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Thou who hast come to this transient and
unhappy world, turn to Me.
Gita IX. 33
This Self is a self of Knowledge, an inner light in the heart; he is
the conscious being common to all the states of being and moves in both
worlds. He becomes a dream-self and passes beyond this world and its
forms of death.... There are two planes of this conscious being, this
and the other worlds: a third state is their place of joining, the state
of dream, and when he stands in this place of their joining, he sees
both planes of his existence, this world and the other world. When he
sleeps, he take the substance of this world in which all is and himself
undoes and himself builds by his own illumination, his own light; when
this conscious being sleeps, he becomes luminous with his self-light....
There are no roads nor chariots, nor joys nor pleasures, nor tanks nor
ponds nor rivers, but he creates them by his own light, for he is the
maker. By sleep he casts off his body and unsleeping sees those that
sleep; he preserves by his life-breath this lower nest and goes forth,
immortal, from his nest; immortal, he goes where he wills, the golden
Purusha, the solitary Swan. They say, "the country of waking only
is his, for the things which he sees when awake, these only he sees
when asleep"; but there he is his own self-light.
Brihadaranyaka Upanishad IV. 3. 7,9-12,14
What is seen and what is not seen, what is experienced and what is not
experienced, what is and what is not, - all it sees, it is all and sees.
Prasna Upanishad IV. 5
ALL human thought, all mental man's experience moves between
a constant affirmation and negation; there is for his mind no truth
of idea, no result of experience that cannot be affirmed, none that
cannot be negated. It has negated the existence of the individual being,
negated the existence of the cosmos, negated the existence of any immanent
or underlying Reality, negated any Reality beyond the individual and
the cosmos; but it is also constantly affirming these things, - sometimes
one of them solely or any two or all of them together. It has to do
so because our thinking mind is in its very nature an ignorant dealer
in possibilities, not possessing the truth behind any of them, but sounding
and testing each in turn or many together if so perchance it may get
at some settled belief or knowledge about them, some certitude, yet,
living in a world of relativities and possibilities, it can arrive at
no final certainty, no absolute and abiding conviction. Even the actual,
the realised can present itself to our mentality as a "may be or
may not be", syâd vâ na syâd vâ, or as
an "is" under the shadow of the "might not have been"
and wearing the aspect of that which will not be hereafter. Our life-being
is also afflicted by the same incertitude; it can rest in no aim of
living from which it can derive a sure or final satisfaction or to which
it can assign an enduring value. Our nature starts from facts and actualities
which it takes for real; it is pushed beyond them into a pursuit of
uncertain possibilities and led eventually to question all that it took
as real. For it proceeds from a fundamental ignorance and has no hold
on assured truth; all the truths on which it relics for a time are found
to be partial, incomplete and questionable.
At the outset man lives in his physical mind which perceives the actual,
the physical, the objective and accepts it as fact and this fact as
self-evident truth beyond question; whatever is not actual, not physical,
not objective it regards as unreal or unrealised, only to be accepted
as entirely real when it has succeeded in becoming actual, becoming
a physical fact, becoming objective: its own being too it regards as
an objective fact, warranted to be real by its existence in a visible
and sensible body; all other subjective beings and things it accepts
on the same evidence in so far as they can become objects of our external
consciousness or acceptable to that part of the reason which builds
upon the data supplied by that consciousness and relics upon them as
the one solid basis of knowledge. Physical Science is a vast extension
of this mentality: it corrects the errors of the sense and pushes beyond
the first limitations of the sense-mind by discovering means of bringing
facts and objects not seizable by our corporeal organs into the field
of objectivity; but it has the same standard of reality, the objective,
the physical actuality; its test of the real is possibility of verification
by positive reason and objective evidence.
But man also has a life-mind, a vital mentality which is an instrument
of desire: this is not satisfied with the actual, it is a dealer In
possibilities; it has the passion for novelty and is seeking always
to extend the limits of experience for the satisfaction of desire, for
enjoyment, for an enlarged self-affirmation and aggrandisement of its
terrain of power and profit. It desires, enjoys, possesses actualities,
but it hunts also after unrealised possibilities, is ardent to materialise
them, to possess and enjoy them also. It is not satisfied with the physical
and objective only, but seeks too a subjective, an imaginative, a purely
emotive satisfaction and pleasure. If there were not this factor, the
physical mind of man left to itself would live like the animal, accepting
his first actual physical life and its limits as his whole possibility,
moving in material Nature's established order and asking for nothing
beyond it. But this vital mind, this unquiet life-will comes in with
its demands and disturbs this inert or routine satisfaction which lives
penned within the bounds of actuality; it enlarges always desire and
craving, creates a dissatisfaction, an unrest, a seeking for something
more than what life seems able to give it: it brings about a vast enlargement
of the field of physical actuality by the actualisation of our unrealised
possibilities, but also a constant demand for more and always more,
a quest for new worlds to conquer, an incessant drive towards an exceeding
of the bounds of circumstance and a self-exceeding. To add to this cause
of unrest and incertitude there comes in a thinking mind that inquires
into everything, questions everything, builds up affirmations and unbuilds
them, erects systems of certitude but finally accepts none of them as
certain, affirms and questions the evidence of the senses, follows out
the conclusions of the reason but undoes them again to arrive at different
or quite opposite conclusions, and continues indefinitely if not ad
infinitum this process. This is the history of human thought and
human endeavour, a constant breaking of bounds only to move always in
the same spirals enlarged perhaps but following the same or constantly
similar curves of direction. The mind of humanity, ever seeking, ever
active, never arrives at a firmly settled reality of life's alms and
objects or at a settled reality of its own certitudes arid convictions,
an established foundation or firm formation of its idea of existence.
