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Yoga of Self-Perfection
(Equality)
11 - The Perfection of Equality
12 - The Way of Equality
13 - The Action of Equality |
The Perfection of Equality
The very first necessity for spiritual
perfection is a perfect equality. Perfection in the sense in which we
use it in Yoga, means a growth out of a lower undivine into a higher
divine nature. In terms of knowledge it is a putting on the being of
the higher self and a casting away of the darker broken lower self or
a transforming of our imperfect state into the rounded luminous fullness
of our real and spiritual personality. In terms of devotion and adoration
it is a growing into a likeness of the nature or the law of the being
of the Divine, to be united with whom we aspire, - for if there is not
this likeness, this oneness of the law of the being, unity between that
transcending and universal and this individual spirit is not possible.
The supreme divine nature is founded on equality. This affirmation is
true of it whether we look on the Supreme Being as a pure silent Self
and Spirit or as the divine Master of cosmic existence. The pure Self
is equal, unmoved, the witness in an impartial peace of all the happenings
and relations of cosmic existence. While it is not averse to them, -
aversion is not equality, nor, if that were the attitude of the Self
to cosmic existence, could the universe come at all into being or proceed
upon its cycles, - a detachment, the calm of an equal regard, a superiority
to the reactions which trouble and are the disabling weakness of the
soul involved in outward nature, are the very substance of the silent
Infinite's purity and the condition of its impartial assent and support
to the many-sided movement of the universe. But in that power too of
the Supreme which governs and develops these motions, the same equality
is a basic condition.
The Master of things cannot be affected
or troubled by the reactions of things; if he were, he would be subject
to them, not master, not free to develop them according to his sovereign
will and wisdom and according to the inner truth and necessity of what
is behind their relations, but obliged rather to act according to the
claim of temporary accident and phenomenon. The truth of all things
is in the calm of their depths, not in the shifting inconstant wave
form on the surface. The supreme conscious Being in his divine knowledge
and will and love governs their evolution - to our ignorance so often
a cruel confusion and distraction - from these depths and is not troubled
by the clamour of the surface. The divine nature does not share in our
gropings and our passions; when we speak of the divine wrath or favour
or of God suffering in man, we are using a human language which mistranslates
the inner significance of the movement we characterise. We see something
of the real truth of them when we rise out of the phenomenal mind into
the heights of the spiritual being. For then we perceive that whether
in the silence of self or in its action in the cosmos, the Divine is
always Sachchidananda, an infinite existence, an infinite consciousness
and self-founded power of conscious being, an infinite bliss in all
his existence. We ourselves begin to dwell in an equal light, strength,
joy-the psychological rendering of the divine knowledge, will and delight
in self and things which are the active universal outpourings from those
infinite sources. In the strength of that light, power and joy a secret
self and spirit within us accepts and transforms always into food of
its perfect experience the dual letters of the mind's transcript of
life, and if there were not the hidden greater existence even now within
us, we could not bear the pressure of the universal force or subsist
in this great and dangerous world. A perfect equality of our spirit
and nature is a means by which we can move back from the troubled and
ignorant outer consciousness into this inner kingdom of heaven and possess
the spirit's eternal kingdoms, rajyam samrddham, of greatness, joy and
peace. That self-elevation to the divine nature is the complete fruit
and the whole occasion of the discipline of equality demanded from us
by the self-perfecting aim in Yoga.
A perfect equality and peace of
the soul is indispensable to change the whole substance of our being
into substance of the self out of its present stuff of troubled mentality.
It is equally indispensable if we aspire to replace our present confused
and ignorant action by the self-possessed and luminous works of a free
spirit governing its nature and in tune with universal being. A divine
action or even a perfect human action is impossible if we have not equality
of spirit and an equality in the motive-forces of our nature. The Divine
is equal to all, an impartial sustainer of his universe, who views all
with equal eyes, assents to the law of developing being which he has
brought out of the depths of his existence, tolerates what has to be
tolerated, depresses what has to be depressed, raises what has to be
raised, creates, sustains and destroys with a perfect and equal understanding
of all causes and results and working out of the spiritual and pragmatic
meaning of all phenomena. God does not create in obedience to any troubled
passion of desire or maintain and preserve through an attachment of
partial preference or destroy in a fury of wrath, disgust or aversion.
The Divine deals with great and small, just and unjust, ignorant and
wise as the Self of all who, deeply intimate and one with the being,
leads all according to their nature and need with a perfect understanding,
power and justness of proportion. But through it all he moves things
according to his large aim in the cycles and draws the soul upward in
the evolution through its apparent progress and retrogression towards
the higher and ever higher development which is the sense of the cosmic
urge. The self-perfecting individual who seeks to be one in will with
the Divine and make his nature an instrument of the divine purpose,
must enlarge himself out of the egoistic and partial views and motives
of the human ignorance and mould himself into an image of this supreme
equality.
