THE two sides of our being, conscious
experiencing soul and executive Nature continuously
and variously offering to the soul her experiences,
determine in their meeting all the affections of our
inner status and its responses. Nature contributes the
character of the happenings and the forms of the instruments
of experience, the soul meets it by an assent to the
natural determinations of the response to these happenings
or by a will to other determination which it imposes
upon the nature. The acceptance of the instrumental
ego-consciousness and the will-to-desire are the initial
consent of the self to the lapse into the lower ranges
of experience in which it forgets its divine nature
of being; the rejection of these things, the return
to free self and the will of the divine delight in being
is the liberation of the spirit. But on the other side
stand the contributions of Nature herself to the mixed
tangle, which she imposes on the soul's experience of
her doings and makings when once that first initial
consent has been given and made the law of the whole
outward transaction. Nature's essential contributions
are two, the gunas and the dualities. This inferior
action of Nature in which we live has certain essential
qualitative modes which constitute the whole basis of
its inferiority. The constant effect of these modes
on the soul in its natural powers of mind, life and
body is a discordant and divided experience, a strife
of opposites, dvandva, a motion in all its
experience and an oscillation between or a mixture of
constant pairs of contraries, of combining positives
and negatives, dualities. A complete liberation from
the ego and the will of desire must bring with it a
superiority to the qualitative modes of the inferior
Nature, traigunyätitya, a release from
this mixed and discordant experience, a cessation or
solution of the dual action of Nature. But on this side
too there are two kinds of freedom. A liberation from
Nature in a quiescent bliss of the spirit is the first
form of release. A farther liberation of the Nature
into a divine quality and spiritual power of world-experience
fills the supreme calm with the supreme kinetic bliss
of knowledge, power, joy and mastery. A divine unity
of supreme spirit and its supreme nature is the integral
liberation.
Nature, because she is a power of spirit, is essentially
qualitative in her action. One may almost say that Nature
is only the power in being and the development in action
of the infinite qualities of the spirit, anantaguna.
All else belongs to her outward and more mechanical
aspects; but this play of quality is the essential thing,
of which the rest is the result and mechanical combination.
Once we have set right the working of the essential
power and quality, all the rest becomes subject to the
control of the experiencing Purusha. But in the inferior
nature of things the play of infinite quality is subject
to a limited measure, a divided and conflicting working,
a system of opposites and discords between which some
practical mobile system of concords has to be found
and to be kept in action; this play of concorded discords,
conflicting qualities, disparate powers and ways of
experience compelled to some just manageable, partial,
mostly precarious agreement, an unstable, mutable equilibrium,
is managed by a fundamental working in three qualitative
modes which conflict and combine together in all her
creations. These three modes have been given in the
Sankhya system, which is generally adopted for this
purpose by all the schools of philosophic thought and
of Yoga in India, the three names, sattva, rajas
and tamas.[This subject has been treated in
the Yoga of Works. It is restated here from the point
of view of the general type of nature and the complete
liberation of the being.] Tamas is the principle
and power of inertia; Rajas is the principle of kinesis,
passion, endeavour, struggle, initiation (ärambhä);
Sattwa the principle of assimilation, equilibrium and
harmony. The metaphysical bearing of this classification
does not concern us; but in its psychological and spiritual
bearing it is of immense practical importance, because
these three principles enter into all things, combine
to give them their turn of active nature, result, effectuation,
and their unequal working in the soul-experience is
the constituent force of our active personality, our
temperament, type of nature and cast of psychological
response to experience. All character of action and
experience in us is determined by the predominance and
by the proportional interaction of these three qualities
or modes of Nature. The soul in its personality is obliged,
as it were, to run into their moulds; mostly, too, it
is controlled by them rather than has any free control
of them. The soul can only be free by rising above and
rejecting the tormented strife of their unequal action
and their insufficient concords and combinations and
precarious harmonies, whether in the sense of a complete
quiescence from the half-regulated chaos of their action
or in the sense of a superiority to this lower turn
of nature and a higher control or transformation of
their working. There must be either an emptiness of
the gunas or a superiority to the gunas.
The gunas affect every part of our natural being. They
have indeed their strongest relative hold in the three
different members of it, mind, life and body. Tamas,
the principle of inertia, is strongest in material nature
and in our physical being. The action of this principle
is of two kinds, inertia offeree and inertia of knowledge.