At a certain point of this constant unrest and travail even the physical
mind loses its conviction of objective certitude and enters into an
agnosticism which questions all its own standards of life and knowledge,
doubts whether all this is real or else whether all, even if real. Is
not futile; the vital mind, baffled by life and frustrated or else dissatisfied
with all its satisfactions, overtaken by a deep disgust and disappointment,
finds that all is vanity arid vexation of spirit and is ready to reject
life and existence as an unreality, all that it hunted after as an illusion,
Maya; the thinking mind, unbuilding all its affirmations, discovers
that all are mere mental constructions and there is no reality in them
or else that the only reality is something beyond this existence, something
that has not been made or constructed, something Absolute and Eternal,
- all that is relative, all that is of time is a dream, a hallucination
of the mind or a vast delirium, an immense cosmic Illusion, a delusive
figure of apparent existence. The principle of negation prevails over
the principle of affirmation and becomes universal and absolute. Thence
arise the great world-negating religions and philosophies; thence too
a recoil of the life-motive from itself and a seeking after a life elsewhere
flawless and eternal or a will to annul life itself in an immobile Reality
or an original Non-Existence. In India the philosophy of world-negation
has been given formulations of supreme power arid value by two of the
greatest of her thinkers, Buddha and Shankara. There have been, intermediate
or later in time, other philosophies of considerable importance, some
of them widely accepted, formulated with much acumen of thought by men
of genius and spiritual insight, which disputed with more or less force
and success the conclusions of these two great metaphysical systems,
but none has been put forward with an equal force of presentation or
drive of personality or had a similar massive effect. The spirit of
these two remarkable spiritual philosophies, - for Shankara in the historical
process of India's philosophical mind takes up, completes and replaces
Buddha, - has weighed with a tremendous power on her thought, religion
and general mentality: everywhere broods its mighty shadow, everywhere
is the Impress of the three great formulas, the chain of Karma, escape
from the wheel of rebirth, Maya. It is necessary therefore to look afresh
at the Idea or Truth behind the negation of cosmic existence and to
consider, however briefly, what is the value of its main formulations
or suggestions, on what reality they stand, how far they are imperative
to the reason or to experience. For the present it will be enough to
throw a regard on the principal ideas which are grouped around the conception
of the great cosmic Illusion, Maya, and to set against them those that
are proper to our own line of thought and vision; for both proceed from
the conception of the One Reality, but one line leads to a universal
Illusionism, the other to a universal Realism, - an unreal or real-unreal
universe reposing on a transcendent Reality or a real universe reposing
on a Reality at once universal and transcendent or absolute.
In itself and by itself the vital being's aversion, the life-mind's
recoil from life cannot be taken as valid or conclusive. Its strongest
motive is a sense of disappointment and an acceptance of frustration
which has no greater claim to conclusiveness than the idealist's opposite
motive of invariable hope and his faith and will to realise. Nevertheless
there is a certain validity in the mental support of this sense of frustration,
in the perception at which the thinking mind arrives that there is an
illusion behind all human effort and terrestrial endeavour, the illusion
of his political and social gospels, the illusion of his ethical efforts
at perfection, the illusion of philanthropy and service, the illusion
of works, the illusion of fame, power, success, the illusion of all
achievement. Human, social and political endeavour turns always in a
circle and leads nowhere; man's life and nature remain always the same,
always imperfect, and neither laws nor institutions nor education nor
philosophy nor morality nor religious teachings have succeeded in producing
the perfect man, still less a perfect humanity, - straighten the tail
of the dog as you will, it has been said, it always resumes its natural
curve of crookedness. Altruism, philanthropy and service, Christian
love or Buddhist compassion have not made the world a whit happier,
they only give infinitesimal bits of momentary relief here and there,
throw drops on the fire of the world's suffering. All aims are in the
end transitory and futile, all achievements unsatisfying or evanescent;
all works are so much labour of effort and success and failure which
consummate nothing definitive: whatever changes are made in human life
are of the form only and these forms pursue each other in a futile circle;
for the essence of life, its general character remains the same for
ever. This view of things may be exaggerated, but it has an undeniable
force; it is supported by the experience of man's centuries and it carries
in itself a significance which at one time or another comes upon the
mind with an overwhelming air of self-evidence. Not only so, but if
it is true that the fundamental laws and values of terrestrial existence
are fixed or that it must always turn in repeated cycles, - and this
has been for long a very prevalent notion, - then this view of things
in the end is hardly escapable. For imperfection, ignorance, frustration
and suffering are a dominant factor of the existing world-order, the
elements contrary to them, knowledge, happiness, success, perfection
are constantly found to be deceptive or inconclusive: the two opposites
are so inextricably mixed that, if this state of things is not a motion
towards a greater fulfilment, if this is the permanent character of
the world-order, then it is hard to avoid the conclusion that all here
is either the creation of an inconscient Energy, which would account
for the incapacity of an apparent consciousness to arrive at anything,
or intentionally a world of ordeal and failure, the issue being not
here but elsewhere, or even a vast and aimless cosmic Illusion.
Among these alternative conclusions the second, as it is usually put
before us, offers no ground for the philosophic reason, since we have
no satisfying indication of the connection between the here and the
elsewhere which are posited against each other but not explained in
the inevitability of their relations, and there is no light cast on
the necessity or fundamental significance of the ordeal and failure.
It could only be intelligible, - except as the mysterious will of an
arbitrary Creator, - if there was a choice by immortal spirits to try
the adventure of the Ignorance and a necessity for them to learn the
nature of a world of Ignorance in order that they might reject it. But
such a creative motive, necessarily incidental and quite temporary ill
its incidence, with the earth as its casual field of experience, could
hardly by itself account for the immense and enduring phenomenon of
this complex universe. It can become an operative part of a satisfactory
explanation if this world is the field for the working out of a greater
creative motive, if it is a manifestation of a divine Truth or a divine
Possibility in which under certain conditions an initiating Ignorance
must Intervene as a necessary factor, and if the arrangement of this
universe contains in it a compulsion of the Ignorance to move towards
Knowledge, of the imperfect manifestation to grow into perfection, of
the frustration to serve as steps towards a filial victory, of the suffering
to prepare an emergence of the divine Delight of Being. In that case
the sense of disappointment, frustration, illusion and the vanity of
all things would not be valid; for the aspects that seem to justify
it would be only the natural circumstances of a difficult evolution:
all the stress of struggle and effort, success and failure, joy and
suffering, the mixture of ignorance and knowledge would be the experience
needed for the soul, mind, life and physical part to grow into the full
light of a spiritual perfected being. It would reveal itself as the
process of an evolutionary manifestation; there would be no need to
bring in the fiat of an arbitrary Omnipotence or a cosmic Illusion,
a phantasy of meaningless Maya.