This equal poise in action is especially
necessary for the Sadhaka of the integral Yoga. First, he must acquire
that equal assent and understanding which will respond to the law of
the divine action without trying to impose on it a partial will and
the violent claim of a personal aspiration. A wise impersonality, a
quiescent equality, a universality which sees all things as the manifestations
of the Divine, the one Existence, is not angry, troubled, impatient
with the way of things or on the other hand excited, over-eager and
precipitate, but sees that the law must be obeyed and the pace of time
respected, observes and understands with sympathy the actuality of things
and beings, but looks also behind the present appearance to their inner
significances and forward to the unrolling of their divine possibilities,
is the first thing demanded of those who would do works as the perfect
instruments of the Divine. But this impersonal acquiescence is only
the basis. Man is the instrument of an evolution which wears at first
the mask of a struggle, but grows more and more into its truer and deeper
sense of a constant wise adjustment and must take on in a rising scale
the deepest truth and significance - now only underlying the adjustment
and struggle - of a universal harmony. The perfected human soul must
always be an instrument for the hastening of the ways of this evolution.
For that a divine power acting with the royalty of the divine will in
it must be in whatever degree present in the nature. But to be accomplished
and permanent, steadfast in action, truly divine, it has to proceed
on the basis of a spiritual equality, a calm, impersonal and equal self-identification
with all beings, an understanding of all energies. The Divine acts with
a mighty power in the myriad workings of the universe, but with the
supporting light and force of an imperturbable oneness, freedom and
peace. That must be the type of the perfected soul's divine works. And
equality is the condition of the being which makes possible this changed
spirit in the action.
But even a human perfection cannot
dispense with equality as one of its chief elements and even its essential
atmosphere. The aim of a human perfection must include, if it is to
deserve the name, two things, self-mastery and a mastery of the surroundings;
it must seek for them in the greatest degree of these powers which is
at all attainable by our human nature. Man's urge of self-perfection
is to be, in the ancient language, svarat and samrat, self-ruler and
king. But to be self-ruler is not possible for him if he is subject
to the attack of the lower nature, to the turbulence of grief and joy,
to the violent touches of pleasure and pain, to the tumult of his emotions
and passions, to the bondage of his personal likings and dislikings,
to the strong chains of desire and attachment, to the narrowness of
a personal and emotionally preferential judgment and opinion, to all
the hundred touches of his egoism and its pursuing stamp on his thought,
feeling and action. All these things are the slavery to the lower self
which the greater "I" in man must put under his feet if he
is to be king of his own nature. To surmount them is the condition of
self-rule; but of that surmounting again equality is the condition and
the essence of the movement. To be quite free from all these things,
- if possible, or at least to be master of and superior to them, - is
equality. Farther, one who is not self-ruler, cannot be master of his
surroundings. The knowledge, the will, the harmony which is necessary
for this outward mastery, can come only as a crown of the inward conquest.
It belongs to the self-possessing soul and mind which follows with a
disinterested equality the Truth, the Right, the universal Largeness
to which alone this mastery is possible, - following always the great
ideal they present to our imperfection, while it understands and makes
a full allowance too for all that seems to conflict with them and stand
in the way of their manifestation. This rule is true even on the levels
of our actual human mentality, where we can only get a limited perfection.
But the ideal of Yoga takes up this aim of Swarajya and Samrajya and
puts it on the larger spiritual basis. There it gets its full power,
opens to the diviner degrees of the spirit; for it is by oneness with
the Infinite, by a spiritual power acting upon finite things, that some
highest integral perfection of our being and nature finds its own native
foundation.
A perfect equality not only of the
self, but in the nature is a condition of the Yoga of self-perfection.
The first obvious step to it will be the conquest of our emotional and
vital being, for here are the sources of greatest trouble, the most
rampant forces of inequality and subjection, the most insistent claim
of our imperfection. The equality of these parts of our nature comes
by purification and freedom. We might say that equality is the very
sign of liberation. To be free from the domination of the urge of vital
desire and the stormy mastery of the soul by the passions is to have
a calm and equal heart and a life-principle governed by the large and
even view of a universal spirit. Desire is the impurity of the Prana,
the life-principle, and its chain of bondage. A free Prana means a content
and satisfied life-soul which fronts the contact of outward things without
desire and receives them with an equal response; delivered, uplifted
above the servile duality of liking and disliking, indifferent to the
urgings of pleasure and pain, not excited by the pleasant, not troubled
and overpowered by the unpleasant, not clinging with attachment to the
touches it prefers or violently repelling those for which it has an
aversion, it will be opened to a greater system of values of experience.
