{"id":630,"date":"2013-07-13T01:29:20","date_gmt":"2013-07-13T01:29:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/localhost\/?p=630"},"modified":"2013-07-13T01:29:20","modified_gmt":"2013-07-13T01:29:20","slug":"04-the-two-negations-the-refusal-of-the-ascetic-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\/04-the-two-negations-the-refusal-of-the-ascetic-vol-18-the-life-divine-volume-18","title":{"rendered":"-04_The Two Negations – The Refusal of the Ascetic.htm"},"content":{"rendered":"\n\n
\n

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


\n\t\tThe Two Negations<\/font><\/b><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\n        II.  THE REFUSAL OF THE ASCETIC<\/b><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\n\t\tAll this is the Brahman; this Self is the Brahman and the Self is fourfold.<\/p>\n

Beyond relation, featureless, unthinkable, in which all is still. <\/font><\/p>\n

   
\n           
\n           
\n           
\n           
\n           
\n           
\n           
\n           
\n           
\n           
\n           
\n           
\n           
\n           
\n           
\n            Mandukya
\nUpanishad.\u00b9<\/font><\/font><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\n\t\t <\/font> A<\/font>ND<\/font> still there is a beyond. <\/p>\n

   For on the other side of the cosmic consciousness there is, attainable to us, a consciousness yet more
\ntranscendent,—transcendent not only of the ego, but of the Cosmos itself,—against which the universe seems to stand out
\nlike a petty picture against an immeasurable background. That supports the universal activity,—or perhaps only tolerates it;
\nIt embraces Life with Its vastness,—or else rejects it from Its infinitude. <\/p>\n

\n

   
\nIf the materialist is justified from his point of view in insisting on
\nMatter as reality, the relative world as the sole thing of
\nwhich we can in some sort be sure and the Beyond as wholly unknowable,
\nif not indeed non-existent, a dream of the mind,
\nan abstraction of Thought divorcing itself from reality, so also is the
\nSannyasin, enamoured of that Beyond, justified from his
\npoint of view in insisting on pure Spirit as the reality, the one thing
\nfree from change, birth, death, and the relative as a
\ncreation of the mind and the senses, a dream, an abstraction in the
\ncontrary sense of Mentality withdrawing from the pure
\nand eternal Knowledge. <\/p>\n

\n

   
\nWhat justification, of logic or of experience, can be asserted in
\nsupport of the one extreme which cannot be met by an
\nequally cogent logic and an equally valid experience at the other end?
\nThe world of Matter is affirmed by the experience of
\nthe physical senses which, because they are themselves unable to
\nperceive anything immaterial or not organised as gross
\nMatter, would persuade us that the suprasensible is the unreal. This
\nvulgar or       <\/font><\/p>\n

\n           <\/font><\/p>\n

\n    <\/font>
\n \u00b9<\/font>Verses 2, 7. <\/font><\/p>\n

\nPage -17<\/font><\/p>\n

\n

rustic error of our corporeal organs does not gain in validity by being promoted into the domain of philosophical reasoning.
\nObviously, their pretension is unfounded. Even in the world of Matter there are existences of which the physical senses are
\nincapable of taking cognisance. Yet the denial of the suprasensible as necessarily an illusion or a hallucination depends on
\nthis constant sensuous association of the real with the materially perceptible, which is itself a hallucination. Assuming
\nthroughout what it seeks to establish, it has the vice of the argument in a circle and can have no validity for an impartial
\nreasoning.\n<\/p>\n

     Not only are there physical
\nrealities which are suprasensible, but, if evidence and experience are
\nat all a test of truth,
\nthere are also senses which are supraphysical\u00b9<\/font> <\/p>\n

and can not only take cognisance of the realities of the material world without the aid of the corporeal sense-organs, but can
\nbring us into contact with other realities, supraphysical and belonging to another world—included, that is to say, in an
\norganisation of conscious experiences that are dependent on some other principle than the gross Matter of which our suns
\nand earths seem to be made.\n<\/p>\n

     Constantly asserted by
\nhuman experience and belief since the origins of thought, this truth,
\nnow that the necessity of an
\nexclusive preoccupation with the secrets of the material world no
\nlonger exists, begins to be justified by new-born forms of
\nscientific research. The increasing evidences, of which only the most
\nobvious and outward are established under the name
\nof telepathy with its cognate phenomena, cannot long be resisted except
\nby minds shut up in the brilliant shell of the past, by
\nintellects limited in spite of their acuteness through the limitation
\nof their field of experience and inquiry, or by those who
\nconfuse enlightenment and reason with the faithful repetition of the
\nformulas left to us from a bygone century and the
\njealous conservation of dead or dying intellectual dogmas. <\/p>\n

