II
The Mathematics of Infinity — The Correct Sense of "Immutable" — The Two Hemispheres — The Vedic Vedanta
The followers of Shankara argue that if the condition of absolute existence is that of an infinite divine oneness, there can be no room for our ordinary human ignorance, avidyā, which we have to outgrow by means of God-realisation. In other words, they ask how God can fully remain God, an infinite divine being, if the Ignorance is not an illusory but a real state produced by the Self as the creator; for a real Ignorance would seem to mean that God is not everything and therefore not infinite unless we say, absurdly enough, that the Ignorance which has to be transcended is also a part of divine being and consciousness and not ignorant at all, even in appearance. The conclusion is: we must hold that Brahman is not comprehensive of the Ignorance, and let our minds do what they can with the bewildering riddle of a nonexistent universe appearing as an empirical entity.
But, really speaking, there is no need to resort to such drastic measures: the steady vision of the Upanishads perceived a simple solution of the ordinary mentality's inability to conceive the infinite Essence and the infinite phenomenon as co-existent. The bedrock of spiritual experience is the intuition of the one and inexhaustible Essence dwelling equally in everything, its full spiritual infinity being somehow present in the innermost of every infinitesimal point of the so-called Illusion. All the schools of Indian mysticism agree that the illimitable deity of whose Self everything is a phenomenon is lodged "in the recess of life, in the heart of things, in the cavern of being".1 But once we grasp that the spiritual Essence is such that It exists in all Its plenitude in the depth of everything we do not necessarily imply that the infinite Self has become less by being manifested and apparently differentiated, if we have the Upanishadic insight into
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the mathematics of Infinity, according to which the very nature of infinity is such that it is inexhaustible and therefore never diminished, however much we may deduct from it. The one innermost Infinite can deploy Itself endlessly because of Its infinity and, just because of Its infinity, retain an infinite of Itself in spite of Its endless deployments. Paradoxically, God, being infinite, does not become less nor is His spaceless and timeless fullness impaired because, phenomenally speaking, the Ignorance is not divine. As to how and why this Ignorance is created, the question can only be solved with complete satisfaction by the same supramental omnipotence and omniscience which creates it. But there is no call to regard the universe as a foundationless shadow which has no place in the conscious being of Brahman: even by mental logic this much is defensible that an interminable manifestation of whatsoever It wills, even a thousand million Ignorances, is possible to an illimitable Essence without the latter suffering the slightest diminution. To quote the words of the Vedantic mystics themselves, as prefixed to the Isha: "The Full is That; the Full is This; the Full is taken from the Full; when the Full is taken from the Full, what remains is still the Full." Can there be a plainer indication that the Brahmic Essence which is in the heart of all manifestation remains, as the Mandukya puts it, "the unconditioned, the immutability never affected" by apparent variations of quantity and quality, extension and duration, because Its infinity is never used up or instabilised?
Shankarites with their dilemmatic prejudices failed to appreciate the profound significance of this spiritual mathematics: hence their peculiar view of the problem of Maya in place of the comprehensive monism of the Upanishads which could, without the least intellectual compromise, embrace by its spiritual concept of the Brahmic Essence pluralism even to the last and outermost degree of plurality.
For Maya originally meant creative wisdom, "the energy of the stuff of knowledge" which measures out, defines and enumerates the divine Conscious-Force — chit-tapas — by
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which the potentialities of the unmanifest Absolute stand formulated in Nature of prakriti. It was looked upon not as a mirage but as a miracle, not a witless mystery but a divine paradox with a purpose perceived directly by the sages in their meditations as simultaneously the self-expressive and self-enveloping power of One who, according to the Svetas-vatara Upanishad, "fashions all form though Himself formless, from whom comes the world in the beginning and whither it goes in the end." As the Taittiriya Upanishad repeatedly asserts, the cosmic multiplicity and movement are originated by the primeval Unity by an act of conscious energy out of Its plenitude of Bliss:2 "Brahman is Bliss; from Bliss are verily these creatures born; by Bliss they live and grow; and into Bliss again they return."3 Everything is ensouled and embodied in the Maya of that Bliss4 which constitutes the very essentiality of divine Being and is not dependent on stimuli, objects and expectations though it may deploy itself internally in infinite self-multiplication. Everything, therefore, has a secret counterpart of the Bliss which operates through the Seed-Logos. The aim of life is to realise through the initial figures of loss, pain and imperfection the truth of the Beatitude eternally focused in the multiple oneness of the causal Will of Prajna, and so confer, as Sri Aurobindo says, a novel value on the powers of the Spirit. The material universe is a process of Darkness gradually beholding itself as Light divinely self-concealed for the joy of being humanly self-discovered.
