THE purification of the mental
being and the psychic Prana,—we will leave aside
for the time the question of the physical purification,
that of the body and physical Prana, though that too
is necessary to an integral perfection,—prepares
the ground for a spiritual liberation. Suddhi
is the condition for mukti. All purification
is a release, a delivery; for it is a throwing away
of limiting, binding, obscuring imperfections and confusions:
purification from desire brings the freedom of the psychic
Prana, purification from wrong emotions and troubling
reactions the freedom of the heart, purification from
the obscuring limited thought of the sense-mind the
freedom of the intelligence, purification from mere
intellectuality the freedom of the gnosis. But all this
is an instrumental liberation. The freedom of the soul,
mukti, is of a larger and more essential character;
it is an opening out of mortal limitation into the illimitable
immortality of the Spirit.
For certain ways of thinking liberation is a throwing
off of all nature, a silent state of pure being, a Nirvana
or extinction, a dissolution of the natural existence
into some indefinable Absolute, moksa. But an absorbed
and immersed bliss, a wideness of actionless peace,
a release of self-extinction or self-drowning in the
Absolute is not our aim. We shall give to the idea of
liberation, mukti, only the connotation of that inner
change which is common to all experience of this kind,
essential to perfection and indispensable to spiritual
freedom. We shall find that it then implies always two
things, a rejection and an assumption, a negative and
a positive side; the negative movement of freedom is
a liberation from the principal bonds, the master-knots
of the lower soul-nature, the positive side an opening
or growth into the higher spiritual existence. But what
are these master-knots—other and deeper twistings
than the instrumental knots of the mind, heart, psychic
life-force? We find them pointed out for us and insisted
on with great force and a constant emphatic repetition
in the Gita; they are four, desire, ego, the dualities
and the three gunas of Nature; for to be desireless,
ego-less, equal of mind and soul and spirit and nistraigunya
is in the idea of the Gita to be free, mukta.
We may accept this description; for everything essential
is covered by its amplitude. On the other hand, the
positive sense of freedom is to be universal in soul,
transcendently one in spirit with God, possessed of
the highest divine nature,—as we may say, like
to God, or one with him in the law of our being. This
is the whole and full sense of liberation and this is
the integral freedom of the spirit.
We have already had to speak of purification from the
psychic desire of which the craving of the Prana is
the evolutionary or, as we may put it, the practical
basis. But this is in the mental and psychic nature;
spiritual desirelessness has a wider and more essential
meaning: for desire has a double knot, a lower knot
in the Prana, which is a craving in the instruments,
and a very subtle knot in the soul itself with the Buddhi
as its first support or pratisthä, which
is the inmost origin of this mesh of our bondage. When
we look from below, desire presents itself to us as
a craving of the life force which subtilises in the
emotions into a craving of the heart and is farther
subtilised in the intelligence into a craving, preference,
passion of the aesthetic, ethical, dynamic or rational
turn of the Buddhi. This desire is essential to the
ordinary man; he cannot live or act as an individual
without knotting up all his action into the service
of some kind of lower or higher craving, preference
or passion. But when we are able to look at desire from
above, we see that what supports this instrumental desire
is a will of the spirit. There is a will, tapas,
sakti, by which the secret spirit imposes on
its outer members all their action and draws from it
an active delight of its being, an Ananda, in which
they very obscurely and imperfectly, if at all consciously,
partake. This Tapas is the will of the transcendent
spirit who creates the universal movement, of the universal
spirit who supports and informs it, of the free individual
spirit who is the soul centre of its multiplicities.
It is one will, free in all these at once, comprehensive,
harmonious, unified; we find it, when we live and act
in the spirit, to be an effortless and desireless, a
spontaneous and illumined, a self-fulfilling and self-possessing,
a satisfied and blissful will of the spiritual delight
of being.
But the moment the individual soul leans away from the
universal and transcendent truth of its being, leans
towards ego, tries to make this will a thing of its
own, a separate personal energy, that will changes its
character: it becomes an effort, a straining, a heat
of force which may have its fiery joys of effectuation
and of possession, but has also its afflicting recoils
and pain of labour. It is this that turns in each instrument
into an intellectual, emotional, dynamic, sensational
or vital will of desire, wish, craving. Even when the
instruments per se are purified of their own
apparent initiative and particular kind of desire, this
imperfect Tapas may still remain, and so long as it
conceals the source or deforms the type of the inner
action, the soul has not the bliss of liberty, or can
only have it by refraining from all action; even, if
allowed to persist, it will rekindle the pranic or other
desires or at least throw a reminiscent shadow of them
on the being. This spiritual seed or beginning of desire
too must be expelled, renounced, cast away: the Sadhaka
must either choose an active peace and complete inner
silence or lose individual initiation, sarikalpärambha,
in a unity with the universal will, the Tapas of the
divine Shakti. The passive way is to be inwardly immobile,
without effort, wish, expectation or any turn to action,
niscesta, anïha, nirapeksa, nivrtta;
the active way is to be thus immobile and impersonal
in the mind, but to allow the supreme Will in its spiritual
purity to act through the purified instruments. Then,
if the soul abides on the level of the spiritualised
mentality, it becomes an instrument only, but is itself
without initiative or action, niskriya, sarvärambha-parityägi.
