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The
gnosis is the effective principle of the Spirit, a highest
dynamis of the spiritual existence. The gnostic individual
would be the consummation of the spiritual man; his whole
way of being, thinking, living, acting would be governed by
the power of a vast universal spirituality. ...He would feel
the presence of the Divine in every centre of his consciousness,
in every vibration of his life-force, in every cell of his
body. In all the workings of his force of Nature he would
be aware of the workings of the supreme World-Mother, the
Supernature; he would see his natural being as the becoming
and the manifestation of the power of the World-Mother. In
this consciousness he would live and act in an entire transcendent
freedom, a complete joy of the spirit, an entire identity
with the cosmic self and a spontaneous sympathy with all in
the universe. All beings would be to him his own selves, all
ways and powers of consciousness would be felt as the ways
and powers of his own universality His own life and the world
life would be to him like a perfect work of art; it would
be as if the creation of a cosmic and spontaneous genius infallible
in its working out of a multitudinous order. The gnostic individual
would be in the world and of the world, but would also exceed
it in his consciousness
and live in his self of transcendence above it; he would be
universal but free in the universe, individual but not limited
by a separative individuality. ...
One in self with all, the supramental being
will seek the delight of self-manifestation of the Spirit
in himself but equally the delight of the Divine in all :
he will have the cosmic joy and will be a power for bringing
the bliss of the spirit, the joy of being to others; for their
joy will be part of his own joy of existence. ...His feeling
of universality, his action of universality will be always
a spontaneous state and natural movement, an automatic expression
of the Truth, an act of the joy of the spirit's self-existence.
There could be in it no place for limited self or desire or
for the satisfaction or frustration of the limited self or
the satisfaction or frustration of desire, no place for the
relative and dependent happiness and grief that visit and
afflict our limited nature; for these are things that belong
to the ego and the Ignorance, not to the freedom and truth
of the Spirit. ... The gnostic existence and delight of existence
is a universal and total being and delight, and there will
be the presence of that totality and universality in each
separate movement: in each there will be, not a partial experience
of self or a fractional bit of his joy,. but the sense of
the whole movement of an integral being and the presence of
its entire and integral bliss of being, Ananda.
The gnostic life will be an inner life in which
the antinomy of the inner and the outer, the self and the
world will have been cured and exceeded. The gnostic being
will have indeed an inmost existence in which he is alone
with God, one with the Eternal, self-plunged into the depths
of the Infinite, in communion with its heights and its luminous
abysses of secrecy; no- thing will be able to disturb or to
invade these depths or bring him down from the summits, neither
the world's contents not his action nor all that is around
him. This is the transcendence aspect of the spiritual life
and it is necessary for the freedom of the spirit; for otherwise
the identity in Nature with the world would be a binding limitation
and not a free identity. But at the
same time God-love and the delight of God will be the heart's
expression of that inner communion and oneness, and that delight
and love will expand itself to embrace all existence. The
peace of God within will be extended in the gnostit experience
of the universe into a universal calm of equality not merely
passive but dynamic, a calm of freedom in oneness dominating
all that meets it, tranquillising all that enters into it,
imposing its law of peace on the supramental being's relations
with the world in which he is living. ...It is this poise
and freedom in the spirit that will enable him to take all
life into him- self while still remaining the spiritual self
and to embrace even the world of the Ignorance without himself
entering into the Ignorance. ...
Love will be for him the contact, meeting,
union of self with self, of spirit with spirit, a unification
of being, a power and joy and intimacy and closeness of soul
to soul, of the One to the One, a joy of identity and the
consequences of a diverse identity. It is the joy of an intimate
self-revealing diversity of the One, the multitudinous union
of the One and a happy interaction in the identity, that will
be for him the full revealed sense of life. Creation aesthetic
or dynamic, mental creation, life creation, material creation
will have for him the" same sense. It will be the creation
of significant forms of the Eternal Force, Light, Beauty,
Reality,-the beauty and truth of its forms and bodies, the
beauty and truth of its powers and qualities, the beauty and
truth of its spirit, its formless beauty of self and essence.
As a consequence of the total change and
reversal of consciousness establishing a new relation of spirit
with mind and life and matter, and a new significance and
perfection in the relation, there will be a reversal, a perfecting
new significance also of the relations between the spirit
and the body it inhabits.
Peace and ecstasy cease to be different
and become one. ... This calm and this delight rise together,
as one state, into an increasing intensity and culminate in
the eternal ecstasy, the bliss that is the Infinite. ..this
fundamental ecstasy of being.
