IV
The Fourfold Atman — The Individual in the Eternal — Brahman as Brahmaloka — The Mandukya's Pointers Towards an Integral Spirituality
In order to realise the fourfold Atman, the soul of man must be divinely able to possess the lower hemisphere. At present the ego-sense which is our first insistent experience hinders us from achieving with full wakefulness, in Space and Time, the divine status of our soul-existence. In Its spaceless and timeless being, Atman is always thus conscious but in Its frontal action here in self-conceptive extension and duration It puts the rest of Its consciousness behind as subliminal and supraliminal so that Its superficial or frontal action as the lower Brahman is unaware of It though all the while the latter exists and acts only by that ever-unimpaired Infinite. This power of absorbed concentration has been compared by Sri Aurobindo to the power of concentration in our normal mentality by which we absorb ourselves in a particular object and in a particular work and forget the integral ego in us which is really doing the work to be done. The integral ego itself, gross as well as subtle, is even such a self-forgetfulness — by the phenomenal superficies — of the divine nature of the individual soul. But the true soul is there behind this apparent absorption in the idea of being, force of being and form of being, in living touch with the innermost plenitudes of the All, and it enlightens gradually the circumscribed ego with the intuition of unity, universality and divinity, and leads it by Yoga to realise and manifest the fourfold consciousness which alone can put the individual in rapport with the universal on all the planes of being.
It has been contended that it is impossible for the individual soul to be conscious like Brahman because the individual and the universal co-exist up to the third state but are merged in the last, with the result that the soul becomes as good as extinct and is compelled to lose all consciousness of the
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world. But if Brahman is Atman there is no reason why extinction should be the consequence, provided the soul lets the memory of the supreme union percolate through all the layers of its being by an ever-increasing opening of the latter to the Highest and to the truth of manifestation which is behind their initial perversities. In the last verse of the Mandukya the same word "Atman" is used to denote the true Self of the individual as well as the supreme Self of all, for the Essence which constitutes both is identical and by realising one's own Essence that of everything else is realised. But the Mandukya implies much more than a mere negation of extinction: it is of the greatest philosophic moment to note that when Atman is realised as the supreme Self of all there is implied an infinity of centres from which the supreme Self is experienced. For, if, as the Katha puts it, the Eternal is to be discerned by the wise as existing within their own Atman, and speaks1 also of the one Purusha who resides within each man's Atman, then surely there is intended to be some shade of difference between the Atman of all and the Atman of each — a shade which is also evident when the Mundaka says2 that the Atman of those who practise Yoga properly makes Brahman its dwelling place. In other words, the universal Atman is in each case of self-liberation experienced from an individual centre: the supreme Atman is the proverbial circle whose circumference is nowhere and centre everywhere. Just as the terms Vaishwanara, Taijasa and Prajna stand for both the macrocosmic and the microcosmic aspects, so too, when the ultimate Universal reality is called Atman, that term in its application to the individual connotes also the highest individuality. Such a position is no more impossible, simply because in the fourth state Atman is spoken of as "the One who is non-dual", than are a concrete individual form of the universal objectivity and a subtle individual poise assumed by the universal subjectivity: it differs from them in one respect only — namely, that they in themselves, in their superficies, are states of the
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Ignorance while this, like the third state of a divine individual centre in tune with the universal divinity, is a condition of full Knowledge.
