{"id":155,"date":"2013-07-13T01:26:15","date_gmt":"2013-07-13T01:26:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/localhost\/?p=155"},"modified":"2013-07-13T01:26:15","modified_gmt":"2013-07-13T01:26:15","slug":"31-the-ascending-unity-vol-16-the-supramental-manifestation-volume-16","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/01-works-of-sri-aurobindo\/01-sabcl\/16-the-supramental-manifestation-volume-16\/31-the-ascending-unity-vol-16-the-supramental-manifestation-volume-16","title":{"rendered":"-31_The Ascending Unity.htm"},"content":{"rendered":"\n\n
\n

\nThe Ascending Unity<\/font><\/b><\/p>\n

\n <\/p>\n

\n 
\n                       
\n<\/span>T<\/span><\/b>HE
\nhuman mind loves a clear simplicity of view; the more trenchant a statement, the
\nmore violently it is caught by it and inclined to acceptance. This is not only
\nnatural to our first crudity of thinking, and the more attractive because it
\nmakes things delightfully easy to handle and saves an immense amount of worry of
\nenquiry and labour of reflection, but, modified, it accompanies us to the higher
\nlevels of a more watchful mentality. Alexander\u2019s method with the fateful knot
\nis our natural and favourite dealing with the tangled web of things, the easy
\ncut, the royal way, the facile philosophy of this and not this, that and not
\nthat, a strong yes and no, a simple division, a pair of robust opposites, a
\nclean cut of classification. Our reason acts by divisions, even our ordinary
\nillogical thought is a stumbling and bungling summary analysis and arrangement
\nof the experience that offers itself to us with such unending complexity. But
\nthe cleanest and clearest division is that which sets us most at ease, because
\nit impresses on our still childlike intelligence a sense of conclusive and
\nluminous simplicity.<\/p>\n

<\/span>\n<\/p>\n

 
\n  <\/span>          
\n<\/span>But the average mind enamoured of a straight and plain thinking, for
\nwhich, for a famous instance, that great Doctor Johnson thought with the royal
\nforce dear to all strong men when he destroyed Berkeley’s whole philosophy by
\nsimply kicking a stone and saying, \u201cThere I prove the reality of matter,\u201d is
\nnot alone affected by this turn towards simple solutions. Even the philosopher,
\nthough he inclines to an intricate reasoning by the way, is best delighted when
\nhe can get by it to some magnificently conclusive conclusion, some clean-cutting
\ndistinction between Brahman and non-Brahman, Reality and unreality or any of the
\nhost of mental oppositions on which so many \u201cisms\u201d have been founded. These
\nroyal roads of philosophy have the advantage that they are highly and grandly
\ncut for the steps of the metaphysical intellect and at the same time attract and
\noverpower the ordinary mind by the grandiose eminence of the peak in\n<\/p>\n

\nPage-265<\/span>
\n \n<\/p>\n

\n

which
\nthey end, some snow-white heaven-cutting Matterhorn of sovereign formula. What a
\nmagnificent exterminating sweep do we hear, for instance, in that old renowned
\nsentence, brahma satyam jagan mithy<\/i><\/span>\u00e3,
\n<\/span><\/i>the Eternal alone is true,
\nthe universe is a lie, and how these four victorious words seem to settle the
\nwhole business of God and man and world and life at once and for ever in their
\nuncompromising antithesis of affirmation and negation. But after all perhaps
\nwhen we come to think more at large about the matter, we may find that Nature
\nand Existence are not of the same mind as man in this respect, that there is
\nhere a great complexity which we must follow with patience and that those ways
\nof thinking have most chance of a fruitful truth-yielding, which like the
\ninspired thinking of the Upanishads, take in many sides at once and reconcile
\nmany conflicting conclusions. One can hew material for a hundred philosophies
\nout of the Upanishads as if from some bottomless Titans\u2019 quarry and yet no
\nmore exhaust it than one can exhaust the opulent bosom of our mother Earth or
\nthe riches of our father Ether.<\/p>\n