But there is too a higher mental and spiritual basis for the philosophy
of world-negation and here we are on more solid ground: for it can be
contended that the world is in its very nature an illusion and no reasoning
from the features and circumstances of an Illusion could justify it
or raise it into a Reality, - there is only one Reality, the transcendent,
the supracosmic: no divine fulfilment, even if our life were to grow
into the life of gods, could nullify or cancel the original unreality
which is its fundamental character; for that fulfilment would be only
the bright side of an Illusion. Or even if not absolutely an illusion,
it would be a reality of an inferior order and must come to an end by
the soul's recognition that the Brahman alone is true, that there is
nothing but the transcendent and immutable Absolute. If this is the
one Truth, then all ground is cut away from under our feet; the divine
Manifestation, the victory of the soul in Matter, its mastery over existence,
the divine life in Nature would itself be a falsehood or at least something
not altogether real imposed for a time on the sole true Reality. But
here all turns on the mind's conception or the mental being's experience
of Reality and how far that conception is valid or how far that experience
is imperative, -even if it is a spiritual experience, how far it is
absolutely conclusive, solely imperative.
The cosmic Illusion is sometimes envisaged, - though that is not the
accepted position, - as something that has the character of an unreal
subjective experience; it is then, - or may be, - a figure of forms
and movements that arises in some eternal sleep of things or in a dream-consciousness
and is temporarily imposed on a pure and featureless self-aware Existence;
it is a dream that takes place in the Infinite. In the philosophies
of the Mayavadins, - for there are several systems alike in their basis
but not altogether and at every point coincident with each other, -
the analogy of dream is given, but as an analogy only, not as the intrinsic
character of the world-illusion. It is difficult for the positive physical
mind to admit the idea that ourselves, the world and life, the sole
thing to which our consciousness bears positive witness, are inexistent,
a cheat imposed on us by that consciousness: certain analogies are brought
forward, the analogies especially of dream and hallucination, in order
to show that it is possible for the experiences of the consciousness
to seem to it real and yet prove to be without any basis or without
a sufficient basis in reality; as a dream is real to the dreamer so
long as he sleeps but waking shows it to be unreal, so our experience
of world seems to us positive and real but, when we stand back from
the illusion, we shall find that it had no reality. But it may be as
well to give the dream-analogy its full value and see whether our sense
of world-experience has in any way a similar basis. For the idea of
the world as a dream, whether it be a dream of the subjective mind or
a dream of the soul or a dream in the Eternal, is often entertained
and it powerfully enforces the illusionist tendency m human feeling
and thinking. If It has no validity, we must definitely see that and
the reasons of Its inapplicability and set It aside well out of the
way; if It has some validity, we must see what It Is and how far it
goes. If the world is an illusion, but not a dream-illusion, that distinction
too must be put on a secure basis.
Dream is felt to be unreal, first, because it ceases and has no farther
validity when we pass from one status of consciousness to another which
is our normal status. But this is not by itself a sufficient reason
: for it may well be that there are different states of consciousness
each with its own realities; if the consciousness of one state of things
fades back and its contents are lost or, even when caught in memory,
seem to be illusory as soon as we pass into another state, that would
be perfectly normal, but it would not prove the reality of the state
in which we now are and the unreality of the other which we have left
behind us. If earth circumstances begin to seem unreal to a soul passing
into a different world or another plane of consciousness, that would
not prove their unreality; similarly, the fact that world-existence
seems unreal to us when we pass into the spiritual silence or into some
Nirvana, does not of itself prove that the cosmos was all the time an
illusion. The world is real to the consciousness dwelling in it, an
unconditioned existence is real to the consciousness absorbed in Nirvana;
that is all that is established. But the second reason for refusing
credit to our sleep experience is that a dream is something evanescent
without antecedents and without a sequel; ordinarily, too, it is without
any sufficient coherence or any significance intelligible to our waking
being. If our dreams wore like our waking life an aspect of coherence,
each night taking up and carrying farther a past continuous and connected
sleep-experience as each day takes up again our waking world-experience,
then dreams would assume to our mind quite another character. There
is therefore no analogy between a dream and waking life; these are experiences
quite different in their character, validity, order. Our life is accused
of evanescence and often it is accused too, as a whole, of a lack of
inner coherence and significance; but its lack of complete significance
may be due to our lack or limitation of understanding: actually, when
we go within and begin to see it from within, it assumes a complete
connected significance; at the same time whatever lack of inner coherence
was felt before disappears and we see that it was due to the incoherence
of our own inner seeing and knowledge and was not at all a character
of life. There is no surface incoherence in life, it rather appears
to our minds as a chain affirm sequences, and, if that is a mental delusion,
as is sometimes alleged, if the sequence is created by our minds and
does not actually exist in life, that does not remove the difference
of the two states of consciousness. For in dream the coherence given
by an observing inner consciousness is absent, and whatever sense of
sequence there is seems to be due to a vague and false imitation of
the connections of waking life, a subconscious mimesis, but this imitative
sequence is shadowy and imperfect, fails and breaks always and is often
wholly absent. We see too that the dream-consciousness seems to be wholly
devoid of that control which the waking consciousness exercises to a
certain extent over life-circumstances; it has the Nature-automatism
of a subconscient construction and nothing of the conscious will and
organising force of the evolved mind of the human being. Again the evanescence
of a dream is radical and one dream has no connection with another;
but the evanescence of the waking life is of details, - there is no
evidence of evanescence in the connected totality of world-experience.
Our bodies perish but souls proceed from birth to birth through the
ages: stars and planets may disappear after a lapse of aeons or of many
light-cycles, but universe, cosmic existence may well be a permanent
as it is certainly a continuous activity; there is nothing to prove
that the Infinite Energy which creates it has an end or a beginning
either of itself or of its action. So far there is too great a disparateness
between dream-life and waking life to make the analogy applicable.
