THE very first necessity for
spiritual perfection is a perfect equality. Perfection
in the sense in which we use it in Yoga, means a growth
out of a lower undivine into a higher divine nature.
In terms of knowledge it is a putting on the being of
the higher self and a casting away of the darker broken
lower self or a transforming of our imperfect state
into the rounded luminous fullness of our real and spiritual
personality. In terms of devotion and adoration it is
a growing into a likeness of the nature or the law of
the being of the Divine, to be united with whom we aspire,—for
if there is not this likeness, this oneness of the law
of the being, unity between that transcending and universal
and this individual spirit is not possible. The supreme
divine nature is founded on equality. This affirmation
is true of it whether we look on the Supreme Being as
a pure silent Self and Spirit or as the divine Master
of cosmic existence. The pure Self is equal, unmoved,
the witness in an impartial peace of all the happenings
and relations of cosmic existence. While it is not averse
to them,—aversion is not equality, nor, if that
were the attitude of the Self to cosmic existence, could
the universe come at all into being or proceed upon
its cycles,—a detachment, the calm of an equal
regard, a superiority to the reactions which trouble
and are the disabling weakness of the soul involved
in outward nature, are the very substance of the silent
Infinite's purity and the condition of its impartial
assent and support to the many-sided movement of the
universe. But in that power too of the Supreme which
governs and develops these motions, the same equality
is a basic condition.
The
Master of things cannot be affected or troubled by the
reactions of things; if he were, he would be subject
to them, not master, not free to develop them according
to his sovereign will and wisdom and according to the
inner truth and necessity of what is behind their relations,
but obliged rather to act according to the claim of
temporary accident and phenomenon. The truth of all
things is in the calm of their depths, not in the shifting
inconstant wave form on the surface. The supreme conscious
Being in his divine knowledge and will and love governs
their evolution—to our ignorance so often a cruel
confusion and distraction—from these depths and
is not troubled by the clamour of the surface. The divine
nature does not share in our gropings and our passions;
when we speak of the divine wrath or favour or of God
suffering in man, we are using a human language which
mistranslates the inner significance of the movement
we characterise. We see something of the real truth
of them when we rise out of the phenomenal mind into
the heights of the spiritual being. For then we perceive
that whether in the silence of self or in its action
in the cosmos, the Divine is always Sachchidananda,
an infinite existence, an infinite consciousness and
self-founded power of conscious being, an infinite bliss
in all his existence. We ourselves begin to dwell in
an equal light, strength, joy—the psychological
rendering of the divine knowledge, will and delight
in self and things which are the active universal outpourings
from those infinite sources. In the strength of that
light, power and joy a secret self and spirit within
us accepts and transforms always into food of its perfect
experience the dual letters of the mind's transcript
of life, and if there were not the hidden greater existence
even now within us, we could not bear the pressure of
the universal force or subsist in this great and dangerous
world. A perfect equality of our spirit and nature is
a means by which we can move back from the troubled
and ignorant outer consciousness into this inner kingdom
of heaven and possess the spirit's eternal kingdoms,
räjyam samrddham, of greatness, joy and
peace. That self-elevation to the divine nature is the
complete fruit and the whole occasion of the discipline
of equality demanded from us by the self-perfecting
aim in Yoga.
A perfect equality and peace of the soul is indispensable
to change the whole substance of our being into substance
of the self out of its present stuff of troubled mentality.
It is equally indispensable if we aspire to replace
our present confused and ignorant action by the self-possessed
and luminous works of a free spirit governing its nature
and in tune with universal being. A divine action or
even a perfect human action is impossible if we have
not equality of spirit and an equality in the motive-forces
of our nature. The Divine is equal to all, an impartial
sustainer of his universe, who views all with equal
eyes, assents to the law of developing being which he
has brought out of the depths of his existence, tolerates
what has to be tolerated, depresses what has to be depressed,
raises what has to be raised, creates, sustains and
destroys with a perfect and equal understanding of all
causes and results and working out of the spiritual
and pragmatic meaning of all phenomena. God does not
create in obedience to any troubled passion of desire
or maintain and preserve through an attachment of partial
preference or destroy in a fury of wrath, disgust or
aversion. The Divine deals with great and small, just
and unjust, ignorant and wise as the Self of all who,
deeply intimate and one with the being, leads all according
to their nature and need with a perfect understanding,
power and justness of proportion. But through it all
he moves things according to his large aim in the cycles
and draws the soul upward in the evolution through its
apparent progress and retrogression towards the higher
and ever higher development which is the sense of the
cosmic urge. The self-perfecting individual who seeks
to be one in will with the Divine and make his nature
an instrument of the divine purpose, must enlarge himself
out of the egoistic and partial views and motives of
the human ignorance and mould himself into an image
of this supreme equality.
