{"id":3050,"date":"2013-07-13T01:45:38","date_gmt":"2013-07-13T01:45:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/localhost\/?p=3050"},"modified":"2013-07-13T01:45:38","modified_gmt":"2013-07-13T01:45:38","slug":"18-the-suprarational-ultimate-of-life-vol-25-the-human-cycle","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/01-works-of-sri-aurobindo\/03-cwsa\/25-the-human-cycle\/18-the-suprarational-ultimate-of-life-vol-25-the-human-cycle","title":{"rendered":"-18_The Suprarational Ultimate of Life.htm"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n\n\n
\n

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

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

\n\t\t\t <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tThe Suprarational Ultimate of Life <\/font><\/b><\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tI<\/font>N ALL<\/b> the higher powers of his life man may be said to be seeking, blindly enough, for God. To get at the Divine and
\n Eternal in himself and the world and to harmonise them, to
\nput his being and his life in tune with the Infinite reveals itself in these parts of his nature as his concealed aim and his destiny. He
\nsets out to arrive at his highest and largest and most perfect self, and the moment he at all touches upon it, this self in him appears
\nto be one with some great Soul and Self of Truth and Good and Beauty in the world to which we give the name of God. To get
\nat this as a spiritual presence is the aim of religion, to grow into harmony with its eternal nature of right, love, strength and
\npurity is the aim of ethics, to enjoy and mould ourselves into the harmony of its eternal beauty and delight is the aim and
\nconsummation of our aesthetic need and nature, to know and to be according to its eternal principles of truth is the end of
\nscience and philosophy and of all our insistent drive towards knowledge. <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tBut all this seems to be something above our normal and usual being; it is something into which we strive to grow, but
\nit does not seem to be the normal stuff, the natural being or atmosphere of the individual and the society in their ordinary
\nconsciousness and their daily life. That life is practical and not idealistic; it is concerned not with good, beauty, spiritual experience, the higher truth, but with interests, physical needs, desires, vital necessities. This is real to it, all the rest is a little shadowy;
\nthis belongs to its ordinary labour, all the rest to its leisure; this to the stuff of which it is made, all the rest to its parts of
\nornament and dispensable improvement. To all that rest society gives a place, but its heart is not there. It accepts ethics as a
\nbond and an influence, but it does not live for ethical good; its real gods are vital need and utility and the desires of the body. 
\n  <\/p>\n

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\n\t\t\tIf it governs its life partly by ethical laws because otherwise vital need, desire, utility in seeking their own satisfaction through
\nmany egoistic individuals would clash among themselves and destroy their own aims, it does not feel called upon to make its
\nlife entirely ethical. It concerns itself still less with beauty; even if it admits things beautiful as an embellishment and an amusement, a satisfaction and pastime of the eye and ear and mind, nothing moves it imperatively to make its life a thing of beauty.
\nIt allows religion a fixed place and portion, on holy days, in the church or temple, at the end of life when age and the approach
\nof death call the attention forcibly away from this life to other life, at fixed times in the week or the day when it thinks it right
\nfor a moment to pause in the affairs of the world and remember God: but to make the whole of life a religion, a remembering of
\nGod and a seeking after him, is a thing that is not really done even in societies which like the Indian erect spirituality as their
\naim and principle. It admits philosophy in a still more remote fashion; and if nowadays it eagerly seeks after science, that is
\nbecause science helps prodigiously the satisfaction of its vital desires, needs and interests: but it does not turn to seek after an
\nentirely scientific life any more than after an entirely ethical life. A more complete effort in any one of these directions it leaves
\nto the individual, to the few, and to individuals of a special type, the saint, the ethical man, the artist, the thinker, the man
\nof religion; it gives them a place, does some homage to them, assigns some room to the things they represent, but for itself it
\nis content to follow mainly after its own inherent principle of vital satisfaction, vital necessity and utility, vital efficiency. <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tThe reason is that here we get to another power of our being which is different from the ethical, aesthetic, rational and
\nreligious, \u2014 one which, even if we recognise it as lower in the scale, still insists on its own reality and has not only the right
\nto exist but the right to satisfy itself and be fulfilled. It is indeed the primary power, it is the base of our existence upon
\nearth, it is that which the others take as their starting-point and their foundation. This is the life-power in us, the vitalistic, the
\ndynamic nature.<\/p>\n