But it may be questioned whether our dreams are indeed totally unreal
and without significance, whether they are not a figure, an image-record
or a symbolic transcript or representation of things that are real.
For that we have to examine, however summarily, the nature of sleep
and of dream-phenomena, their process of origination and their provenance.
What happens in sleep is that our consciousness withdraws from the field
of its waking experiences; it is supposed to be resting, suspended or
In abeyance, but that is a superficial view of the matter. What is in
abeyance is the waking activities, what is at rest is the surface mind
and the normal conscious action of the bodily part of us; but the inner
consciousness is not suspended, it enters into new inner activities,
only a part of which, a part happening or recorded in something of us
that is near to the surface, we remember. There is maintained in sleep,
thus near the surface, an obscure subconscious element which is a receptacle
or passage for our dream experiences and itself also a dream-builder;
but behind it is the depth and mass of the subliminal, the totality
of our concealed inner being and consciousness which is of quite another
order. Normally it is a subconscient part in us, intermediate between
consciousness and pure inconscience, that sends up through this surface
layer its formations in the shape of dreams, constructions marked by
an apparent inconsequence and incoherence. Many of these are fugitive
structures built upon circumstances of our present life selected apparently
at random and surrounded with a phantasy of variation; others call back
the past, or rather selected circumstances and persons of the past,
as a starting-point for similar fleeting edifices. There are other dreams
of the subconscious which seem to be pure phantasy without any such
initiation or basis; but the new method of psycho-analysis, trying to
look for the first time into our dreams with some kind of scientific
understanding, has established in them a system of meanings, a key to
things in us which need to be known and handled by the waking consciousness;
this of itself changes the whole character and value of our dream-experience.
It begins to look as if there were something real behind it and as if
too that something were an element of no mean practical importance.
But the subconscious is not our sole dream-builder. The subconscious
In us is the extreme border of our secret inner existence where it meets
the Inconscient, it is a degree of our being in which the Inconscient
struggles into a half consciousness; the surface physical consciousness
also, when it sinks back from the waking level and retrogresses towards
the Inconscient, retires into this intermediate subconscience. Or, from
another viewpoint, this nether part of us may be described as the antechamber
of the Inconscient through which its formations rise into our waking
or our subliminal being. When we sleep and the surface physical part
of us, which is in its first origin here an output from the Inconscient,
relapses towards the originating inconscience, it enters into this subconscious
element, antechamber or substratum, and there it finds the impressions
of its past or persistent habits of mind and experiences, - for all
have left their mark on our subconscious part and have there a power
of recurrence. In its effect on our waking self this recurrence often
takes the form of a reassertion of old habits, impulses dormant or suppressed,
rejected elements of the nature, or it comes up as some other not so
easily recognisable, some peculiar disguised or subtle result of these
suppressed or rejected but not erased impulses or elements. In the dream-consciousness
the phenomenon is an apparently fanciful construction, a composite of
figures and movements built upon or around the buried impressions with
a sense in them that escapes the waking intelligence because it has
no clue to the subconscient's system of significances. After a time
this subconscious activity appears to sink back into complete inconscience
and we speak of this state as deep dreamless sleep; thence we emerge
again into the dreamshallows or return to the waking surface.
But, in fact, in what we call dreamless sleep, we have gone into a profounder
and denser layer of the subconscient, a state too involved, too immersed
or too obscure, dull and heavy to bring to the surface its structures,
and we are dreaming there but unable to grasp or retain in the recording
layer of subconscience these more obscure dream-figures. Or else, it
may be, the part of our mind which still remains active in the sleep
of the body has entered into the inner domains of our being, the subliminal
mental, the subliminal vital, the subtle-physical, and is there lost
to all active connection with the surface parts of us. If we are still
in the nearer depths of these regions, the surface subconscient which
is our sleep-wakefulness records something of what we experience in
these depths; but it records it in its own transcription, often marred
by characteristic incoherences and always, even when most coherent,
deformed or cast into figures drawn from the world of waking experience.
But If we have gone deeper inward, the record fails or cannot be recovered
and we have the Illusion of dreamlessness; but the activity of the inner
dream consciousness continues behind the veil of the now mute and inactive
subconscient surface. This continued dream activity is revealed to us
when we become more inwardly conscious, for then we get into connection
with the heavier and deeper subconscient stratum and can be aware, -
at the time or by a retracing or recovering through memory, - of what
happened when we sank into these torpid depths. It is possible too to
become conscious deeper within our subliminal selves and we are then
aware of experiences on other planes of our being or even in supraphysical
worlds to which sleep gives us a right of secret entry. A transcript
of such experiences reaches us; but the transcriber here is not the
subconscious, it is the subliminal, a greater dream-builder.
If the subliminal thus comes to the front in our dream-consciousness,
there is sometimes an activity of our subliminal intelligence, - dream
becomes a series of thoughts, often strangely or vividly figured, problems
are solved which our waking consciousness could not solve, warnings,
premonitions, indications of the future, veridical dreams replace the
normal subconscious incoherence. There can come also a structure of
symbol-images, some of a mental character, some of a vital nature: the
former are precise in their figures, clear in their significance; the
latter are often complex and baffling to our waking consciousness, but,
if we can seize the clue, they reveal their own sense and peculiar system
of coherence. Finally, there can come to us the records of happenings
seen or experienced by us on other planes of our own being or of universal
being into which we enter: these have sometimes, like the symbolic dreams,
a strong bearing on our own inner and outer life or the life of others,
reveal elements of our or their mental being and life-being or disclose
influences on them of which our waking self is totally ignorant; but
sometimes they have no such bearing and are purely records of other
organised systems of consciousness independent of our physical existence.
The subconscious dreams constitute the bulk of our most ordinary sleep-experience
and they are those which we usually remember; but sometimes the subliminal
builder is able to impress our sleep consciousness sufficiently to stamp
his activities on our waking memory. If we develop our inner being,
live more inwardly than most men do, then the balance is changed and
a larger dream-consciousness opens before us; our dreams can take on
a subliminal and no longer a subconscious character and can assume a
reality and significance.
