{"id":2166,"date":"2013-07-13T01:39:52","date_gmt":"2013-07-13T01:39:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/localhost\/?p=2166"},"modified":"2013-07-13T01:39:52","modified_gmt":"2013-07-13T01:39:52","slug":"51-chapter-v-the-divine-personality-vol-23-24-the-synthesis-of-yoga","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/01-works-of-sri-aurobindo\/03-cwsa\/23-24-the-synthesis-of-yoga\/51-chapter-v-the-divine-personality-vol-23-24-the-synthesis-of-yoga","title":{"rendered":"-51_Chapter V The Divine Personality.htm"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/p>\n

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

\n\t\t\tChapter V <\/font><\/b><\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tThe Divine Personality
\n<\/font><\/b><\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t <\/p>\n

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

\n\t\t\tOn the other hand, the way of devotion is impossible if
\nthe personality of the Divine cannot be taken as a reality, a real reality and not a hypostasis of the illusion. There can be
\nno love without a lover and beloved. If our personality is an illusion and the Personality to whom our adoration rises only a
\nprimary aspect of the illusion, and if we believe that, then love and adoration must at once be killed, or can only survive in the
\nillogical 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
\nof our minds or a bright cosmic phenomenon which vanishes from the eye of Truth, may be possible, but the way of salvation
\ncannot be built upon a foundation of wilful self-deception. The bhakta indeed does not allow these doubts of the intellect to<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t <\/p>\n

\nPage \u2013 <\/font>577<\/font><\/p>\n

\n

\n\t\t\tcome in his way; he has the divinations of his heart, and these
\nare to him sufficient. But the sadhaka of the integral Yoga has to know the eternal and ultimate Truth and not to persist to
\nthe end in the delight of a Shadow. If the impersonal is the sole enduring truth, then a firm synthesis is impossible. He can at
\nmost take the divine personality as a symbol, a powerful and effective fiction, but he will have in the end to overpass it and to
\nabandon devotion for the sole pursuit of the ultimate knowledge. He will have to empty being of all its symbols, values, contents
\nin order to arrive at the featureless Reality. <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tWe have said, however, that personality and impersonality,
\nas our minds understand them, are only aspects of the Divine and both are contained in his being; they are one thing which
\nwe 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
\nof any doubts with which the intellect may seek to afflict us as we follow the impulse of devotion and the intuition of love or
\nto pursue us into the joy of the divine union. They 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 well therefore to discharge ourselves of them
\nas early as may be by perceiving the limits of the intellect, the rational philosophic mind, in its peculiar way of approaching the
\ntruth and the limits even of the spiritual experience which sets out from the approach through the intellect, to see that it need
\nnot be the whole integrality of the highest and widest spiritual experience. Spiritual intuition is always a more luminous guide
\nthan the discriminating reason, and spiritual intuition addresses itself to us not only through the reason, but through the rest
\nof our being as well, through the heart and the life also. The integral knowledge will then be that which takes account of all
\nand unifies their diverse truths. The intellect itself will be more deeply satisfied if it does not confine itself to its own data, but
\naccepts truth of the heart and the life also and gives to them their absolute spiritual value. <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tThe nature of the philosophical intellect is to move among ideas and to give them a sort of abstract reality of their own<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t <\/p>\n

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\n  
\n  <\/p>\n

\n

\n\t\t\tapart from all their concrete representations which affect our
\nlife and personal consciousness. Its bent is to reduce these representations to their barest and most general terms and to subtilise
\neven these if possible into some final abstraction. The pure intellectual direction travels away from life. In judging things it tries
\nto get back from their effects on our personality and to arrive at whatever general and impersonal truth may be behind them;
\nit 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
\nof reality. Therefore it is bound by its own nature to end in its extremes at an absolute impersonality and an absolute abstraction. This is where the ancient philosophies ended. They reduced everything to three abstractions, existence, consciousness and
\nbliss of being, and they tended to get rid of the two of these three which seemed dependent on the first and most abstract,
\nand to throw all back into a pure featureless existence from which everything else had been discharged, all representations,
\nall values, except the one infinite and timeless fact of being. But the intellect had still one farther possible step to take and it took
\nit in Buddhistic philosophy. It found that even this final fact of existence was only a representation; it abstracted that also and
\ngot to an infinite zero which might be either a void or an eternal inexpressible. <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tThe heart and life, as we know, have an exactly opposite law. They cannot live with abstractions; they can find their
\nsatisfaction only in things that are concrete or can be made seizable; whether physically, mentally or spiritually, their object
\nis not something which they seek to discriminate and arrive at by intellectual abstraction; a living becoming of it or a conscious
\npossession and joy of their object is what they seek. Nor is it the satisfaction of an abstract mind or impersonal existence to which
\nthey respond, but the joy and the activity of a being, a conscious Person in us, whether finite or infinite, to whom the delights and
\npowers of his existence are a reality. Therefore when the heart and life turn towards the Highest and the Infinite, they arrive not
\nat an abstract existence or non-existence, a Sat or else a Nirvana, but at an existent, a Sat Purusha, not merely at a consciousness,
\n  
\n <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t <\/p>\n

