{"id":620,"date":"2013-07-13T01:29:17","date_gmt":"2013-07-13T01:29:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/localhost\/?p=620"},"modified":"2013-07-13T01:29:17","modified_gmt":"2013-07-13T01:29:17","slug":"08-the-ego-and-the-dualities-vol-18-the-life-divine-volume-18","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/01-works-of-sri-aurobindo\/01-sabcl\/18-the-life-divine-volume-18\/08-the-ego-and-the-dualities-vol-18-the-life-divine-volume-18","title":{"rendered":"-08_The Ego and the Dualities .htm"},"content":{"rendered":"\n\n
\n


\nC<\/font>HAPTER<\/font>  VII<\/font><\/b><\/p>\n


\n The Ego and the Dualities<\/p>\n

<\/font><\/b><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\nThe
\nsoul seated on the same tree of Nature is absorbed and deluded and has sorrow
\nbecause it is not the Lord, but when it sees and is in union with that other
\nself and greatness of it which is the Lord, then sorrow passes away from it. <\/font><\/p>\n

\n

                                                                                                                                                Swetaswatara Upanishad.\u00b9<\/font>
\n\t\t<\/font> <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

   
\nI<\/b>f all is in truth Sachchidananda, death, suffering, evil, limitation can
\nonly be the creations, positive in practical effect, negative in essence, of a
\ndistorting consciousness which has fallen from the total and unifying knowledge
\nof itself into some error of division and partial experience. This is the fall
\nof man typified in the poetic parable of the Hebrew Genesis. That fall is his
\ndeviation from the full and pure acceptance of God and himself, or rather of God
\nin himself, into a dividing consciousness which brings with it all the train of
\nthe dualities, life and death, good and evil, joy and pain, completeness and
\nwant, the fruit of a divided being. This is the fruit which Adam and Eve,
\nPurusha and Prakriti, the soul tempted by Nature, have eaten. The redemption
\ncomes by the recovery of the universal in the individual and of the spiritual
\nterm in the physical consciousness. Then alone the soul in Nature can be allowed
\nto partake of the fruit of the tree of life and be as the Divine and live for
\never. For then only can the purpose of its descent into material consciousness
\nbe accomplished, when the knowledge of good and evil, joy and suffering, life
\nand death has been accomplished through the recovery by the human soul of a
\nhigher knowledge which reconciles and identifies these opposites in the
\nuniversal and transforms their divisions into the image of the divine Unity.\n<\/p>\n

    
\nTo Sachchidananda extended in all things in widest commonalty and impartial
\nuniversality, death, suffering, evil and limitation can only be at the most
\nreverse terms, shadow-forms of their luminous opposites. As these things are
\nfelt by us, they are<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

      
\n\t\t1<\/sup> IV. 7
\n<\/font>\n<\/p>\n

\nPage-51<\/font><\/p>\n

\n

\nnotes of a discord. They formulate separation where there should be a unity,
\nmiscomprehension where there should be an understanding, an attempt to arrive at
\nindependent harmonies where there should be a self-adaptation to the orchestral
\nwhole. All totality, even if it be only in one scheme of the universal
\nvibrations, even if it be only a totality of the physical consciousness without
\npossession of all that is in movement beyond and behind, must be to that extent
\na reversion to harmony and a reconciliation of jarring opposites. On the other
\nhand, to Sachchidananda transcendent of the forms of the universe the dual terms
\nthemselves, even so understood, can no longer be justly applicable.
\nTranscendence transfigures; it does not reconcile, but rather transmutes
\nopposites into something surpassing them that effaces their oppositions.<\/p>\n