This equal poise in action is especially necessary for
the Sadhaka of the integral Yoga. First, he must acquire
that equal assent and understanding which will respond
to the law of the divine action without trying to impose
on it a partial will and the violent claim of a personal
aspiration. A wise impersonality, a quiescent equality,
a universality which sees all things as the manifestations
of the Divine, the one Existence, is not angry, troubled,
impatient with the way of things or on the other hand
excited, over-eager and precipitate, but sees that the
law must be obeyed and the pace of time respected, observes
and understands with sympathy the actuality of things
and beings, but looks also behind the present appearance
to their inner significances and forward to the unrolling
of their divine possibilities, is the first thing demanded
of those who would do works as the perfect instruments
of the Divine. But this impersonal acquiescence is only
the basis. Man is the instrument of an evolution which
wears at first the mask of a struggle, but grows more
and more into its truer and deeper sense of a constant
wise adjustment and must take on in a rising scale the
deepest truth and significance—now only underlying
the adjustment and struggle—of a universal harmony.
The perfected human soul must always be an instrument
for the hastening of the ways of this evolution. For
that a divine power acting with the royalty of the divine
will in it must be in whatever degree present in the
nature. But to be accomplished and permanent, steadfast
in action, truly divine, it has to proceed on the basis
of a spiritual equality, a calm, impersonal and equal
self-identification with all beings, an understanding
of all energies. The Divine acts with a mighty power
in the myriad workings of the universe, but with the
supporting light and force of an imperturbable oneness,
freedom and peace. That must be the type of the perfected
soul's divine works And equality is the condition of
the being which makes possible this changed spirit in
the action.
But even a human perfection cannot dispense with equality
as one of its chief elements and even its essential
atmosphere The aim of a human perfection must include,
if it is to deserve the name, two things, self-mastery
and a mastery of the surroundings it must seek for them
in the greatest degree of these powers which is at all
attainable by our human nature. Man's urge of self-perfection
is to be, in the ancient language, svarät
and samrät, self-ruler and king. But to
be self-ruler is not possible for him if he is subject
to the attack of the lower nature, to the turbulence
of grief and joy, to the violent touches of pleasure
and pain, to the tumult of his emotions and passions,
to the bondage of his personal likings and dislikings,
to the strong chains of desire and attachment, to the
narrowness of a personal and emotionally preferential
judgment and opinion, to all the hundred touches of
his egoism and its pursuing stamp on his thought, feeling
and action All these things are the slavery to the lower
self which the greater "I" in man must put
under his feet if he is to be king of his own nature.
To surmount them is the condition of self-rule; but
of that surmounting again equality is the condition
and the essence of the movement. To be quite free from
all these things,—if possible, or at least to
be master of and superior to them,—is equality.
Farther, one who is not self-ruler, cannot be master
of his surroundings. The knowledge, the will, the harmony
which is necessary for this outward mastery, can come
only as a crown of the inward conquest. It belongs to
the self-possessing soul and mind which follows with
a disinterested equality the Truth, the Right, the universal
Largeness to which alone this mastery is possible,—following
always the great ideal they present to our imperfection,
while it understands and makes a full allowance too
for all that seems to conflict with them and stand in
the way of their manifestation. This rule is true even
on the levels of our actual human mentality, where we
can only get a limited perfection. But the ideal of
Yoga takes up this aim of Swarajya and Samrajya and
puts it on the larger spiritual basis. There it gets
its full power, opens to the diviner degrees of the
spirit; for it is by oneness with the Infinite, by a
spiritual power acting upon finite things, that some
highest integral perfection of our being and nature
finds its own native foundation.
A perfect equality not only of the self, but in the
nature is a condition of the Yoga of self-perfection.
The first obvious step to it will be the conquest of
our emotional and vital being, for here are the sources
of greatest trouble, the most rampant forces of inequality
and subjection, the most insistent claim of our imperfection.
The equality of these parts of our nature comes by purification
and freedom. We might say that equality is the very
sign of liberation. To be free from the domination of
the urge of vital desire and the stormy mastery of the
soul by the passions is to have a calm and equal heart
and a life-principle governed by the large and even
view of a universal spirit. Desire is the impurity of
the Prana, the life-principle, and its chain of bondage.