It is even possible to become wholly conscious in sleep and follow throughout
from beginning to end or over large stretches the stages of our dream-experience;
it is found that then we are aware of ourselves passing from state after
state of consciousness to a brief period of luminous and peaceful dreamless
rest, which is the true restorer of the energies of the waking nature,
and then returning by the same way to the waking consciousness. It is
normal, as we thus pass from state to state, to let the previous experiences
slip away from us; in the return only the more vivid or those nearest
to the waking surface are remembered: but this can be remedied, -a greater
retention is possible or the power can be developed of going back in
memory from dream to dream, from state to state, till the whole is once
more before us. A coherent knowledge of sleep-life, though difficult
to achieve or to keep established, is possible.
Our subliminal self is not, like our surface physical being, an outcome
of the energy of the Inconscient; it is a meeting-place of the consciousness
that emerges from below by evolution and the consciousness that has
descended from above for involution. There is in it an inner mind, an
inner vital being of ourselves, an inner or subtle-physical being larger
than our outer being and nature. This inner existence is the concealed
origin of almost all in our surface self that is not a construction
of the first inconscient World-Energy or a natural developed functioning
of our surface consciousness or a reaction of it to impacts from the
outside universal Nature, - and even in this construction, these functionings,
these reactions the subliminal takes part and exercises on them a considerable
influence. There is here a consciousness which has a power of direct
contact with the universal unlike the mostly Indirect contacts which
our surface being maintains with the universe through the sense-mind
and the senses. There are here inner senses, a subliminal sight, touch,
hearing; but these subtle senses are rather channels of the inner being's
direct consciousness of things than its informants: the subliminal is
not dependent on its senses for its knowledge, they only give a form
to its direct experience of objects; they do not, so much as in waking
mind, convey forms of objects for the mind's documentation or as the
starting-point or basis for an indirect constructive experience. The
subliminal has the right of entry into the mental and vital and subtle-physical
planes of the universal consciousness, it is not confined to the material
plane and the physical world; it possesses means of communication with
the worlds of being which the descent towards involution created in
its passage and with all corresponding planes or worlds that may have
arisen or been constructed to serve the purpose of the re-ascent from
Inconscience to Superconscience. It is into this large realm of interior
existence that our mind and vital being retire when they withdraw from
the surface activities whether by sleep or inward-drawn concentration
or by the inner plunge of trance.
Our waking state is unaware of its connection with the subliminal being,
although It receives from it, - but without any knowledge of the place
of origin, - the inspirations, intuitions, ideas, win-suggestions, sense-suggestions,
urges to action that rise from below or from behind our limited surface
existence. Sleep like trance opens the gate of the subliminal to us;
for in sleep, as in trance, we retire behind the veil of the limited
waking personality and it is behind this veil that the subliminal has
its existence. But we receive the records of our sleep experience through
dream and in dream figures and not in that condition which might be
called an inner waking and which is the most accessible form of the
trance state, nor through the supernormal clarities of vision and other
more luminous and concrete ways of communication developed by the inner
subliminal cognition when it gets into habitual or occasional conscious
connection with our waking self. The subliminal, with the subconscious
as an annexe of itself, - for the subconscious is also part of the behind-the-veil
entity, - is the seer of inner things and of supraphysical experiences;
the surface subconscious is only a transcriber. It is for this reason
that the Upanishad describes the subliminal being as the Dream Self
because it is normally in dreams, visions, absorbed states of inner
experience that we enter into and are part of its experiences, - just
as it describes the superconscient as the Sleep Self because normally
all mental or sensory experiences cease when we enter this superconscience.
For in the deeper trance into which the touch of the superconscient
plunges our mentality, no record from it or transcript of its contents
can normally reach us; it is only by an especial or an unusual development,
in a supernormal condition or through a break or rift in our confined
normality, that we can be on the surface conscious of the contacts or
messages of the Superconscience. But, in spite of these figurative names
of dream-state and sleep-state, the field of both these states of consciousness
was clearly regarded as a field of reality no less than that of the
waking state in which our movements of perceptive consciousness are
a record or transcript of physical things and of our contacts with the
physical universe. No doubt, all the three states can be classed as
parts of an illusion, our experiences of them can be ranked together
as constructions of an illusory consciousness, our waking state no less
illusory than our dream state or sleep-state, since the only true truth
or real reality is the incommunicable Self or One-Existence (Atman,
Adwaita) which is the fourth state of the Self described by the Vedanta.
But it is equally possible to regard and rank them together as three
different orders of one Reality or as three states of consciousness
in which is embodied our contact with three different grades of self-experience
and world-experience.
If this is a true account of dream-experience, dreams can no longer
be classed as a mere unreal figure of unreal things temporarily imposed
upon our half-unconsciousness as a reality; the analogy therefore fails
even as an illustrative support for the theory of the cosmic Illusion.
It may be said, however, that our dreams are not themselves realities
but only a transcript of reality, a system of symbol-images, and our
waking experience of the universe is similarly not a reality but only
a transcript of reality, a series of collection of symbol-images. It
is quite true that primarily we see the physical universe only through
a system of images Impressed or imposed on our senses and so far the
contention is justified; it may also be admitted that in a certain sense
and from one viewpoint our experiences and activities can be considered
as symbols of a truth which our lives are trying to express but at present
only with a partial success and an imperfect coherence. If that were
all, life might be described as a dream-experience of self and things
in the consciousness of the Infinite. But although our primary evidence
of the objects of the universe consists of a structure of sense-images,
these are completed, validated, set in order by an automatic intuition
in the consciousness which immediately relates the image with the thing
imaged and gets the tangible experience of the object, so that we are
not merely regarding or reading a translation or sense-transcript of
the reality but looking through the sense-image to the reality. This
adequacy is amplified too by the action of a reason which fathoms and
understands the law of things sensed and can observe scrupulously the
sense-transcript and correct its errors. Therefore we may conclude that
we experience a real universe through our imaged sense-transcript by
the aid of the intuition and the reason, - an intuition which gives
us the touch of things and a reason which investigates their truth by
its conceptive knowledge. But we must note also that even if our image
view of the universe, our sense-transcript, is a system of symbol-images
and not an exact reproduction or transcription, a literal translation,
still a symbol is a notation of something that is, a transcript of realities.
