In our scrutiny of the seven principles of existence it
was found that they are one in their essential and fundamental reality: for if
even the matter of the most material universe is nothing but a status of being of
Spirit made an object of sense, envisaged by the Spirit's own consciousness as
the stuff of its forms, much more must the life-force that constitutes itself
into form of Matter, and the mind-consciousness that throws itself out as Life,
and the Supermind that develops Mind as one of its powers, be nothing but
Spirit itself modified in apparent substance and in dynamism of action, not
modified in real essence. All are powers of one Power of being and not other
than that All-Existence, All-Consciousness, All-Will, All-Delight which is the
true truth behind every appearance. And they are not only one in their reality,
but also inseparable in the sevenfold variety of their action. They are the
seven colours of the light of the divine consciousness, the seven rays of the
Infinite, and by them the Spirit has filled in on the canvas of his
self-existence conceptually extended, woven of the objective warp of Space and
the subjective woof of Time, the myriad wonders of his self-creation great,
simple, symmetrical in its primal laws and vast framings, infinitely curious
and intricate in its variety of forms and actions and the complexities of
relation and mutual effect of all upon each and each upon all. These are the
seven Words of the ancient sages; by them have been created and in the light of
their meaning are worked out and have to be interpreted the developed and
developing harmonies of the world we know and the worlds behind of which we
have only an indirect knowledge. The Light, the Sound is one; their action is
sevenfold.
But here there is a world based upon an original
Inconscience; here consciousness has formulated itself in the figure of an
ignorance labouring towards knowledge. We have seen that there is no essential
reason either in the nature of Being itself or in the original character and
fundamental relations of its seven principles for this intrusion of Ignorance,
of discord into the harmony, of darkness into the light, of division and
limitation into the self-conscious infinity of the divine creation. For we can
conceive, and since we can, the Divine can still more conceive,—and since there
is the conception, there must somewhere be the execution, the creation actual
or intended,—a universal harmony into which these contrary elements do not
enter. The Vedic seers were conscious of such a divine self-manifestation and
looked on it as the greater world beyond this lesser, a freer and wider plane
of consciousness and being, the truth-creation of the Creator which they
described as the seat or own home of the Truth, as the vast Truth, or the
Truth, the Right, the Vast, [sadanam ŗtasya,
své damé ŗtasya, ŗtasya bŗhaté, ŗtam satyam bŗhat] or again as a Truth
hidden by a Truth where the Sun of Knowledge finishes his journey and unyokes
his horses, where the thousand rays of consciousness stand together so that
there is That One, the supreme form of the Divine Being. But this world in
which we live seemed to them to be a mingled weft in which truth is disfigured
by an abundant falsehood, anrtasya bhureh, [Rig Veda, VII. 60. 5] here the one light has to be born by its
own vast force out of an initial darkness or sea of Inconscience; [aprakétam
salilam ] immortality and godhead have to be built up out of an
existence which is under the yoke of death, ignorance, weakness, suffering and
limitation. This self-building they figured as the creation by man in himself
of that other world or high ordered harmony of infinite being which already
exists perfect and eternal in the Divine Infinite. The lower is for us the
first condition of the higher; the darkness is the dense body of the light, the
Inconscient guards in itself all the concealed Superconscient, the powers of
the division and falsehood hold from us but also for us and to be conquered
from them the riches and substance of the unity and the truth in their cave of
subconscience. This was in their view, expressed in the highly figured
enigmatic language of the early mystics, the sense and justification of man's
actual existence and his conscious or unconscious Godward effort, his
conception so paradoxical at first sight in a world which seems its very
opposite, his aspiration so impossible to a superficial view in a creature so
ephemeral, weak, ignorant, limited, towards a plenitude of immortality,
knowledge, power, bliss, a divine and imperishable existence.
For, as a matter of fact, while the very keyword of the
ideal creation is a plenary self-consciousness and self-possession in the
infinite Soul and a perfect oneness, the keyword of the creation of which we
have present experience is the very opposite; it is an original inconscience developing
in life into a limited and divided self-consciousness, an original inert
subjection to the drive of a blind self-existent Force developing in life into
a struggle of the self-conscious being to possess himself and all things and to
establish in the kingdom of this unseeing mechanic Force the reign of an
enlightened Will and Knowledge. And because the blind mechanic Force, — we know
now really that it is no such thing,—confronts us everywhere, initial,
omnipresent, the fundamental law, the great total energy, and because the only
enlightened will we know, our own, appears as a subsequent phenomenon, a
result, a partial, subordinate, circumscribed, sporadic energy, the struggle
seems to us at the best a very precarious and doubtful venture. The Inconscient
to our perceptions is the beginning and the end; the self-conscious soul seems
hardly more than a temporary accident, a fragile blossom upon this great, dark
and monstrous Ashwattha-tree of the universe. Or if we suppose the soul to be
eternal, it appears at least as a foreigner, an alien and not over well-treated
guest in the reign of this vast Inconscience. If not an accident in the
Inconscient Darkness, it is perhaps a mistake, a stumble downwards of the
superconscient Light.
If this view of things had a complete validity, then
only the absolute idealist, sent perhaps out of some higher existence, unable
to forget his mission, stung into indomitable enthusiasm by a divine oestrus or
sustained in a calm and infinite fortitude by the light and force and voice of
the unseen Godhead, could persist under such circumstances in holding up before
himself, much more before an incredulous or doubting world, the hope of a full
success for the human endeavour. Actually, for the most part, men either reject
it from the beginning or turn away from it eventually, after some early
enthusiasm, as a proved impossibility. The consistent materialist seeks a
partial and short-lived power, knowledge, happiness, so much only as the
dominant inconscient order of Nature will allow to the struggling
self-consciousness of man if he accepts his limitations, obeys her laws and
makes as good a use of them by his enlightened will as their inexorable
mechanism will tolerate. The religionist seeks his reign of enlightened will,
love or divine being, his
The Knowledge and the
Ignorance: The Life Divine, SABCL,
Vol. 18, pp. 481-86
See also a fire has come and gone.