A free Prana means a content and satisfied life-soul
which fronts the contact of outward things without desire
and receives them with an equal response; delivered,
uplifted above the servile duality of liking and disliking,
indifferent to the urgings of pleasure and pain, not
excited by the pleasant, not troubled and overpowered
by the unpleasant, not clinging with attachment to the
touches it prefers or violently repelling those for
which it has an aversion, it will be opened to a greater
system of values of experience. All that comes to it
from the world with menace or with solicitation, it
will refer to the higher principles, to a reason and
heart in touch with or changed by the light and calm
joy of the spirit. Thus quieted, mastered by the spirit
and no longer trying to impose its own mastery on the
deeper and finer soul in us, this life-soul will be
itself spiritualised and work as a clear and noble instrument
of the diviner dealings of the spirit with things. There
is no question here of an ascetic killing of the life-impulse
and its native utilities and functions; not its killing
is demanded, but its transformation. The function of
the Prana is enjoyment, but the real enjoyment of existence
is an inward spiritual Ananda, not partial and troubled
like that of our vital, emotional or mental pleasure,
degraded as they are now by the predominance of the
physical mind, but universal, profound, a massed concentration
of spiritual bliss possessed in a calm ecstasy of self
and all existence. Possession is its function, by possession
comes the soul's enjoyment of things, but this is the
real possession, a thing large and inward, not dependent
on the outward seizing which makes us subject to what
we seize. All outward possession and enjoyment will
be only an occasion of a satisfied and equal play of
the spiritual Ananda with the forms and phenomena of
its own world-being. The egoistic possession, the making
things our own in the sense of the ego's claim on God
and beings and the world, parigraha, must be
renounced in order that this greater thing, this large,
universal and perfect life, may come. Tyaktena bhunjithäh,
by renouncing the egoistic sense of desire and possession,
the soul enjoys divinely its self and the universe.
A free heart is similarly a heart delivered from the
gusts and storms of the affections and the passions;
the assailing touch of grief, wrath, hatred, fear, inequality
of love, trouble of joy, pain of sorrow fall away from
the equal heart, and leave it a thing large, calm, equal,
luminous, divine. These things are not incumbent on
the essential nature of our being, but the creations
of the present make of our outward active mental and
vital nature and its transactions with its surroundings.
The ego-sense which induces us to act as separate beings
who make their isolated claim and experience the test
of the values of the universe, is responsible for these
aberrations. When we live in unity with the Divine in
ourselves and the spirit of the universe, these imperfections
fall away from us and disappear in the calm and equal
strength and delight of the inner spiritual existence.
Always that is within us and transforms the outward
touches before they reach it by a passage through a
subliminal psychic soul in us which is the hidden instrument
of its delight of being. By equality of the heart we
get away from the troubled desire-soul on the surface,
open the gates of this profounder being, bring out its
responses and impose their true divine values on all
that solicits our emotional being. A free, happy, equal
and all-embracing heart of spiritual feeling is the
outcome of this perfection.
In
this perfection too there is no question of a severe
ascetic insensibility, an aloof spiritual indifference
or a strained rugged austerity of self-suppression.
This is not a killing of the emotional nature but a
transformation. All that presents itself here in our
outward nature in perverse or imperfect forms has a
significance and utility which come out when we get
back to the greater truth of divine being. Love will
be not destroyed, but perfected, enlarged to its widest
capacity, deepened to its spiritual rapture, the love
of God, the love of man, the love of all things as ourselves
and as beings and powers of the Divine; a large, universal
love, not at all incapable of various relation, will
replace the claimant, egoistic, self-regarding love
of little joys and griefs and insistent demands afflicted
with all the chequered pattern of angers and jealousies
and satisfactions, rushings to unity and movements of
fatigue, divorce and separation on which we now place
so high a value. Grief will cease to exist, but a universal,
an equal love and sympathy will take its place, not
a suffering sympathy, but a power which, itself delivered,
is strong to sustain, to help, to liberate. To the free
spirit wrath and hatred are impossible, but not the
strong Rudra energy of the Divine which can battle without
hatred and destroy without wrath, because all the time
aware of the things it destroys as parts of itself,
its own manifestations and unaltered therefore in its
sympathy and understanding of those in whom are embodied
these manifestations. All our emotional nature will
undergo this high liberating transformation; but in
order that it may do so, a perfect equality is the eifective
condition.