\nPage \u2013 <\/font>579<\/font><\/p>\n

\n

\n\t\t\tbut at a conscious Being, a Chaitanya Purusha, not merely at a
\npurely impersonal delight of the Is, but at an infinite I Am of bliss, an Anandamaya Purusha; nor can they immerge and lose
\nhis consciousness and bliss in featureless existence, but must insist on all three in one, for delight of existence is their highest
\npower and without consciousness delight cannot be possessed. That is the sense of the supreme figure of the intensest Indian
\nreligion of love, Sri Krishna, the All-blissful and All-beautiful. <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tThe intelligence can also follow this trend, but it ceases then
\nto be the pure intellect; it calls in its power of imagination to its aid, it becomes the image-maker, the creator of symbols and
\nvalues, a spiritual artist and poet. Therefore the severest intellectual philosophy admits the Saguna, the divine Person, only
\nas the supreme cosmic symbol; go beyond it to reality and you will arrive, it says, at last to the Nirguna, the pure Impersonal.
\nThe rival philosophy asserts the superiority of the Saguna; that which is impersonal is, it will perhaps say, only the material, the
\nstuff of his spiritual nature out of which he manifests the powers of his being, consciousness and bliss, all that expresses him; the
\nimpersonal is the apparent negative out of which he looses the temporal variations of his eternal positive of personality. There
\nare evidently here two instincts, or, if we hesitate to apply 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

\n\t\t\tBoth the ideas of the intellect, its discriminations, and the
\naspirations of the heart and life, their approximations, have behind them realities at which they are the means of arriving.
\nBoth are justified by spiritual experience; both arrive at the divine absolute of that which they are seeking. But still each
\ntends, if too exclusively indulged, to be hampered by the limitations of its innate quality and its characteristic means. We see
\nthat in our earthly living, where the heart and life followed exclusively failed to lead to any luminous issue, while an exclusive
\nintellectuality becomes either remote, abstract and impotent or 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

\n\t\t\t <\/p>\n

\nPage \u2013 <\/font>580<\/font> 
\n <\/p>\n

\n

\n\t\t\t The reconciling power lies beyond in the intuition. But there
\nis an intuition which serves the intellect and an intuition which serves the heart and the life, and if we follow either of these
\nexclusively, we shall not get much farther than before; we shall only make more intimately real to us, but still separately, the
\nthings at which the other and less seeing powers are aiming. But the fact that it can lend itself impartially to all parts of
\nour being, \u2014 for even the body has its intuitions, \u2014 shows that the intuition is not exclusive, but an integral truth-finder. We
\nhave to question the intuition of our whole being, not only separately in each part of it, nor in a sum of their findings,
\nbut beyond all these lower instruments, beyond even their first spiritual correspondents, by rising into the native home of the
\nintuition which is the native home of the infinite and illimitable Truth, r<\/font>tasya sve dame<\/i>, where all existence discovers its unity.
\n.<\/i> That is what the ancient Veda meant when it cried, “There is a
\nfirm truth hidden by truth (the eternal truth concealed by this other of which we have here these lower intuitions); there the
\nten hundred rays of light stand together; that is One.” R<\/font>tena<\/i>
\n\t\t\tr<\/font>tam apihitam dhruvam <\/i>. . . daś<\/font>a
\n\t\t\tś<\/font>atā<\/font> saha tasthus, tad ekam.<\/i>
\n.<\/i> <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tThe spiritual intuition lays hold always upon the reality;
\nit is the luminous harbinger of spiritual realisation or else its illuminative light; it sees that which the other powers of our
\nbeing are labouring to explore; it gets at the firm truth of the abstract representations of the intellect and the phenomenal representations of the heart and life, a truth which is itself neither remotely abstract nor outwardly concrete, but something else for
\nwhich these are only two sides of its psychological manifestation to us. What the intuition of our integral being perceives, when its
\nmembers no longer dispute among themselves but are illumined from above, is that the whole of our being aims at the one reality.
\nThe impersonal is a truth, the personal too is a truth; they are the same truth seen from two sides of our psychological activity;
\nneither by itself gives the total account of the Reality, and yet by either we can approach it. <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tLooked at from one side, it would seem as if an impersonal Thought were at work and created the fiction of the<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t <\/p>\n

