But
if the Spirit has involved its eternal greatness in the material universe
and is there evolving its powers by the virtue of a secret self-knowledge,
is disclosing them in a grandiose succession under the self-imposed
difficulties of a material form of being, is disengaging them from a
first veiling absorbed inconscience of Nature, there is no difficulty
in thinking or seeing that this soul shaped into humanity is a being
of that Being, that this also has risen out of material involution by
increasing self-expression in a series of births of which each grade
is a new ridge of the ascent opening to higher powers of the Spirit
and that it is still arising and will not be for ever limited by the
present walls of its birth but may, if we will, be born into a divine
humanity. Our humanity is the conscious meeting-place of the finite
and the infinite and to grow more and more towards that Infinite even
in this physical birth is our privilege. This Infinite, this Spirit
who is housed within us but not bound or shut in by mind or body, is
our own self and to find and be our self was, as the ancient sages knew,
always the object of our human striving, for it is the object of the
whole immense working of Nature. But it is by degrees of the self-finding
that Nature enlarges to her spiritual reality. Man himself is a doubly
involved being; most of himself in mind and below is involved in a subliminal
conscience or a subconscience; most of himself above mind is involved
in a spiritual superconscience. When he becomes conscient in the superconscience,
the heights and the depths of his being will be illumined by another
light of knowledge than the flickering lamp of the reason can now cast
into a few corners; for then the master of the field will enlighten
this whole wonderful field of his being, as the sun illumines the whole
system it has created out of its own glories. Then only he can know
the reality even of his own mind and life and body. Mind will be changed
into a greater consciousness, his life will be a direct power and action
of the Divinity, his very body no longer this first gross lump of breathing
clay, but a very image and body of spiritual being. That transfiguration
on the summit of the mountain, divine birth, divya janma, is
that to which all these births are a long series of laborious steps.
An involution of spirit in matter is the beginning, but a spiritual
assumption of divine birth is the fullness of the evolution.
East
and West have two ways of looking at life which are opposite sides of
one reality. Between the pragmatic truth on which the vital thought
of modern Europe enamoured of the vigour of life, all the dance of God
in Nature, puts so vehement and exclusive a stress and the eternal immutable
Truth to which the Indian mind enamoured of calm and poise loves to
turn with an equal passion for an exclusive finding, there is no such
divorce and quarrel as is now declared by the partisan mind, the separating
reason, the absorbing passion of an exclusive will of realisation. The
one eternal immutable Truth is the Spirit and without the Spirit the
pragmatic truth of a self-creating universe would have no origin or
foundation; it would be barren of significance, empty of inner guidance,
lost in its end, a firework display shooting up into the void only to
fall away and perish in mid-air. But neither is the pragmatic truth
a dream of the non-existent, an illusion or a long lapse into some futile
delirium of creative imagination; that would be to make the eternal
Spirit a drunkard or a dreamer, the fool of his own gigantic self-hallucinations.
The truths of universal existence are of two kinds, truths of the Spirit
which are themselves eternal and immutable, and these are the great
things that cast themselves out into becoming and there constantly realise
their powers and significances, and the play of the consciousness with
them, the discords, the musical variations, soundings of possibility,
progressive notations, reversions, perversions, mounting conversions
into a greater figure of harmony; and of all these things the Spirit
has made, makes always his universe. But it is himself that he makes
in it, himself that is the creator and the energy of creation and the
cause and the method and the result of the working, the mechanist and
the machine, the music and the musician, the poet and the poem, supermind,
mind and life and matter, the soul and Nature.
An
original error pursues us in our solutions of our problem. We are perplexed
by the appearance of an antinomy; we set soul against Nature, the spirit
against his creative energy. But Soul and Nature, Purusha and Prakriti,
are two eternal lovers who possess their perpetual unity and enjoy their
constant difference, and in the unity abound in the passion of the multitudinous
play of their difference, and in every step of the difference abound
in the secret sense or the overt consciousness of unity. Nature takes
the Soul into herself so that he falls asleep in a trance of union with
her absorbed passion of creation and she too seems then to be asleep
in the whirl of her own creative energy; and that is the involution
in Matter. Above, it may be, the Soul takes Nature into himself so that
she falls asleep in a trance of oneness with the absorbed self-possession
of the
Spirit and he too seems to be asleep in the deep of his own self-locked
immobile being. But still above and below and around and within all
this beat and rhythm is the eternity of the Spirit who has thus figured
himself in soul and Nature and enjoys with a perfect awareness all that
he creates in himself by this involution and evolution. The soul fulfils
itself in Nature when it possesses in her the consciousness of that
eternity and its power and joy and transfigures the natural becoming
with the fullness of the spiritual being. The constant self-creation
which we call birth finds there the perfect evolution of all that it
held in its own nature and reveals its own utmost significance. The
complete soul possesses all its self and all Nature.
Therefore
all this evolution is a growing of the Self in material Nature to the
conscious possession of its own spiritual being. It begins with form—apparently
a form of Force—in which a Spirit is housed and hidden; it ends
in a Spirit which consciously directs its own force and creates or assumes
its own forms for the free joy of its being in Nature. Nature holding
her own Self and Spirit involved and suppressed within herself, an imprisoned
master of existence subjected to her ways of birth and action,—yet
are these ways his and this Spirit the condition of her being and the
law of her workings,—commences the evolution: the Spirit holding
Nature conscious in himself, complete by his completeness, liberated
by his liberation, perfected in his perfection, crowns the evolution.
All our births are the births
of this Spirit and self which has become or put forth a soul in Nature.
To be is the object of our existence,—there is no other end or
object, for the consciousness and bliss of being is the whole beginning
and middle and end, as it is that which is without beginning or end.
But this means in the steps of the evolution to grow more and more until
we grow into our own fullness of self; all birth is a progressive self-finding,
a means of self-realisation. To grow in knowledge, in power, in delight,
love and oneness, towards the infinite light, capacity and bliss of
spiritual existence, to universalise ourselves till we are one with
all being, and to exceed constantly our present limited self till it
opens fully to the transcendence in which the universal lives and to
base upon it all our becoming, that is the full evolution of what now
lies darkly wrapped or works half-evolved in Nature.
-Sri
Aurobindo
