{"id":2185,"date":"2013-07-13T01:39:59","date_gmt":"2013-07-13T01:39:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/localhost\/?p=2185"},"modified":"2013-07-13T01:39:59","modified_gmt":"2013-07-13T01:39:59","slug":"20-chapter-ii-the-status-of-knowledge-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\/20-chapter-ii-the-status-of-knowledge-vol-23-24-the-synthesis-of-yoga","title":{"rendered":"-20_Chapter II The Status of Knowledge.htm"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/p>\n

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

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

\n\t\t\t <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tThe Status of Knowledge
\n\t\t\t<\/font><\/b><\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tT<\/font>HE SELF<\/b>, the Divine, the Supreme Reality, the All, the
\nTranscendent, \u2014 the One in all these aspects is then the object of Yogic knowledge. Ordinary objects, the external
\nappearances of life and matter, the psychology of our thoughts and actions, the perception of the forces of the apparent world
\ncan 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
\nthe knowledge for which Yoga strives must be different from what men ordinarily understand by the word. For we mean
\nordinarily by knowledge an intellectual appreciation of the facts of life, mind and matter and the laws that govern them. This is
\na knowledge founded upon our sense-perception and upon reasoning from our sense-perceptions and it is undertaken partly for
\nthe pure satisfaction of the intellect, partly for practical efficiency and the added power which knowledge gives in managing our
\nlives and the lives of others, in utilising for human ends the overt or secret forces of Nature and in helping or hurting, in saving
\nand ennobling or in oppressing and destroying our fellow-men. Yoga, indeed, is commensurate with all life and can include all
\nthese subjects and objects. There is even a Yoga\u00b9<\/font> which can be used for self-indulgence as well as for self-conquest, for hurting
\nothers as well as for their salvation. But “all life” includes not only, not even mainly life as humanity now leads it. It envisages
\nrather and regards as its one true object a higher truly conscious existence which our half-conscious humanity does not
\nyet possess and can only arrive at by a self-exceeding spiritual ascension. It is this greater consciousness and higher existence <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t\u00b9<\/font>Yoga
\n\t\t\tdevelops power, it develops it even when we do not desire or
\n\t\t\tconsciously aim at it; and power is always a double-edged weapon
\n\t\t\twhich can be used to hurt or destroy as well as to help and save. Be
\n\t\t\tit also noted that all destruction is not evil. <\/font><\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tPage \u2013 <\/font>300<\/font><\/p>\n

\n

\n\t\t\twhich is the peculiar and appropriate object of Yogic discipline. <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tThis greater consciousness, this higher existence are not an
\nenlightened or illumined mentality supported by a greater dynamic energy or supporting a purer moral life and character.
\nTheir superiority to the ordinary human consciousness is not in degree but in kind and essence. There is a change not merely
\nof the surface or instrumental manner of our being but of its very foundation and dynamic principle. Yogic knowledge seeks
\nto enter into a secret consciousness beyond mind which is only occultly here, concealed at the basis of all existence. For it is that
\nconsciousness alone that truly knows and only by its possession can we possess God and rightly know the world and its real
\nnature and secret forces. All this world visible or sensible to us and all too in it that is not visible is merely the phenomenal
\nexpression of something beyond the mind and the senses. The knowledge which the senses and intellectual reasoning from the
\ndata of the senses can bring us, is not true knowledge; it is a science of appearances. And even appearances cannot be properly 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
\nthat is seized, all other things can then be known in their truth and no longer as now only in their appearance. <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tIt is evident that however much we may analyse the physical and sensible, we cannot by that means arrive at the knowledge
\nof the Self or of ourselves or of that which we call God. The telescope, the microscope, the scalpel, the retort and alembic
\ncannot go beyond the physical, although they may arrive at subtler and subtler truths about the physical. If then we confine
\nourselves to what the senses and their physical aids reveal to us and refuse from the beginning to admit any other reality or
\nany other means of knowledge, we are obliged to conclude that nothing is real except the physical and that there is no Self in
\nus or in the universe, no God within and without, no ourselves even except this aggregate of brain, nerves and body. But this we
\nare only obliged to conclude because we have assumed it firmly from the beginning and therefore cannot but circle round to our
\noriginal assumption. <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tPage \u2013 <\/font>301<\/font><\/p>\n