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\n <\/p>\n

\n

\n\t\t\tthinker for the convenience of its action, an impersonal Power
\nat work creating the fiction of the doer, an impersonal existence in operation which uses the fiction of a personal being who
\nhas a conscious personality and a personal delight. Looked at from the other side, it is the thinker who expresses himself in
\nthoughts which without him could not exist and our general notion of thought symbolises simply the power of the nature of
\nthe thinker; the Ishwara expresses himself by will and power and force; the Existent extends himself in all the forms integral and
\npartial, direct, inverse and perverse of his existence, consciousness and bliss, and our abstract general notion of these things
\nis only an intellectual representation of the triple power of his nature of being. All impersonality seems in its turn to become a
\nfiction and existence in its every movement and its every particle nothing but the life, the consciousness, the power, the delight of
\nthe one and yet innumerable Personality, the infinite Godhead, the self-aware and self-unfolding Purusha. Both views are true,
\nexcept that the idea of fiction, which is borrowed from our own intellectual processes, has to be exiled and each must be given
\nits proper validity. The integral seeker has to see in this light that he can reach one and the same Reality on both lines, either
\nsuccessively or simultaneously, as if on two connected wheels travelling on parallel lines, but parallel lines which in defiance
\nof intellectual logic but in obedience to their own inner truth of unity do meet in infinity. <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tWe have to look at the divine Personality from this standpoint. When we speak of personality, we mean by it at first
\nsomething limited, external and separative, and our idea of a personal God assumes the same imperfect character. Our personality is to us at first a separate creature, a limited mind, body, character which we conceive of as the person we are, a
\nfixed quantity; for although in reality it is always changing, yet there is a sufficient element of stability to give a kind of practical
\njustification to this notion of fixedness. We conceive of God as such a person, only without body, a separate person different
\nfrom all others with a mind and character limited by certain qualities. At first in our primitive conceptions his deity is a thing<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t <\/p>\n

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\n

\n\t\t\tof much inconstancy, freak and caprice, an enlarged edition of
\nour human character; but afterwards we conceive of the divine nature of personality as a quite fixed quantity and we attribute
\nto it those qualities alone which we regard as divine and ideal, while all the others are eliminated. This limitation compels us
\nto account for all the rest by attributing them to a Devil, or by lending to man an original creative capacity for all that we
\nconsider evil, or else, when we perceive that this will not quite do, by erecting a power which we call Nature and attributing to
\nthat all the lower quality and mass of action for which we 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 regard him as an infinite Spirit, but still a
\nseparate person, a spirit with certain fixed divine qualities as his attributes. So are conceived the ideas of the divine Personality,
\nthe personal God which vary so much in various religions. <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tAll this may seem at first sight to be an original anthropomorphism terminating in an intellectual notion of the Deity which is very much at variance with the actualities of the world
\nas we see it. It is not surprising that the philosophical and sceptical mind should have found little difficulty in destroying
\nit all intellectually, whether in the direction of 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 with all the rest as only symbols of Maya or
\nphenomenal truths of the Time-consciousness. But these are only the personifications of monotheism. Polytheistic religions, less
\nexalted perhaps, but wider and more sensitive in their response to cosmic life, have felt that all in the cosmos has a divine
\norigin; therefore they conceived of the existence of many divine personalities with a vague sense of an indefinable Divine behind,
\nwhose relations with the personal gods were not very clearly conceived. And in their more exoteric forms these gods were crudely
\nanthropomorphic; but where the inner sense of spiritual things became clearer, the various godheads assumed the appearance
\nof personalities of the one Divine, \u2014 that is the declared point of view of the ancient Veda. This Divine might be a supreme <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t <\/p>\n

