-03_A Chapter for a Work on Vedanta

Chapter XI.

The Means of Realisation.

Vedanta is merely an intellectual assent, without Yoga. The verbal revelation of the true relations between the One and the Many, the intellectual acceptance of the revelation and the dogmatic acknowledgement of the relations do not lead us beyond metaphysics, and there is no human pursuit more barren and frivolous than metaphysics practised merely as an intellectual pastime, a play with words and thoughts, when there is no intention of fulfilling thought in life or of moulding our inner state and outer activity by the knowledge which we have intellectually accepted. It is only by Yoga that the fulfilment and moulding of our life and being in the type of the true relations between God and the soul can become possible. Therefore every Upanishad has in it an element of Yoga as well as an element of Sankhya, the scientific psychology on which Yoga is founded. Vedanta, the perception of the relations between God in Himself and God in the world, Sankhya, the scientific, philosophical and psychological analysis of those relations and Yoga, called also by the Rishis Yajna, their practical application in social life, religious worship and individual discipline and self-perfection, is and has always been the whole substance of the Hindu religion. Whatever we know of God, that we ought in every way to be and live, is almost the only common dogma of all Hindu sects and schools of every description.

If then we know this of God and ourselves that we and He are one, So'ham asmi, but divided by a movement of selfawareness which differentiates our forward active movement of waking life from the great life behind that knows and embraces all, then to recover that oneness in our waking state becomes the supreme aim and meaning of every individual existence. Nothing connected only with the movement of division can be of any moment to us, neither our bodily life and health, nor our family welfare, nor our communal wellbeing compared with this immense self-fulfilment; they can only be of importance as means or movements in the self-fulfilment. If, farther,

we know that by recovering our secret oneness with God we shall also be at one with the world and that hatred, grief, fear, limitation, sickness, mortality, the creations of the divided movement, will no longer be able to exercise their yoke upon us, then the abandonment of all else, if necessary, for the one thing needful, becomes not only the supreme aim and meaning of human life, but our only true interest. Even if, as is quite probable, we cannot in one birth attain to the fullness of this grand result, yet it is clear that even a little progress towards it must mean an immense change in our life and inner experience and be well worth the sacrifice and the labour. As the Gita says with force, "A little of this rule of life saves man out of his great fear." If farther a man knows that all mankind is intended to attain this consummation, he being one life with that divine movement called humanity, it must also be part of his self-fulfilment to pour whatever fullness of being, knowledge, power or bliss he may attain, out on his fellow beings. It is his interest also, for humanity being one piece, it is difficult for the individual to attain fullness of life here when the race creates for him an atmosphere of darkness, unrest and base preoccupation with the cares of a half-intellectualised animal existence. So strong has this atmosphere become in the Iron Age, that it is the rule for the individual who seeks his own salvation to sever himself from life and society and content himself with only the inner realisation. Modern Hinduism has become, therefore, in all but its strongest spirits, absorbed in the idea of an individual salvation. But our Vedic forefathers were of a different stuff. They had always their eye on the individual in the race. Nothing is more remarkable in the Veda than the absolute indifference and even confusion with which the singular and plural are used by the singer, as if "I" and "we" were identical in meaning, and the persistence with which the Rishi regards himself as a representative soul, as it were, of the visham devayatinam, the peoples in their seeking after the Godhead. We find the same transition in the Isha from the singular "pashyami" of the successful representative soul realising his oneness with God to the plural asman when he turns to pray for the equal purification and felicity of his fellows. Our ideal, therefore, is fixed, — to become one with God and lead individually the divine life, but also to help others to the divine realisation and prepare, by any means, humanity for the kingdom of God on earth, — satya-dharma, satyayuga.