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\n\t\t\tIts whole principle and aim is to be, to assert
\nits existence, to increase, to expand, to possess and to enjoy: its native terms are growth of being, pleasure and power. Life
\nitself here is Being at labour in Matter to express itself in terms of conscious force; human life is the human being at labour to
\nimpress himself on the material world with the greatest possible force and intensity and extension. His primary insistent aim must
\nbe to live and make for himself a place in the world, for himself and his species, secondly, having made it to possess, produce and
\nenjoy with an ever-widening scope, and finally to spread himself over all the earth-life and dominate it; this is and must be his
\nfirst practical business. That is what the Darwinians have tried to express by their notion of the struggle for life. But the struggle
\nis not merely to last and live, but to increase, enjoy and possess: its method includes and uses not only a principle and instinct
\nof egoism, but a concomitant principle and instinct of association. Human life is moved by two equally powerful impulses,
\none of individualistic self-assertion, the other of collective selfassertion; it works by strife, but also by mutual assistance and
\nunited effort: it uses two diverse convergent forms of action, two motives which seem to be contradictory but are in fact always
\ncoexistent, competitive endeavour and cooperative endeavour. It is from this character of the dynamism of life that the whole
\nstructure of human society has come into being, and it is upon the sustained and vigorous action of this dynamism that the
\ncontinuance, energy and growth of all human societies depends. If this life-force in them fails and these motive-powers lose in
\nvigour, then all begins to languish, stagnate and finally move towards disintegration. <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tThe modern European idea of society is founded upon the primary and predominant part played by this vital dynamism in
\nthe formation and maintenance of society; for the European, ever since the Teutonic mind and temperament took possession of
\nwestern Europe, has been fundamentally the practical, dynamic and kinetic man, vitalistic in the very marrow of his thought and
\nbeing. All else has been the fine flower of his life and culture, this has been its root and stalk, and in modern times this truth
\nof his temperament, always there, has come aggressively to the
\nsurface and triumphed over the traditions of Christian piety and Latinistic
\n\t\t\tculture.   <\/p>\n

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\n\t\t\tThis triumphant emergence and lead of
\nthe vital man and his motives has been the whole significance of the great economic and political civilisation of the nineteenth
\ncentury. Life in society consists, for the practical human instincts, in three activities, the domestic and social life of man,
\n\t\t\t\u2014 social
\nin the sense of his customary relations with others in the community both as an individual and as a member of one family
\namong many, \u2014 his economic activities as a producer, wealthgetter and consumer and his political status and action. Society is
\nthe organisation of these three things and, fundamentally, it is for the practical human being nothing more. Learning and science,
\nculture, ethics, aesthetics, religion are assigned their place as aids to life, for its guidance and betterment, for its embellishment,
\nfor the consolation of its labours, difficulties and sorrows, but they are no part of its very substance, do not figure among its
\nessential objects. Life itself is the only object of living. <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tThe ancients held a different, indeed a diametrically opposite view. Although they recognised the immense importance of the primary activities, in Asia the social most, in Europe the
\npolitical, \u2014 as every society must which at all means to live and flourish, \u2014 yet these were not to them primary in the higher
\nsense of the word; they were man’s first business, but not his chief business. The ancients regarded this life as an occasion
\nfor the development of the rational, the ethical, the aesthetic, the spiritual being. Greece and Rome laid stress on the three
\nfirst alone, Asia went farther, made these also subordinate and looked upon them as stepping-stones to a spiritual consummation. Greece and Rome were proudest of their art, poetry and philosophy and cherished these things as much as or even more
\nthan their political liberty or greatness. Asia too exalted these three powers and valued inordinately her social organisation,
\nbut valued much more highly, exalted with a much greater intensity of worship her saints, her religious founders and thinkers,
\nher spiritual heroes.   <\/p>\n

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\n\tThe modern world has been proudest of its economic organisation, its
\n\tpolitical liberty, order and progress, the mechanism, comfort and ease of
\n\tits social and domestic life,
\nits science, but science most in its application to practical life, most for its instruments and conveniences, its railways, telegraphs, steamships and its other thousand and one discoveries, countless inventions and engines which help man to master the
\nphysical world. That marks the whole difference in the attitude. <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tOn this a great deal hangs; for if the practical and vitalistic
\nview of life and society is the right one, if society merely or principally exists for the maintenance, comfort, vital happiness
\nand political and economic efficiency of the species, then our idea that life is a seeking for God and for the highest self and
\nthat society too must one day make that its principle cannot stand. Modern society, at any rate in its self-conscious aim,
\nis far enough from any such endeavour; whatever may be the splendour of its achievement, it acknowledges only two gods,
\nlife and practical reason organised under the name of science. Therefore on this great primary thing, this life-power and its
\nmanifestations, we must look with especial care to see what it is in its reality as well as what it is in its appearance. Its appearance
\nis familiar enough; for of that is made the very stuff and present form of our everyday life. Its main ideals are the physical good
\nand vitalistic well-being of the individual and the community, the entire satisfaction of the desire for bodily health, long life,
\ncomfort, luxury, wealth, amusement, recreation, a constant and tireless expenditure of the mind and the dynamic life-force in remunerative work and production and, as the higher flame-spires of this restless and devouring energy, creations and conquests of
\nvarious kinds, wars, invasions, colonisation, discovery, commercial victory, travel, adventure, the full possession and utilisation
\nof the earth. All this life still takes as its cadre the old existing forms, the family, the society, the nation and it has two impulses,
\nindividualistic and collective. <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tThe primary impulse of life is individualistic and makes
\nfamily, social and national life a means for the greater satisfaction of the vital individual. In the family the individual
\nseeks for the satisfaction of his vital instinct of possession, as well as for the joy of companionship, and for the fulfilment of
\nhis other vital instinct of self-reproduction. His gains are the  <\/p>\n

