus worshipping him. The courage of an unflinching spiritual
\nvision and experience can meet him also in more severe or in terrible forms.
\nNone of these are all the Divinity; yet these forms of his personality are real
\ntruths of himself in which he meets us and seems to deal with us, as if the
\nrest had been put away behind him. He is each separately and all altogether.
\n <\/p>\n

\nPage \u2013 560<\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\n<\/div>\n

He is Vishnu, Krishna, Kali; he
\nreveals himself to us in humanity as the Christ personality or the Buddha
\npersonality. When we look beyond our first exclusively concentrated vision, we
\nsee behind Vishnu all the personality of Shiva and behind Shiva all the
\npersonality of Vishnu. He is the Ananta-guna, infinite quality and the infinite
\ndivine Personality which manifests itself through it. Again he seems to withdraw
\ninto a pure spiritual impersonality or beyond all idea even of impersonal Self
\nand to justify a spiritualised atheism or agnosticism; he becomes to the mind
\nof man an indefinable, anirdeśyam<\/i><\/span>.
\nBut out of this unknowable the conscious Being, the divine Person, who has
\nmanifested himself here, still speaks, \u201cThis too is I; even here beyond the
\nview of mind, I am He, the Purushottama.\u201d <\/p>\n

For beyond the
\ndivisions and contradictions of the intellect there is another light and there
\nthe vision of a truth reveals itself which we may thus try to express to
\nourselves intellectually. There all is one truth of all these truths; for there
\neach is present and justified in all the rest. In that light our spiritual
\nexperience becomes united and integralised<\/span>; no least
\nhair’s breadth of real division is left, no shade of superiority and
\ninferiority remains between the seeking of the Impersonal and the adoration of
\nthe divine Personality, between the way of knowledge and the way of devotion.<\/p>\n

 Page \u2013 561<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/table>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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