THE
fundamental idea of a Yoga of self-perfection must
be, under these conditions, a reversal of the present
relations of the soul of man to his mental, vital
and physical nature. Man is at present a partly
self-conscious soul subject to and limited by mind,
life and body, who has to become an entirely self-conscious
soul master of his mind, life and body. Not limited
by their claims and demands, a perfect self-conscious
soul would be superior to and a free possessor of
its instruments. This effort of man to be master
of his own being has been the sense of a large part
of his past spiritual, intellectual and moral strivings.
In order to be possessor of his being with any complete
reality of freedom and mastery, man must find out
his highest self, the real man or highest Purusha
in him, which is free and master of its own inalienable
power. He must cease to be the mental, vital, physical
ego; for that is always the creation, instrument
and subject of mental, vital, physical Nature. This
ego is not his real self, but an instrumentation
of Nature by which it has developed a sense of limited
and separate individual being in mind, life and
body. By this instrumentation he acts as if he were
a separate existence in the material universe. Nature
has evolved certain habitual limiting conditions
under which that action takes place; self-identification
of the soul with the ego is the means by which she
induces the soul to consent to this action and accept
these habitual limiting conditions. While the identification
lasts, there is a self-imprisonment in this habitual
round and narrow action, and, until it is transcended,
there can be no free use by the soul of its individual
living, much less a real self-exceeding. For this
reason an essential movement of the Yoga is to draw
back from the outward ego sense by which we are
identified with the action of mind, life and body
and live inwardly in the soul. The liberation from
an externalised ego sense is the first step towards
the soul's freedom and mastery.
When we thus draw back into the soul, we find ourselves
to be not the mind, but a mental being who stands
behind the action of the embodied mind, not a mental
and vital personality,—personality is a composition
of Nature,—but a mental Person, manomaya purusa.
We become aware of a being within who takes his
stand upon mind for self-knowledge and world-knowledge
and thinks of himself as an individual for self-experience
and world-experience, for an inward action and an
outward-going action, but is yet different from
mind, life and body. This sense of difference from
the vital actions and the physical being is very
marked; for although the Purusha feels his mind
to be involved in life and body, yet he is aware
that even if the physical life and body were to
cease or be dissolved, he would still go on existing
in his mental being. But the sense of difference
from the mind is more difficult and less firmly
distinct. But still it is there; it is characterised
by any or all of three intuitions in which this
mental Purusha lives and becomes by them aware of
his own greater existence.
First, he has the intuition of himself as someone
observing the action of the mind; it is something
which is going on in him and yet before him as an
object of his regarding knowledge. This self-awareness
is the intuitive sense of the witness Purusha, säksi.
Witness Purusha is a pure consciousness who watches
Nature and sees it as an action reflected upon the
consciousness and enlightened by that consciousness,
but in itself other than it. To mental Purusha Nature
is only an action, a complex action of discriminating
and combining thought, of will, of sense, of emotion,
of temperament and character, of ego feeling, which
works upon a foundation of vital impulses, needs
and cravings in the conditions imposed by the physical
body. But it is not limited by them, since it can
not only give them new directions and much variation,
refining and extension, but is able to act in thought
and imagination and a mental world of much more
subtle and flexible creations. But also there is
an intuition in the mental Purusha of something
larger and greater than this present action in which
he lives, a range of experience of which it is only
a frontal scheme or a narrow superficial selection.
By this intuition he stands upon the threshold of
a subliminal self with a more extended possibility
than this superficial mentality opens to his self-knowledge.
A last and greatest intuition is an inner awareness
of something which he more essentially is, something
as high above mind as mind is above the physical
life and body. This inner awareness is his intuition
of his supramental and spiritual being.
The mental Purusha can at any time involve himself
again in the superficial action from which he has
drawn back, live for a while entirely identified
with the mechanism of mind, life and body and absorbedly
repeat its recurrent normal action. But once that
separative movement has been made and lived in for
some time, he can never be to himself quite what
he was before. The involution in the outward action
becomes now only a recurrent self-oblivion from
which there is a tendency in him to draw back again
to himself and to pure self-experience. It may be
noted too that the Purusha by drawing back from
the normal action of this outward consciousness
which has created for him his present natural form
of self-experience, is able to take two other poises.