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\npossession of wife, servants, house, wealth, estates, the reproduction of much of himself in the body and mind of his progeny
\nand the prolongation of his activities, gains and possessions in the life of his children; incidentally he enjoys the vital and
\nphysical pleasures and the more mental pleasures of emotion and affection to which the domestic life gives scope. In society
\nhe finds a less intimate but a larger expansion of himself and his instincts. A wider field of companionship, interchange, associated effort and production, errant or gregarious pleasure, satisfied emotion, stirred sensation and regular amusement are
\nthe advantages which attach him to social existence. In the nation and its constituent parts he finds a means for the play of a
\nremoter but still larger sense of power and expansion. If he has the force, he finds there fame, pre-eminence, leadership or at a
\nlower pitch the sense of an effective action on a small or a large scale, in a reduced or a magnified field of public action; if he
\ncannot have this, still he can feel a share of some kind, a true portion or fictitious image of participation, in the pride, power
\nand splendour of a great collective activity and vital expansion. In all this there is primarily at work the individualist principle of
\nthe vital instinct in which the competitive side of that movement of our nature associates with the cooperative but predominates
\nover it. Carried to an excess this predominance creates the ideal of the arriviste, to whom family, society and nation are not so
\nmuch a sympathetic field as a ladder to be climbed, a prey to be devoured, a thing to be conquered and dominated. In extreme
\ncases the individualist turn isolates itself from the companion motive, reverts to a primitive anti-social feeling and creates the
\nnomad, the adventurer, the ranger of wilds, or the pure solitary, \u2014 solitary not from any intellectual or spiritual impulse, but
\nbecause society, once an instrument, has become a prison and a burden, an oppressive cramping of his expansion, a denial of
\nbreathing-space and elbow-room. But these cases grow rarer, now that the ubiquitous tentacles of modern society take hold
\neverywhere; soon there will be no place of refuge left for either the nomad or the solitary, not even perhaps Saharan deserts or
\nthe secure remotenesses of the Himalayas. <\/p>\n

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\n\t\t\tEven, it may be, the
\nrefuge of an inner seclusion may be taken from us by a collectivist society intent to make its pragmatic, economic, dynamic most
\nof every individual “cell” of the organism. <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tFor this growing collectivist or cooperative tendency embodies the second instinct of the vital or practical being in man. It shows itself first in the family ideal by which the individual
\nsubordinates himself and finds his vital satisfaction and practical account, not in his own predominant individuality, but in the
\nlife of a larger vital ego. This ideal played a great part in the old aristocratic views of life; it was there in the ancient Indian
\nidea of the kula <\/i>and the kuladharma<\/i>, and in later India it was at the root of the joint-family system which made the strong
\neconomic base of mediaeval Hinduism. It has taken its grossest Vaishya form in the ideal of the British domestic Philistine, the
\nidea of the human individual born here to follow a trade or profession, to marry and procreate a family, to earn his living,
\nto succeed reasonably if not to amass an efficient or ostentatious wealth, to enjoy for a space and then die, thus having done the
\nwhole business for which he came into the body and performed all his essential duty in life,
\n\t\t\t\u2014 for this apparently was the end
\nunto which man with all his divine possibilities was born! But whatever form it may take, however this grossness may be refined or toned down, whatever ethical or religious conceptions may be superadded, always the family is an essentially practical,
\nvitalistic and economic creation. It is simply a larger vital ego, a more complex vital organism that takes up the individual and
\nenglobes him in a more effective competitive and cooperative life unit. The family like the individual accepts and uses society
\nfor its field and means of continuance, of vital satisfaction and well-being, of aggrandisement and enjoyment. But this life unit
\nalso, this multiple ego can be induced by the cooperative instinct in life to subordinate its egoism to the claims of the society
\nand trained even to sacrifice itself at need on the communal altar. For the society is only a still larger vital competitive and
\ncooperative ego that takes up both the individual and the family into a more complex organism and uses them for the collective
\nsatisfaction of its vital needs, claims, interests, aggrandisement, well-being,
\n\t\t\tenjoyment.  <\/p>\n