Having seen how the Upanishads equally accepted and reconciled the noumenal and the phenomenal, we are in a position to grasp the exact meaning of that most controversial term akṣara or immutable as applied to the Self. Surely it does not imply an inherent inability to project a universe, for the Upanishads declare in one voice that the Self has in fact achieved this projection. It can only mean that the nature of the Self is such as to keep always Its sense of infinite oneness, even if It manifests a play of multiplicity so that It never ceases to possess the self-sufficient beatitude proper to
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such oneness, enabling It, as the Chhandogya5 says, to remain pure of that restless desire and hankering and instability which is the badge of all that is contingent and not conscious of an infinite and self-sufficient unity of Delight. The problem is then easily solved, for, according to the mathematics of infinity, Atman can retain the consciousness and delight of an infinite and self-sufficient oneness in spite of manifesting a lower grade of being which becomes forgetful of its transcendent source while that source is all the time aware of the act by which Its own Self assumes, by means of Its immeasurable possibilities, the role of the spatio-temporal cosmos. Indeed, notwithstanding all that It makes valid in Its self-conceived terms of endless Space and Time, Its infinity is able to conserve, beyond both these terms, an unbounded Selfhood which, by its very transcendence of spatio-temporality, has not to run in the course of the three dimensions or the three times but holds them all together and at once, thus combining with Its multiple and progressive manifestation an ideal and perpetual potential of stability. In this sense It enjoys an eternal immutability of infinite fullness and oneness, an illimitable constant of blissful self-possession by which It remains in an equipoise of immobility even while indulging in the most indefatigable movement of creation. In view of the subsequent misunderstanding of the epithet "immutable", it is interesting to note how the Mundaka6 even feels a scruple in saying that all existences are born from the Immutable, lest the disciple should be puzzled how the mobile universe could emerge from that which seems to be an infinite rest. So, in order to imply that by Immutability it does not mean an impotent passivity but a state of transcendental mystery which is creative as well as unchangeable, it adds that the divine Purusha from whom everything takes its birth is really "higher than the highest Immutable" — that is to say, one who manages to remain unchangeable without being limited to static unproductiveness: thus His infinite Self within all creatures does not exclude the Self as the Creator but divinely embraces in His immutable conscious
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being all this ebb and flow of existence.
We may add that the Mundaka pointedly takes up a phrase applied by the Mandukya to Prajna and boldly joins it to its account of the sheer Self. The Mandukya calls Prajna "the womb of all". The Mundaka7 ends its description of "the invisible, the unseizable, without connections" — terms indicating the Mandukya's fourth status — with the words: "the womb of creatures." And, when this Upanishad8 defines "the one Self", it does not hesitate to say: "He in whom are inwoven heaven and earth and the mid-regions, and mind with all the life-currents."
With such a comprehensive idea in mind we must approach, if we are to appreciate fully its consistency, the profound division made by the Upanishads of ultimate Reality into the higher and the lower hemispheres of Brahman, parārdha and apārārdha, which constitutes the Knowledge and the Ignorance, vidyā and avidyā, the double status of the Self and the Lord as distinguished from the double status of the dreamer and the waking-soul. The higher Brahman comprehends in His Knowledge the Ignorance of the lower Brahman but in His own ultra-mental way of light to which avidyā is not the forgetfulness of the One but the play of multiplicity on the firm basis of unity. The higher Brahman is the original Atman who remains immutable and infinite despite manifesting the immensities of the lower Brahman over which He presides as the Lord. The synthetic objective of the ancient yoga was to see in the terms of the higher the values of the lower being which gets absorbed in the many, puts the One behind it and imagines that each is in all but not all in each and that each acts independently and not in secret unity with the rest of existence. Indeed, there were many who favoured an intransigent flight into the Supracosmic, but for the most calm-considering, dhīra, among the ancients the regeneration and not the rejection of the mental consciousness of multiplicity was the Truth and Bliss and Immortality; for, as the Isha beautifully expresses it, "he who sees everywhere the Self in all existences and all
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existences in the Self, shrinks not thereafter from aught. He in whom it is the Self-Being that has become all existences that are Becomings, for he has the perfect knowledge, how shall he be deluded, whence shall he have grief who sees everywhere oneness?"9 It is exactly this sort of manifold oneness which is taught in the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad when it says that, though the universe has emanated from Atman who is the invisible king and witness of it, there can be no duality in Atman's essential Consciousness, for all things are Its own infinite Self variously formulated: "It does not see another, hear another or know another;" indeed It cannot at all be said to know or be conscious of Itself or another in the knowledge-values of the Ignorance because for It the knower and all that is known are consciously one in Essence. But Its Bliss is not founded on the rejection of the world which It has emanated: It embraces and enjoys it as at once its Lord and its Self: as its Self It effects, essentially, the opposition between the Lord and the creation — as its Lord It saves this identity from being an exclusive and vacant zero. At the height of spiritual experience is the utter Intangible of the fourth state, into whose basic experience of boundless Identity one can absorb oneself to the exclusion of the three other states which support both the cosmos and its Creator. But it is precisely because the Self and the Lord are simultaneous in the being of the higher Brahman that the Absolute is not an exclusive and vacant zero — a fact illustrated and borne out by the analogy of the mystic word OM which in spite of its three syllables is pronounced as one sound and the fulfilment of which is the goal "declared by all the Vedas" — that is to say, the realisation of the single Self and at the same time the divine possession of Its three planes of manifestation — the causal and ultra-mental, the subtle and internal, the gross and external, figured respectively as the Sun, the Moon and the Earth in the Prashna Upanishad.