Our means is Yoga. Yoga is not, as the popular mind too often conceives, shutting oneself in a room or isolating oneself in a monastery or cave and going through certain fixed mental and bodily practices. These are merely particular and specialised types of Yogic practice. The mental and bodily practices of Rajayoga and Hatha-yoga are exercises of great force and utility, but they are not indispensable. Even solitude is not indispensable, and absolute solitude limits our means and scope of self fulfilment. Yoga is the application, by whatever means, of Vedanta to life so as to put oneself in some kind of touch with the high, one, universal and transcendent Existence in us and without us in our progress towards a final unity. All religious worship, sincerely done, all emotional, intellectual and spiritual realisation of that which is higher than ourselves, all steadily practised increase of essential power, purity, love or knowledge, all sacrifice and self transcending amounts to some form of Yoga. But Yoga can be done with knowledge or without knowledge, with a higher immediate object or with a lower immediate object, for a partial higher result or for the fullest divine perfection and bliss. Yoga without knowledge can never have the force of Yoga with knowledge, Yoga with the lower object the force of Yoga with the higher object, Yoga for a partial result the force of Yoga for the full and perfect result. But even in its lowest, most ignorant or narrowest forms, it is still a step towards God.

[A Fragmentary Chapter for a Work on Vedanta]

Each of the great authoritative Upanishads has its own peculiar character and determined province as well as one common starting-point of thought and supreme truth in the light of which all their knowledge has to be understood. The unity of this universal existence in the transcendental Being who alone is manifested here or elsewhere forms their common possession and standpoint. All thought and experience here rest upon this great enigma of a multiplicity that when questioned resolves itself to a unity of sum, of nature and of being, of a unity that when observed seems to be a mere sum or convention for a collection of multiples. The mind when it starts its business of experience in sensation and thought, finds itself stumbling about in a forest of details of each of which it becomes aware individually by knocking up against it, like a wayfarer in a thick and midnight forest stumbling and dashing himself against the trees, — by the shock and the touch only he knows of them. Mind cannot discriminate and put these details into their place except, imperfectly, by the aid of memory — the habit of the [. . .] of sensations. Like the women imprisoned in the magic forests of the old Tantra the mind is a prisoner in the circle of its own sensations wandering round and round in that narrow area and always returning to the original source of its bondage,— its inability to go beyond its data, the compulsion under which it lies of returning to the object it meets merely the image of that object as mirrored through the senses and in the mind. It is reason, the faculty that can discriminate as objects, that first attempts to deliver mind from its bondage by standing apart from the object and its mental reflection and judging them in its own terms and by its own measurements and not in the terms and measurements of the senses. The knowledge which the mind gives is sanjna, awareness not passing beyond contact with and response to the thing known, the knowledge which reason gives is prajna, awareness placing the object in front of it and studying it as a thing affecting but yet apart from and unconnected with the feelings and needs of that which experiences. Therefore it is,

according to our philosophy, in buddhi and not in manas that ahan-kara, the discriminative ego-sense is born. Mind like matter has an inert unity of all things in experience born of non-discrimination; the perception of an object outside and a sensation within it stand on the same footing to sanjna. We must discriminate and reflect, in order to be aware of separate multiplicity as distinguished from a multitude [of] sensations in the unity of our consciousness. Afterwards when we rise through reason but above it, to Veda, we recover, however rudi-mentarily, the original unity, but discriminating, knowing the tattwa of things, perceiving them to be circumstances not of an individual sensebound [but] of universal and sense delivered consciousness. The consummation of our knowledge and the ordering of life by that knowledge, is man's evolution, the business for which he is here upon the earth. To climb to it from the animal mentality¹

The first thing that this discriminating reason effects is to put each detail in its place and then to arrange the details in groups. It travels from the individual to the group, from the group to the class, from the class to the kind, from the kind to the mass. And there until help arrives it has to pause. It has done much. It has distinguished each individual tree in the magical forest from its neighbour; it has arranged them in groves and thickets; it has distinguished and numbered the various species of trees and fixed their genus. It has mapped them out collectively and known the whole mass as the forest. But it is not yet free. It has not escaped from the ensorcelled gyre of the Almighty Magician. It knows every detail of its prison, nothing more. It has discovered the vyashti and the samashti; it has arrived only at a collective and not at a real unity. It has discovered the relations of unit to unit, the units to the smaller group and the smaller group to the larger group and the whole to the mass. It has its laws of life fixed upon that knowledge, its duties of individual to individual, of man to the family, of the man and family to the class, of [all] three to the nation, of the nation and its constituents to humanity. It has ordered excellently our life in the prison house. But it still travels in the magic circle, it is still a prisoner and a [. . .]. It has even discovered one pregnant truth that the farther we [travel] from the many, the nearer we [draw]