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\n\t\t\tThe individual and family consent to this exploitation for the same reason that induced the individual to
\ntake on himself the yoke of the family, because they find their account in this wider vital life and have the instinct in it of their
\nown larger growth, security and satisfaction. The society, still more than the family, is essentially economic in its aims and in
\nits very nature. That accounts for the predominantly economic and materialistic character of modern ideas of Socialism; for
\nthese ideas are the full rationalistic flowering of this instinct of collective life. But since the society is one competitive unit
\namong many of its kind, and since its first relations with the others are always potentially hostile, even at the best competitive
\nand not cooperative, and have to be organised in that view, a political character is necessarily added to the social life, even
\npredominates for a time over the economic and we have the nation or State. If we give their due value to these fundamental
\ncharacteristics and motives of collective existence, it will seem natural enough that the development of the collective and cooperative idea of society should have culminated in a huge, often a monstrous overgrowth of the vitalistic, economic and political
\nideal of life, society and civilisation. <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tWhat account are the higher parts of man’s being, those
\nfiner powers in him that more openly tend to the growth of his divine nature, to make with this vital instinct or with its gigantic
\nmodern developments? Obviously, their first impulse must be to take hold of them and dominate and transform all this crude
\nlife into their own image; but when they discover that here is a power apart, as persistent as themselves, that it seeks a satisfaction per se <\/i>
\n\t\t\tand accepts their impress to a certain extent, but not altogether
\n\t\t\tand, as it were, unwillingly, partially, unsatisfactorily, \u2014 what
\n\t\t\tthen? We often find that ethics and religion especially, when they
\n\t\t\tfind themselves in a constant conflict with the vital instincts, the
\n\t\t\tdynamic life-power in man, proceed to an attitude of almost complete
\n\t\t\thostility and seek to damn them in idea and repress them in fact. <\/p>\n

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\n\tTo the vital instinct for wealth and wellbeing they oppose the ideal of a
\n\tchill and austere poverty; to the vital instinct for pleasure the ideal not
\n\tonly of self-denial, but of
\nabsolute mortification; to the vital instinct for health and ease the ascetic’s contempt, disgust and neglect of the body; to the
\nvital instinct for incessant action and creation the ideal of calm and inaction, passivity, contemplation; to the vital instinct for
\npower, expansion, domination, rule, conquest the ideal of humility, self-abasement, submission, meek harmlessness, docility
\nin suffering; to the vital instinct of sex on which depends the continuance of the species, the ideal of an unreproductive chastity
\nand celibacy; to the social and family instinct the anti-social ideal of the ascetic, the monk, the solitary, the world-shunning
\nsaint. Commencing with discipline and subordination they proceed to complete mortification, which means when translated
\nthe putting to death of the vital instincts, and declare that life itself is an illusion to be shed from the soul or a kingdom of
\nthe flesh, the world and the devil, \u2014 accepting thus the claim of the unenlightened and undisciplined life itself that it is not, was
\nnever meant to be, can never become the kingdom of God, a high manifestation of the Spirit.\n\t<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tUp to a certain point this recoil has its uses and may easily \u00af<\/i>
\neven, by tapasya<\/i>, by the law of energy increasing through compression, develop for a time a new vigour in the life of the society,
\nas happened in India in the early Buddhist centuries. But beyond a certain point it tends, not really to kill, for that is impossible,
\nbut to discourage along with the vital instincts the indispensable life-energy of which they are the play and renders them in the end
\ninert, feeble, narrow, unelastic, incapable of energetic reaction to force and circumstance. That was the final result in India
\nof the agelong pressure of Buddhism and its supplanter and successor, Illusionism. No society wholly or too persistently and
\npervadingly dominated by this denial of the life dynamism can flourish and put forth its possibilities of growth and perfection.
\nFor from dynamic it becomes static and from the static position it proceeds to stagnation and degeneration. Even the higher being
\nof man, which finds its account in a vigorous life dynamism, both as a fund of force to be transmuted into its own loftier energies
\nand as a potent channel of connection with the outer life, suffers in the end by this failure and contraction. <\/p>\n