     
\nAt first, however, we must strive to relate the individual again to the harmony
\nof the totality. There it is necessary for us,\u2014otherwise there is no issue from
\nthe problem,\u2014to realise that the terms in which our present consciousness
\nrenders the values of the universe, though practically justified for the
\npurposes of human experience and progress, are not the sole terms in which it is
\npossible to render them and may not be the complete, the right, the ultimate
\nformulas. Just as there may be sense-organs or formations of sense-capacity
\nwhich see the physical world differently and it may well be better, because more
\ncompletely, than our sense-organs and sense-capacity, so there may be other
\nmental and supramental envisagings of the universe which surpass our own. States
\nof consciousness there are in which Death is only a change in immortal Life,
\npain a violent backwash of the waters of universal delight, limitation a turning
\nof the Infinite upon itself, evil a circling of the good around its own
\nperfection; and this not in abstract conception only, but in actual vision and
\nin constant and substantial experience. To arrive at such states of
\nconsciousness may, for the individual, be one of the most important and
\nindispensable steps of his progress towards self-perfection. <\/p>\n

   
\n\t\tCertainly, the practical values given us by our senses and by the
\n\t\tdualistic sense-mind must hold good in their field and be accepted as
\n\t\tthe standard for ordinary life-experience until a\n<\/p>\n

\nPage-52  <\/font><\/p>\n

\n

\nlarger harmony is ready into which they can enter and transform themselves
\nwithout losing hold of the realities which they represent. To enlarge the
\nsense-faculties without the knowledge that would give the old sense-values their
\nright interpretation from the new standpoint might lead to serious disorders and
\nincapacities, might unfit for practical life and for the orderly and disciplined
\nuse of the reason. Equally, an enlargement of our mental consciousness out of
\nthe experience of the egoistic dualities into an unregulated unity with some
\nform of total consciousness might easily bring about a confusion and incapacity
\nfor the active life of humanity in the established order of the world’s
\nrelativities. This, no doubt, is the root of the injunction imposed in the Gita
\non the man who has the knowledge not to disturb the life-basis and thought-basis
\nof the ignorant; for, impelled by his example but unable to comprehend the
\nprinciple of his action, they would lose their own system of values without
\narriving at a higher foundation.\n<\/p>\n

    
\nSuch a disorder and incapacity may be accepted personally and are accepted by
\nmany great souls as a temporary passage or as the price to be paid for the entry
\ninto a wider existence. But the right goal of human progress must be always an
\neffective and synthetic reinterpretation by which the law of that wider
\nexistence may be represented in a new order of truths and in a more just and
\npuissant working of the faculties on the life-material of the universe. For the
\nsenses the sun goes round the earth; that was for them the centre of existence
\nand the motions of life are arranged on the basis of a misconception. The truth
\nis the very opposite, but its discovery would have been of little use if there
\nwere not a science that makes the new conception the centre of a reasoned and
\nordered knowledge putting their right values on the perceptions of the senses.
\nSo also for the mental consciousness God moves round the personal ego and all
\nHis works and ways are brought to the judgment of our egoistic sensations,
\nemotions and conceptions and are there given values and interpretations which,
\nthough a perversion and inversion of the truth of things, are yet useful and
\npractically sufficient in a certain development of human life and progress. They
\nare a rough practical systematisation of our experience of things valid so long
\nas we dwell in a\n<\/p>\n

\nPage-53<\/font><\/p>\n

\n

\ncertain order of ideas and activities. But they do not represent the last and
\nhighest state of human life and knowledge. \u201cTruth is the path and not the
\nfalsehood.\u201d The truth is not that God moves round the ego as the centre of
\nexistence and can be judged by the ego and its view of the dualities, but that
\nthe Divine is itself the centre and that the experience of the individual only
\nfinds its own true truth when it is known in the terms of the universal and the
\ntranscendent. Nevertheless, to substitute this conception for the egoistic
\nwithout an adequate base of knowledge may lead to the substitution of new but
\nstill false and arbitrary ideas for the old and bring about a violent instead of
\na settled disorder of right values. Such a disorder often marks the inception of
\nnew philosophies and religions and initiates useful revolutions. But the true
\ngoal is only reached when we can group round the right central conception a
\nreasoned and effective knowledge in which the egoistic life shall rediscover all
\nits values transformed and corrected. Then we shall possess that new order of
\ntruths which will make it possible for us to substitute a more divine life for
\nthe existence which we now lead and to effectualise a more divine and puissant
\nuse of our faculties on the life-material of the universe.\n<\/p>\n