Even if our images are incorrect, what they endeavour to image are realities,
not illusions; when we see a tree or a stone or an animal, it is not
a non-existent figure, a hallucination that we are seeing; we may not
be sure that the image is exact, we may concede that other-sense might
very well see it otherwise, but still there is something there that
justifies the image, something with which it has more or less correspondence.
But in the theory of Illusion the only reality is an indeterminable
featureless pure Existence, Brahman, and there is no possibility of
its being translated or mistranslated into a system of symbol-figures,
for that could only be if this Existence had some determinate contents
or some unmanifested truths of its being which could be transcribed
into the forms or names given to them by our consciousness: a pure Indeterminable
cannot be rendered by a transcript, a multitude of representative differentiae,
a crowd of symbols or images; for there is in it only a pure Identity,
there is nothing to transcribe, nothing to symbolise, nothing to image.
Therefore the dream-analogy fails us altogether and is better put out
of the way; it can always be used as a vivid metaphor of a certain attitude
our mind can take towards its experiences, but it has no value for a
metaphysical inquiry into the reality and fundamental significances
or the origin of existence.
If we take up the analogy of hallucination, we find it hardly more helpful
for a true understanding of the theory of cosmic Illusion than the dream-analogy.
Hallucinations are of two kinds, mental or ideative and visual or in
some way sensory. When we see an image of things where those things
are not, it is an erroneous construction of the senses, a visual hallucination;
when we take for an objective fact a thing which is a subjective structure
of the mind, a constructive mental error or an objectivised imagination
or a misplaced mental image, it is a mental hallucination. An example
of the first is the mirage, an example of the second is the classic
instance of a rope taken for a snake. In passing we may note that there
are many things called hallucinations which are not really that but
symbol-images sent up from the subliminal or experiences in which the
subliminal consciousness or sense comes to the surface and puts us into
contact with supraphysical realities; thus the cosmic consciousness
which is our entry by a breaking down of our mental limitations into
the sense of a vast reality, has been classed, even in admitting it,
as a hallucination. But, taking only the common hallucination, mental
or visual, we observe that it seems to be at first sight a true example
of what is called imposition in the philosophic theory; it is the placement
of an unreal figure of things on a reality, of a mirage upon the bare
desert air, of the figure of a non-present snake on the present and
real rope. The world, we may contend, is such a hallucination, an imposition
of a non-existent unreal figure of things on the bare ever-present sole
reality of the Brahman. But then we note that In each case the hallucination,
the false Image is not of something quite nonexistent; it is an Image
of something existent and real but not present in the place on which
it has been imposed by the mind's error or by a sense-error. A mirage
is the image of a city, an oasis, running water or of other absent things,
and if these things did not exist, the false image of them, whether
raised up by the mind or reflected in the desert air, would not be there
to delude the mind with a false sense of reality. A snake exists and
its existence and form are known to the victim of the momentary hallucination:
if it had not been so, the delusion would not have been created; for
it is a form-resemblance of the seen reality to another reality previously
known elsewhere that is the origin of the error. The analogy therefore
is unhelpful; it would be valid only if our image of the universe were
a falsity reflecting a true universe which is not here but elsewhere
or else if it were a false imaged manifestation of the Reality replacing
in the mind or covering with its distorted resemblance a true manifestation.
But here the world is a non-existent form of things, an illusory construction
imposed on the bare Reality, on the sole Existent which is for ever
empty of things and formless: there would be a true analogy only if
our vision constructed in the void air of the desert a figure of things
that exist nowhere, or else if it imposed on a bare ground both rope
and snake and other figures that equally existed nowhere.
It is clear that in this analogy two quite different kinds of illusion
not illustrative of each other are mistakenly put together as if they
were identical in nature. All mental or sense-hallucinations are really
misrepresentations or misplacements or impossible combinations or false
developments of things that are in themselves existent or possible or
in some way within or allied to the province of the real. All mental
errors and illusions are the result of an ignorance which miscombines
its data or proceeds falsely upon a previous or present or possible
content of knowledge. But the cosmic Illusion has no basis of actuality,
it is an original and all-originating illusion; it imposes names, figures,
happenings that are pure inventions on a Reality in which there never
were and never will be any happenings, names or figures. The analogy
of mental hallucination would only be applicable if we admit a Brahman
without names, forms or relations and a world of names, forms and relations
as equal realities imposed one upon the other, the rope in the place
of the snake, or the snake in the place of the rope, - an attribution,
it might be, of the activities of the Saguna to the quiescence of the
Nirguna. But if both are real, both must be either separate aspects
of the Reality or co-ordinate aspects, positive and negative poles of
the one Existence. Any error or confusion of Mind between them would
not be a creative cosmic Illusion, but only a wrong perception of realities,
a wrong relation created by the Ignorance.
If we scrutinise other illustrations or analogies that are offered to
us for a better understanding of the operation of Maya, we detect in
all of them an inapplicability that deprives them of their force and
value. The familiar instance of mother-of-pearl and silver turns also,
like the rope and snake analogy, upon an error due to a resemblance
between a present real and another and absent real; it can have no application
to the imposition of a multiple and mutable unreality upon a sole and
unique immutable Real. In the example of an optical illusion duplicating
or multiplying a single object, as when we see two moons instead of
one, there are two or more identical forms of the one object, one real,
one - or the rest - an illusion: this does not illustrate the juxtaposition
of world and Brahman; for in the operation of Maya there is a much more
complex phenomenon, - there is indeed an illusory multiplication of
the Identical imposed upon its one and ever-unalterable Identity, the
One appearing as many, but upon that is imposed an immense organised
diversity in nature, a diversity of forms and movements which have nothing
to do with the original Real. Dreams, visions, the imagination of the
artist or poet can present such an organised diversity which is not
real; but it is an imitation, a mimesis of a real and already existent
organised diversity, or it starts from such a mimesis and even in the
richest variation or wildest invention some mimetic element is observable.