But if it rises to the gnosis, it is at once an instrument
and a participant in the bliss of the divine action
and the bliss of the divine Ananda; it unifies in itself
the prakrti and the purusa.
The
ego turn, the separative turn of the being, is the fulcrum
of the whole embarrassed labour of the ignorance and
the bondage. So long as one is not free from the ego
sense, there can be no real freedom. The seat of the
ego is said to be in the Buddhi; it is an ignorance
of the discriminating mind and reason which discriminate
wrongly and take the individuation of mind, life and
body for a truth of separative existence and are turned
away from the greater reconciling truth of the oneness
of all existence. At any rate, in man it is the ego
idea which chiefly supports the falsehood of a separative
existence; to get rid of this idea, to dwell on the
opposite idea of unity, of the one self, the one spirit,
the one being of nature is therefore an effective remedy;
but it is not by itself absolutely effective. For the
ego, though it supports itself by this ego idea, aham-buddhi,
finds its most powerful means for a certain obstinacy
or passion of persistence in the normal action of the
sense-mind, the Prana and the body. To cast out of us
the ego idea is not entirely possible or not entirely
effective until these instruments have undergone purification;
for, their action being persistently egoistic and separative,
the Buddhi is carried away by them,—as a boat
by winds on the sea, says the Gita,—the knowledge
in the intelligence is being constantly obscured or
lost temporarily and has to be restored again, a very
labour of Sisyphus. But if the lower instruments have
been purified of egoistic desire, wish, will, egoistic
passion, egoistic emotion and the Buddhi itself of egoistic
idea and preference, then the knowledge of the spiritual
truth of oneness can find a firm foundation. Till then,
the ego takes all sorts of subtle forms and we imagine
ourselves to be free from it, when we are really acting
as its instruments and all we have attained is a certain
intellectual poise which is not the true spiritual liberation.
Moreover, to throw away the active sense of ego is not
enough; that may merely bring an inactive state of the
mentality, a certain passive inert quietude of separate
being may take the place of the kinetic egoism, which
is also not the true liberation. The ego sense must
be replaced by a oneness with the transcendental Divine
and with universal being.
This necessity arises from the fact that the Buddhi
is only a pratisthä or chief support of
the ego-sense in its manifold play, ahankära;
but in its source it is a degradation or deformation
of a truth of our spiritual being. The truth of being
is that there is a transcendent existence, supreme self
or spirit, a timeless soul of existence, an eternal,
a Divine, or even we may speak of it in relation to
current mental ideas of the Godhead as a supra-Divine,
which is here immanent, all-embracing, all-initiating
and all-governing, a great universal Spirit; and the
individual is a conscious power of being of the Eternal,
capable eternally of relations with him, but one with
him too in the very core of reality of its own eternal
existence. This is a truth which the intelligence can
apprehend, can, when once purified, reflect, transmit,
hold in a derivative fashion, but it can only be entirely
realised, lived and made effective in the spirit. When
we live in the spirit, then we not only know, but are
this truth of our being. The individual then enjoys
in the spirit, in the bliss of the spirit, his oneness
with the universal existence, his oneness with the timeless
Divine and his oneness with all other beings and that
is the essential sense of a spiritual liberation from
the ego. But the moment the soul leans towards the mental
limitation, there is a certain sense of spiritual separativeness
which has its joys, but may at any moment lapse into
the entire ego-sense, ignorance, oblivion of oneness.
To get rid of this separativeness an attempt is made
to absorb oneself in the idea and realisation of the
Divine, and this takes in certain forms of spiritual
askesis the turn of a strain towards the abolition of
all individual being and a casting away, in the trance
of immersion, of all individual or universal relations
with the Divine, in others it becomes an absorbed dwelling
in him and not in this world or a continual absorbed
or intent living in his presence, säyujya,
sälokya, sämipya mukti. The way proposed
for the integral Yoga is a lifting up and surrender
of the whole being to him, by which not only do we become
one with him in our spiritual existence, but dwell too
in him and he in us, so that the whole nature is full
of his presence and changed into the divine nature;
we become one spirit and consciousness and life and
substance with the Divine and at the same time we live
and move in and have a various joy of that oneness.
This integral liberation from the ego into the divine
spirit and nature can only be relatively complete on
our present level, but it begins to become absolute
as we open to and mount into the gnosis. This is the
liberated perfection.