All that comes to it from the world with menace or with solicitation,
it will refer to the higher principles, to a reason and heart in touch
with or changed by the light and calm joy of the spirit. Thus quieted,
mastered by the spirit and no longer trying to impose its own mastery
on the deeper and finer soul in us, this life-soul will be itself spiritualised
and work as a clear and noble instrument of the diviner dealings of
the spirit with things. There is no question here of an ascetic killing
of the life-impulse and its native utilities and functions; not its
killing is demanded, but its transformation. The function of the Prana
is enjoyment, but the real enjoyment of existence is an inward spiritual
Ananda, not partial and troubled like that of our vital, emotional or
mental pleasure, degraded as they are now by the predominance of the
physical mind, but universal, profound, a massed concentration of spiritual
bliss possessed in a calm ecstasy of self and all existence. Possession
is its function, by possession comes the soul's enjoyment of things,
but this is the real possession, a thing large and inward, not dependent
on the outward seizing which makes us subject to what we seize. All
outward possession and enjoyment will be only an occasion of a satisfied
and equal play of the spiritual Ananda with the forms and phenomena
of its own world-being. The egoistic possession, the making things our
own in the sense of the ego's claim on God and beings and the world,
parigraha, must be renounced in order that this greater thing, this
large, universal and perfect life, may come. Tyaktena bhunjithan, by
renouncing the egoistic sense of desire and possession, the soul enjoys
divinely its self and the universe.
A free heart is similarly a heart
delivered from the gusts and storms of the affections and the passions;
the assailing touch of grief, wrath, hatred, fear, inequality of love,
trouble of joy, pain of sorrow fall away from the equal heart, and leave
it a thing large, calm, equal, luminous, divine. These things are not
incumbent on the essential nature of our being, but the creations of
the present make of our outward active mental and vital nature and its
transactions with its surroundings. The ego-sense which induces us to
act as separate beings who make their isolated claim and experience
the test of the values of the universe, is responsible for these aberrations.
When we live in unity with the Divine in ourselves and the spirit of
the universe, these imperfections fall away from us and disappear in
the calm and equal strength and delight of the inner spiritual existence.
Always that is within us and transforms the outward touches before they
reach it by a passage through a subliminal psychic soul in us which
is the hidden instrument of its delight of being. By equality of the
heart we get away from the troubled desire-soul oil the surface, open
the gates of this profounder being, bring out its responses and impose
their true divine values on all that solicits our emotional being. A
free, happy, equal and all-embracing heart of spiritual feeling is the
outcome of this perfection.
In this perfection too there is
no question of a severe ascetic insensibility, an aloof spiritual indifference
or a strained rugged austerity of self-suppression. This is not a killing
of the emotional nature but a transformation. All that presents itself
here in our outward nature in perverse or imperfect forms has a significance
and utility which come out when we get back to the greater truth of
divine being. Love will be not destroyed, but perfected, enlarged to
its widest capacity, deepened to its spiritual rapture, the love of
God, the love of man, the love of all things as ourselves and as beings
and powers of the Divine; a large, universal love, not at all incapable
of various relation, will replace the claimant, egoistic, self-regarding
love of little joys and griefs and insistent demands afflicted with
all the chequered pattern of angers and jealousies and satisfactions,
rushings to unity and movements of fatigue, divorce and separation on
which we now place so high a value. Grief will cease to exist, but a
universal, an equal love and sympathy will take its place, not a suffering
sympathy, but a power which, itself delivered, is strong to sustain,
to help, to liberate. To the free spirit wrath and hatred are impossible,
but not the strong Rudra energy of the Divine which can battle without
hatred and destroy without wrath, because all the time aware of the
things it destroys as parts of itself, its own manifestations and unaltered
therefore in its sympathy and understanding of those in whom are embodied
these manifestations. All our emotional nature will undergo this high
liberating transformation; but in order that it may do so, a perfect
equality is the effective condition.
The same equality must be brought
into the rest of our being. Our whole dynamic being is acting under
the influence of unequal impulses, the manifestations of the lower ignorant
nature. These urgings we obey or partially control or place on them
the changing and modifying influence of our reason, our refining aesthetic
sense and mind and regulating ethical notions. A tangled strain of right
and wrong, of useful and harmful, harmonious or disordered activity
is the mixed result of our endeavour, a shifting standard of human reason
and unreason, virtue and vice, honour and dishonour, the noble and the
ignoble, things apprjved and things disapproved of men, much trouble
of self-approbation and disapprobation or of self-righteousness and
disgust, remorse, shame and moral depression. These things are no doubt
very necessary at present for our spiritual evolution. But the seeker
of a greater perfection will draw back from all these dualities, regard
them with an equal eye and arrive through equality at an impartial and
universal action of the dynamic Tapas, spiritual force, in which his
own force and will are turned into pure and just instruments of a greater
calm secret of divine working. The ordinary mental standards will be
exceeded on the basis of this dynamic equality. The eye of his will
must look beyond to a purity of divine being, a motive of divine will-power
guided by divine knowledge of which his perfected nature will be the
engine, yantra. That must remain impossible in entirety as long as the
dynamic ego with its subservience to the emotional and vital impulses
and the preferences of the personal judgment interferes in his action.