    
\nThat new life and power of the human integer must necessarily repose on a
\nrealisation of the great verities which translate into our mode of conceiving
\nthings the nature of the divine existence. It must proceed through a
\nrenunciation by the ego of its false standpoint and false certainties, through
\nits entry into a right relation and harmony with the totalities of which it
\nforms a part and with the transcendences from which it is a descent, and through
\nits perfect self-opening to a truth and a law that exceed its own conventions,\u2014a
\ntruth that shall be its fulfilment and a law that shall be its deliverance. Its
\ngoal must be the abolition of those values which are the creations of the
\negoistic view of things; its crown must be the transcendence of limitation,
\nignorance, death, suffering and evil.\n<\/p>\n

    
\nThe transcendence, the abolition are not possible here on earth and in our human
\nlife if the terms of that life are necessarily bound to our present egoistic
\nvaluations. If life is in its nature individual phenomenon and not
\nrepresentation of a universal\n<\/p>\n

    
\nPage-54<\/font><\/p>\n

\n

\nexistence and the breathing of a mighty Life-Spirit, if the dualities which are
\nthe response of the individual to its contacts are not merely a response but the
\nvery essence and condition of all living, if limitation is the inalienable
\nnature of the substance of which our mind and body are formed, disintegration of
\ndeath the first and last condition of all life, its end and its beginning,
\npleasure and pain the inseparable dual stuff of all sensation, joy and grief the
\nnecessary light and shade of all emotion, truth and error the two poles between
\nwhich all knowledge must eternally move, then transcendence is only attainable
\nby the abandonment of human life in a Nirvana beyond all existence or by
\nattainment to another world, a heaven quite otherwise constituted than this
\nmaterial universe.<\/p>\n

     
\nIt is not very easy for the customary mind of man, always attached to its past
\nand present associations, to conceive of an existence still human, yet radically
\nchanged in what are now our fixed circumstances. We are in respect to our
\npossible higher evolution much in the position of the original Ape of the
\nDarwinian theory. It would have been impossible for that Ape leading his
\ninstinctive arboreal life in primeval forests to conceive that there would be
\none day an animal on the earth who would use a new faculty called reason upon
\nthe materials of his inner and outer existence, who would dominate by that power
\nhis instincts and habits, change the circumstances of his physical life, build
\nfor himself houses of stone, manipulate Nature’s forces, sail the seas, ride the
\nair, develop codes of conduct, evolve conscious methods for his mental and
\nspiritual development. And if such a conception had been possible for the
\nApe-mind, it would still have been difficult for him to imagine that by any
\nprogress of Nature or long effort of Will and tendency he himself could develop
\ninto that animal. Man, because he has acquired reason and still more because he
\nhas indulged his power of imagination and intuition, is able to conceive an
\nexistence higher than his own and even to envisage his personal elevation beyond
\nhis present state into that existence. His idea of the supreme state is an
\nabsolute of all that is positive to his own concepts and desirable to his own
\ninstinctive aspiration,\u2014Knowledge without its negative shadow of error, Bliss
\nwithout its negation in experience of suffer-<\/p>\n

\nPage-55 <\/font><\/p>\n

\n

\ning, Power without its constant denial by incapacity, purity and plenitude of
\nbeing without the opposing sense of defect and limitation. It is so that he
\nconceives his gods; it is so that he constructs his heavens. But it is not so
\nthat his reason conceives of a possible earth and a possible humanity. His dream
\nof God and Heaven is really a dream of his own perfection; but he finds the same
\ndifficulty in accepting its practical realisation here for his ultimate aim as
\nwould the ancestral Ape if called upon to believe in himself as the future Man.
\nHis imagination, his religious aspirations may hold that end before him; but
\nwhen his reason asserts itself, rejecting imagination and transcendent
\nintuition, he puts it by as a brilliant superstition contrary to the hard facts
\nof the material universe. It becomes then only his inspiring vision of the
\nimpossible. All that is possible is a conditioned, limited and precarious
\nknowledge, happiness, power and good.\n<\/p>\n