He can have an intuition of himself as a soul in
body, which puts forth life as its activity and
mind as the light of that activity. This soul in
body is the physical conscious being, annamaya
purusa, which uses life and mind characteristically
for physical experience,—all else being regarded
as a consequence of physical experience,—does
not look beyond the life of the body and, so far
as it feels anything beyond its physical individuality,
is aware only of the physical universe and at most
its oneness with the soul of physical Nature. But
he can have too an intuition of himself as a soul
of life, self-identified with a great movement of
becoming in Time, which puts forth body as a form
or basic sense-image and mind as a conscious activity
of life-experience. This soul in life is the vital
conscious being, pränamaya purusa,
which is capable of looking beyond the duration
and limits of the physical body, of feeling an eternity
of life behind and in front, an identity with a
universal Life-being, but does not look beyond a
constant vital becoming in Time. These three Purushas
are soul-forms of the Spirit by which it identifies
its conscious existence with and founds its action
upon any of these three planes or principles of
its universal being.
But man is characteristically a mental being. Moreover,
mentality is his highest present status in which
he is nearest to his real self, most easily and
largely aware of spirit. His way to perfection is
not to involve himself in the outward or superficial
existence, nor is it to place himself in the soul
of life or the soul of body, but to insist on the
three mental intuitions by which he can lift himself
eventually above the physical, vital and mental
levels. This insistence may take two quite different
forms, each with its own object and way of proceeding.
It is quite possible for him to accentuate it in
a direction away from existence in Nature, a detachment,
a withdrawal from mind, life and body. He may try
to live more and more as the witness Purusha, regarding
the action of Nature, without interest in it, without
sanction to it, detached, rejecting the whole action,
withdrawing into pure conscious existence. This
is the Sankhya liberation. He may go inward into
that larger existence of which he has the intuition
and away from the superficial mentality into a dream-state
or sleep-state which admits him into wider or higher
ranges of consciousness. By passing away into these
ranges he may put away from him the terrestrial
being. There is even, it was supposed in ancient
times, a transition to supramental worlds from which
a return to earthly consciousness was either not
possible or not obligatory. But the definite and
sure finality of this kind of liberation depends
on the elevation of the mental being into that spiritual
self of which he becomes aware when he looks away
and upward from all mentality. That is given as
the key to entire cessation from terrestrial existence
whether by immer-gence in pure being or a participation
in supracosmic being.
But
if our aim is to be not only free by self-detachment
from Nature, but perfected in mastery, this type
of insistence can no longer suffice. We have to
regard our mental, vital and physical action of
Nature, find out the knots of its bondage and the
loosing-points of liberation, discover the keys
of its imperfection and lay our finger on the key
of perfection. When the regarding soul, the witness
Purusha stands back from his action of nature and
observes it, he sees that it proceeds of its own
impulsion by the power of its mechanism, by force
of continuity of movement, continuity of mentality,
continuity of life impulse, continuity of an involuntary
physical mechanism. At first the whole thing seems
to be the recurrent action of an automatic machinery,
although the sum of that action mounts constantly
into a creation, development, evolution. He was
as if seized in this wheel, attached to it by the
ego sense, whirled round and onward in the circling
of the machinery. A complete mechanical determinism
or a stream of determinations of Nature to which
he lent the light of his consciousness, is the natural
aspect of his mental, vital and physical personality
once it is regarded from this stable detached standpoint
and no longer by a soul caught up in the movement
and imagining itself to be a part of the action.
But on a farther view we find that this determinism
is not so complete as it seemed; action of Nature
continues and is what it is because of the sanction
of the Purusha. The regarding Purusha sees that
he supports and in some way fills and pervades the
action with his conscious being. He discovers that
without him it could not continue and that where
he persistently withdraws this sanction, the habitual
action becomes gradually enfeebled, flags and ceases.
His whole active mentality can be thus brought to
a complete stillness. There is yet a passive mentality
which mechanically continues, but this too can be
stilled by his withdrawal into himself out of the
action. Even then the life action in its most mechanical
parts continues; but that too can be stilled into
cessation. It would appear then that he is not only
the upholding (bhartr) Purusha, but in
some way the master of his nature, Ishwara. It was
the consciousness of this sanctioning control, this
necessity of his consent, which made him in the
ego-sense conceive of himself as a soul or mental
being with a free will determining all his own becomings.
Yet the free-will seems to be imperfect, almost
illusory, since the actual will itself is a machinery
of Nature and each separate willing determined by
the stream of past action and the sum of conditions
it created,—although, because the result of
the stream, the sum, is at each moment a new development,
a new determination, it may seem to be a self-born
willing, virginally creative at each moment. What
he contributed all the while was a consent behind,
a sanction to what Nature was doing. He does not
seem able to rule her entirely, but only choose
between certain well-defined possibilities: there
is in her a power of resistance born of her past
impetus and a still greater power of resistance
born of the sum of fixed conditions she has created,
which she presents to him as a set of permanent
laws to be obeyed. He cannot radically alter her
way of proceeding, cannot freely effect his will
from within her present movement, nor, while standing
in the mentality, get outside or above her in such
a way as to exercise a really free control. There
is a duality of dependence, her dependence on his
consent, his dependence on her law and way and limits
of action, determination denied by a sense of free-will,
free-will nullified by the actuality of natural
determination. He is sure that she is his power,
but yet he seems to be subject to her. He is the
sanctioning (anumantr) Purusha, but does
not seem to be the absolute lord, Ishwara.