The fifth section of the Prashna Upanishad not only elucidates the connection between the teachings of the Mandukya and the Isha but also throws a flood of light on
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the intimate relations which both bear to the poetry of the Vedic Sacrifice so that the Vedas are shown to be more Vedantic than we have supposed and the Vedanta more Vedic than we have suspected. The Vedic symbols, which have generally been taken as part of a semi-barbarous ritual centred round the worship of the Sun and the various solar powers operative in Nature, stand out as mere veils, for the vulgar eye, of a spiritual experience stated by the Upanishads in translucent language when the age of the Mysteries was over and the mind of man was likely to forget the esoteric side of the religion of a more imaginative and less intellectual phase of the ancient Indian culture. A glimpse of the world-perspective of these Mysteries as reconstructed by Sri Aurobindo in his exhaustive analysis of Vedic symbolism is given us as through the key-hole of a sanctum by the fifth section of the Prashna which answers the question put by Satyakama to his Master: "To what does a man attain who meditates on OM until death?" The Master replies that OM is both the higher and the lower Brahman so that one can attain to one or the other of them according to one's knowledge and use of the three aspects of the Veda — the ṛk, the yajus and the sāma, corresponding to the three levels of manifested being. It is known to scholars that the Rik meant the illumined word of praise, the Yajus the illumined word as actively guiding the sacrifice, while the Sama was the musical counterpart of them both, the word of harmony which fulfilled, as it were, the divine desire of sacrifice in man and, deriving from the same root as samattva, was indicative of a state of "sameness" or communion with the godhead to which the sacrifice was offered. Judging from the Prashna, the Rik seems to mean the Veda as considered to consist of inspired prayers, marking the first stage of Yoga, the Yajus a practical application of the Vedic secrets, and the Sama a complete internal self-surrender to the divine Being leading the ego to dissolve in a transport of soul-music on being touched by the knowledge that is born of love. When one devotes one's life to God, yet without a very dynamic will behind one's Yoga, one is
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supposed to have followed the Riks only and utilised by meditation the first letter A of the sacred word: "one getteth by it knowledge but one soon returneth to the earth; and him the Riks lead to the world of men and there perfected in austerity, continuance and faith he experienceth the greatness of the Spirit."10 The first and second letters together are said to lead to the middle or Moon-world which they represent and which, as its name Soma suggests, forms the subtle pleasance of conceptive desires foreshadowing the divine delight which is the concealed raison d'être of all that seems desirable: "he in the world of the Moon experienceth the majesty of the Spirit but he returneth again."11 But when the third letter is combined with the other two, the triple character symbolises the world of which the Moon is a mere reflection, the world in which "the inner and the outer and the middle actions of the Spirit are made whole in their perfect using so that the soul knows and is not shaken",12 the world of the Sun which, unlike the Moon, frees one from the obligation of rebirth on the Earth and through which, "perfected in its light" and purged of all evil "as a snake putteth off its skin", the Yogi attains, by meditating on the completed OM and following the Soma-sense of the Veda, to Brahmaloka or the world of Brahman with whose "densely concentrated consciousness" he sees the highest Purusha "dwelling in His kingdom": "the man of knowledge passes to Him by OM, even to the supreme Spirit that is calm and ageless and fearless and immortal."13
So the Sun, which is called in the Vedas "the eye of the gods" and "the divine creator", is that luminous power of the Spirit by which It omnisciently harmonises Its "inner and outer and middle actions" in the universe. It is the face of the godhead turned towards the world, the outlook of the supreme Essence on Its manifold becomings of Its inlook on their secret nature by means of Its awareness of being the One who has Himself become the Many. It is the Kavi of the Isha and the Prajna of the Mandukya, called also the Purusha of the principle of Vijnana in the fourth section of the
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Prashna.14 When a man ceases to dream, says the Prashna, he sinks into a state bordering on divine beatitude in which everything gets gathered-up into a self which is greater than the intellect and the ego-personality, buddhi and ahaṅkāra.15 This Self which is not mental but ultra-mental uses the intellect and the ego as its figureheads, for it is the causal Logos who has his basis of bliss in the ultimate Immutable.16 The Taittiriya Upanishad17 also says that the mental self in man is secretly pervaded and guided by another, that of Vijnana, characterised by his irresistible resolution of what is to be done (śraddhā), his spontaneous infallibility of movement (ṛtam), his full possession of the truth which binds the mortal to the Immortal (satyam),18 his integrality of being uniting all differences (yoga), and lastly his foundation in vastness (mahā).