\n

\n\t\t\tIf, 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
\nis to be sought and known. The intellect is not that means. Undoubtedly there are a number of suprasensuous truths at which
\nthe intellect is able to arrive in its own manner and which it is able to perceive and state as intellectual conceptions. The very
\nidea of Force for instance on which Science so much insists, is a conception, a truth at which the intellect alone can arrive by
\ngoing beyond its data; for we do not sense this universal force but only its results, and the force itself we infer as a necessary
\ncause of these results. So also the intellect by following a certain line of rigorous analysis can arrive at the intellectual conception
\nand the intellectual conviction of the Self and this conviction can be very real, very luminous, very potent as the beginning
\nof other and greater things. Still, in itself intellectual analysis can only lead to an arrangement of clear conceptions, perhaps
\nto a right arrangement of true conceptions; but this is not the knowledge aimed at by Yoga. For it is not in itself an effective
\nknowledge. A man may be perfect in it and yet be precisely what he was before except in the mere fact of the greater intellectual
\nillumination. The change of our being at which Yoga aims, may not at all take place. <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tIt is true that intellectual deliberation and right discrimination
\n\t\t\tare an important part of the Yoga of knowledge; but their object is
\n\t\t\trather to remove a difficulty than to arrive at the final and
\n\t\t\tpositive result of this path. Our ordinary intellectual notions are
\n\t\t\ta stumbling-block in the way of knowledge; for they are governed by
\n\t\t\tthe error of the senses and they found themselves on the notion that
\n\t\t\tmatter and body are the reality, that life and force are the
\n\t\t\treality, that passion and emotion, thought and sense are the
\n\t\t\treality; and with these things we identify ourselves, and because we
\n\t\t\tidentify ourselves with these things we cannot get back to the real
\n\t\t\tself. Therefore, it is necessary for the seeker of knowledge to
\n\t\t\tremove this stumbling-block and to get right notions about himself
\n\t\t\tand the world; for how shall we pursue by knowledge the real self if
\n\t\t\twe have no notion of what it is and are on the contrary burdened
\n\t\t\twith ideas quite opposite to the truth? <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tPage \u2013 <\/font>302<\/font><\/p>\n

\n

\n\t\t\tTherefore right thought is a necessary preliminary, and once the habit of right thought is established, free from sense-error
\nand desire and old association and intellectual prejudgment, the understanding becomes purified and offers no serious obstacle
\nto the farther process of knowledge. Still, right thought only becomes effective when in the purified understanding it is followed
\nby other operations, by vision, by experience, by realisation. <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tWhat are these operations? They are not mere psychological
\nself-analysis and self-observation. Such analysis, such observation are, like the process of right thought, of immense value and
\npractically indispensable. They may even, if rightly pursued, lead to a right thought of considerable power and effectivity. Like
\nintellectual 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
\nthe understanding. Self-knowledge of all kinds is on the straight path to the knowledge of the real Self. The Upanishad tells us
\nthat the Self-existent has so set the doors of the soul that they turn outwards and most men look outward into the appearances
\nof 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
\nimmortality. To this turning of the eye inward psychological self-observation and analysis is a great and effective introduction. We
\ncan look into the inward of ourselves more easily than we can look into the inward of things external to us because there, in
\nthings outside us, we are in the first place embarrassed by the form and secondly we have no natural previous experience of
\nthat in them which is other than their physical substance. A purified or tranquillised mind may reflect or a powerful concentration may discover God in the world, the Self in Nature even before it is realised in ourselves, but this is rare and difficult.\u00b2<\/font>
\nAnd it is only in ourselves that we can observe and know the <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t\u00b2<\/font> 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
\nof God is therefore removed.   <\/font><\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tPage \u2013 <\/font>303<\/font><\/p>\n

