A
DIVINE perfection of the human being is our aim. We
must know then, first, what are the essential elements
that constitute man's total perfection; secondly,
what we mean by a divine as distinguished from a human
perfection of our being. That man as a being is capable
of self-development and of some approach at least
to an ideal standard of perfection which his mind
is able to conceive, fix before it and pursue, is
common ground to all thinking humanity, though it
may be only the minority who concern themselves with
this possibility as providing the one most important
aim of life. But by some the ideal is conceived as
a mundane change, by others as a religious conversion.
The mundane perfection is sometimes conceived of as
something outward, social, a thing of action, a more
rational dealing with our fellow-men and our environment,
a better and more efficient citizenship and discharge
of duties, a better, richer, kindlier and happier
way of living, with a more just and more harmonious
associated enjoyment of the opportunities of existence.
By others again a more inner and subjective ideal
is cherished, a clarifying and raising of the intelligence,
will and reason, a heightening and ordering of power
and capacity in the nature, a nobler ethical, a richer
aesthetic, a finer emotional, a much healthier and
better-governed vital and physical being. Sometimes
one element is stressed, almost to the exclusion of
the rest; sometimes, in wider and more well-balanced
minds, the whole harmony is envisaged as a total perfection.
A change of education and social institutions is the
outward means adopted or an inner self-training and
development is preferred as the true instrumentation.
Or the two aims may be clearly united, the perfection
of the inner individual, the perfection of the outer
living.
But the mundane aim takes for its field the present
life and its opportunities; the religious aim, on
the contrary, fixes before it the self-preparation
for another existence after death, its commonest ideal
is some kind of pure sainthood, its means a conversion
of the imperfect or sinful human being by divine grace
or through obedience to a law laid down by a scripture
or else given by a religious founder. The aim of religion
may include a social change, but it is then a change
brought about by the acceptance of a common religious
ideal and way of consecrated living, a brotherhood
of the saints, a theocracy or kingdom of God reflecting
on earth the kingdom of heaven.
The object of our synthetic Yoga must, in this respect
too as in its other parts, be more integral and comprehensive,
embrace all these elements or these tendencies of
a larger impulse of self-perfection and harmonise
them or rather unify, and in order to do that successfully
it must seize on a truth which is wider than the ordinary
religious and higher than the mundane principle. All
life is a secret Yoga, an obscure growth of Nature
towards the discovery and fulfilment of the divine
principle hidden in her which becomes progressively
less obscure, more self-conscient and luminous, more
self-possessed in the human being by the opening of
all his instruments of knowledge, will, action, life
to the Spirit within him and in the world. Mind, life,
body, all the forms of our nature are the means of
this growth, but they find their last perfection only
by opening out to something beyond them, first, because
they are not the whole of what man is, secondly, because
that other something which he is, is the key of his
completeness and brings a light which discovers to
him the whole high and large reality of his being.
Mind is fulfilled by a greater knowledge of which
it is only a half-light, life discovers its meaning
in a greater power and will of which it is the outward
and as yet obscure functioning, body finds its last
use as an instrument of a power of being of which
it is a physical support and material starting-point.
They have all themselves first to be developed and
find out their ordinary possibilities; all our normal
life is a trying of these possibilities and an opportunity
for this preparatory and tentative self-training.
But life cannot find its perfect self-fulfilment till
it opens to that greater reality of being of which
by this development of a richer power and a more sensitive
use and capacity it becomes a well-prepared field
of working.
Intellectual, volitional, ethical, emotional, aesthetic
and physical training and improvement are all so much
to the good, but they are only in the end a constant
movement in a circle without any last delivering and
illumining aim, unless they arrive at a point when
they can open themselves to the power and presence
of the Spirit and admit its direct workings. This
direct working effects a conversion of the whole being
which is the indispensable condition of our real perfection.
To grow into the truth and power of the Spirit and
by the direct action of that power to be made a fit
channel of its self-expression,—a living of
man in the Divine and a divine living of the Spirit
in humanity,—will therefore be the principle
and the whole object of an integral Yoga of self-perfection.
In the process of this change there must be by the
very necessity of the effort two stages of its working.