There is here no such thing as the operation attributed to Maya in which
there is no mimesis but a pure and radically original creation of unreal
forms and movements that are non-existent anywhere and neither Imitate
nor reflect nor alter and develop anything discoverable in the Reality.
There is nothing in the operations of Mind-Illusion that throws light
upon this mystery; it Is, as a stupendous cosmic Illusion of this kind
must be, sui generis, without parallel. What we see in the universe
is that a diversity of the identical is everywhere the fundamental operation
of cosmic Nature; but here it presents itself, not as an illusion, but
as a various real formation out of a one original substance. A Reality
of Oneness manifesting itself in a reality of numberless forms and powers
of its being is what we confront everywhere. There is no doubt in its
process a mystery, even a magic, but there is nothing to show that it
is a magic of the unreal and not a working of a Consciousness and Force
of being of the omnipotent Real, a self-creation operated by an eternal
self-knowledge.
This at once raises the question of the nature of Mind, the parent of
these illusions, and its relation to the original Existence. Is mind
the child and instrument of an original Illusion, or is it itself a
primal miscreating Force or Consciousness? or is the mental ignorance
a misprision of the truths of Existence, a deviation from an original
Truth-Consciousness which is the real world-builder? Our own mind, at
any rate, is not an original and primary creative power of Consciousness;
it is, and all mind of the same character must be, derivative, an instrumental
demiurge, an intermediary creator. It is likely then that analogies
from the errors of mind, which are the outcome of an intermediate Ignorance,
may not truly illustrate the nature or action of an original creative
Illusion, an all-inventing and all-constructing Maya. Our mind stands
between a superconscience and an inconscience and receives from both
these opposite powers: it stands between an occult subliminal existence
and an outward cosmic phenomenon; it receives inspirations, intuitions,
imaginations, impulsions to knowledge and action, figures of subjective
realities or possibilities from the unknown inner source; it receives
the figures of realised actualities and their suggestions of further
possibility from the observed cosmic phenomenon. What it receives are
truths essential, possible or actual; it starts from the realised actualities
of the physical universe and it brings out from them in its subjective
action the unrealised possibilities which they contain or suggest or
to which it can arrive by proceeding from them as a starting-point:
it selects some out of these possibilities for a subjective action and
plays with imagined or inwardly constructed forms of them; it chooses
others for objectivisation and attempts to realise them. But it receives
inspirations also from above and within, from invisible sources and
not only from the impacts of the visible cosmic phenomenon; it sees
truths other than those suggested by the actual physicality around it,
and here too it plays subjectively with transmitted or constructed forms
of these truths or it selects for objectivisation, attempts to realise.
Our mind is an observer and user of actualities, a diviner or recipient
of truths not yet known or actualised, a dealer in possibilities that
mediate between the truth and actuality. But it has not the omniscience
of an infinite Consciousness; it is limited in knowledge and has to
supplement its restricted knowledge by imagination and discovery. It
does not, like the infinite Consciousness, manifest the known, it has
to discover the unknown; it seizes the possibilities of the Infinite,
not as results or variations of forms of a latent Truth, but as constructions
or creations, figments of its own boundless imagination. It has not
the omnipotence of an infinite conscious Energy; it can only realise
or actualise what the cosmic Energy will accept from it or what it has
the strength to impose or introduce into the sum of things because the
secret Divinity, superconscient or subliminal, which uses it intends
that that should be expressed in Nature. Its limitation of Knowledge
constitutes by incompleteness, but also by openness to error, an Ignorance.
In dealing with actualities it may misobserve, misuse, miscreate; in
dealing with possibilities it may miscompose, miscombine, misapply,
misplace; in its dealings with truths revealed to it may deform, misrepresent,
disharmonise. It may also make constructions of its own which have no
correspondence with the things of actual existence, no potentiality
of realisation, no support from the truth behind them; but still these
constructions start from an illegitimate extension of actualities, catch
at unpermitted possibilities, or turn truths to an application which
is not applicable. Mind creates, but it Is not an original creator,
not omniscient or omnipotent, not even an always efficient demiurge.
Maya, the Illusive Power, on the contrary, must be an original creator,
for It creates all things out of nothing unless we suppose that It creates
out of the substance of the Reality, but then the things It creates
must be in some way real; It has a perfect knowledge of what it wishes
to create, a perfect power to create whatever it chooses, omniscient
and omnipotent though only over Its own illusions, harmonising them
and linking them together with a magical sureness and sovereign energy,
absolutely effective in imposing its own formations or figments passed
off as truths, possibilities, actualities on the creature intelligence.
Our mind works best and with a firm confidence when it is given a substance
to work on or at least to use as a basis for its operations, or when
it can handle a cosmic force of which it has acquired the knowledge,
- it is sure of its steps when it has to deal with actualities; this
rule of dealing with objectivised or discovered actualities and proceeding
from them for creation is the reason of the enormous success of physical
Science. But here there is evidently no creation of illusions, no creation
of non-existence in vacuo and turning them into apparent actualities
such as is attributed to the cosmic Illusion. For Mind can only create
out of substance what is possible to the substance, it can only do with
the force of Nature what is in accordance with her realisable energies;
it can only invent or discover what is already contained in the truth
and potentiality of Nature. On the other side, it receives inspirations
for creation from within itself or from above: but these can only take
form if they are truths or potentials, not by the mind's own right of
invention; for if the mind erects what is neither true nor potential,
that cannot be created, cannot become actual in Nature. Maya, on the
contrary, if it creates on the basis of the Reality, yet erects a superstructure
which has nothing to do with the Reality, is not true or potential in
it; if it creates out of the substance of the Reality, it makes out
of it things that are not possible to it or in accordance with it, -
for it creates forms and the Reality is supposed to be a Formless incapable
of form, it creates determinations and the Reality is supposed to be
absolutely indeterminable.