    
\nYet in the principle of reason itself there is the assertion of a Transcendence.
\nFor reason is in its whole aim and essence the pursuit of Knowledge, the
\npursuit, that is to say, of Truth by the elimination of error. Its view, its aim
\nis not that of a passage from a greater to a lesser error, but it supposes a
\npositive, pre-existent Truth towards which through the dualities of right
\nknowledge and wrong knowledge we can progressively move. If our reason has not
\nthe same instinctive certitude with regard to the other aspirations of humanity,
\nit is because it lacks the same essential illumination inherent in its own
\npositive activity. We can just conceive of a positive or absolute realisation of
\nhappiness, because the heart to which that instinct for happiness belongs has
\nits own form of certitude, is capable of faith, and because our minds can
\nenvisage the elimination of unsatisfied want which is the apparent cause of
\nsuffering. But how shall we conceive of the elimination of pain from nervous
\nsensation or of death from the life of the body? Yet the rejection of pain is a
\nsovereign instinct of the sensations, the rejection of death a dominant claim
\ninherent in the essence of our vitality. But these things present themselves to
\nour reason as instinctive aspirations, not as realisable potentialities.\n<\/p>\n

    
\nYet the same law should hold throughout. The error of the practical reason is an
\nexcessive subjection to the apparent fact\n<\/p>\n

 Page-56<\/font><\/p>\n

\n

\nwhich it can immediately feel as real and an insufficient courage in carrying
\nprofounder facts of potentiality to their logical conclusion. What is, is the
\nrealisation of an anterior potentiality; present potentiality is a clue to
\nfuture realisation. And here potentiality exists; for the mastery of phenomena
\ndepends upon a knowledge of their causes and processes and if we know the causes
\nof error, sorrow, pain, death, we may labour with some hope towards their
\nelimination. For knowledge is power and mastery.\n<\/p>\n

    
\nIn fact, we do pursue as an ideal, so far as we may, the elimination of all
\nthese negative or adverse phenomena. We seek constantly to minimise the causes
\nof error, pain and suffering. Science, as its knowledge increases, dreams of
\nregulating birth and of indefinitely prolonging life, if not of effecting the
\nentire conquest of death. But because we envisage only external or secondary
\ncauses, we can only think of removing them to a distance and not of eliminating
\nthe actual roots of that against which we struggle. And we are thus limited
\nbecause we strive towards secondary perceptions and not towards root-knowledge,
\nbecause we know processes of things, but not their essence. We thus arrive at a
\nmore powerful manipulation of circumstances, but not at essential control. But
\nif we could grasp the essential nature and the essential cause of error,
\nsuffering and death, we might hope to arrive at a mastery over them which should
\nbe not relative but entire. We might hope even to eliminate them altogether and
\njustify the dominant instinct of our nature by the conquest of that absolute
\ngood, bliss, knowledge and immortality which our intuitions perceive as the true
\nand ultimate condition of the human being.\n<\/p>\n

    
\nThe ancient Vedanta presents us with such a solution in the conception and
\nexperience of Brahman as the one universal and essential fact and of the nature
\nof Brahman as Sachchidananda. <\/p>\n

   
\n\t\tIn this view the essence of all life is the movement of a universal and
\n\t\timmortal existence, the essence of all sensation and emotion is the play
\n\t\tof a universal and self-existent delight in being, the essence of all
\n\t\tthought and perception is the radiation of a universal and all-pervading
\n\t\ttruth, the essence of all activity is the progression of a universal and
\n\t\tself-effecting good.\n<\/p>\n