First, there will be the personal endeavour of the
human being, as soon as he becomes aware by his soul,
mind, heart of this divine possibility and turns towards
it as the true object of life, to prepare himself
for it and to get rid of all in him that belongs to
a lower working, of all that stands in the way of
his opening to the spiritual truth and its power,
so as to possess by this liberation his spiritual
being and turn all his natural movements into free
means of its self-expression. It is by this turn that
the self-conscious Yoga aware of its aim begins: there
is a new awakening and an upward change of the life
motive. So long as there is only an intellectual,
ethical and other self-training for the now normal
purposes of life which does not travel beyond the
ordinary circle of working of mind, life and body,
we are still only in the obscure and yet unillumined
preparatory Yoga of Nature; we are still in pursuit
of only an ordinary human perfection. A spiritual
desire of the Divine and of the divine perfection,
of a unity with him in all our being and a spiritual
perfection in all our nature, is the effective sign
of this change, the precursory power of a great integral
conversion of our being and living.
By personal effort a precursory change, a preliminary
conversion can be effected; it amounts to a greater
or less spiritualising
of our mental motives, our character and temperament,
and a mastery, stilling or changed action of the vital
and physical life. This converted subjectivity can
be made the base of some communion or unity of the
soul in mind with the Divine and some partial reflection
of the divine nature in the mentality of the human
being. That is as far as man can go by his unaided
or indirectly aided effort, because that is an effort
of mind and mind cannot climb beyond itself permanently:
at most it arises to a spiritualised and idealised
mentality. If it shoots up beyond that border, it
loses hold of itself, loses hold of life, and arrives
either at a trance of absorption or a passivity. A
greater perfection can only be arrived at by a higher
power entering in and taking up the whole action of
the being. The second stage of this Yoga will therefore
be a persistent giving up of all the action of the
nature into the hands of this greater Power, a substitution
of its influence, possession and working for the personal
effort, until the Divine to whom we aspire becomes
the direct master of the Yoga and effects the entire
spiritual and ideal conversion of the being.
This double character of our Yoga raises it beyond
the mundane ideal of perfection, while at the same
time it goes too beyond the loftier, intenser, but
much narrower religious formula. The mundane ideal
regards man always as a mental, vital and physical
being and it aims at a human perfection well within
these limits, a perfection of mind, life and body,
an expansion and refinement of the intellect and knowledge,
of the will and power, of ethical character, aim and
conduct, of aesthetic sensibility and creativeness,
of emotional balanced poise and enjoyment, of vital
and physical soundness, regulated action and just
efficiency. It is a wide and full aim, but yet not
sufficiently full and wide, because it ignores that
other greater element of our being which the mind
vaguely conceives as the spiritual element and leaves
it either undeveloped or insufficiently satisfied
as merely some high occasional or added derivatory
experience, the result of the action of mind in its
exceptional aspects or dependent upon mind for its
presence and persistence. It can become a high aim
when it seeks to develop the loftier and the larger
reaches of our mentality, but yet not sufficiently
high, because it does not aspire beyond mind to that
of which our purest reason, our brightest mental intuition,
our deepest mental sense and feeling, strongest mental
will and power or ideal aim and purpose are only pale
radiations. Its aim besides is limited to a terrestrial
perfection of the normal human life.
A Yoga of integral perfection regards man as a divine
spiritual being involved in mind, life and body; it
aims therefore at a liberation and a perfection of
his divine nature. It seeks to make an inner living
in the perfectly developed spiritual being his constant
intrinsic living and the spiritualised action of mind,
life and body only its outward human expression. In
order that this spiritual being may not be something
vague and indefinable or else but imperfectly realised
and dependent on the mental support and the mental
limitations, it seeks to go beyond mind to the supramental
knowledge, will, sense, feeling, intuition, dynamic
initiation of vital and physical action, all that
makes the native working of the spiritual being. It
accepts human life, but takes account of the large
supraterrestrial action behind the earthly material
living, and it joins itself to the divine Being from
whom the supreme origination of all these partial
and lower states proceeds so that the whole of life
may become aware of its divine source and feel in
each action of knowledge, of will, of feeling, sense
and body the divine originating impulse. It rejects
nothing that is essential in the mundane aim, but
enlarges it, finds and lives in its greater and its
truer meaning now hidden from it, transfigures it
from a limited, earthly and mortal thing to a figure
of intimate, divine and immortal values.