<\/span><\/p>\n

 
\n           
\n<\/span>Man began this familiar process of simple cuttings by emphasising his
\nsense of himself as man; he made of himself a being separate, unique and
\npeculiar in this world, for whom or round <\/span>whom everything else was
\nsupposed to be created, \u2014 and all the rest,
\nthe subhuman existence, animal, plant, inanimate object, everything to the
\noriginal atom seemed to him a creation different from himself, separate, of
\nanother nature; he condemned all to be without a soul, he was the one ensouled
\nbeing. He saw life, defined it by certain characters that struck his mind, and
\nset apart all other existence as non-living, inanimate. He looked at his earth,
\nmade it the centre of the universe, because the one in- habited scene of
\nembodied souls or living beings; but the innumerable other heavenly bodies were
\nonly lights to illumine earth’s day or to relieve her night. He perceived the
\ninsufficiency of this one earthly life only to create another opposite
\ndefinition of a perfect heavenly existence and set it in the skies he saw above
\nhim. He perceived his \u201cI\u201d or self and conceived of it as a separate embodied
\nego, the centre of all his earthly and heavenly interests, and cut off all other
\nbeing as the not-I which was there for him to make the best use he could out of
\nit for this little absorbing entity.<\/span>\n<\/p>\n

\nPage-266<\/span>
\n 
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

When
\nhe looked beyond these natural sense-governed divisions, he still followed the
\nsame logical policy. Conceiving of spirit, he cut it off sharply as a thing by
\nitself, the opposite of all that was not spirit; an antinomy between spirit and
\nmatter became the base of his self-conception, or else more amply between spirit
\non the one side and on the other mind, life and body. Then conceiving or <\/i>self
\nas a pure entity, all else being not-self was separated from it as of quite
\nanother character. Incidentally, with the eye of his inveterate dividing mind,
\nhe saw it as his own separate self and, just as before he had made the
\nsatisfaction of ego his whole business on earth, so he made the soul’s own
\nindividual salvation its one all-important spiritual and heavenly transaction.
\nOr he saw the universal and denied the reality of the individual, refusing to
\nthem any living unity or coexistent reality, or saw a transcendent Absolute
\nseparate from individual and universe so that these became a figment of the
\nunreal, Asat. Being and Becoming are to his clean-cutting confidently trenchant
\nmind two opposite categories, of which one or the other must be denied, or made
\na temporary construction or a sum, or sicklied over with the pale hue of
\nillusion, and not Becoming accepted as an eternal display of Being. These
\nconceptions of the sense-guided or the intellectual reason still pursue us, but
\na considering wisdom comes more and more to perceive that conclusive and
\nsatisfying as they may seem and helpful though they may be for action of life,
\naction of mind, action of spirit, they are yet, as we now put them,
\nconstructions. There is a truth behind them, but a truth which does not really
\npermit of these isolations. Our classifications set up too rigid walls; all
\nborders are borders only and not impassable gulfs. The one infinitely variable
\nSpirit in things carries over all of himself into each form of his omnipresence;
\nthe self, the Being is at once unique in each, common in our collectivities and
\none in all beings. God moves in many ways at once in his own indivisible unity.<\/p>\n

<\/span><\/p>\n

 
\n           
\n<\/span>The conception of man as a separate and quite peculiar being in the
\nuniverse has been rudely shaken down by a patient and disinterested examination
\nof the process of Nature. He is without equal or peer and occupies a privileged
\nposition on earth, but is not solitary in his being; all the evolution is there<\/span>
\nto ex-<\/span>\n<\/p>\n

\nPage-267<\/p>\n

<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

plain
\nthis seeker of spiritual greatness embodied in a fragile body and narrow life
\nand bounded mind who in turn by his being and seeking explains to itself the
\nevolution. The animal prepares and imperfectly prefigures man and is itself
\nprepared in the plant, as that too is foreseen obscurely by all that precedes it
\nin the terrestrial expansion. Man himself takes up the miraculous play of the
\nelectron and atom, draws up through the complex development of the protoplasm
\nthe chemical life of sub-vital things, perfects the original nervous system of
\nthe plant in the physiology of the completed animal being, consummates and
\nrepeats rapidly in his embryonic growth the past evolution of the animal form
\ninto the human perfection and, once born, rears himself from the earth- ward and
\ndownward animal proneness to the erect figure of the spirit who is already
\nlooking up to his farther heavenward evolution. All the terrestrial past of the
\nworld is there summarised in man, and not only has Nature given as it were the
\nphysical sign that she has formed in him an epitome of her universal forces, but
\npsychologically also he is one in his subconscient being with her obscurer
\nsub-animal life, contains in his mind and nature the animal and rises out of all
\nthis substratum into his conscious manhood.<\/p>\n