Nevertheless, there is somewhere an absolute control,
a real Ishwara. He is aware of it and knows that
if he can find it, he will enter into control, become
not only the passive sanctioning witness and upholding
soul of her will, but the free powerful user and
determiner of her movements. But this control seems
to belong to another poise than the mentality. Sometimes
he finds himself using it, but as a channel or instrument;
it comes to him from above. It is clear then that
it is supramental, a power of the Spirit greater
than mental being which he already knows himself
to be at the summit and in the secret core of his
conscious being. To enter into identity with that
Spirit must then be his way to control and lordship.
He can do it passively by a sort of reflection and
receiving in his mental consciousness, but then
he is only a mould, channel or instrument, not a
possessor or participant in the power. He can arrive
at identity by an absorption of his mentality in
inner spiritual being, but then the conscious action
ceases in a trance of identity. To be active master
of the nature he must evidently rise to some higher
supramental poise where there is possible not only
a passive, but an active identity with the controlling
spirit. To find the way of rising to this greater
poise and be self-ruler, Swarat, is a condition
of his perfection.
The difficulty of the ascent is due to a natural
ignorance. He is the Purusha, witness of mental
and physical Nature, säksi, but not
a complete knower of self and Nature, jnätr.
Knowledge in the mentality is enlightened by his
consciousness; he is the mental knower; but he finds
that this is not a real knowledge, but only a partial
seeking and partial finding, a derivative uncertain
reflection and narrow utilisation for action from
a greater light beyond which is the real knowledge.
This light is the self-awareness and all-awareness
of Spirit. The essential self-awareness he can arrive
at even on the mental plane of being, by reflection
in the soul of mind or by its absorption in spirit,
as indeed it can be arrived at by another kind of
reflection or absorption in soul of life and soul
of body. But for participation in an effective all-awareness
with this essential self-awareness as the soul of
its action he must rise to supermind. To be lord
of his being, he must be knower of self and Nature,
jnätr ïsvarah. Partially
this may be done on a higher level of mind where
it responds directly to supermind, but really and
completely this perfection belongs not to the mental
being, but to the ideal or knowledge Soul, vijnänamaya
purusa. To draw up the mental into the greater
knowledge being and that into the Bliss-Self of
the spirit, änandamaya purusa, is
the uttermost way of this perfection.
But no perfection, much less this perfection can
be attained without a very radical dealing with
the present nature and the abrogation of much that
seems to be the fixed law of its complex nexus of
mental, vital and physical being. The law of this
nexus has been created for a definite and limited
end, the temporary maintenance, preservation, possession,
aggrandisement, enjoyment, experience, need, action
of the mental ego in the living body. Other resultant
uses are served, but this is the immediate and fundamentally
determining object and utility. To arrive at a higher
utility and freer instrumentation this nexus must
be partly broken up, exceeded, transformed into
a larger harmony of action. The Purusha sees that
the law created is that of a partly stable, partly
unstable selective determination of habitual, yet
developing experiences out of a first confused consciousness
of self and not-self, subjective being and external
universe. This determination is managed by mind,
life and body acting upon each other, in harmony
and correspondence, but also in discord and divergence,
mutual interference and limitation. There is a similar
mixed harmony and discord between various activities
of the mind in itself, as also between activities
of the life in itself and of the physical being.
The whole is a sort of disorderly order, an order
evolved and contrived out of a constantly surrounding
and invading confusion.
This is the first difficulty the Purusha has to
deal with, a mixed and confused action of Nature,—an
action without clear self-knowledge, distinct motive,
firm instrumentation, only an attempt at these things
and a general relative success of effectuality,—a
surprising effect of adaptation in some directions,
but also much distress of inadequacy. That mixed
and confused action has to be mended; purification
is an essential means towards self-perfection. All
these impurities and inadequacies result in various
kinds of limitation and bondage: but there are two
or three primary knots of the bondage,—ego
is the principal knot,—from which the others
derive. These bonds must be got rid of; purification
is not complete till it brings about liberation.
Besides, after a certain purification and liberation
has been effected, there is still the conversion
of the purified instruments to the law of a higher
object and utility, a large, real and perfect order
of action. By the conversion man can arrive at a
certain perfection of fullness of being, calm, power
and knowledge, even a greater vital action and more
perfect physical existence. One result of this perfection
is a large and perfected delight of being, Ananda.