The supreme Bliss or Immortality is certainly a fulfilment3 and not a denial of all that the individual soul is and desires. If complete mergence in the universal were the result, then it would be vain to speak of the "mortal putting on Immortality". The liberated Yogi must still carry implicit in his consciousness the sense of his liberation into the plenary Bliss; else self-liberation would become a contradiction in terms and hold no meaning for the human soul starting its self-discovery from its first ego-standpoint. For, after all it is the human soul that is liberated, Brahman himself having been always free in His universal aspect. To quote a well-known figure from the Mundaka Upanishad, when the river of the soul pours itself into Brahman it gains for good its essential Consciousness as Water and is no longer tyrannised over by the Name and Form of River; but still it is the river which has attained the oceanic heart of essential Bliss and its experience of that Bliss does not lessen or efface the riverine water which was poured into the ocean, for otherwise there will be no real awareness of self-liberation and the putting on of Immortality by the mortal becomes impossible. In fact, Immortality is significant only if the once-deluded soul is led to discover through Yoga its highest counterpart conscious of Its own eternal Essence and Self, but at the same time is not annihilated as a distinct numerical entity. If we say that Brahman projects the individual and totally reabsorbs him, we knock all value out of self-liberation unless we add that it is the projected individual who experiences the so-called reabsorbtion or that Brahman re-experiences Himself from an individual point of view. "There must be then," as Sri Aurobindo insists, "some kind of reality of the individual soul as distinct from the Supreme even in the event of freedom and illumination." And since all process of spiritual becoming is, according to the Upanishads, a progressive
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discovery of what one already is in the depths of one's being, what we call Brahman must be a free and illumined state of multiple oneness.
It is exactly this view that the Mundaka takes in describing the supreme status. It speaks of the soul entering into Brahman, making Brahman its dwelling place, finding everywhere the Omnipresent and by self-union penetrating into the All. It does not at all mention extinction, dissolution, or self-effacing reabsorption; on the contrary it says in conclusion, as if to illumine fully the expressions already used and bring out the true practical import of its concept of "Brahman": "The strivers after Truth, they who have made certain of the nature of things by the knowledge that is Vedanta and are purified in their being by the Yoga of renunciation, in their time of ultimate end become absolute and immortal and are released into Brahmaloka."4 This verse harks back to an early reference5 in the same Upanishad to the ineffectual efforts of those who hope to attain Brahmaloka permanently by charitable works and the external ceremonial of the Vedic cult.
But what precisely is Brahmaloka, the world of Brahman? There seems to be several grades in it: the Prashna calls the world of the Sun Brahmaloka and the first reference in the Mundaka also speaks of it as a solar paradise. But "the highest infinite heaven" in which the true Yogi, according to the Kena,6 "finds his foundation" if he has realised the secret doctrine is clearly the same ultimate status which is obtained when, as the Mundaka phrases it, the liberated soul passes right through the gates of the Sun and becomes at the time of death absolute and immortal by being released into Brahma-loka. So we must appreciate the ancient nuance between the Self in Its pure aspect and Its creative role as Brahma, the original of the first figure of the later Puranic trinity: the secondary world of Brahman leading to the primary is the Supreme's poise as Brahma the Creator who is the Prajna of the Mandukya. Even the Brihadaranyaka confirms this idea of grades in the world of Brahman by calling the highest level of Brahmaloka the status of the highest Purusha; while in the
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Chhandogya7 the Self is called the supreme and uncreated Brahmaloka which is attained by means of Yoga. But the term in question is unequivocally significant, in the Sanskrit language, of a status of conscious being in which the liberated souls enjoy an essential identity with Brahman without becoming merged in His universality.
We must not, however, imagine that these souls would thus be less than Brahman, for the category of magnitude has no bearing on the realm of essence: the Self can be smaller than a corn of rice, says Sandilya in the Chhandogya Upanishad, and yet greater than the whole world. It is really nothing less than what the Mundaka in a later verse calls "becoming Brahman by knowing Brahman", since the unobscured perception by the Many that the One has become Many in them is tantamount to perceiving that the multiplicity is but a varied deployment of their own essential unity. This is exactly as it should be, in accordance with the Upanishadic view of creation as only the self-projection of a transcendent Being in Its self-conceived conditions of Space and Time. It is essential Being which is essential Consciousness which again is essential Bliss — Sat-Chit-Ananda — dwelling in energy on Itself, Chit-tapas, to diffuse what is self-concentrated. Hence the highest concentration must hold the supernal principle or corresponding truth of multiplicity which supports and justifies the spatio-temporal activity which has sprung from it. It is not surprising, therefore, that the Taittirya should aver that in the principle of Ananda or Brahmic Bliss each individual has his counterpart of supreme individuality dynamic in time through the gnostic self of Vijnana and based transcendentally in the conscious being of Brahman,8 so that what is called Brahman proves to be just the universal Being who contains and constitutes the highest Brahmaloka. It is a latter-day mistake to see the two as different; no text in the main Upanishads lends the least support to it, for it would contradict what the Mundaka calls "the knowledge that is Vedanta".