But our mind has the faculty of imagination; it can create and take
as true and real its own mental structures: here, it might be thought,
is something analogous to the action of Maya. Our mental imagination
is an instrument of Ignorance; it is the resort or device or refuge
of a limited capacity of knowledge, a limited capacity of effective
action. Mind supplements these deficiencies by its power of imagination:
it uses it to extract from things obvious and visible the things that
are not obvious and visible; it undertakes to create its own figures
of the possible and the impossible; it erects illusory actuals or draws
figures of a conjectured or constructed truth of things that are not
true to outer experience. That is at least the appearance of its operation;
but, in reality, it is the mind's way or one of its ways of summoning
out of Being its infinite possibilities, even of discovering or capturing
the unknown possibilities of the Infinite. But, because it cannot do
this with knowledge, it makes experimental constructions of truth and
possibility and a yet unrealised actuality: as its power of receiving
inspirations of Truth is limited, it imagines, hypothetises, questions
whether this or that may not be truths; as its force to summon real
potentials is narrow and restricted, it erects possibilities which It
hopes to actualise or wishes it could actualise; as its power to actualise
is cramped and confined by the material world's oppositions, it figures
subjective actualisations to satisfy its will of creation and delight
of self-presentation. But it is to be noted that through the imagination
it does receive a figure of truth, does summon possibilities which are
afterwards realised, does often by its imagination exercise an effective
pressure on the world's actualities. Imaginations that persist in the
human mind, like the idea of travel in the air, end often by self-fulfilment;
individual thought-formations can actualise themselves if there is sufficient
strength in the formation or in the mind that forms it. Imaginations
can create their own potentiality, especially if they are supported
in the collective mind, and may in the long run draw on themselves the
sanction of the cosmic Will. In fact all imaginations represent possibilities:
some are able one day to actualise in some form, perhaps a very different
form of actuality; more are condemned to sterility because they do not
enter into the figure or scheme of the present creation, do not come
within the permitted potentiality of the individual or do not accord
with the collective or the generic principle or are alien to the nature
or destiny of the containing world-existence.
Thus the mind's Imaginations are not purely and radically illusory:
they proceed on the basis of its experience of actualities or at least
set out from that, are variations upon actuality, or they figure the
"may-be"s or "might-be"s of the Infinite, what could
be if other truths had manifested, if existing potentials had been otherwise
arranged or other possibilities than those already admitted became potential.
Moreover, through this faculty forms and powers of other domains than
that of the physical actuality communicate with our mental being. Even
when the imaginations are extravagant or take the form of hallucinations
or illusions, they proceed with actuals or possibles for their basis.
The mind creates the figure of a mermaid, but the phantasy is composed
of two actualities put together in a way that is outside the earth's
normal potentiality; angels, griffins, chimeras are constructed on the
same principle: sometimes the imagination is a memory of former actualities
as in the mythical figure of the dragon, sometimes it is a figure or
a happening that is real or could be real on other planes or in other
conditions of existence. Even the illusions of the maniac are founded
on an extravagant misfitting of actuals, as when the lunatic combines
himself, kingship and England and sits in imagination on the throne
of the Plantagenets and Tudors. Again, when we look into the origin
of mental error, we find normally that it is a miscombination, misplacement,
misuse, misunderstanding or misapplication of elements of experience
and knowledge. Imagination itself is in its nature a substitute for
a truer consciousness's faculty of intuition of possibility: as the
mind ascends towards the Truth-Consciousness, this mental power becomes
a truth-imagination which brings the colour and light of the higher
truth into the limited adequacy or inadequacy of the knowledge already
achieved and formulated and, finally, in the transforming light above
it gives place wholly to higher truth-powers or itself turns into intuition
and inspiration; the Mind in that uplifting ceases to be a creator of
delusions and an architect of error. Mind then is not a sovereign creator
of things non-existent or erected in a void: it is an ignorance trying
to know; its very illusions start from a basis of some kind and are
the results of a limited knowledge or a half-ignorance. Mind is an instrument
of the cosmic Ignorance, but it does not seem to be or does not act
like a power or an instrument of a cosmic Illusion. It is a seeker and
discoverer or a creator or would-be creator of truths, possibilities
and actualities, and it would be rational to suppose that the original
Consciousness and Power, from which mind must be a derivation, is also
a creator of truths, possibilities and actualities, not limited like
mind but cosmic in its scope, not open to error, because free from all
ignorance, a sovereign instrument or a self-power of a supreme Omniscience
and Omnipotence, an eternal Wisdom and Knowledge.
This then is the dual possibility that arises before us. There is, we
may suppose, an original consciousness and power creative of illusions
and unrealities with mind as its instrument or medium in the human and
animal consciousness, so that the differentiated universe we see is
unreal, a fiction of Maya, and only some indeterminable and undifferentiated
Absolute is real. Or there is, we may equally suppose, an original,
a supreme or cosmic Truth-Consciousness creative of a true universe,
but with mind acting in that universe as an imperfect consciousness,
ignorant, partly knowing, partly not knowing, - a consciousness which
is by its ignorance or limitation of knowledge capable of error, mispresentation,
mistaken or misdirected development from the known, of uncertain gropings
towards the unknown, of partial creations and buildings, a constant
half-position between truth and error, knowledge and nescience. But
this ignorance in fact proceeds, however stumblingly, upon knowledge
and towards knowledge; it is inherently capable of shedding the limitation,
the mixture, and can turn by that liberation into the Truth-Consciousness,
into a power of the original Knowledge. Our inquiry has so far led rather
in the second direction; it points towards the conclusion that the nature
of our consciousness is not of a character that would justify the hypothesis
of a Cosmic Illusion as the solution of its problem. A problem exists,
but it consists in the mixture of Knowledge with Ignorance in our cognition
of self and things, and it is the origin of this Imperfection that we
have to discover. There is no need of bringing in an original power
of Illusion always mysteriously existent in the eternal Reality or else
intervening and imposing a world of non-existent forms on a Consciousness
or Superconscience that is for ever pure, eternal and absolute.
Sri Aurobindo
in SABCL volume 19, "The Life Divine
- Book 2 Part 2: The Knowledge and the Spiritual Evolution" pages
412-438
published by Sri
Aurobindo Ashram - Pondicherry
diffusion by SABDA
or
Lotus Light
Publications U.S.A.
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