\n

\n\t\t\tprocess of the Self in its becoming and follow the process by which it draws back into self-being. Therefore the ancient counsel, know thyself, will always stand as the first word that directs us towards
\nthe <\/i>knowledge. Still, psychological self-knowledge
\nis only the experience of the modes of the Self, it is not the realisation of the Self in its pure being. <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tThe status of knowledge, then, which Yoga envisages is not merely an intellectual conception or clear discrimination
\nof the truth, nor is it an enlightened psychological experience of the modes of our being. It is a “realisation”, in the full
\nsense of the word; it is the making real to ourselves and in ourselves of the Self, the transcendent and universal Divine, and
\nit is the subsequent impossibility of viewing the modes of being except in the light of that Self and in their true aspect as its
\nflux of becoming under the psychical and physical conditions of our world-existence. This realisation consists of three successive
\nmovements, internal vision, complete internal experience and identity. <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tThis internal vision, dr<\/font>s<\/font>t<\/font>i<\/i>, the power so highly valued by 
\nthe 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
\nwhich things unseen become as evident and real to it \u2014 to the soul and not merely to the intellect
\n\u2014 as do things seen to the
\nphysical eye. In the physical world there are always two forms of knowledge, the direct and the indirect,
\npratyaks<\/font>a<\/i>, of that which
\n.<\/i> is present to the eyes, and paroks<\/font>a<\/i>, of that which is remote from
\n.<\/i> and beyond our vision. When the object is beyond our vision,
\nwe are necessarily obliged to arrive at an idea of it by inference, imagination, analogy, by hearing the descriptions of others who
\nhave seen it or by studying pictorial or other representations of it if these are available. By putting together all these aids we can
\nindeed 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
\nto us the grasped reality, but only our conceptual representation of a reality. But once we have seen it with the eyes,
\n\u2014 for no
\nother sense is adequate, \u2014 we possess, we realise; it is there secure in our satisfied being, part of ourselves in knowledge<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tPage \u2013 <\/font>304<\/font><\/p>\n

\n

\n\t\t\tPrecisely the same rule holds good of psychical things and of the
\n\t\t\tSelf. We may hear clear and luminous teachings about the Self from
\n\t\t\tphilosophers or teachers or from ancient writings; we may by
\n\t\t\tthought, inference, imagination, analogy or by any other available
\n\t\t\tmeans attempt to form a mental figure or conception of it; we may
\n\t\t\thold firmly that conception in our mind and fix it by an entire and
\n\t\t\texclusive concentration;\u00b3<\/font> but we have not yet realised it, we have not seen God. It is only when after long and
\npersistent concentration or by other means the veil of the mind is rent or swept aside, only when a flood of light breaks over the
\nawakened mentality, jyotirmaya brahman<\/i>, and conception gives place to a knowledge-vision in which the Self is as present, real,
\nconcrete as a physical object to the physical eye, that we possess in knowledge; for we have seen. After that revelation, whatever
\nfadings of the light, whatever periods of darkness may afflict the soul, it can never irretrievably lose what it has once held.
\nThe experience is inevitably renewed and must become more frequent till it is constant; when and how soon depends on the
\ndevotion and persistence with which we insist on the path and besiege by our will or our love the hidden Deity. <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tThis inner vision is one form of psychological experience; but the inner experience is not confined to that seeing; vision
\nonly opens, it does not embrace. Just as the eye, though it is alone adequate to bring the first sense of realisation, has to call
\nin the aid of experience by the touch and other organs of sense before there is an embracing knowledge, so the vision of the self
\nought to be completed by an experience of it in all our members. Our whole being ought to demand God and not only our illumined eye of knowledge. For since each principle in us is only a manifestation of the Self, each can get back to its reality and
\nhave the experience of it. We can have a mental experience of the Self and seize as concrete realities all those apparently abstract
\nthings that to the mind constitute existence \u2014 consciousness, force, delight and their manifold forms and workings: thus the <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t\u00b3<\/font> This is the idea of the triple operation of Jnanayoga,
\n\t\t\tś<\/font>ravan<\/font>a<\/i>,
\nmanana<\/i>, nididhyā<\/font>sana<\/i>,
\n.<\/i> hearing, thinking or mentalising and fixing in concentration.<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tPage \u2013 <\/font>305<\/font>
\n  <\/p>\n