The Vedantic ideal, even like the Vedic, was not to lose
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oneself always in a sealed trance but to use the trance-state as a step towards making Sat-Chit-Ananda gradually the normal consciousness of life. The universal Life of which our waking consciousness is only "an individual universe of movement"9 is no fatuity to be abandoned or an inexplicable bungling on the part of the Supreme, but "the manifest Brahman"10 — Brahman who is Himself "the Life whose light becomes apparent in all existing things".11 For our waking self has its inmost centre of truth in the creative Maya of Brahmic Bliss and our whole organic existence is but an effort of that Bliss to climb up through vitalised Matter and mentalised vitality and spiritualised mentality to its own integral harmony which expresses the pure spiritual substance and conscious energy through the process of an ultra-mental Law. In the word "Anandamaya" we have the Vedantic equivalent of the Gita's Para-Prakriti, the divine energy of the highest Purusha, Purushottama. And though it is true that the plenary manifestation of the Highest in the lowest was never so well accomplished in the days of the Upanishads by the Rishis as in the days of the Gita by the Charioteer of Kurukshetra, the ideal was none the less there, envisaged clearly enough to make them declare that Brahmaloka is verily here and now, its kingdom within the human heart,12 which OM as a spirit of mind piloting the life and the body has set in Matter.13 When all the knots that bind the heart are rent asunder, then man, even in the body of this birth, enjoys the Bliss of Immortality;14 for after beholding, "bright and luminous in the inner body", the indivisible Spirit with the subtle eyes of the meditating heart15, "the will in the thought may continuously remember what the motion of the mind turned inwards has succeeded in attaining."16 All is unified in the Highest who is imperishable, says the Mundaka;17 there the members of organic life discover their foundation and all these god-forms expressing themselves in mental, vital and physical existence withdraw into their godheads and the self of Vijnana expands into the illimitable Atman. Then the soul, delivered from the disruptive ignor-
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ance of Name and Form, sees how That is both the higher and the lower being18 and how in their deepmost truth Life is That and Speech is That and Mind is That only19 and how the wise by reflective perception behold everywhere in the universe That which shines out as Delight and Immortality.20 For: "All is this eternal and immortal Brahman. The Eternal is before us and the Eternal is behind us and to the south and to the north of us and above and below and extended everywhere. All this magnificent universe is nothing but the Eternal."21
However, the supernal vision is not vouchsafed to the mortal if he fails to conform to the Law of the Supreme who has so set this world-riddle that without utter purity and consecration of the being the outward-going waking consciousness cannot be transformed nor suffused with a full perception of the higher Brahman who has become everything even in the lower Brahman. The subtle sight which fulfils the ideal of the Upanishads to see not only all existences in the Self but also the Self in all existences — that is to say, even in each individual universe of movement in the universal motion — cannot be developed until the mental consciousness which is man's ordinary experience is not transformed enough to be a pellucid image of the ultra-mental. Else the Yogi has to set his mind to sleep and withdraw into the Highest — a mode of escape which was accepted by all who were not prepared to cope with the rounded ideal of the original Vedanta and which by its later prevalence has been responsible for the current misconception that the Upanishads at the height of their inspiration advocate the theory that the individual is merged in the universal Brahman and that the Atman proper is a complete exclusion of the three other states. If the mental being were sufficiently opened to the divine Light and flooded by a splendour beyond it so that all its activity is initiated and guided from above, it would be possible to realise the fourfold simultaneity of a divine self-existence, individual and universal, such as is described by the Mandukya as the
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integral character of the Immutable whose name is OM. For then the mind and the Spirit would be in close harmony and the Yogi be able to realise not only the absolute value of the Infinite but also its translation into the derivative forms of it in the lower hemisphere. He would possess it in itself as well as in its downward orientation, as "That which remains unexpressed by the word but by which the word is expressed, That which thinks not by the mind but by which the mind is thought, That which sees not with the eye but by which one sees the eye's seeings, That which breathes not with the breath but by which the life-breath is led forward in its paths."22 What is more, all the present means of experience would become to the best of their capacity channels of the supernal Idea of Truth which is behind each of them, so that they might at least translate correctly what in its own fullness is realisable only in the language of the ultra-mental.