1 This sentence was not completed. One or two words inserted in the previous sentence, perhaps after "man's", perhaps after "business", are illegible.

to the one, the less is the transience, the greater the permanence. The family outlasts the individual, the class endures when the single family has perished, the kind survives the disappearance of the class, the collective whole endures and outlives all the revolutions of its component parts. Therefore a final law and morality is found, the sacrifice and consummation of the less in the greater, of the few for the many, — an evolutionary utility, a consummate altruism. And when all is said and done, we are still in the prison house. For even the most permanent is here transient, the world perishes as inevitably as the midge and the ant and to our ranging vision seems hardly mightier in its ultimate reality or the importance of its fate. For who has made individual follow individual and nation follow nation and world follow world through the brilliant mirage of [life and] the incomprehensible mystery of death, and when all is ended, what profit has man had of all his labour that he has done under the sun?

Reason cannot deliver us. The day of our freedom dawns when we [transcend] reason, not by imagination, which is itself only an intellectual faculty, not [by] the intuition even, but by illumination. The intuitive reason can do much for us, can indicate to us the higher truth. The intellectual reason can only arrive, as we have seen, at a collective unity; it is still bound by its data. The intuitive reason first suggests to us a unity which is not collective but essential, the Brahman of the Veda [........................].² It is intuitive reason [that] [.........................................................] its non-existence to the observing intellect [......] has ever [. . .]ed beyond the uttermost limit of the stars and assured [. . .] [that] there is always a beyond, or lived from all time before the stars shone out in the heavens [so that] he can say, Time never began. The imagination can indeed add tract to tract of Space and millennium to millennium of Time and, returning tired and appalled, say "I at least find no end and infinity is possible". But still we have no proof—there are no data on which we can stand. Infinity remains to the intellect a surmise, a hypothesis, a powerful inference. Reason is essentially a measuring and arranging faculty and can only deal with the finite. It is ensorcelled within the limits of the forest. Yet we have an intuitive perception of

2 Most of the last part of this sentence has been lost through mutilation of the manuscript. Most of the next two lines have similarly been lost.

the truth of infinity, not collectively, not as a never ending sum of miles or moments but as a thing in itself not dependent on that which it contains. We have, if we examine ourselves, other such intuitive perceptions, of immortality although we cannot look beyond the black wall of death, of freedom although the facts of the world seem to load us with chains.

Are we yet free by the force of this intuitive reason? We cannot say so, — for this reason that it gives us suggestions, but not realisations. It is in its nature what the old psychologists would have called smriti, a memory of truth, rather than a perception. There is a suggestion to us in ourselves of infinity, of immortality, of freedom and knowledge in us replies, Yes, I know that to be true, though I do not see it, there is something in me that has always known it, it is in me like some divine memory. The reason of this movement is that the intuitive reason works in the intellect. It is the memory of freedom coming to the woman in the forest which tells her that there is something outside this green and leafy, but yet to her dark, fatal and dismal forest of imprisonment, some world of wide and boundless skies where a man can move freely doing what he wills, kamachari. And because it works in the intellect, its movement can be imitated by the other inhabitants of the intellect, by the brilliancy of imagination, by the fond thought that is only the image of our wish. The rationalist is right in distrusting intuition although it gave him Newton's theory of gravitation and most of the brilliant beginnings of Science and Free Thought, — right, yet not right; right, from the standpoint of a scepticism that asks for intellectual certainty, wrong from the standpoint of ultimate truth and the imperative needs of humanity. Faith rests upon the validity of this faculty of intuitive reason, and faith has been the great helper and consoler of humanity in its progress, the indispensable staff on which he supports his thought and his action. But because the divine smriti is copied by the voices of desire and fancy faith has also been the parent and perpetuator of many errors.