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\n\t\t\tThe ancient Indian
\nideal recognised this truth and divided life into four essential \u00af<\/i>
\nand indispensable divisions, artha<\/i>, kama<\/i>, dharma<\/i>, moksa<\/i>, vital
\n.<\/i>
\ninterests, satisfaction of desires of all kinds, ethics and religion, and liberation or spirituality, and it insisted on the practice and
\ndevelopment of all. Still it tended not only to put the last forward as the goal of all the rest, which it is, but to put it at the end of
\nlife and its habitat in another world of our being, rather than here in life as a supreme status and formative power on the
\nphysical plane. But this rules out the idea of the kingdom of God on earth, the perfectibility of society and of man in society,
\nthe evolution of a new and diviner race, and without one or other of these no universal ideal can be complete. It provides a
\ntemporary and occasional, but not an inherent justification for life; it holds out no illumining fulfilment either for its individual
\nor its collective impulse. <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tLet us then look at this vital instinct and life dynamism
\nin its own being and not merely as an occasion for ethical or religious development and see whether it is really rebellious in
\nits very nature to the Divine. We can see at once that what we have described is the first stage of the vital being, the infrarational, the instinctive; this is the crude character of its first native development and persists even when it is trained by the
\ngrowing application to it of the enlightening reason. Evidently it is in this natural form a thing of the earth, gross, earthy,
\nfull even of hideous uglinesses and brute blunders and jarring discords; but so also is the infrarational stage in ethics, in aesthetics, in religion. It is true too that it presents a much more enormous difficulty than these others, more fundamentally and
\nobstinately resists elevation, because it is the very province of the infrarational, a first formulation of consciousness out of
\nthe Inconscient, nearest to it in the scale of being. But still it has too, properly looked at, its rich elements of power, beauty,
\nnobility, good, sacrifice, worship, divinity; here too are highreaching gods, masked but still resplendent. Until recently, and
\neven now, reason, in the garb no longer of philosophy, but of science, has increasingly proposed to take up all this physical
\nand vital life and perfect it by the sole power of rationalism, by a knowledge
\n\t\t\tof the laws of Nature, of sociology and physiology and biology and
\n\t\t\thealth, by collectivism, by State education, by a new psychological
\n\t\t\teducation and a number of other kindred means.   <\/p>\n

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All this is well in its own way and in its limits, but it
\nis not enough and can never come to a truly satisfying success. The ancient attempt of reason in the form of a high idealistic,
\nrational, aesthetic, ethical and religious culture achieved only an imperfect discipline of the vital man and his instincts, sometimes
\nonly a polishing, a gloss, a clothing and mannerising of the original uncouth savage. The modern attempt of reason in the
\nform of a broad and thorough rational, utilitarian and efficient instruction and organisation of man and his life is not succeeding
\nany better for all its insistent but always illusory promise of more perfect results in the future. These endeavours cannot indeed be
\ntruly successful if our theory of life is right and if this great mass of vital energism contains in itself the imprisoned suprarational,
\nif it has, as it then must have, the instinctive reaching out for something divine, absolute and infinite which is concealed in its
\nblind strivings. Here too reason must be overpassed or surpass itself and become a passage to the Divine.\n\t<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tThe first mark of the suprarational, when it intervenes to take up any portion of our being, is the growth of absolute
\nideals; and since life is Being and Force and the divine state of being is unity and the Divine in force is God as Power taking possession, the absolute vital ideals must be of that nature. Nowhere are they wanting. If we take the domestic and social
\nlife of man, we find hints of them there in several forms; but we need only note, however imperfect and dim the present shapes,
\nthe strivings of love at its own self-finding, its reachings towards its absolute
\n\t\t\t\u2014 the absolute love of man and woman, the absolute
\nmaternal or paternal, filial or fraternal love, the love of friends, the love of comrades, love of country, love of humanity. These
\nideals of which the poets have sung so persistently, are not a mere glamour and illusion, however the egoisms and discords
\nof our instinctive, infrarational way of living may seem to contradict them. Always crossed by imperfection or opposite vital
\nmovements, they are still divine possibilities and can be made a first means of
\n\t\t\tour growth into a spiritual unity of being with being.   <\/p>\n