Whatever is predominantly governed by Tamas, tends in
its force to a sluggish inaction and immobility or else
to a mechanical action which it does not possess, but
is possessed by obscure forces which drive it in a mechanical
round of energy; equally in its consciousness it turns
to an inconscience or enveloped subconscience or to
a reluctant, sluggish or in some way mechanical conscious
action which does not possess the idea of its own energy,
but is guided by an idea which seems external to it
or at least concealed from its active awareness. Thus
the principle of our body is in its nature inert, subconscient,
incapable of anything but a mechanical and habitual
self-guidance and action: though it has like everything
else a principle of kinesis and a principle of equilibrium
of its state and action, an inherent principle of response
and a secret consciousness, the greatest portion of
its rajasic motions is contributed by the life-power
and all the overt consciousness by the mental being.
The principle of Rajas has its strongest hold on the
vital nature. It is the Life within us that is the strongest
kinetic motor power, but the life-power in earthly beings
is possessed by the force of desire, therefore Rajas
turns always to action and desire; desire is the strongest
human and animal initiator of most kinesis and action,
predominant to such an extent that many consider it
the father of all action and even the originator of
our being. Moreover, Rajas finding itself in a world
of matter which starts from the principle of inconscience
and a mechanically driven inertia, has to work against
an immense contrary force; therefore its whole action
takes on the nature of an effort, a struggle, a besieged
and an impeded conflict for possession which is distressed
in its every step by a limiting incapacity, disappointment
and suffering: even its gains are precarious and limited
and marred by the reaction of the effort and an after-taste
of insufficiency and transience. The principle of Sattwa
has its strongest hold in the mind; not so much in the
lower parts of the mind which are dominated by the rajasic
life-power, but mostly in the intelligence and the will
of the reason. Intelligence, reason, rational will are
moved by the nature of their predominant principle towards
a constant effort of assimilation, assimilation by knowledge,
assimilation by a power of understanding will, a constant
effort towards equilibrium, some stability, rule, harmony
of the conflicting elements of natural happening and
experience. This satisfaction it gets in various ways
and in various degrees of acquisition. The attainment
of assimilation, equilibrium and harmony brings with
it always a relative but more or less intense and satisfying
sense of ease, happiness, mastery, security, which is
other than the troubled and vehement pleasures insecurely
bestowed by the satisfaction of rajasic desire and passion.
Light and happiness are the characteristics of the sattwic
Guna. The whole nature of the embodied living mental
being is determined by these three gunas.
But these are only predominant powers in each part of
our complex system. The three qualities mingle, combine
and strive in every fibre and in every member of our
intricate psychology. The mental character is made by
them, the character of our reason, the character of
our will, the character of our moral, aesthetic, emotional,
dynamic, sensational being. Tamas brings in all the
ignorance, inertia, weakness, incapacity which afflicts
our nature, a clouded reason, nescience, unintelligence,
a clinging to habitual notions and mechanical ideas,
the refusal to think and know, the small mind, the closed
avenues, the trotting round of mental habit, the dark
and the twilit places. Tamas brings in the impotent
will, want of faith and self-confidence and initiative,
the disinclination to act, the shrinking from endeavour
and aspiration, the poor and little spirit, and in our
moral and dynamic being the inertia, the cowardice,
baseness, sloth, lax subjection to small and ignoble
motives, the weak yielding to our lower nature. Tamas
brings into our emotional nature insensibility, indifference,
want of sympathy and openness, the shut soul, the callous
heart, the soon spent affection and languor of the feelings,
into our aesthetic and sensational nature the dull aesthesis,
the limited range of response, the insensibility to
beauty, all that makes in man the coarse, heavy and
vulgar spirit. Rajas contributes our normal active nature
with all its good and evil; when unchastened by a sufficient
element of Sattwa, it turns to egoism, self-will and
violence, the perverse, obstinate or exaggerating action
of the reason, prejudice, attachment to opinion, clinging
to error, the subservience of the intelligence to our
desires and preferences and not to the truth, the fanatic
or the sectarian mind, self-will, pride, arrogance,
selfishness, ambition, lust, greed, cruelty, hatred,
jealousy, the egoisms of love, all the vices and passions,
the exaggerations of the aesthesis, the morbidities
and perversions of the sensational and vital being.