   
\nIt is true that the glimpse of supraphysical realities acquired by
\nmethodical research has been imperfect and is yet
\nill-affirmed; for the methods used are still crude and defective. But
\nthese rediscovered subtle senses have at least been
\nfound to be true\n<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

   
\n \u00b9<\/font><\/font> Sū<\/font>ksma indriya,<\/i> subtle organs, existing in the subtle body (suksma deha<\/i>), and the means of subtle vision and
\nexperience (sū<\/font>ksma drsti<\/i>).<\/font><\/p>\n

\nPage-18<\/font><\/p>\n

\n

witnesses to physical facts beyond the range of the corporeal organs. There is no justification, then, for scouting them as
\nfalse witnesses when they testify to supraphysical facts beyond the domain of the material organisation of consciousness.
\nLike all evidence, like the evidence of the physical senses themselves, their testimony has to be controlled, scrutinised and
\narranged by the reason, rightly translated and rightly related, and their field, laws and processes determined. But the truth of
\ngreat ranges of experience whose objects exist in a more subtle substance and are perceived by more subtle instruments
\nthan those of gross physical Matter, claims in the end the same validity as the truth of the material universe. The worlds
\nbeyond exist: they have their universal rhythm, their grand lines and formations, their self-existent laws and mighty energies,
\ntheir just and luminous means of knowledge. And here on our physical existence and in our physical body they exercise their
\ninfluences; here also they organise their means of manifestation and commission their messengers and their witnesses.<\/p>\n

     
\nBut the worlds are only frames for our experience, the senses only instruments of experience and conveniences.
\nConsciousness is the great underlying fact, the universal witness for whom the world is a field, the senses instruments. To
\nthat witness the worlds and their objects appeal for their reality and for the one world or the many, for the physical equally
\nwith the supraphysical we have no other evidence that they exist. It has been argued that this is no relation peculiar to the
\nconstitution of humanity and its outlook upon an objective world, but the very nature of existence itself; all phenomenal
\nexistence consists of an observing consciousness and an active objectivity, and the Action cannot proceed without the
\nWitness because the universe exists only in or for the consciousness that observes and has no independent reality. It has
\nbeen argued in reply that the material universe enjoys an eternal self-existence; it was here before life and mind made their
\nappearance: it will survive after they have disappeared and no longer trouble with their transient strivings and limited
\nthoughts the eternal and inconscient rhythm of the suns. The difference, so metaphysical in appearance, is yet of the utmost
\npractical import, for it determines the whole\n<\/p>\n

\nPage-19 <\/font> <\/p>\n

\n

outlook of man upon life, the goal that he shall
\nassign for his efforts and the field in which he shall circumscribe his
\nenergies.
\nFor it raises the question of the reality of cosmic existence and, more
\nimportant still, the question of the value of human life.\n<\/p>\n

     If we push the materialist
\nconclusion far enough, we arrive at an insignificance and unreality in
\nthe life of the individual
\nand the race which leaves us, logically, the option between either a
\nfeverish effort of the individual to snatch what he may
\nfrom a transient existence, to “live his life”, as it is said, or a
\ndispassionate and objectless service of the race and the
\nindividual, knowing well that the latter is a transient fiction of the
\nnervous mentality and the former only a little more
\nlong-lived collective form of the same regular nervous spasm of Matter.
\nWe work or enjoy under the impulsion of a material
\nenergy which deceives us with the brief delusion of life or with the
\nnobler delusion of an ethical aim and a mental
\nconsummation. Materialism like spiritual Monism arrives at a Maya that
\nis and yet is not,—is, for it is present and
\ncompelling, is not, for it is phenomenal and transitory in its works.
\nAt the other end, if we stress too much the unreality of
\nthe objective world, we arrive by a different road at similar but still
\nmore trenchant conclusions,—the fictitious character of
\nthe individual ego, the unreality and purposelessness of human
\nexistence, the return into the Non-Being or the relationless
\nAbsolute as the sole rational escape from the meaningless tangle of
\nphenomenal life.\n<\/p>\n

     And yet the question cannot
\nbe solved by logic arguing on the data of our ordinary physical
\nexistence; for in those data
\nthere is always a hiatus of experience which renders all argument
\ninconclusive. We have, normally, neither any definitive
\nexperience of a cosmic mind or supermind not bound up with the life of
\nthe individual body, nor, on the other hand, any firm
\nlimit of experience which would justify us in supposing that our
\nsubjective self really depends upon the physical frame and
\ncan neither survive it nor enlarge itself beyond the individual body.
\nOnly by an extension of the field of our consciousness or
\nan unhoped-for increase in our instruments of knowledge can the ancient
\nquarrel be decided.\n<\/p>\n

