Maya's Hieroglyphics

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Namaste to all. As sort of a test as I try to switch back from

digest mode (vacation's over), I offer this selection from

Aurobindo's book The Synthesis of Yoga. This is from the beginning

of the section on Jnana Yoga, and touches on some issues and themes

recently discussed on this list. He begins by comparing and

contrasting traditional Jnana Yoga from his "Integral" formulation.

 

Sri Aurobindo:

 

The traditional Way of Knowledge proceeds by elimination and

rejects successively the body, the life, the senses, the heart, the

very thought in order to merge into the quiescent Self or supreme

Nihil or indefinite Absolute. The way of integral knowledge

supposes that we are intended to arrive at an integral

self-fulfilment and the only thing that is to be eliminated is our

own unconsciousness, the Ignorance and the results of the

Ignorance.

 

Eliminate the falsity of the being which figures as the ego; then

our true being can manifest in us. Eliminate the falsity of the

life which figures as mere vital craving and the mechanical round

of our corporeal existence; our true life in the power of the

Godhead and the joy of the Infinite will appear. Eliminate the

falsity of the senses with their subjection to material shows and

to dual sensations; there is a greater sense in us that can open

through these to the Divine in things and divinely reply to it.

Eliminate the falsity of the heart with its turbid passions and

desires and its dual emotions; a deeper heart in us can open with

its divine love for all creatures and its infinite passion and

yearning for the responses of the Infinite. Eliminate the falsity

of the thought with its imperfect mental constructions, its

arrogant assertions and denials, its limited and exclusive

concentrations; a greater faculty of Knowledge is behind that can

open to the true Truth of God and the soul and Nature and the

universe.

 

An integral self-fulfilment, -an absolute, a culmination for the

experiences of the heart, for its instinct of love, joy, devotion

and worship; an absolute, a culmination for the senses, for their

pursuit of divine beauty and good and delight in the forms of

things; an absolute, a culmination for the life, for its pursuit of

works, of divine power, mastery and perfection; an absolute, a

culmination beyond its own limits for the thought, for its hunger

after truth and light and divine wisdom and knowledge. Not

something quite other than themselves from which they are all cast

away is the end of these things in our nature, but something

supreme in which they at once transcend themselves and find their

own absolutes and infinitudes, their harmonies beyond measure.

 

Behind the traditional way of Knowledge, justifying its

thought-process of elimination and withdrawal, stands an

overmastering spiritual experience. Deep, intense, convincing,

common to all who have overstepped a certain limit of the active

mind-belt into the horizonless inner space, this is the great

experience of liberation, the consciousness of something within us

that is behind and outside of the universe and all its forms,

interests, aims, events and happenings, calm, untouched,

unconcerned, illimitable, immobile, free, the uplook to something

above us indescribable and unseizable into which by abolition of

our personality we shall enter, the presence of an omnipresent

eternal witness Purusha, the sense of an Infinity or a Timelessness

that looks down on us from an august negation of all our existence

and is alone the one thing Real.

 

This experience is the highest sublimation of spiritualised mind

looking resolutely beyond its own existence. No one who has not

passed through this liberation can be entirely free from the mind

and its meshes, but one is not compelled to linger in this

experience for ever. Great as it is, it is only the Mind's

overwhelming experience of what is beyond itself and all it can

conceive. It is a supreme negative experience, but beyond it is all

the tremendous light of an infinite Consciousness, an illimitable

Knowledge, an affirmative absolute Presence.

 

The object of spiritual knowledge is the Supreme, the Divine, the

Infinite and the Absolute. This Supreme has its relations to our

individual being and its relations to the universe and it

transcends both the soul and the universe. Neither the universe nor

the individual are what they seem to be, for the report of them

which our mind and our senses give us, is, so long as they are

unenlightened by a faculty of higher supramental and suprasensuous

knowledge, a false report, an imperfect construction, an attenuated

and erroneous figure. And yet that which the universe and the

individual seem to be is still a figure of what they really are, a

figure that points beyond itself to the reality behind it.

 

Truth proceeds by a correction of the values our mind and senses

give us, and first by the action of a higher intelligence that

enlightens and sets right as far as may be the conclusions of the

ignorant sense-mind and limited physical intelligence; that is the

method of all human knowledge and science. But beyond it there is a

knowledge, a Truth-Consciousness, that exceeds our intellect and

brings us into the true light of which it is a refracted ray. There

the abstract terms of pure reason and the constructions of the mind

disappear or are converted into concrete soul-vision and the

tremendous actuality of spiritual experience. This knowledge can

turn away to the absolute Eternal and lose vision of the soul and

the universe; but it can too see that existence from that Eternal.

When that is done, we find that the ignorance of the mind and the

senses and all the apparent futilities of human life were not an

useless excursion of the conscious being, an otiose blunder. Here

they were planned as a rough ground for the self-expression of the

Soul that comes from the Infinite, a material foundation for its

self-unfolding and self-possessing in the terms of the universe. It

is true that in themselves they and all that is here have no

significance, and to build separate significances for them is to

live in an illusion, Maya; but they have a supreme significance in

the Supreme, an absolute Power in the Absolute and it is that that

assigns to them and refers to that Truth their present relative

values. This is the all-uniting experience that is the foundation

of the deepest integral and most intimate self-knowledge and

world-knowledge.

 

In relation to the individual the Supreme is our own true and

highest self, that which ultimately we are in our essence, that of

which we are in our manifested nature. A spiritual knowledge, moved

to arrive at the true Self in us, must reject, as the traditional

way of knowledge rejects, all misleading appearances. . .

 

.. . . The material movements are an exterior notation by which

the soul represents its perceptions of certain truths of the

Infinite and makes them effective in the terms of Substance. These

things are a language, a notation, a hieroglyphic, a system of

symbols, not themselves the deepest truest sense of the things they

intimate.

 

 

 

 

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