Thus purification, liberation, perfection, delight
of being are four constituent elements of the Yoga,—suddhi,
mukti, siddhi, bhukti.
But this perfection cannot be attained or cannot
be secure and entire in its largeness if the Purusha
lays stress on individuality. To abandon identification
with the physical, vital and mental ego, is not
enough; he must arrive in soul also at a true, universalised,
not separative individuality. In the lower nature
man is an ego making a clean cut in conception between
himself and all other existence; the ego is to him
self, but all the rest not-self, external to his
being. His whole action starts from and is founded
upon this self-conception and world-conception.
But the conception is in fact an error. However
sharply he individualises himself in mental idea
and mental or other action, he is inseparable from
the universal being, his body from universal force
and matter, his life from the universal life, his
mind from universal mind, his soul and spirit from
universal soul and spirit. The universal acts on
him, invades him, overcomes him, shapes itself in
him at every moment; he in his reaction acts on
the universal, invades, tries to impose himself
on it, shape it, overcome its attack, rule and use
its instrumentation.
This conflict is a rendering of the underlying unity,
which assumes the aspect of struggle by a necessity
of the original separation; the two pieces into
which mind has cut the oneness, rush upon each other
to restore the oneness and each tries to seize on
and take into itself the separated portion. Universe
seems to be always trying to swallow up man, the
infinite to resume this finite which stands on its
self-defence and even replies by aggression. But
in real fact the universal being through this apparent
struggle is working out its purpose in man, though
the key and truth of the purpose and working is
lost to his superficial conscious mind, only held
obscurely in an underlying subconscient and only
known luminously in an overruling superconscient
unity. Man also is impelled towards unity by a constant
impulse of extension of his ego, which identifies
itself as best it can with other egos and with such
portions of the universe as he can physically, vitally,
mentally get into his use and possession. As man
aims at knowledge and mastery of his own being,
so also he aims at knowledge and mastery of the
environmental world of nature, its objects, its
instrumentation, its beings. First he tries to effect
this aim by egoistic possession, but, as he develops,
the element of sympathy born of the secret oneness
grows in him and he arrives at the idea of a widening
cooperation and oneness with other beings, a harmony
with universal Nature and universal being.
The witness Purusha in the mind observes that the
inadequacy of his effort, all the inadequacy in
fact of man's life and nature arises from the separation
and the consequent struggle, want of knowledge,
want of harmony, want of oneness. It is essential
for him to grow out of separative individuality,
to universalise himself, to make himself one with
the universe. This unification can be done only
through the soul by making our soul of mind one
with the universal Mind, our soul of life one with
the universal Life-soul, our soul of body one with
the universal soul of physical Nature. When this
can be done, in proportion to the power, intensity,
depth, completeness, permanence with which it can
be done, great effects are produced upon the natural
action. Especially there grows an immediate and
profound sympathy and immixture of mind with mind,
life with life, a lessening of the body's insistence
on separateness, a power of direct mental and other
intercommunication and effective mutual action which
helps out now the inadequate indirect communication
and action that was till now the greater part of
the conscious means used by embodied mind. But still
the Purusha sees that in mental, vital, physical
nature, taken by itself, there is always a defect,
inadequacy, confused action, due to the mechanically
unequal interplay of the three modes or gunas of
Nature. To transcend it he has in the universality
too to rise to the supramental and spiritual, to
be one with the supramental soul of cosmos, the
universal spirit. He arrives at the larger light
and order of a higher principle in himself and the
universe which is the characteristic action of the
divine Sachchidananda. Even, he is able to impose
the influence of that light and order, not only
on his own natural being, but, within the radius
and to the extent of the Spirit's action in him,
on the world he lives in, on that which is around
him. He is svarät, self-knower, self-ruler,
but he begins to be also through this spiritual
oneness and transcendence samrät,
a knower and master of his environing world of being.
In this self-development the soul finds that it
has accomplished on this line the object of the
whole integral Yoga, union with the Supreme in its
self and in its universalised individuality. So
long as he remains in the world-existence, this
perfection must radiate out from him,—for
that is the necessity of his oneness with the universe
and its beings,—in an influence and action
which help all around who are capable of it to rise
to or advance towards the same perfection, and for
the rest in an influence and action which help,
as only the self-ruler and master man can help,
in leading the human race forward spiritually towards
this consummation and towards some image of a greater
divine truth in their personal and communal existence.
He becomes a light and power of the Truth to which
he has climbed and a means for others' ascension.
-Sri
Aurobindo