The liberation from ego, the liberation from desire
together found the central spiritual freedom. The sense,
the idea, the experience that I am a separately self-existent
being in the universe, and the forming of consciousness
and force of being into the mould of that experience
are the root of all suffering, ignorance and evil. And
it is so because that falsifies both in practice and
in cognition the whole real truth of things; it limits
the being, limits the consciousness, limits the power
of our being, limits the bliss of being; this limitation,
again, produces a wrong way of existence, wrong way
of consciousness, wrong way of using the power of our
being and consciousness, and wrong, perverse and contrary
forms of the delight of existence. The soul limited
in being and self-isolated in its environment feels
itself no longer in unity and harmony with its Self,
with God, with the universe, with all around it; but
rather it finds itself at odds with the universe, in
conflict and disaccord with other beings who are its
other selves, but whom it treats as not-self; and so
long as this disaccord and disagreement last, it cannot
possess its World and it cannot enjoy the universal
life, but is full of unease, fear, afflictions of all
kinds, in a painful struggle to preserve and increase
itself and possess its surroundings,—for to possess
its world is the nature of infinite spirit and the necessary
urge in all being. The satisfactions it gets from this
labour and effort are of a stinted, perverse and unsatisfying
kind: for the one real satisfaction it has is that of
growth, of an increasing return towards itself, of some
realisation of accord and harmony, of successful self-creation
and self-realisation, but the little of these things
that it can achieve on the basis of ego-consciousness
is always limited, insecure, imperfect, transitory.
It is at war too with its own self,—first because,
since it is no longer in possession of the central harmonising
truth of its own being, it cannot properly control its
natural members or accord their tendencies, powers and
demands; it has not the secret of harmony, because it
has not the secret of its own unity and self-possession;
and, secondly, not being in possession of its highest
self, it has to struggle towards that, is not allowed
to be at peace till it is in possession of its own true
highest being. All this means that it is not at one
with God; for to be at one with God is to be at one
with oneself, at one with the universe and at one with
all beings. This oneness is the secret of a right and
a divine existence. But the ego cannot have it, because
it is in its very nature separative and because even
with regard to ourselves, to our own psychological existence
it is a false centre of unity; for it tries to rind
the unity of our being in an identification with a shifting
mental, vital, physical personality, not with the eternal
self of our total existence. Only in the spiritual self
can we possess the true unity; for there the individual
enlarges to his own total being and finds himself one
with universal existence and with the transcending Divinity.
All
the trouble and suffering of the soul proceeds from
this wrong egoistic and separative way of existence.
The soul not in possession of its free self-existence,
anätmavän, because it is limited
in its consciousness, is limited in knowledge; and this
limited knowledge takes the form of a falsifying knowledge.
The struggle to return to a true knowing is imposed
upon it, but the ego in the separative mind is satisfied
with shows and fragments of knowledge which it pieces
together into some false or some imperfect total or
governing notion, and this knowledge fails it and has
to be abandoned for a fresh pursuit of the one thing
to be known. That one thing is the Divine, the Self,
the Spirit in whom universal and individual being find
at last their right foundation and their right harmonies.
Again, because it is limited in force, the ego-prisoned
soul is full of many incapacities; wrong knowledge is
accompanied by wrong will, wrong tendencies and impulses
of the being, and the acute sense of this wrong-ness
is the root of the human consciousness of sin. This
deficiency of its nature it tries to set right by standards
of conduct which will help it to remove the egoistic
consciousness and satisfactions of sin by the egoistic
consciousness and self-satisfaction of virtue, the rajasic
by the sattwic egoism. But the original sin has to be
cured, the separation of its being and will from the
divine Being and the divine Will; when it returns to
unity with the divine Will and Being, it rises beyond
sin and virtue to the infinite self-existent purity
and the security of its own divine nature. Its incapacities
it tries to set right by organising its imperfect knowledge
and disciplining its half-enlightened will and force
and directing them by some systematic effort of the
reason; but the result must always be a limited, uncertain,
mutable and stumbling way and standard of capacity in
action. Only when it returns again to the large unity
of the free spirit, bhümä, can the
action of its nature move perfectly as the instrument
of the infinite Spirit and in the steps of the Right
and Truth and Power which belong to the free soul acting
from the supreme centre of its existence. Again, because
it is limited in the delight of being, it is unable
to lay hold on the secure, self-existent perfect bliss
of the spirit or the delight, the Ananda of the universe
which keeps the world in motion, but is only able to
move in a mixed and shifting succession of pleasures
and pains, joys and sorrows, or must take refuge in
some conscient inconscience or neutral indifference.
The ego mind cannot do otherwise, and the soul which
has externalised itself in ego, is subjected to this
unsatisfactory, secondary, imperfect, often perverse,
troubled or annulled enjoyment of existence; yet all
the time the spiritual and universal Ananda is within,
in the self, in the spirit, in its secret unity with
God and existence. To cast away the chain of ego and
go back to free self, immortal spiritual being is the
soul's return to its own eternal divinity.
The will to the imperfect separative being, that wrong
Tapas which makes the soul in Nature attempt to individualise
itself, to individualise its being, consciousness, force
of being, delight of existence in a separative sense,
to have these things as its own, in its own right and
not in the right of God and of the universal oneness,
is that which brings about this wrong turn and creates
the ego. To turn from this original desire is therefore
essential, to get back to the will without desire whose
whole enjoyment of being and whole will in being is
that of a free universal and unifying Ananda. These
two things are one, liberation from the will that is
of the nature of desire and liberation from the ego,
and the oneness which is brought about by the happy
loss of the will of desire and the ego, is the essence
of Mukti.
-Sri
Aurobindo