\nPage-57<\/font><\/p>\n

\n

     
\nBut the play and movement embodies itself in a multiplicity of forms, a
\nvariation of tendencies, an interplay of energies. Multiplicity permits of the
\ninterference of a determinative and temporarily deformative factor, the
\nindividual ego; and the nature of the ego is a self-limitation of consciousness
\nby a willed ignorance of the rest of its play and its exclusive absorption in
\none form, one combination of tendencies, one field of the movement of energies.
\nEgo is the factor which determines the reactions of error, sorrow, pain, evil,
\ndeath; for it gives these values to movements which would otherwise be
\nrepresented in their right relation to the one Existence, Bliss, Truth and Good.
\nBy recovering the right relation we may eliminate the ego-determined reactions,
\nreducing them eventually to their true values; and this recovery can be effected
\nby the right participation of the individual in the consciousness of the
\ntotality and in the consciousness of the transcendent which the totality
\nrepresents.\n<\/p>\n

    
\nInto later Vedanta there crept and arrived at fixity the idea that the limited
\nego is not only the cause of the dualities, but the essential condition for the
\nexistence of the universe. By getting rid of the ignorance of the ego and its
\nresultant limitations we do indeed eliminate the dualities, but we eliminate
\nalong with them our existence in the cosmic movement. Thus we return to the
\nessentially evil and illusory nature of human existence and the vanity of all
\neffort after perfection in the life of the world. A relative good linked always
\nto its opposite is all that here we can seek. But if we adhere to the larger and
\nprofounder idea that the ego is only an intermediate representation of something
\nbeyond itself, we escape from this consequence and are able to apply Vedanta to
\nfulfilment of life and not only to the escape from life. The essential cause and
\ncondition of universal existence is the Lord, Ishwara or Purusha, manifesting
\nand occupying individual and universal forms. The limited ego is only an
\nintermediate phenomenon of consciousness necessary for a certain line of
\ndevelopment. Following this line the individual can arrive at that which is
\nbeyond himself, that which he represents, and can yet continue to represent it,
\nno longer as an obscured and limited ego, but as a centre of the Divine and of
\nthe universal consciousness embracing, utilising and transforming into\n<\/p>\n

\nPage-58 <\/font><\/p>\n

\n

\nharmony with the Divine all individual determinations.<\/p>\n

     
\nWe have then the manifestation of the divine Conscious Being in the totality of
\nphysical Nature as the foundation of human existence in the material universe.
\nWe have the emergence of that Conscious Being in an involved and inevitably
\nevolving Life, Mind and Supermind as the condition of our activities; for it is
\nthis evolution which has enabled man to appear in Matter and it is this
\nevolution which will enable him progressively to manifest God in the body,\u2014the
\nuniversal Incarnation. We have in egoistic formation the intermediate and
\ndecisive factor which allows the One to emerge as the conscious Many out of that
\nindeterminate totality general, obscure and formless which we call the
\nsubconscient,\u2014hrdya samudra,<\/i>
\nthe ocean heart in things of the Rig Veda. We have the dualities of life and
\ndeath, joy and sorrow, pleasure and pain, truth and error, good and evil as the
\nfirst formations of egoistic consciousness, the natural and inevitable outcome
\nof its attempt to realise unity in an artificial construction of itself
\nexclusive of the total truth, good, life and delight of being in the universe.
\nWe have the dissolution of this egoistic construction by the self-opening of the
\nindividual to the universe and to God as the means of that supreme fulfilment to
\nwhich egoistic life is only a prelude even as animal life was only a prelude to
\nthe human. We have the realisation of the All in the individual by the
\ntransformation of the limited ego into a conscious centre of the divine unity
\nand freedom as the term at which the fulfilment arrives. And we have the
\noutflowing of the infinite and absolute Existence, Truth, Good and Delight of
\nbeing on the Many in the world as the divine result towards which the cycles of
\nour evolution move. This is the supreme birth which maternal Nature holds in
\nherself; of this she strives to be delivered. <\/p>\n

\nPage-59<\/font><\/p>\n<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/table>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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