Tamas in its own right produces the coarse, dull and
ignorant type of human nature, Rajas the vivid, restless,
kinetic man, driven by the breath of action, passion
and desire. Sattwa produces a higher type. The gifts
of Sattwa are the mind of reason and balance, clarity
of the disinterested truth-seeking open intelligence,
a will subordinated to the reason or guided by the ethical
spirit, self-control, equality, calm, love, sympathy,
refinement, measure, fineness of the aesthetic and emotional
mind, in the sensational being delicacy, just acceptivity,
moderation and poise, a vitality subdued and governed
by the mastering intelligence. The accomplished types
of the sattwic man are the philosopher, saint and sage,
of the rajasic man the statesman, warrior, forceful
man of action. But in all men there is in greater or
less proportions a mingling of the gunas, a multiple
personality and in most a good deal of shifting and
alternation from the predominance of one to the prevalence
of another Guna; even in the governing form of their
nature most human beings are of a mixed type. All the
colour and variety of life is made of the intricate
pattern of the weaving of the gunas.
But richness of life, even a sattwic harmony of mind
and nature does not constitute spiritual perfection.
There is a relative possible perfection, but it is a
perfection of incompleteness, some partial height, force,
beauty, some measure of nobility and greatness, some
imposed and precariously sustained balance. There is
a relative mastery, but it is a mastery of the body
by life or of the life by mind, not a free possession
of the instruments by the liberated and self-possessing
spirit. The gunas have to be transcended if we would
arrive at spiritual perfection. Tamas evidently has
to be overcome, inertia and ignorance and incapacity
cannot be elements of a true perfection; but it can
only be overcome in Nature by the force of Rajas aided
by an increasing force of Sattwa. Rajas has to be overcome,
egoism, personal desire and self-seeking passion are
not elements of the true perfection; but it can only
be overcome by force of Sattwa enlightening the being
and force of Tamas limiting the action. Sattwa itself
does not give the highest or the integral perfection;
Sattwa is always a quality of the limited nature; sattwic
knowledge is the light of a limited mentality; sattwic
will is the government of a limited intelligent force.
Moreover, Sattwa cannot act by itself in Nature, but
has to rely for all action on the aid of Rajas, so that
even sattwic action is always liable to the imperfections
of Rajas; egoism, perplexity, inconsistency, a one-sided
turn, a limited and exaggerated will, exaggerating itself
in the intensity of its limitations, pursue the mind
and action even of the saint, philosopher and sage.
There is a sattwic as well as a rajasic or tamasic egoism,
at the highest an egoism of knowledge or virtue; but
the mind's egoism of whatever type is incompatible with
liberation. All the three gunas have to be transcended.
Sattwa may bring us near to the Light, but its limited
clarity falls away from us when we enter into the luminous
body of the divine Nature.
This transcendence is usually sought by a withdrawal
from the action of the lower nature. That withdrawal
brings with it a stressing of the tendency to inaction.
Sattwa, when it wishes to intensify itself, seeks to
get rid of Rajas and calls in the aid of the tamasic
principle of inaction; that is the reason why a certain
type of highly sattwic men live intensely in the inward
being, but hardly at all in the outward life of action,
or else are there incompetent and ineffective. The seeker
of liberation goes farther in this direction, strives
by imposing an enlightened Tamas on his natural being,
a Tamas which by this saving enlightenment is more of
a quiescence than an incapacity, to give the sattwic
Guna freedom to lose itself in the light of the spirit.
A quietude and stillness is imposed on the body, on
the active life-soul of desire and ego, on the external
mind, while the sattwic nature by stress of meditation,
by an exclusive concentration of adoration, by a will
turned inward to the Supreme, strives to merge itself
in the spirit. But if this is sufficient for a quietistic
release, it is not sufficient for the freedom of an
integral perfection. This liberation depends upon inaction
and is not entirely self-existent and absolute ; the
moment the soul turns to action, it finds that the activity
of the nature is still the old imperfect motion. There
is a liberation of the soul from the nature which is
gained by inaction, but not a liberation of the soul
in nature perfect and self-existent whether in action
or in inaction. The question then arises whether such
a liberation and perfection are possible and what may
be the condition of this perfect freedom.