It is knowledge that loosens our bonds, that snaps asunder the toils of sense and dispels the force of the world-enchantment. In order to be free, we must pass from intuition to illumination. We must get the direct perception of the knowledge of which intuitive reason is the memory. For within us there are unawakened folds in folds of conscious experience which we have yet to set in action in order to fulfil

our nature's possibilities. In these inner realms we are sushupta, asleep; but the whole movement of humanity is towards the awakening of these centres. Science is in error when it imagines that man is from all time and to all time a rational animal and the reason the end and summit of his evolution. Man did not begin with reason, neither will he end with it. There are faculties within us which transcend reason and are asleep to our waking consciousness, just as life is asleep in the metal, consciousness in the tree, reason in the animal. Our evolution is not over, we have not completed even half of the great journey. And if now we are striving to purify the intellect and to carry reason to its utmost capacities, it is in order that we may discourage the lower movements of passion and desire, self interest and prejudice and dogmatic intolerance which stand in the way of the illumination. When the intellectual buddhi is pure by vichara and abhyasa of these things, then it becomes ready to rise up out of the mind into the higher levels of consciousness and there lose itself in a much mightier movement which because of its greatness and perfection is called in the Rigveda mahas and in the Vedanta vijnana. This is what is meant in the Veda by Saraswati awakening the great ocean. Pavaka nah saraswati maho arnash chetayati. This is the justification of the demand in our own Yoga that desire shall be expelled, the mind stilled, the very play of reason and imagination silenced before a man shall attain to knowledge,— as the Gita puts it na kinchid api chintayet.

This illumination of the vijnana, when it is complete, shows us not a collective material unity, a sum of physical units, but a real unity. It reveals to us Space, Time and the chain of apparent circumstance to be merely conventions and symbols seen in His own being by One Seer and dependent purely on a greater transcendental existence of which they are not separate realities and divisions but the manifold expressions of its single Truth. It is this knowledge that gives us freedom. We escape from the enchanted forest, we know once more the world outside this petty world, see the boundless heavens above and breast the wide and circumambient air of our infinite existence. The first necessity is to know the One, to be in possession of the divine Existence; afterwards we can have all the knowledge, joy and power for action that is intended for our souls, — for He being known all is known, tasmin vijnate sarvam vijnatam, not at once by any miraculous revelation, but by progressive illumination or rather an

application of the single necessary illumination to God's multiplicity in manifestation, by the movement of the mahat and the bhuma, not working from petty details to the whole, but from the knowledge of the one to the knowledge of relation and circumstance, by a process of knowledge that is sovereign and free, not painful, struggling and bound. This is the central truth of Veda and Upanishad and the process by which they have been revealed to men.

This free and great movement of illumination descending from above to us below and not like our thought here which climbs painfully up the mountainpeaks of thought only to find at the summit that it is yet far removed from the skies to which it aspires, this winged and mighty descent of Truth is what we call Sruti or revelation. There are three words which are used of illumined thought, drishti, sruti and smriti, sight, hearing and remembrance. The direct vision or experience of a truth or the thought-substance of a truth is called drishti, and because they had that direct vision or experience, that pratyaksha not of the senses, but of the liberated soul, the Rishis are called drashtas. But besides the truth and its artha or thought-substance in which it is represented to the mind, there is the vak or sound symbol, the inevitable word in which the truth is naturally enshrined and revealed, and not as in ordinary speech half concealed or only suggested. The revelation of the vak is sruti. The revealed word is also revelatory and whoever has taken it into his soul, though the mind may not understand it, has the Truth ready prepared in the higher or sushupta reaches of his being from whence it must inevitably descend at a future date or in another life to his lower and darkened consciousness in order to liberate and illumine. It is this psychological truth which is the foundation of the Hindu's trust in the Name of God, the vibrations of the mantra and the sound of the Veda. For the vak carries, in the right state of the soul, an illumination with it of the truth which it holds, an inspiration of its force of satyam which is less than drishti but must in the end lead to drishti. A still more indirect action of the vijnana is smriti, — when the truth is presented to the soul and its truth immediately and directly recognised by a movement resembling memory — a perception that this was always true and already known to the higher consciousness. It is smriti that is nearest to intellect action and forms the link between vijnanam and prajn[an]am, ideal thought and intellectual thought, by leading to the higher forms of intellectual

activity, such as intuitive reason, inspiration, insight and prophetic revelation, the equipment of the man of genius.