.. translates
[in the mind] into a calm of intense delight of spiritual
perception and vision and knowledge, in the heart into a wide
or deep or passionate delight of universal union and love
and sympathy and the joy of beings and the joy of things.
In the will and vital parts it is felt as the energy of delight
of a divine life-power in action or a beatitude of the senses
perceiving and meeting the One everywhere, perceiving as their
normal aesthesis of things a universal beauty and a secret
harmony of creation of which our mind can catch only imperfect
glimpses or a rare supernormal sense. In the body it reveals
itself as an ecstasy pouring into it from the heights of the
spirit and the peace and bliss of a pure and spiritualised
physical existence. A universal beauty and glory of being
begins to manifest; all objects reveal hidden lines, vibrations,
powers, harmonic significances concealed from the normal mind
and the physical sense. In the universal phenomenon is revealed
the eternal Ananda.
SRI AUROBINDO, The Life Divine,
ch. 55. or The Future Evolution of Man, VIII.
A spiritual or gnostic being would feel his harmony with
the whole gnostic life around him, whatever his position in
the whole. According to his place in it he would know how
to lead or to rule, but also how to subordinate himself; both
would be to him an equal delight: for the spirit's freedom,
because it is eternal, self-existent and inalienable, can
be felt as much in service and willing subordination and adjustment
with other selves as in power and rule. An inner spiritual
freedom can accept its place in the truth of an inner spiritual
hierarchy as well as in the truth, not incompatible with it,
of a fundamental spiritual equality. It is this self-arrangement
of Truth, a natural order of the spirit, that would exist
in a common life of different degrees and stages of the evolving
gnostic being. Unity is the basis of the gnostic consciousness,
mutuality the natural result of its direct awareness of oneness
in diversity, harmony the inevitable power of the working
of its force. Unity, mutuality and harmony must therefore
be the inescapable law ,of
a common or collective gnostic life. What forms it might .
take would depend upon the will of evolutionary manifestation
of the Supernature, but this would be its general character
and principle .
The one rule of the gnostic life would
be the self-expression of the Spirit, the will of the Divine
Being; that will, that self- expression could manifest through
extreme simplicity or through extreme complexity and opulence
or in their natural balance, -for beauty and plenitude, a
hidden sweetness and laughter in things, a sunshine and gladness
of life are also powers and expressions of the Spirit. In
all directions the Spirit within determining the law of
the nature would determine the frame of the life and its detail
and circumstance. In all there would be the same plastic
principle; a rigid standardization, however necessary for
the mind's arrangement of things, could not be the law of
the spiritual life. A great diversity and liberty of self-expression
based on an underlying unity might well become manifest; but
everywhere there would be harmony and truth of order .
A life of gnostic beings carrying
the evolution to a higher supramental status might fitly be
characterized as a divine life ; for it would be a life in
the Divine, a life of the beginnings of a spiritual divine
light and power and joy manifested in material Nature. That
might be described, since it surpasses the mental human level,
as a life of spiritual and supramental superman hood. But
this must not be confused with past and present ideas of supermanhood;
for superman hood in the mental idea consists of an overtopping
of the normal human level, not in kind but in degree of the
same kind, by an enlarged personality, a magnified and exaggerated
ego, an increased power of mind, an increased power of vital
force, a refined or dense and massive exaggeration of the
forces of the human Ignorance; it carries also, commonly implied
in it, the idea of a forceful domination over humanity by
the superman. That would mean a super- manhood of the Nietzschean
type; it might be at its worst the reign of the 'blond beast'
or the dark beast or of any and every beast,
a return to barbaric strength and ruthlessness and force :
but this would be no evolution, it would be a reversion to
an old strenuous barbarism.
Rut earth has had enough of this kind in her past
and its repetition can only prolong the old lines; she can
get no true profit for her future, no power of self-exceeding,
from the Titan, the Asura: even a great or supernormal power
in it could only carry her on larger circles of her old orbit,
But what has to emerge is something much more difficult and
much more simple ; it is a self-realized being, a building
of the spiritual self, an intensity and urge of the soul and
the deliverance and sovereignty of its light and power and
beauty,-not an egoistic superman- hood seizing on a mental
and vital domination over humanity, but the sovereignty of
the Spirit over its instruments, its possession of itself
and its possession of life in the power of the spirit, a new
consciousness in which huminity itself shall find its own
self-exceeding and self-fulfilment by the revelation of the
divinity that is striving for birth within it. This is the
sole true supermanhood and the one real possibility of a step
forward in evolutionary Nature..
Sri
Aurobindo, The Life Divine
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