The
ordinary idea is that it is not possible because all
action is of the lower gunas, necessarily defective,
sadosam, caused by the motion, inequality, want of balance,
unstable strife of the gunas; but when these unequal
gunas fall into perfect equilibrium, all action of Nature
ceases and the soul rests in its quietude. The divine
Being, we may say, may either exist in his silence or
act in Nature through her instrumentation, but in that
case must put on the appearance of her strife and imperfection.
That may be true of the ordinary deputed action of the
Divine in the human spirit with its present relations
of soul to nature in an embodied imperfect mental being,
but it is not true of the divine nature of perfection.
The strife of the gunas is only a representation in
the imperfection of the lower nature; what the three
gunas stand for are three essential powers of the Divine
which are not merely existent in a perfect equilibrium
of quietude, but unified in a perfect consensus of divine
action. Tamas in the spiritual being becomes a divine
calm, which is not an inertia and incapacity of action,
but a perfect power, sakti, holding in itself
all its capacity and capable of controlling and subjecting
to the law of calm even the most stupendous and enormous
activity: Rajas becomes a self-effecting initiating
sheer Will of the spirit, which is not desire, endeavour,
striving passion, but the same perfect power of being,
sakti, capable of an infinite, imperturbable
and blissful action. Sattwa becomes not the modified
mental light, prakäsa, but the self-existent
light of the divine being, jyotih, which is
the soul of the perfect power of being and illumines
in their unity the divine quietude and the divine will
of action. The ordinary liberation gets the still divine
light in the divine quietude, but the integral perfection
will aim at this greater triune unity.
When this liberation of the nature comes, there is a
liberation also of all the spiritual sense of the dualities
of Nature. In the lower nature the dualities are the
inevitable effect of the play of the gunas on the soul
affected by the formations of the sattwic, rajasic and
tamasic ego. The knot of this duality is an ignorance
which is unable to seize on the spiritual truth of things
and concentrates on the imperfect appearances, but meets
them not with a mastery of their inner truth, but with
a strife and a shifting balance of attraction and repulsion,
capacity and incapacity, liking and disliking, pleasure
and pain, joy and sorrow, acceptance and repugnance;
all life is represented to us as a tangle of these things,
of the pleasant and the unpleasant, the beautiful and
the unbeautiful, truth and falsehood, fortune and misfortune,
success and failure, good and evil, the inextricable
double web of Nature. Attachment to its likings and
repugnances keeps the soul bound in this web of good
and evil, joys and sorrows. The seeker of liberation
gets rid of attachment, throws away from his soul the
dualities, but as the dualities appear to be the whole
act, stuff and frame of life, this release would seem
to be most easily compassed by a withdrawal from life,
whether a physical withdrawal, so far as that is possible
while in the body, or an inner retirement, a refusal
of sanction, a liberating distaste, vairägya,
for the whole action of Nature. There is a separation
of the soul from Nature. Then the soul watches seated
above and unmoved, udasina, the strife of the gunas
in the natural being and regards as an impassive witness
the pleasure and pain of the mind and body. Or it is
able to impose its indifference even on the outer mind
and watches with the impartial calm or the impartial
joy of the detached spectator the universal action in
which it has no longer an active inner participation.
The end of this movement is the rejection of birth and
a departure into the silent self, moksa.
But this rejection is not the last possible word of
liberation. The integral liberation comes when this
passion for release, mumuksutva, founded on
distaste or vairägya, is itself transcended;
the soul is then liberated both from attachment to the
lower action of nature and from all repugnance to the
cosmic action of the Divine. This liberation gets its
completeness when the spiritual gnosis can act with
a supramental knowledge and reception of the action
of Nature and a supramental luminous will in initiation.
The gnosis discovers the spiritual sense in Nature,
God in things, the soul of good in all things that have
the contrary appearance; that soul is delivered in them
and out of them, the perversions of the imperfect or
contrary forms fall away or are transformed into their
higher divine truth,—even as the gunas go back
to their divine principles,—and the spirit lives
in a universal, infinite and absolute Truth, Good, Beauty,
Bliss which is the supramental or ideal divine Nature.
The liberation of the Nature becomes one with the liberation
of the spirit, and there is founded in the integral
freedom the integral perfection.
-Sri
Aurobindo