It is remarkable how these appellations stand for exactly the same things which are attributed to the solar deity in the Vedas. The Sun there is also called satyam and ṛtam; instead of being endowed with mahā it manifests in mahat svar, the heaven of the great light, and is entitled bṛhat which also means the vast, and like Vijnana it is of a consciously undivided essence, the son of Aditi the infinite Mother. Upwards — or, rather, inwards, for we have already the authentic divine status — the Sun of Vijnana opens into the Purusha of Bliss19 who with this his "glorious golden -sheath"20 finds his foundation in the pure Self;21 downwards its radiance touches the mental consciousness and, though dissipated by the refractive surface of the mind, is still the hidden truth behind all the ideative approximations of the latter.22 It thus shares the activities of both the Self and the mind and stands forth as a link of connection when the mortal turns towards the birthless and deathless Immortality of the Atman proper. The Sun, therefore, represents in the Vedas as well as the Upanishads the status of consciousness symbolised by the last letter of OM, which on being uttered, after the first has been spoken singly and the second together with the first, completes the full utterance of that word and
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serves as the entrance to the sheer Absolute hymned as early as the Vedic times by the seer Dirghatamas as "the sole Existent whom the sages called by many names — Varuna, Mitra, Agni, Yama and Matariswan."23
Notes and References
1. Katha Upanishad: I. 2. 12 (Sri Aurobindo's translation).
2. Taittiriya Upanishad: II. Chap. 6-9.
3. Ibid., III. Chap. 6.
4. Anandamaya Purusha: Taittiriya Upanishad: II. Chap. 5.
5. Chhandogya Upanishad: VII - 23-26.
6. Mundaka Upanishad: II. I. (1,2,3,4).
7. Ibid., I. 1. 6.
8. Ibid., II. 2. 5.
9. Isha Upanishad: 6, 7.
10. Prashna Upanishad: V. 3.
11. Ibid., V. 4.
12. Ibid., V. 6.
13. Ibid., V. 5.
14. Ibid., IV. 9.
15. Ibid., IV. 6,7,8.
16. Ibid., IV. 9, 10. Corresponding to Vijnana the Vedantic word derived from the term Prajna is Prajnana. "Prajnana," explains Sri Aurobindo, "is the consciousness that cognises all things as objects confronting its observation; in the divine mind it is knowledge regarding things as their source, possessor and witness. Vijnana is comprehensive knowledge containing, penetrating into things, pervading them in consciousness by a sort of identification with their truth." In the human mind Vijnana is the understanding of the meaning, nature and law of things in their relation to one another as if they formed a universal organic unity which includes even the witness who confronts the objects of his knowledge: it is, in different ways, the essence of Science, Art and Philosophy.
17. Taittiriya Upanishad: II. Chap. 4.
18. For this special meaning of the word "satyam", vide Chhandogya VIII. 3 (5).
19. Called "Anandamaya Purusha" in the Taittiriya II. 5, and the principle of Mayas or Priyam in the Vedas.
20. Mundaka Upanishad: II. 2. (9).
21. Hence the Brihadaranyaka describes the pure Self in terms of Vijnana.
22. Hence the later mistake of calling the Intellect Vijnana: the intellect is the lower buddhi, the scattered form of the higher Buddhi which is the true Vijnana.
23. Rig Veda: I. 164 (46).
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