     The extension of our consciousness, to be satisfying, must\n<\/p>\n

\nPage-20<\/font><\/p>\n

\n

necessarily be an inner enlargement from the individual into the cosmic existence. For the Witness, if he exists, is not the
\nindividual embodied mind born in the world, but that cosmic Consciousness embracing the universe and appearing as an
\nimmanent Intelligence in all its works to which either world subsists eternally and really as Its own active existence or else
\nfrom which it is born and into which it disappears by an act of knowledge or by an act of conscious power. Not organised
\nmind, but that which, calm and eternal, broods equally in the living earth and the living human body and to which mind and
\nsenses are dispensable instruments, is the Witness of cosmic existence and its Lord.\n<\/p>\n

     The possibility of a cosmic
\nconsciousness in humanity is coming slowly to be admitted in modern
\nPsychology, like the
\npossibility of more elastic instruments of knowledge, although still
\nclassified, even when its value and power are admitted, as
\na hallucination. In the psychology of the East it has always been
\nrecognised as a reality and the aim of our subjective
\nprogress. The essence of the passage over to this goal is the exceeding
\nof the limits imposed on us by the ego-sense and at
\nleast a partaking, at most an identification with the self-knowledge
\nwhich broods secret in all life and in all that seems to us
\ninanimate.\n<\/p>\n

    Entering into that Consciousness,
\nwe may continue to dwell, like It, upon universal existence. Then we
\nbecome
\naware—for all our terms of consciousness and even our sensational
\nexperience begin to change,—of Matter as one
\nexistence and of bodies as its formations in which the one existence
\nseparates itself physically in the single body from itself
\nin all others and again by physical means establishes communication
\nbetween these multitudinous points of its being. Mind
\nwe experience similarly, and Life also, as the same existence one in
\nits multiplicity, separating and reuniting itself in each
\ndomain by means appropriate to that movement. And, if we choose, we can
\nproceed farther and, after passing through
\nmany linking stages, become aware of a supermind whose universal
\noperation is the key to all lesser activities. Nor do we
\nbecome merely conscious of this cosmic existence, but likewise
\nconscious in it, receiving it in sensation, but also entering
\ninto it in awareness. In it we live as we lived before in the
\nego-sense, active, more and more in contact, even   \n<\/p>\n

\n Page-21<\/font><\/p>\n

\n

unified more and more with other minds, other lives, other bodies than the organism we call ourselves, producing effects not
\nonly on our own moral and mental being and on the subjective being of others, but even on the physical world and its events
\nby means nearer to the divine than those possible to our egoistic capacity.\n<\/p>\n

    Real then to the man who has had
\ncontact with it or lives in it, is this cosmic consciousness, with a
\ngreater than the
\nphysical reality; real in itself, real in its effects and works. And as
\nit is thus real to the world which is its own total
\nexpression, so is the world real to it; but not as an independent
\nexistence. For in that higher and less hampered experience
\nwe perceive that consciousness and being are not different from each
\nother, but all being is a supreme consciousness, all
\nconsciousness is self-existence, eternal in itself, real in its works
\nand neither a dream nor an evolution. The world is real
\nprecisely because it exists only in consciousness; for it is a
\nConscious Energy one with Being that creates it. It is the
\nexistence of material form in its own right apart from the
\nself-illumined energy which assumes the form, that would be a
\ncontradiction of the truth of things, a phantasmagoria, a nightmare, an
\nimpossible falsehood.\n<\/p>\n

     But this conscious Being
\nwhich is the truth of the infinite supermind, is more than the universe
\nand lives independently in
\nIts own inexpressible infinity as well as in the cosmic harmonies.
\nWorld lives by That; That does not live by the world. And
\nas we can enter into the cosmic consciousness and be one with all
\ncosmic existence, so we can enter into the
\nworld-transcending consciousness and become superior to all cosmic
\nexistence. And then arises the question which first
\noccurred to us, whether this transcendence is necessarily also a
\nrejection. What relation has this universe to the Beyond?\n<\/p>\n

     For at the gates of the
\nTranscendent stands that mere and perfect Spirit described in the
\nUpanishads, luminous, pure,
\nsustaining the world but inactive in it, without sinews of energy,
\nwithout flaw of duality, without scar of division, unique,
\nidentical, free from all appearance of relation and of
\nmultiplicity,—the pure Self of the Adwaitins,\u00b9<\/font><\/p>\n

the inactive Brahman, the transcendent Silence. And the mind when it passes those gates\n<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