\nPage \u2013 <\/font>583<\/font> 
\n <\/p>\n

\n

\n\t\t\tBeing who manifests himself in various divine personalities or
\nan impersonal existence which meets the human mind in these forms; or both views might be held simultaneously without any
\nintellectual attempt to reconcile them, since both were felt to be true to spiritual experience. <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tIf we subject these notions of the divine Personality to the discrimination of the intellect, we shall be inclined to reduce
\nthem, according to our bent, to fictions of the imagination 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 may say that That is in reality the very opposite
\nof our humanity and our personality and therefore in order to enter into relations with it we are impelled to set up these human
\nfictions and these personal symbols so as to make it nearer to us. But we have to judge by spiritual experience, and in a total
\nspiritual experience we shall find that these things are not fictions and symbols, but truths of divine being in their essence, however
\nimperfect may have been our representations of them. Even our first idea of our own personality is not an absolute error, but only
\nan incomplete and superficial view beset by many mental errors. Greater self-knowledge shows us that we are not fundamentally
\nthe particular formulation of form, powers, properties, qualities with a conscious I identifying itself with them, which we at first
\nappear to be. That is only a temporary fact, though still a fact, of our partial being on the surface of our active consciousness. We
\nfind within an infinite being with the potentiality of all qualities, of infinite quality,
\nananta-gun<\/font>a<\/i>, which can be combined in any
\n.<\/i> number of possible ways, and each combination is a revelation
\nof 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
\nmanifestation. <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tBut we see too that this being does not seem to
\n\t\t\tbe composed even of infinite quality, but has a status of his
\n\t\t\tcomplex reality in which he seems to stand back from it and to
\n\t\t\tbecome an indefinable conscious existence, anirdeś<\/font>yam<\/i>.
\n\t\t\tEven consciousness seems to be drawn back and leave merely a
\n\t\t\ttimeless pure existence. And again even this pure self of our being
\n\t\t\tseems at a certain <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t <\/p>\n

\nPage \u2013 <\/font>584<\/font><\/p>\n

\n

\n\t\t\tpitch to deny its own reality, or to be a projection from a selfless\u00b9<\/font> baseless unknowable, which we may conceive of either as a nameless somewhat, or as a Nihil. It is when we would fix upon
\nthis exclusively and forget all that it has withdrawn into itself that we speak of pure impersonality or the void Nihil as the highest 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
\ncast itself upward into its own unexpressed absolute. And if we carry up our heart as well as our reasoning mind to the Highest,
\nwe 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
\nin various forms of divine personality; in formulations of quality which variously express him to us in his nature; in infinite
\nquality, the Ananta-guna; in the divine Person who expresses himself through infinite quality; in absolute impersonality, an
\nabsolute existence or an absolute non-existence, which is yet all the time the unexpressed Absolute of this divine Person, this
\nconscious Being who manifests himself through us and through the universe. <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tEven on the cosmic plane we are constantly approaching the Divine on either of these sides. We may think, feel and say
\nthat God is Truth, Justice, Righteousness, Power, Love, 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 are not merely a number of qualities or powers or
\na psychological quantity, but a being, a person who so expresses his nature, so is the Divine a Person, a conscious Being who thus
\nexpresses his nature to us. And we can adore him through 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 things in the divine nature which we have put outside
\nthe form of personality in which we are thus worshipping him. The courage of an unflinching spiritual vision and experience <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t\u00b9<\/i><\/font> anā<\/font>tmyam anilayanam<\/font><\/i>. Taittiriya Upanishad.
\n\t\t\t<\/font> <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t <\/p>\n

\nPage \u2013 <\/font>585<\/font> 
\n  <\/p>\n

\n

\n\t\t\tcan meet him also in more severe or in terrible forms. None
\nof these are all the Divinity; yet these forms of his personality are real truths of himself in which he meets us and seems to
\ndeal 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
\nreveals himself to us in humanity as the Christ personality or the Buddha personality. When we look beyond our first exclusively
\nconcentrated vision, we see behind Vishnu all the personality of Shiva and behind Shiva all the personality of Vishnu. He
\nis the Ananta-guna, infinite quality and the infinite divine Personality which manifests itself through it. Again he seems to
\nwithdraw into a pure spiritual impersonality or beyond all idea even of impersonal Self and to justify a spiritualised atheism
\nor agnosticism; he becomes to the mind of man an indefinable, anirdeś<\/font>yam<\/i>. But out of this unknowable the conscious Being, the divine Person, who has manifested himself here, still speaks,
\n“This too is I; even here beyond the view of mind, I am He, the Purushottama.” <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tFor beyond the divisions and contradictions of the intellect there is another light and there the vision of a truth reveals itself
\nwhich we may thus try to express to ourselves intellectually. There all is one truth of all these truths; for there each is present
\nand justified in all the rest. In that light our spiritual experience becomes united and integralised; no least hair’s breadth of real
\ndivision is left, no shade of superiority and inferiority remains between the seeking of the Impersonal and the adoration of the
\ndivine Personality, between the way of knowledge and the way of devotion.
\n   <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\nPage \u2013 <\/font>586<\/font><\/p>\n<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/table>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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