A perfect equality of the will is the power which dissolves these knots
of the lower impulsion to works. This equality will not respond to the
lower impulses, but watch for a greater seeing impulsion from the Light
above the mind, and will not judge and govern with the intellectual
judgment, but wait for enlightenment and direction from a superior plane
of vision. As it mounts upward to the supramental being and widens inward
to the spiritual largeness, the dynamic nature will be transformed,
spiritualised like the emotional and pranic, and grow into a power of
the divine nature. There will be plenty of stumblings and errors and
imperfections of adjustment of the instruments to their new working,
but the increasingly equal soul will not be troubled overmuch or grieve
at these things, since, delivered to the guidance of the Light and Power
within self and above mind, it will proceed on its way with a firm assurance
and await with growing calm the vicissitudes and completion of the process
of transformation. The promise of the Divine Being in the Gita will
be the anchor of its resolution, "Abandon all dharmas and take
refuge in Me alone; I will deliver thee from all sin and evil; do not
grieve."
The equality of the thinking mind
will be a part and a very important part of the perfection of the instruments
in the nature. Our present attractive self-justifying attachment to
our intellectual preferences, our judgments, opinions, imaginations,
limiting associations of the memory which makes the basis of our mentality,
to the current repetitions of our habitual mind, to the insistences
of our pragmatic mind, to the limitations even of our intellectual truth-mind,
must go the way of other attachments and yield to the impartiality of
an equal vision. The equal thought-mind will look on knowledge and ignorance
and on truth and error, those dualities created by our limited nature
of consciousness and the partiality of our intellect and its little
stock of reasonings and intuitions, accept them both without being bound
to either twine of the skein and await a luminous transcendence. In
ignorance it will see a knowledge which is imprisoned and seeks or waits
for delivery, in error a truth at work which has lost itself or got
thrown by the groping mind into misleading forms. On the other side,
it will not hold itself bound and limited by its knowledge or forbidden
by it to proceed to fresh illumination, nor lay too fierce a grasp on
truth, even when using it to the full, or tyrannously chain it to its
present formulations. This perfect equality of the thinking mind is
indispensable because the objective of this progress is the greater
light which belongs to a higher plane of spiritual cognizance. This
equality is the most delicate and difficult of all, the least practised
by the human mind; its perfection is impossible so long as the supramental
light does not fall fully on the upward looking mentality. But an increasing
will to equality in the intelligence is needed, before that light can
work freely upon the mental substance. This too is not an abnegation
of the seekings and cosmic purposes of the intelligence, not an indifference
or impartial scepticism, nor yet a stilling of all thought in the silence
of the Ineffable. A stilling of the mental thought may be part of the
discipline, when the object is to free the mind from its own partial
workings, in order that it may become an equal channel of a higher light
and knowledge; but there must also be a transformation of the mental
substance; otherwise the higher light cannot assume full possession
and a compelling shape for the ordered works of the divine consciousness
in the human being. The silence of the Ineffable is a truth of divine
being, but the Word which proceeds from that silence is also a truth,
and it is this Word which has to be given a body in the conscious form
of the nature.
But, finally, all this equalisation
of the nature is a preparation for the highest spiritual equality to
take possession of the whole being and make a pervading atmosphere in
which the light, power and joy of the Divine can manifest itself in
man amid an increasing fullness. That equality is the eternal equality
of Sachchidananda. It is an equality of the infinite being which is
self-existent, an equality of the eternal spirit, but it will mould
into its own mould the mind, heart, will, life, physical being. It is
an equality of the infinite spiritual consciousness which will contain
and base the blissful flowing and satisfied waves of a divine knowledge.
It is an equality of the divine Tapas which will initiate a luminous
action of the divine will in all the nature. It is an equality of the
divine Ananda which will found the play of a divine universal delight,
universal love and an illimitable aesthesis of universal beauty. The
ideal equal peace and calm of the Infinite will be the wide ether of
our perfected being, but the ideal, equal and perfect action of the
Infinite through the nature working on the relations of the universe
will be the untroubled outpouring of its power in our being. This is
the meaning of equality in the terms of the integral Yoga.
Sri Aurobindo
in "The Synthesis of Yoga" - Part 4: The Yoga of Self-Perfection
SABCL Volume 21- Pages 671-680
published
by Sri Aurobindo
Ashram - Pondicherry
diffusion by SABDA
or
Lotus Light Publications
U.S.A.
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