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\n\t\t\tCertain religious disciplines have understood this truth,
\nhave taken up these relations boldly and applied them to our soul’s communion with God; and by a converse process they
\ncan, lifted out of their present social and physical formulas, become for us, not the poor earthly things they are now, but
\ndeep and beautiful and wonderful movements of God in man fulfilling himself in life. All the economic development of life
\nitself takes on at its end the appearance of an attempt to get rid of the animal squalor and bareness which is what obligatory
\npoverty really means, and to give to man the divine ease and leisure of the gods. It is pursued in a wrong way, no doubt,
\nand with many ugly circumstances, but still the ideal is darkly there. Politics itself, that apparent game of strife and deceit and
\ncharlatanism, can be a large field of absolute idealisms. What of patriotism, \u2014 never mind the often ugly instincts from which
\nit starts and which it still obstinately preserves, \u2014 but in its aspects of worship, self-giving, discipline, self-sacrifice? The great
\npolitical ideals of man, monarchy, aristocracy, democracy, apart from the selfishnesses they serve and the rational and practical
\njustifications with which they arm themselves, have had for their soul an ideal, some half-seen truth of the absolute and have
\ncarried with them a worship, a loyalty, a loss of self in the idea which have made men ready to suffer and die for them. War
\nand strife themselves have been schools of heroism; they have \u00af<\/i>
\npreserved the heroic in man, they have created the ksatriyas<\/i> .<\/i>
\n\u00af  \u00af.<\/i> tyaktajivitah <\/i>of the Sanskrit epic phrase, the men of power and
\ncourage who have abandoned their bodily life for a cause; for without heroism man cannot grow into the Godhead; courage,
\nenergy and strength are among the very first principles of the divine nature in action. All this great vital, political, economic
\nlife of man with its two powers of competition and cooperation is stumbling blindly forward towards some realisation of power
\nand unity, \u2014 in two divine directions, therefore. For the Divine in life is Power possessed of self-mastery, but also of mastery
\nof His world, and man and mankind too move towards conquest of their world, their environment. And again the Divine in
\nfulfilment here is and must be oneness, and the ideal of human unity however dim and far off is coming slowly into sight. The
\ncompetitive nation-units are feeling, at times, however feebly as yet, the call to cast themselves into a greater unified cooperative
\nlife of the human race.   <\/p>\n

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\n\t\t\tNo doubt all is still moving, however touched by dim lights
\nfrom above, on a lower half rational half infrarational level, clumsily, coarsely, in ignorance of itself and as yet with little
\nnobility of motive. All is being worked out very crudely by the confused clash of life-forces and the guidance of ideas that
\nare half-lights of the intellect, and the means proposed are too mechanical and the aims too material; they miss the truth that
\nthe outer life-result can only endure if it is founded on inner realities. But so life in the past has moved always and must at
\nfirst move. For life organises itself at first round the ego-motive and the instinct of ego-expansion is the earliest means by which
\nmen have come into contact with each other; the struggle for possession has been the first crude means towards union, the
\naggressive assertion of the smaller self the first step towards a growth into the larger self. All has been therefore a half-ordered
\nconfusion of the struggle for life corrected by the need and instinct of association, a struggle of individuals, clans, tribes,
\nparties, nations, ideas, civilisations, cultures, ideals, religions, each affirming itself, each compelled into contact, association,
\nstrife with the others. For while Nature imposes the ego as a veil behind which she labours out the individual manifestation of the
\nspirit, she also puts a compulsion on it to grow in being until it can at last expand or merge into a larger self in which it meets,
\nharmonises with itself, comprehends in its own consciousness, becomes one with the rest of existence. To assist in this growth
\nLife-Nature throws up in itself ego-enlarging, ego-exceeding, even ego-destroying instincts and movements which combat and
\ncorrect the smaller self-affirming instincts and movements, \u2014 she enforces on her human instrument impulses of love, sympathy, self-denial, self-effacement, self-sacrifice, altruism, the drive towards universality in mind and heart and life, glimmerings
\nof an obscure unanimism that has not yet found thoroughly its  <\/p>\n