\n

\n\t\t\tmind is satisfied of God. We can have an emotional experience of the Self through Love and through emotional delight, love
\nand 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
\nis satisfied of God. We can have an aesthetic experience of the Self in beauty, a delight-perception and taste of the absolute
\nreality all-beautiful in everything whether created by ourselves or Nature in its appeal to the aesthetic mind and the senses; thus
\nthe sense is satisfied of God. We can have even the vital, nervous experience and practically the physical sense of the Self in all life
\nand formation and in all workings of powers, forces, energies that operate through us or others or in the world: thus the life
\nand the body are satisfied of God. <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tAll this knowledge and experience are primary means of
\narriving at and of possessing identity. It is our self that we see and experience and therefore vision and experience are incomplete
\nunless they culminate in identity, unless we are able to live in all our being the supreme Vedantic knowledge, He am I. We must
\nnot only see God and embrace Him, but become that Reality. We must become one with the Self in its transcendence of all form
\nand manifestation by the resolution, the sublimation, the escape from itself of ego and all its belongings into That from which
\nthey proceed, as well as become the Self in all its manifested existences and becomings, one with it in the infinite existence,
\nconsciousness, peace, delight by which it reveals itself in us and one with it in the action, formation, play of self-conception with
\nwhich it garbs itself in the world. <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tIt is difficult for the modern mind to understand how we can
\ndo more than conceive intellectually of the Self or of God; but it may borrow some shadow of this vision, experience and becoming from that inner awakening to Nature which a great English poet has made a reality to the European imagination. If we read
\nthe poems in which Wordsworth expressed his realisation of Nature, we may acquire some distant idea of what realisation is.
\nFor, 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
\nforce and presence other than its forms, yet cause of its forms  <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tPage \u2013 <\/font>306<\/font><\/p>\n

\n

\n\t\t\tand manifested in them. We perceive that he had not only the vision of this and the joy and peace and universality which its
\npresence brings, but the very sense of it, mental, aesthetic, vital, physical; not only this sense and vision of it in its own being
\nbut in the nearest flower and simplest man and the immobile rock; and, finally, that he even occasionally attained to that
\nunity, that becoming the object of his meditation, one phase of which is powerfully and profoundly expressed in the poem
\n“A slumber did my spirit seal,” where he describes himself as become one in his being with earth, “rolled round in its diurnal
\ncourse with rocks and stones and trees.” Exalt this realisation to a profounder Self than physical Nature and we have the
\nelements of the Yogic knowledge. But all this experience is only the vestibule to that suprasensuous, supramental realisation of
\nthe Transcendent who is beyond all His aspects, and the final summit of knowledge can only be attained by entering into the
\nsuperconscient and there merging all other experience into a supernal unity with the Ineffable. That is the culmination of all
\ndivine knowing; that also is the source of all divine delight and divine living. <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tThat status of knowledge is then the aim of this path and indeed of all paths when pursued to their end, to which intellectual discrimination and conception and all concentration and psychological self-knowledge and all seeking by the heart
\nthrough love and by the senses through beauty and by the will through power and works and by the soul through peace and
\njoy are only keys, avenues, first approaches and beginnings of the ascent which we have to use and to follow till the wide and
\ninfinite levels are attained and the divine doors swing open into the infinite Light.
\n   <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tPage \u2013 <\/font>307<\/font><\/p>\n<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/table>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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