But what proof have we that this illumination exists? how can we say that this illuminated sight, this revelatory hearing, this confirming remembrance of eternal knowledge is not a selfdelusion or a peculiarly brilliant working of imagination and of rapid intellectuality. To those who have the illumination, the question does not arise. The prisoner released from his fetters does not doubt the reality of the file that undid their rivets; the woman escaped from the forest does not ask herself whether this amazing sunlight and wide-vaulted blue sky is not a dream and a delusion. The scientist himself would not be patient with one who began the study of science by questioning the reality of the revealing power of microscope and telescope and suggesting that the objects as seen [. . .] were so presented merely by an optical illusion. Those who have experienced and seen, tell [.....................] sceptic.³ "Learn how to use the instruments [......] yourself, study all these wonders invisible to the ordinary eye, examine their constancy, coherency, fidelity to fixed wide and general laws, and then judge; do not vitiate inquiry from the beginning by denying on a priori grounds its utility or the right to inquire." It is only by faith in the instruments of our knowledge that we can acquire knowledge, — by faith in the evidence of the senses that we can think at all, by faith in the validity of reason that we can deduce, infer and argue. So also it is only by faith in illumination that we can see truth from above and come face [to face] with [God.] It is true that all faith must have its limits. The faith in the senses must be transcended and checked by the faith in our reason. The faith in the reason itself is checked by agnosticism [and] will one day be transcended and checked by the faith in the vijnana. The faith in the vijnana must be checked and harmonised by a faith in a still higher form of knowledge, — knowledge by identity. But within its own province each instrument is supreme and must be trusted. In relying, therefore, upon the vijnana, in asserting and demanding a preliminary faith in them,⁴ the Yogin is making no mystic, irrational or obscurantist claim. He is not departing from the universal process

3 Manuscript mutilated; most of the end of this sentence and a few words before and after it have been lost. The inverted commas at the beginning of the next sentence have been placed there by the editors.

4 So in manuscript; this sentence was incompletely revised by Sri Aurobindo.

of knowledge. He claims to exceed reason, just as the scientist claims to exceed the evidence of the senses. When he asserts that things are not what they seem, that there are invisible forces and agencies at work about us and that the whole of our apparent existence and environment is only phenomenal, he is no more departing from rationality or advancing anything wild or absurd than the scientist when he asserts that the earth moves round the sun and the sun is relatively still, affirms the existence of invisible gases or invisible bacilli, or finds in matter only a form of energy. Nor are faith in the Guru and faith in the Sruti irrational demands, any more than the scientist is irrational in saying to his pupil "Trust my expert knowledge, trust my method of experiment and the books that are authoritative and when you have made the experiments, you can use your intellect to confirm, refute, amend or enlarge whatever scientific knowledge is presented to you in book or lecture or personal instruction," — or than the man of the Indian village who has been to London is irrational in expecting his fellow villagers to accept his statement of the existence, sights, scenes, and characteristics of London or in supporting [it] by any book that may have been written with authority on the subject. If the Indian Teacher similarly demands faith in himself as an expert, faith in the Sruti as the evidence of ancient experts, drishti as revealed truth coming direct to them by vijnanam from the divine Knowledge he is following the common, the necessary rule. He has the right to say, Trust these, follow these, afterwards you will yourself look on the unveiled face of Truth and see God. In each case there is a means of confirmation,— the evidence of the observation and deduction has to be confirmed by observation and deduction; the evidence of the senses by the senses, the evidence of the vijnanam by the vijnanam. One cannot exceed one's instrument.

There is also the evidence of common experience — there is this eternal witness to the truth of the vijnana, that men who, in whatever clime and whatever age, have used it, however they may differ in their intellectual statement or the conclusions of the reason about what they have seen, are at one in the substance of their experience and vision. Whoever follows in these days the paths indicated, makes the experiments prescribed, goes through the training needed, cannot go beyond, in the substance of his knowledge, or depart from what the ancients observed. He may not go beyond⁵

5 This sentence was left incomplete.