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\nown true light and motive-power. Because of this obscurity these powers, unable to affirm their own absolute, to take the lead or
\ndominate, obliged to compromise with the demands of the ego, even to become themselves a form of egoism, are impotent also
\nto bring harmony and transformation to life. Instead of peace they seem to bring rather a sword; for they increase the number
\nand tension of conflict of the unreconciled forces, ideas, impulses of which the individual human consciousness and the life of
\nthe collectivity are the arena. The ideal and practical reason of man labours to find amidst all this the right law of life and
\naction; it strives by a rule of moderation and accommodation, by selection and rejection or by the dominance of some chosen
\nideas or powers to reduce things to harmony, to do consciously what Nature through natural selection and instinct has achieved
\nin her animal kinds, an automatically ordered and settled form and norm of their existence. But the order, the structure arrived
\nat by the reason is always partial, precarious and temporary. It is disturbed by a pull from below and a pull from above. For
\nthese powers that life throws up to help towards the growth into a larger self, a wider being, are already reflections of something
\nthat is beyond reason, seeds of the spiritual, the absolute. There is the pressure on human life of an Infinite which will not allow
\nit to rest too long in any formulation, \u2014 not at least until it has delivered out of itself that which shall be its own self-exceeding
\nand self-fulfilment. <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tThis process of life through a first obscure and confused
\neffort of self-finding is the inevitable result of its beginnings; for life has begun from an involution of the spiritual truth of things
\nin what seems to be its opposite. Spiritual experience tells us that there is a Reality which supports and pervades all things as the
\nCosmic Self and Spirit, can be discovered by the individual even here in the terrestrial embodiment as his own self and spirit,
\nand is, at its summits and in its essence, an infinite and eternal self-existent Being, Consciousness and Bliss of existence. But
\nwhat we seem to see as the source and beginning of the material universe is just the contrary
\n\t\t\t\u2014 it wears to us the aspect of a Void,
\nan infinite of Non-Existence, an indeterminate Inconscient, an
\ninsensitive blissless Zero out of which everything has yet to come.   <\/p>\n

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When it begins to move, evolve, create, it puts on the
\nappearance of an inconscient Energy which delivers existence out of the Void in the form of an infinitesimal fragmentation, the
\nelectron \u2014 or perhaps some still more impalpable minute unit, a not yet discovered, hardly discoverable infinitesimal,
\n\t\t\t\u2014 then
\nthe atom, the molecule, and out of this fragmentation builds up a formed and concrete universe in the void of its Infinite. Yet we
\nsee that this unconscious Energy does at every step the works of a vast and minute Intelligence fixing and combining every
\npossible device to prepare, manage and work out the paradox and miracle of Matter and the awakening of a life and a spirit in
\nMatter; existence grows out of the Void, consciousness emerges and increases out of the Inconscient, an ascending urge towards
\npleasure, happiness, delight, divine bliss and ecstasy is inexplicably born out of an insensitive Nihil. These phenomena already
\nbetray the truth, which we discover when we grow aware in our depths, that the Inconscient is only a mask and within it
\nis the Upanishad’s “Conscient in unconscious things”. In the beginning, says the Veda, was the ocean of inconscience and out
\nof it That One arose into birth by his greatness, \u2014 by the might of his self-manifesting Energy.\n\t<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tBut the Inconscient, if a mask, is an effective mask of the Spirit; it imposes on the evolving life and soul the law of a difficult emergence. Life and consciousness, no less than Matter, obey in their first appearance the law of fragmentation. Life organises
\nitself physically round the plasm, the cell, psychologically round the small separative
\n\t\t\tfragmentary ego. Consciousness itself has to concentrate its small
\n\t\t\tbeginnings in a poor surface formation and hide behind the veil of
\n\t\t\tthis limited surface existence the depths and infinities of its own
\n\t\t\tbeing. It has to grow slowly in an external formulation till it is
\n\t\t\tready to break the crust between this petty outer figure of
\n\t\t\tourselves, which we think to be the whole, and the concealed self
\n\t\t\twithin us. Even the spiritual being seems to obey this law of
\n\t\t\tfragmentation and manifest as a unit in the whole a spark of itself
\n\t\t\tthat evolves into an individual psyche.  <\/p>\n

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\n

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\n\t\t\tIt is this little ego, this fragmented consciousness, this concealed 
\nsoul-spark on which is imposed the task of meeting and striving with the forces of the universe, entering into contact with all that
\nseems to it not itself, increasing under the pressure of inner and outer Nature till it can become one with all existence. It has to
\ngrow into self-knowledge and world-knowledge, to get within itself and discover that it is a spiritual being, to get outside of
\nitself and discover its larger truth as the cosmic Individual, to get beyond itself and know and live in some supreme Being,
\nConsciousness and Bliss of existence. For this immense task it is equipped only with the instruments of its original Ignorance.
\nIts limited being is the cause of all the difficulty, discord, struggle, division that mars life. The limitation of its consciousness,
\nunable to dominate or assimilate the contacts of the universal Energy, is the cause of all its suffering, pain and sorrow. Its
\nlimited power of consciousness formulated in an ignorant will unable to grasp or follow the right law of its life and action is
\nthe cause of all its error, wrongdoing and evil. There is no other true cause; for all apparent causes are themselves circumstance
\nand result of this original sin of the being. Only when it rises and widens out of this limited separative consciousness into the
\noneness of the liberated Spirit, can it escape from these results of its growth out of the Inconscience. <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tIf we see this as the truth behind Life, we can understand at once why it has had to follow its present curve of ignorant selfformulation. But also we see what through it all it is obscurely seeking, trying to grasp and form, feeling out for in its own
\nhigher impulses and deepest motives, and why these are in it \u2014 useless, perturbing and chimerical if it were only an animal
\nproduct of inconscient Nature, \u2014 these urgings towards selfdiscovery, mastery,
\n\t\t\tunity, freedom from its lower self, spiritual release. Evolving out
\n\t\t\tof its first involved condition in Matter and in plant life,
\n\t\t\teffecting a first imperfect organised consciousness in the animal it
\n\t\t\tarrives in man, the mental being, at the possibility of a new, a
\n\t\t\tconscious evolution which will bring it to its goal and at a certain
\n\t\t\tstage of his development it wakes in him the overmastering impulse
\n\t\t\tto pass on from mental to spiritual being.   <\/p>\n