<\/span><\/p>\n

 
\n           
\n<\/span>Whatever soul there is in man is not a separate spiritual being which has
\nno connection with all the rest of the terrestrial family, but seems to have
\ngrown out of it by a taking up of it all and an exceeding of its sense by a new
\npower and meaning of the spirit. This is the universal nature of the type man on
\nearth, and it is reasonable to suppose that whatever has been the past history
\nof the individual soul, it must have followed the course of the universal Nature
\nand evolution. The separative pride which would break up the unity of Nature in
\norder to make of our- selves another as well as a greater creation, has no
\nphysical warrant, but has been found on the contrary to be contradicted by all
\nthe evidence; and there is no reason to suppose that it has any spiritual
\njustification. The physical history of humankind is <\/span>the<\/span>
\ngrowth out of the sub-vital and the
\nanimal life into the greater <\/span>power
\nof manhood; our inner history as indicated by our present nature, which is the
\nanimal plus something that exceeds it, must have been a simultaneous and
\ncompanion growing on the same<\/span>\n<\/p>\n

\nPage-268<\/span>
\n 
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

curve
\ninto the soul of humanity. The ancient Indian idea which refused to separate
\nnature of man from the universal Nature or self of man from the one common self,
\naccepted this consequence of its seeing. Thus the Tantra assigns eighty millions
\nof plant and animal lives as the sum of the preparation for a human birth and,
\nwithout binding ourselves to the figure, we can appreciate the force of its idea
\nof the difficult soul evolution by which humanity has come or perhaps constantly
\ncomes into being. We can only get away from this necessity of an animal past by
\ndenying all soul to sub-human nature.<\/p>\n

<\/span><\/p>\n

 
\n           
\n<\/span>But this denial is only one of the blind, hasty and presumptuous
\nisolations of the human mind which, shut up in its own prison of separate
\nself-perception, refuses to see its kinship with the rest of natural being.
\nBecause soul or spirit works in the animal on a lower scale, we are not
\nwarranted in thinking that there is no soul in him, any more than a divine or
\nsuperhuman being would be justified in regarding us as soulless bodies or
\nsoulless minds because of the grovelling downward-drawn inferiority of our
\nhalf-animal nature. The figure which we use when some- times we say of one of
\nour own kind that he has no soul, is only a figure; it means only that the
\nanimal type of soul predominates in him over the more developed soul type which
\nwe expect in the finer spiritual figure of humanity. But this animal element is
\npresent in every mother\u2019s son of us; it is our legacy, our inheritance from
\nthe common earth-mother: and how spiritually do we get this element of our being
\nor incur the burden of this inheritance, if it is not the earning of our own
\npast, the power we have kept from a bygone formative experience? The spiritual
\nlaw of Karma is that the nature of each being can be only the result of his past
\nenergies; to suppose a soul which assumes and continues a past Karma that is not
\nits own, is to cut a line of dissociation across this law and bring in an
\nunknown and unverified factor. But if we admit it, we must account for that
\nfactor, we must explain or discover by what law, by what connection, by what
\nnecessity, by what strange impulsion of choice a spirit, pure of all animal
\nnature, assumes a body and nature of animality prepared for it by a lower order
\nof being. If there is no affinity and no con- sequence of past identity or
\nconnection, this becomes an un-<\/span>\n<\/p>\n

\nPage-269<\/span>
\n 
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

natural
\nand impossible assumption. Then it is the most reasonable and concordant
\nconclusion that man has the animal nature, <\/span>\u2014
\nand indeed if we consider well his psychology, we find that he houses many kinds
\nof animal souls or rather an amalgam of animal natures,<\/span> \u2014 because
\nthe developing self in him like the developed body has had a past sub-human
\nevolution. This conclusion preserves the unity of Nature and its developing
\norder; and it concurs with the persistent evidence of an interaction and
\nparallelism which we perceive between the inward and the outward, the physical
\nand the mental phenomenon,<\/span> \u2014 a
\ncorrespondence and companionship which some would explain by making mind a
\nresult and notation of the act of nerve and body, but which can now be better
\naccounted for by seeing in vital and physical phenomenon a consequence and minor
\nnotation of a soul-action which it at the same time hints and conceals from our
\nsense-bound mentality. Finally, it makes of soul or spirit, no longer a
\nmiraculous accident or intervention in a material universe, but a constant
\npresence in it and the secret of its order and its existence.<\/p>\n