The integral Yoga meets the religious ideal at several
points, but goes beyond it in the sense of a greater
wideness. The religious ideal looks, not only beyond
this earth, but away from it to a heaven or even beyond
all heavens to some kind of Nirvana. Its ideal of
perfection is limited to whatever kind of inner or
outer mutation will eventually serve the turning away
of the soul from the human life to the beyond. Its
ordinary idea of perfection is a religio-ethical change,
a drastic purification of the active and the emotional
being, often with an ascetic abrogation and rejection
of the vital impulses as its completes! reaching of
excellence, and in any case a supraterrestrial motive
and reward or result of a life of piety and right
conduct. In so far as it admits a change of knowledge,
will, aesthesis, it is in the sense of the turning
of them to another object than the aims of human life
and eventually brings a rejection of all earthly objects
of aesthesis, will and knowledge. The method, whether
it lays stress on personal effort or upon divine influence,
on works and knowledge or upon grace, is not like
the mundane a development, but rather a conversion;
but in the end the aim is not a conversion of our
mental and physical nature, but the putting on of
a pure spiritual nature and being, and since that
is not possible here on earth, it looks for its consummation
by a transference to another world or a shuffling
off of all cosmic existence.
But the integral Yoga founds itself on a conception
of the spiritual being as an omnipresent existence,
the fullness of which comes not essentially by a transference
to other worlds or a cosmic self-extinction, but by
a growth out of what we now are phenomenally into
the consciousness of the omnipresent reality which
we always are in the essence of our being. It substitutes
for the form of religious piety its completer spiritual
seeking of a divine union. It proceeds by a personal
effort to a conversion through a divine influence
and possession; but this divine grace, if we may so
call it, is not simply a mysterious flow or touch
coming from above, but the all-pervading act of a
divine presence which we come to know within as the
power of the highest Self and Master of our being
entering into the soul and so possessing it that we
not only feel it close to us and pressing upon our
mortal nature, but live in its law, know that law,
possess it as the whole power of our spiritualised
nature. The conversion its action will effect is an
integral conversion of our ethical being into the
Truth and Right of the divine nature, of our intellectual
into the illumination of divine knowledge, our emotional
into the divine love and unity, our dynamic and volitional
into a working of the divine power, our aesthetic
into a plenary reception and a creative enjoyment
of divine beauty, not excluding even in the end a
divine conversion of the vital and physical being.
It regards all the previous life as an involuntary
and unconscious or half-conscious preparatory growing
towards this change and Yoga as the voluntary and
conscious effort and realisation of the change, by
which all the aim of human existence in all its parts
is fulfilled, even while it is transfigured. Admitting
the supracosmic truth and life in worlds beyond, it
admits too the terrestrial as a continued term of
the one existence and a change of individual and communal
life on earth as a strain of its divine meaning.
To open oneself to the supracosmic Divine is an essential
condition of this integral perfection; to unite oneself
with the universal Divine is another essential condition.
Here the Yoga of self-perfection coincides with the
Yogas of knowledge, works and devotion; for it is
impossible to change the human nature into the divine
or to make it an instrument of the divine knowledge,
will and joy of existence, unless there is a union
with the supreme Being, Consciousness and Bliss and
a unity with its universal Self in all things and
beings. A wholly separative possession of the divine
nature by the human individual, as distinct from a
self-withdrawn absorption in it, is not possible.
But this unity will not be an inmost spiritual oneness
qualified, so long as the human life lasts, by a separative
existence in mind, life and body; the full perfection
is a possession, through this spiritual unity, of
unity too with the universal Mind, the universal Life,
the universal Form which are the other constant terms
of cosmic being. Moreover, since human life is still
accepted as a self-expression of the realised Divine
in man, there must be an action of the entire divine
nature in our life; and this brings in the need of
the supramental conversion which substitutes the native
action of spiritual being for the imperfect action
of the superficial nature and spiritualises and transfigures
its mental, vital and physical parts by the spiritual
ideality. These three elements, a union with the supreme
Divine, unity with the universal Self, and a supramental
life action from this transcendent origin and through
this universality, but still with the individual as
the soul-channel and natural instrument, constitute
the essence of the integral divine perfection of the
human being.
-Sri
Aurobindo