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\n

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\n\tLife cannot arrive at its secret ultimates by following its
\nfirst infrarational motive forces of instinct and desire; for all here is a groping and seeking without finding, a field of brief
\nsatisfactions stamped with the Inconscient’s seal of insufficiency and impermanence. But neither can human reason give it what
\nit searches after; for reason can only establish half-lights and a provisional order. Therefore with man as he is the upward
\nurge in life cannot rest satisfied always; its evolutionary impulse cannot stop short at this transitional term, this half-achievement.
\nIt has to aim at a higher scale of consciousness, deliver out of life and mind something that is still latent and inchoate.\n\t<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tThe ultimates of life are spiritual and only in the full light of the liberated self and spirit can it achieve them. That full
\nlight is not intellect or reason, but a knowledge by inner unity and identity which is the native self-light of the fully developed
\nspiritual consciousness and, preparing that, on the way to it, a knowledge by intimate inner contact with the truth of things
\nand beings which is intuitive and born of a secret oneness. Life seeks for self-knowledge; it is only by the light of the spirit that
\nit can find it. It seeks for a luminous guidance and mastery of its own movements; it is only when it finds within itself this
\ninner self and spirit and by it or in obedience to it governs its own steps that it can have the illumined will it needs and the
\nunerring leadership. For it is so only that the blind certitudes of the instincts and the speculative hypotheses and theories and the
\nexperimental and inferential certitudes of reason can be replaced by the seeing spiritual certitudes. Life seeks the fulfilment of its
\ninstincts of love and sympathy, its yearnings after accord and union; but these are crossed by opposing instincts and it is only
\nthe spiritual consciousness with its realised abiding oneness that can abolish these oppositions. Life seeks for full growth of being,
\nbut it can attain to it only when the limited being has found in itself its own inmost soul of existence and around it its own
\nwidest self of cosmic consciousness by which it can feel the world and all being in itself and as itself. Life seeks for power;
\nit is only the power of the spirit and the power of this conscious oneness that can give it mastery of its self and its world. It
\nseeks for pleasure, happiness, bliss; but the infrarational forms of these
\n\t\t\tthings are stricken with imperfection, fragmentariness, impermanence
\n\t\t\tand the impact of their opposites.   <\/p>\n

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\n

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\n\t\t\tMoreover infrarational life still bears some stamp of the Inconscient in an underlying insensitiveness, a dullness of fibre, a weakness of
\nvibratory response, \u2014 it cannot attain to true happiness or bliss and what it can obtain of pleasure it cannot support for long or
\nbear or keep any extreme intensity of these things. Only the spirit has the secret of an unmixed and abiding happiness or ecstasy, is
\ncapable of a firm tenseness of vibrant response to it, can achieve and justify a spiritual pleasure or joy of life as one form of the
\ninfinite and universal delight of being. Life seeks a harmonious fulfilment of all its powers, now divided and in conflict, all its
\npossibilities, parts, members; it is only in the consciousness of the one self and spirit that that is found, for there they arrive
\nat their full truth and their perfect agreement in the light of the integral Self-existence. <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tINCEThere is then a suprarational ultimate of Life no less than a suprarational Truth, Good and Beauty. The endeavour to reach
\nit is the spiritual meaning of this seeking and striving Life-nature.   <\/p>\n

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\t\t\t<\/font> <\/span> <\/p>\n

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

Chapter XVI   The Suprarational Ultimate of Life   IN ALL the higher powers of his life man may be said to be seeking, blindly…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[58],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3050","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-25-the-human-cycle","wpcat-58-id"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3050","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3050"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3050\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3050"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3050"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3050"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}