    \u00b9<\/font>
\nThe Vedantic Monists.<\/font><\/p>\n

\nPage-22 <\/font> <\/p>\n

\n

suddenly, without intermediate transitions, receives
\na sense of the unreality of the world and the sole reality of the
\nSilence
\nwhich is one of the most powerful and convincing experiences of which
\nthe human mind is capable. Here, in the perception
\nof this pure Self or of the Non-Being behind it, we have the
\nstarting-point for a second negation,—parallel at the other pole
\nto the materialistic, but more complete, more final, more perilous in
\nits effects on the individuals or collectivities that hear its
\npotent call to the wilderness,—the refusal of the ascetic.<\/p>\n

     
\nIt is this revolt of Spirit against Matter that for two thousand years, since Buddhism disturbed the balance of the old
\nAryan world, has dominated increasingly the Indian mind. Not that the sense of the cosmic illusion is the whole of Indian
\nthought; there are other philosophical statements, other religious aspirations. Nor has some attempt at an adjustment
\nbetween the two terms been wanting even from the most extreme philosophies. But all have lived in the shadow of the great
\nRefusal and the final end of life for all is the garb of the ascetic. The general conception of existence has been permeated
\nwith the Buddhistic theory of the chain of Karma and with the consequent antinomy of bondage and liberation, bondage by
\nbirth, liberation by cessation from birth. Therefore all voices are joined in one great consensus that not in this world of the
\ndualities can there be our kingdom of heaven, but beyond, whether in the joys of the eternal Vrindavan\u00b9<\/font>or the high beatitude of Brahmaloka,\u00b2<\/font>beyond all manifestations in some ineffable Nirvana\u00b3<\/font> <\/p>\n

or where all separate experience is lost in the featureless unity of the indefinable Existence. And through many centuries a
\ngreat army of shining witnesses, saints and teachers, names sacred to Indian memory and dominant in Indian imagination,
\nhave borne always the same witness and swelled always the same lofty and distant appeal,—renunciation the sole path of
\nknowledge, acceptation of physical life the act of the ignorant, cessation from birth the right use of human birth, the call of
\nthe Spirit, the recoil from Matter. <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

     \u00b9
\n<\/font>Goloka,<\/i> the Vaishnava heaven of eternal
\nBeauty and Bliss. <\/font><\/p>\n

     \u00b2<\/font>The
\nhighest state of pure existence, consciousness and beatitude attainable by the
\nsoul without complete extinction in the Indefinable. <\/font><\/p>\n

     \u00b3<\/font>
\nExtinction, not necessarily of all being, but of being as we know
\nit; extinction of ego, desire and egoistic action and mentality.<\/font><\/p>\n

\nPage 23 <\/font><\/p>\n

\n

    For an age out of sympathy with
\nthe ascetic spirit—and throughout all the rest of the world the hour of
\nthe Anchorite
\nmay seem to have passed or to be passing—it is easy to attribute this
\ngreat trend to the failing of vital energy in an ancient
\nrace tired out by its burden, its once vast share in the common
\nadvance, exhausted by its many-sided contribution to the sum
\nof human effort and human knowledge. But we have seen that it
\ncorresponds to a truth of existence, a state of conscious realisation
\nwhich stands at the very summit of our possibility. In practice also
\nthe ascetic spirit is an indispensable element in
\nhuman perfection and even its separate affirmation cannot be avoided so
\nlong as the race has not at the other end liberated
\nits intellect and its vital habits from subjection to an always
\ninsistent animalism.\n<\/p>\n

     We seek indeed a larger and
\ncompleter affirmation. We perceive that in the Indian ascetic ideal the
\ngreat Vedantic
\nformula, “One without a second”, has not been read sufficiently in the
\nlight of that other formula equally imperative, “All this
\nis the Brahman”. The passionate aspiration of man upward to the Divine
\nhas not been sufficiently related to the descending
\nmovement of the Divine leaning downward to embrace eternally Its
\nmanifestation. Its meaning in Matter has not been so
\nwell understood as Its truth in the Spirit. The Reality which the
\nSannyasin seeks has been grasped in its full height, but not,
\nas by the ancient Vedantins, in its full extent and comprehensiveness.
\nBut in our completer affirmation we must not
\nminimise the part of the pure spiritual impulse. As we have seen how
\ngreatly Materialism has served the ends of the Divine, so we must
\nacknowledge the still greater service rendered by Asceticism to Life.
\nWe shall preserve the truths of material Science and its real utilities
\nin the final harmony, even if many or even if all of its existing forms
\nhave to be broken or left aside. An even greater scruple of right
\npreservation must guide us in our dealing with the legacy, however
\nactually diminished or depreciated, of the Aryan past. <\/p>\n

\nPage-24<\/font><\/p>\n<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/table>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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