<\/span><\/p>\n

 
\n           
\n<\/span>The concession of an animal soul existence and of its past sub-human
\nbirths slowly and guardedly preparing the birth into humanity cannot stop short
\nat this abrupt line in the natural gradation. For man epitomises in his being
\nnot only the animal existence below him, but the obscurer sub-animal being. But
\nif it is difficult for us to concede a soul to the despised animal form and
\nmind, it is still more difficult to concede it to the brute sub-conscience of
\nthe sub-animal nature. Ancient belief made this concession with the happiest
\nease, saw a soul, a living godhead everywhere in the animate and in the
\ninanimate and nothing was to its view void of a spiritual existence. The logical
\nabstracting intellect with its passion for clean sections intermediately swept
\naway these large beliefs as an imaginative superstition or a primitive animism
\nand, mastered by its limiting and dividing definitions, it drove a trenchant
\nsectional cleavage between man and anima, animal and plant, animate and
\ninanimate being. But now to the eye of our enlarging reason this system of
\nintolerant cleavages is in rapid course of disappearance. The human mind is a
\ndevelopment from what is inchoate in the animal mentality; there is, even, in
\nthat inferior type a sort of suppressed reason,<\/span>\n<\/p>\n

\nPage-270<\/span>
\n 
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

for
\nthat name may well be given to a power of instinctive and customary conclusion
\nfrom experience, association, memory and nervous response, and man himself
\nbegins with these things though he develops out of this animal inheritance a
\nfree human self-detaching power of reflective will and intelligence. And it is
\nnow clear that the nervous life which is the basis of that physical mentality in
\nman and animal, exists also in the plant with a fundamental identity; not only
\nso, but it is akin to us by a sort of nervous psychology which amounts to the
\nexistence of a suppressed mind. A subconscient mind in the plant, it is now not
\nunreasonable to suggest,<\/span> \u2014 but
\nis it not at the summits of plant experience only half subconscious?<\/span> \u2014 becomes
\nconscient in the animal body. When we go lower down, we find hints that there
\nare involved in the sub-vital most brute material forms the rudiments of
\nprecisely the same energy of life and its responses.<\/p>\n

<\/span><\/p>\n

 
\n           
\n<\/span>And the question then arises whether there is not an unbroken continuity
\nin Nature, no scissions and sections, no unbridgeable gulfs or impassable
\nborders, but a complete unity, matter instinct with a suppressed life, life
\ninstinct with a sup- pressed mind, mind instinct with a suppressed energy of a
\ndiviner intelligence, each new form or type of birth evolving a stage in the
\nsuccession of suppressed powers, and there too the evolution not at an end, but
\nthis large and packed intelligence the means of liberating a greater and now
\nsuppressed self-power of the Spirit. A spiritual evolution thus meets our eye in
\nthe world which an inner force raises up a certain scale of gradations of its
\nbirths in form by the unfolding of its own hidden powers to the greatness of its
\ncomplete and highest reality. The word of the ancient Veda stands, <\/span>\u2014
\nout of all the ocean of inconscience, apraketam salilam sarvam idam, <\/i>it
\nis that one spiritual Existent who is born by the greatness of his own energy, tapasas
\ntan mahin<\/i><\/span>\u00e3 aj<\/span><\/i>\u00e3yata
\nekam. <\/span><\/i>Where in this
\nevolution does the thing we call soul make its first appearance? One is obliged
\nto ask, was it not there, must it not have been there from the first beginnings,
\neven though asleep or, as we may say, somnambulist in matter? If man were only a
\nsuperior animal with a greater range of physical mind, we might conceivably say
\nthat there was no soul or spirit, but only three successive powers of Energy in
\na series of the forms of matter.<\/span>\n<\/p>\n

\nPage-271<\/span>
\n 
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

But
\nin this human intelligence there does appear at its summit a greater power of
\nspirit; we rise up to a consciousness which is not limited by its physical means
\nand formulas. This highest thing is not, as it might first appear, an
\nunsubstantial sublimation of mind and mind a subtle sublimation of living
\nmatter. This greatness turns out to have been the very self-existent substance
\nand power of our being; all other things seem in comparison only its lesser
\nforms of itself which it uses for a progressive revelation; Spirit in the end
\nproves itself the first and not only the last, Alpha as well as Omega, and the
\nwhole secret of existence from its beginning. We come to a fathomless conception
\nof this all, sarvam idam, <\/i>in which we see that there is an obscure
\nomnipresent life in matter, activised by that life a secret sleeping mind,
\nsheltered in that sleep of mind an involved all-knowing all-originating Spirit.
\nBut then soul is not to be conceived of as a growth or birth of which we can fix
\na date of its coming or a stage in the evolution which brings it to a first
\ncapacity of formation, but rather all here is assumption of form by a secret
\nsoul which becomes in the self-seeking of life increasingly manifest to a
\ngrowing self- conscience. All assumption of form is a constant and yet
\nprogressive birth or becoming of the soul, sambhava, sambhuti,<\/i><\/span> <\/i>\u2014
\nthe dumb and blind and brute is that
\nand not only the finely, mentally conscious human or the animal existence. All
\nthis infinite becoming is a birth of the Spirit into form. This is the truth,
\nobscure at first or vague to the intelligence, but very luminous to experience,
\non <\/span>which the ancient Indian idea of rebirth took
\nits station.<\/p>\n