The same equality must be brought into the rest of our
being. Our whole dynamic being is acting under the influence
of unequal impulses, the manifestations of the lower
ignorant nature. These urgings we obey or partially
control or place on them the changing and modifying
influence of our reason, our refining aesthetic sense
and mind and regulating ethical notions. A tangled strain
of right and wrong, of useful and harmful, harmonious
or disordered activity is the mixed result of our endeavour,
a shifting standard of human reason and unreason, virtue
and vice, honour and dishonour, the noble and the ignoble,
things approved and things disapproved of men, much
trouble of self-approbation and disapprobation or of
self-righteousness and disgust, remorse, shame and moral
depression. These things are no doubt very necessary
at present for our spiritual evolution. But the seeker
of a greater perfection will draw back from all these
dualities, regard them with an equal eye and arrive
through equality at an impartial and universal action
of the dynamic Tapas, spiritual force, in which his
own force and will are turned into pure and just instruments
of a greater calm secret of divine working. The ordinary
mental standards will be exceeded on the basis of this
dynamic equality. The eye of his will must look beyond
to a purity of divine being, a motive of divine will-power
guided by divine knowledge of which his perfected nature
will be the engine, yantra. That must remain
impossible in entirety as long as the dynamic ego with
its subservience to the emotional and vital impulses
and the preferences of the personal judgement interferes
in his action. A perfect equality of the will is the
power which dissolves these knots of the lower impulsion
to works. This equality will not respond to the lower
impulses, but watch for a greater seeing impulsion from
the Light above the mind, and will not judge and govern
with the intellectual judgment, but wait for enlightenment
and direction from a superior plane of vision. As it
mounts upward to the supramental being and widens inward
to the spiritual largeness, the dynamic nature will
be transformed, spiritualised like the emotional and
pranic, and grow into a power of the divine nature.
There will be plenty of stumblings and errors and imperfections
of adjustment of the instruments to their new working,
but the increasingly equal soul will not be troubled
overmuch or grieve at these things, since, delivered
to the guidance of the Light and Power within self and
above mind, it will proceed on its way with a firm assurance
and await with growing calm the vicissitudes and completion
of the process of transformation. The promise of the
Divine Being in the Gita will be the anchor of its resolution,
"Abandon all dharmas and take refuge in Me alone;
I will deliver thee from all sin and evil; do not grieve."
The equality of the thinking mind will be a part and
a very important part of the perfection of the instruments
in the nature. Our present attractive self-justifying
attachment to our intellectual preferences, our judgments,
opinions, imaginations, limiting associations of the
memory which makes the basis of our mentality, to the
current repetitions of our habitual mind, to the insistences
of our pragmatic mind, to the limitations even of our
intellectual truth-mind, must go the way of other attachments
and yield to the impartiality of an equal vision. The
equal thought-mind will look on knowledge and ignorance
and on truth and error, those dualities created by our
limited nature of consciousness and the partiality of
our intellect and its little stock of reasonings and
intuitions, accept them both without being bound to
either twine of the skein and await a luminous transcendence.
In ignorance it will see a knowledge which is imprisoned
and seeks or waits for delivery, in error a truth at
work which has lost itself or got thrown by the groping
mind into misleading forms. On the other side, it will
not hold itself bound and limited by its knowledge or
forbidden by it to proceed to fresh illumination, nor
lay too fierce a grasp on truth, even when using it
to the full, or tyrannously chain it to its present
formulations. This perfect equality of the thinking
mind is indispensable because the objective of this
progress is the greater light which belongs to a higher
plane of spiritual cognizance. This equality is the
most delicate and difficult of all, the least practised
by the human mind; its perfection is impossible so long
as the supramental light does not fall fully on the
upward looking mentality. But increasing will to equality
in the intelligence is needed, before that light can
work freely upon the mental substance. This too is not
an abnegation of the seekings and cosmic purposes of
the intelligence, not an indifference or impartial scepticism,
nor yet a stilling of all thought in the silence of
the Ineffable. A stilling of the mental thought may
be part of the discipline, when the object is to free
the mind from its own partial workings, in order that
it may become an equal channel of a higher light and
knowledge; but there must also be a transformation of
the mental substance; otherwise the higher light cannot
assume full possession and a compelling shape for the
ordered works of the divine consciousness in the human
being. The silence of the Ineffable is a truth of divine
being, but the Word which proceeds from that silence
is also a truth, and it is this Word which has to be
given a body in the conscious form of the nature.
But, finally, all this equalisation of the nature is
a preparation for the highest spiritual equality to
take possession of the whole being and make a pervading
atmosphere in which the light, power and joy of the
Divine can manifest itself in man amid an increasing
fullness. That equality is the eternal equality of Sachchidananda.
It is an equality of the infinite being which is self-existent,
an equality of the eternal spirit, but it will mould
into its own mould the mind, heart, will, life, physical
being. It is an equality of the infinite spiritual consciousness
which will contain and base the blissful flowing and
satisfied waves of a divine knowledge. It is an equality
of the divine Tapas which will initiate a luminous action
of the divine will in all the nature. It is an equality
of the divine Ananda which will found the play of a
divine universal delight, universal love and an illimitable
aesthesis of universal beauty. The ideal equal peace
and calm of the Infinite will be the wide ether of our
perfected being, but the ideal, equal and perfect action
of the Infinite through the nature working on the relations
of the universe will be the untroubled outpouring of
its power in our being. This is the meaning of equality
in the terms of the integral Yoga.
-Sri
Aurobindo
