Chapter I
The
Human Aspiration
Man's
highest aspiration - his seeking for perfection,his longing
for freedom and mastery, his search after pure truth and unmixed
delight - is in flagrant contradiction with his present existence
and normal experience.
The earliest preoccupation of man in his awakened thoughts and,
as it seems, his inevitable and ultimate preoccupation, - for
it survives the longest periods of scepticism and returns after
every banishment, - is also the highest which his thought can
evisage. It manifests itself in the divination of Godhead, the
impulse towards perfection, the search after pure Truth and unmixed
Bliss, the sense of a secret immortality. The ancient dawns of
human knowledge have left us their witness to this constant aspiration;
today we see a humanity satiated but not satisfied by victorious
analysis of the externalities of Nature preparing to return to
its primeval longings. The earliest formula of Wisdom promises
to be its last, - God, Light, Freedom, Immortality.
These persistent ideals of the race are at once the contradiction
of its normal experience and the affirmation of higher and deeper
experiences which are abnormal to humanity and only to be attained
in their organized entirety, by a revolutionary individual effort
or an evolutionary general progression. To know, possess and
be the divine being in an animal and egoistic consciousness,
to convert our twilt or obscure physical mentality into the plenary
supramental illumination, to build peace and a self-existent
bliss where there is only a stress of transitory satisfactions
besieged by physical pain and emotional suffering, to establish
an infinite freedom in a world which presents itself as a group
of mechanical necessities, to discover and realize the immortal
life in a body subjected to death and constant mutation, - this
is offered to us as the manifestation of God in Matter and the
goal of Nature in her terrestrial evolution. To the ordinary
material intellect which takes its present organization of consciousness
for the limit of its possibilities, the direct contradiction
of the unrealized ideals with the realized fact is a final argument
against their validity. But if we take a more deliberate view
of the world's workings, that direct opposition appears rather
as part of Nature's profoundest method and the seal of her completest
sanction.
Such
contradiction is part of Nature's general method;it is a sign
that she is working towards a greater harmony. The reconciliation
is achieved by an evolutionary progress.
For all problems of existence are essentially problems of harmony.
They arise from the perception of an unsolved discord and the
instinct of an undiscovered agreement or unity. To rest content
with an unsolved discord is possible for the practical and more
animal part of man, but impossible for his fully awakened mind,
and usually even his practical parts only escape from the general
necessity either by shutting out the problem or by accepting
a rough, utilitarian and unillumined compromise. For essentially,
all Nature seeks a harmony, life and matter in their own sphere
as much as mind in the arrangement of its perceptions. The greater
the apparent disorder of the materials offered or the apparent
disparateness, even to irreconcilable opposition, of the elements
that have to be utilized, the stronger is the spur, and it drives
towards a more subtle and puissant order than can normally be
the result of a less difficult endeavour. The accordance of active
Life with a material of form in which the condition of activity
itself seems to be inertia, is one problem of opposites that
Nature has solved and seeks always to solve better with greater
complexities; for its perfect solution would be the material
immortality of a fully organized mind--supporting animal body.
The accordance of conscious mind and conscious will with a form
and a life in themselves not overtly self-conscious and capable
at best of a mechanical or subconscious will is another problem
of opposites in which she has produced astonishing results and
aims always at higher marvels; for there her ultimate miracle
would be an animal consciousness no longer seeking but possessed
of Truth and Light, with the practical omnipotence which would
result from the possesssion of a direct and perfected knowledge.
Not only, then, is the upward impulse of man towards the accordance
of yet higher opposites in itself, but it is the only logical
completion of a rule and an effort that seem to be a fundamental
method of Nature and the very sense of her universal strivings.
Life
evolves out of Matter, Mind out of Life, because they are already
involved there: Matter is a form of veiled Life, Life a form
of veiled Mind. May not Mind be a form and veil of a higher
power, the Spirit, which would be supramental in its nature?
Man's highest aspiration would then only indicate the gradual
unveiling of the Spirit within, the preparation of a higher
life upon earth.
We
speak of the evolution of Life in Matter, the evolution of
Mind in Matter; but evolution is a word which merely states
the phenomenon without
explaining it. For there seems to be no reason why Life should
evolve out of material elements or Mind out of living form,
unless we accept the Vedantic solution that Life is already
involved in Matter and Mind in Life because in essence Matter
is a form of veiled Life, Life a form of veiled Consciousness. And
then there seems to be little objection to a farther step in
the series and the admission that mental consciousness may
itself be only a form and a veil of higher states which are beyond
Mind. In that case, the unconquerable impulse of man towards
God, Light, Bliss, Freedom, Immortality presents itself in its
right place in the chain as simply the imperative impulse by
which Nature is seeking to evolve beyond Mind, and appears to
be as natural, true and just as the impulse towards Life which
she has planted in certain forms of Matter or the impulse towards
Mind which she has planted in certain forms of Life. As there,
so here, the impulse exists more or less obscurely in her different
vessels with an ever-ascending series in the power of its will-to-be;
as there, so here, it is gradually evolving and bound fully to
evolve the necessary organs and faculties. As the impulse towards
Mind ranges from the more sensitive reactions of Life in the
metal and the plant up to its full organization in man, so in
man himself there is the same ascending series, the preparation,
if nothing more, of a higher and divine life. The animal is a
living laboratory in which Nature has, it is said, worked out
man. Man himself may well be a thinking and living laboratory
in whom and with whose conscious co-operation she wills to work
out the superman, the god. Or shall we not say, rather, to manifest
God? For if evolution is the progressive manifestation by Nature
of that which slept or worked in her, involved, it is also the
overt realization of that which she secretly is. We cannot, then,
bid her pause at a given stage of her evolution, nor have we
the right to condemn with the religionist as perverse and presumptuous
or with the Rationalist as a disease or hallucination any intention
she may evince or effort she may make to go beyond. If it be
true that Spirit is involved in Matter and apparent Nature is
secret God, then the manifestation of the divine in himself and
the realization of God within and without are the highest and
most legitimate aim possible to man upon earth.
Thus the eternal paradox and eternal truth of a divine life
in an animal body, an immortal aspiration or reality inhabiting
a moral tenement, a single and universal consciousness representing
itself in limited minds and divided egos, a transcendent, indefinable,
timeless and spaceless Being who alone renders time and space
and cosmos possible, and in all these the higher truth realizable
by the lower term, justify themselves to the deliberate reason
as well as to the persistent instinct or intuition of mankind.
Chapter
2