Thus the sense-action, both gross and subtle, would be raised to its highest intensity as well as holding-power, illumined with the true meaning of image and appearance, and taste the divine delight which hides behind all its multi-coloured shock and reaction of aesthesis. The emotional nature would forget the blinding storm of its fitful waters and vibrate in a deep and sweet and calm response to the call of the eternal Lover, realising how human relations are but a pallid and misguided, though provisionally justified, expression of Nature's divine urge towards self-completion. The intelligence and will would be alchemised into dynamic inspiration, revelation and intuition, vivified by the infallible spontaneities of the Truth-consciousness, aware — in their most detailed operations as in their most extensive gyrations — of the spaceless and timeless infinite of Sat-Chit-Ananda. The way of this transmutation is marked out by the Isha, for it corresponds in the reverse order to the triple action of the Sun of Knowledge which receives the infinite light beyond, focuses the whole truth of the unmanifest into a dense concentration or seed-state of what is to be manifested and finally unrolls by creative ideation the Bliss of Brahman into a
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cosmic rhythm and harmony. The aspiring soul, therefore, must lay aside the glittering ignorance of its mentality and submit by Yoga to the supreme Seer in order that the rays of the Sun of Knowledge which are dispersed by the mind may be marshalled according to the law of the Truth-consciousness by which alone the habitual method of mental experience can be systematised and all its scattered radiations unified in the concentrated body of the gnostic Sun. Then at last a direct intercourse is established, through a transformed Taijasa, between Vaishwanara and Prajna, and the embodied soul of the individual is enabled to perceive through the massed glories of the Sun its own identity with the infinite beatitude of the highest Self. When even the waking self is able to feel its oneness with the Self of Ananda and utter the great cry of realisation, "The Purusha there and there, He am I!", then the universe will justify in the individual the original descent of the Infinite into Space and Time to realise in a progressive expression the perfect Consciousness of the Beyond. For the Truth and Immortality will be possessed and manifested in the human symbol made divine, and a complete fulfilment take place of the whole labour and rapture of Vedic and Vedantic spirituality, the immense effort of the ancient esoterics to unite in being with the one Godhead and forge in their nature, "as in a smithy", the multiple god-forms or perfect Vibhutis of His Ananda.
This translation of the whole human formula into that of the superman, in a most integral fashion made possible by a compassing of the ultra-mental gnosis as never before, is precisely the aim and end, explicitly avowed and pursued, of Sri Aurobindo's Yoga of the Supermind.
Notes and References
1. Katha Upanishad: II. 4 (12).
2. Ibid., III (4).
3. Taittirya Upanishad: II. I (2).
4. Mundaka Upanishad: III. 2 (6).
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5. Ibid., I. 2 (5-7).
6. Kena Upanishad: IV. 9.
7. Chhandogya Upanishad: VIII, 4 (13, 15).
8. Taittiriya Upanishad: II. Chap. 5.
9. Isha Upanishad: 1.
10. Ibid.
11. Mundaka Upanishad: III. 1 (4).
12. Chhandogya Upanishad: VIII. 1 (1-6).
13. Mundaka Upanishad: VI. 2 (6,8).
14. Katha Upanishad: II. 3 (14, 15).
15. Mundaka Upanishad: III. 1 (5,7,8,9).
16. Kena Upanishad: IV. 3.
17. Mundaka Upanishad: III. 2 (7).
18. Ibid., II. 2 (9).
19. Ibid. (2).
20. Ibid. (8).
21. Ibid. (12).
22. Kena Upanishad: I. 4-8.
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