<\/span><\/p>\n

         
\nBut the repeated birth of the same individual does
\nnot at first sight seem to be indispensable in this overpowering universal
\nunity. To the logical intellect it might appear to be a contradiction since all
\nhere is the one Self, Spirit, existence born into nature, assuming a multitude
\nof forms, ascending many gradations of its stages of self-revelation. That
\nsummary cutting of existence into the I and the not-I which was the convenience
\nof our egoistic notion of things, a turn of mind so powerful for action, would
\nseem to be only a practical or a mechanical device of the one Spirit to support
\nits separative phenomenon of birth and conscious variation of combined
\nproceeding, a sor-\n<\/p>\n

\nPage-272<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

ceror\u2019s
\ntrick of the universal intelligence; it is only apparent fact of being, not its
\ntruth, <\/span>\u2014 there is no
\nseparation, only a universal unity, one Spirit. But may not this again be a
\nswinging away to the opposite extreme? As the ego was an excessive scission in
\nthe unity of being, so this idea of an ocean of unity in which our life would be
\nonly an inconstant momentary wave, may be a violent excision of something
\nindispensable to the universal order. Individuality is as important a thing to
\nthe ways of the Spirit of existence as universality. The individual is that
\npotent secret of its being upon which the universal stresses and leans and makes
\nthe knot of power of all its workings: as the individual grows in consciousness
\nand sight and knowledge and all divine power and quality, increasingly he
\nbecomes aware of the universal in him- self, but aware of himself too in the
\nuniversality, of his own past not begun and ended in the single transient body,
\nbut opening to future consummations. If the aim of the universal in our birth is
\nto become self-conscient and possess and enjoy its being, still it is done
\nthrough the individual’s flowering and perfection; if to escape from its own
\nworkings be the last end, still it is the individual that escapes while the
\nuniversal seems con- tent to continue its multitudinous births to all eternity.
\nThere- fore the individual would appear to be a real power of the Spirit and not
\na simple illusion or device, except in so far as the universal too may be, as
\nsome would have it, an immense illusion or a grand imposed device. On this line
\nof thinking we arrive at the idea of some great spiritual existence of which
\nuniversal and individual are two companion powers, pole and pole of its
\nmanifestation, indefinite circumference and multiple centre of the activised
\nrealities of its being.<\/p>\n

<\/span><\/p>\n

     <\/span>    
\nThis
\nis a way of seeing things, harmonious at least in its complexity, supple and
\ncapable of a certain all-embracing scope, which we can take as a basis for our
\nideas of rebirth, <\/span>\u2014 an
\nascending unity, a Spirit involved in material existence which scales
\nwonderfully up many gradations through life to organised mind and beyond mind to
\nthe evolution of its own complete self-conscience, the individual following that
\ngradation and the power for its self-crowning. If human mind is the last word of
\nits possibility on earth, then rebirth must end in man and pro-<\/span>\n<\/p>\n

\nPage-273<\/span>
\n 
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

ceed
\nby some abrupt ceasing either to an existence on other planes<\/span> or
\nto an annulment of its spiritual circle. But if there are higher <\/span>powers
\nof the Spirit which are attainable by birth, then the ascent is not finished,
\ngreater assumptions may lie before the soul which has now reached and is lifted
\nto a perfecting of the high scale of humanity. It may even be that this
\nascending rebirth is not the long upward rocket shooting of a conscious being
\nout of matter or its whirling motion in mind destined to break up and dissolve
\nin some high air of calm nothingness or of silent timeless infinity, but a
\nprogress to some great act and high display of the Divinity which shall give a
\nwise and glorious significance to his persistent intention in an eternal
\ncreation. Or that at least may be one power of the Eternal\u2019s infinite
\npotentiality.<\/span><\/p>\n

\nPage-274<\/span><\/p>\n<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/table>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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