The Vision and Work of Sri Aurobindo

What is Essence?

A Note on Two Answers —

Shankara's and Sri Aurobindo's

1

THE ONTOLOGICAL VIEW: ESSENCE AS BEING

Essence, according to both Shankara and Sri Aurobindo, is the Reality which persists through all states and changes and of which all things and beings are ultimately constituted. It is the permanent underlying oneness which is the Self of all, the Supreme Spirit besides which nothing else exists.

But Shankara makes an irreconcilable opposition between the one and the many. In his eyes, what appears as many is really one: the manyness is seen because of ignorance, and all that characterises it is inapplicable to the one. Thus, consequent on his opposition of the one and the many, is the impassable gulf he digs between the status and the movement, the formless and the forms, the qualitiless and the qualities, the immutable and the mutable, the infinite and the finite, the eternal and the temporal.

The complete division of the one from the many he considers implicit and inevitable in true reasoning about ontology. And his philosophy, which is founded on an intense experience of the one Spirit or Self of all, has built out of that experience a system where essential reality is posited on one side and on the other a pragmatic or phenomenal reality which from the standpoint of the supreme essence is unreal, insubstantial, illusory. Instead of questioning whether his experience of stark unity is final or not, whether such unity can be ultimate in face of the endless multiplicity and diversity of the pragmatically real which it is said to underlie, he holds that logic itself demands finally the sole acceptance of this unity to the exclusion of phenomenal existence.

Sri Aurobindo does not deny the distinction between phenomenal existence and essential reality. But he differs from Shankara in his view of the nature of essence. To him the essential cannot be exclusive of the phenomenal in the sense that

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it holds no supporting truth of the terms in which the phenomenal exists. The terms of the phenomenal - the many, the forms, the qualities, the mutable, the finite, the temporal - must have their origin in the essential if the latter is truly to be their essence. According to Sri Aurobindo, there is no point, no logic, in speaking of the essence of phenomena if essence is irreconcilably opposed to phenomenal existence. No doubt, they must differ, for unless they differed there would be no logical point in talking of the two. But to be essential is to base and make possible the phenomenal by something non-phenomenal in which the phenomenal terms are transcended without being annulled: that is to say, transfigured as well as transcended.

So Sri Aurobindo speaks of Reality and its manifestation rather than of Reality and illusion. His Absolute has two sides to its nature - the essential and the self-creative or dynamic. Both the sides are real and all that the self-creative or dynamic does is to bring out in form and movement what the essential contains in substance and status. Since Shankara's essential Spirit or Self does not contain in substance and status what exists phenomenally as form and movement, Sri Aurobindo considers it an experience partial with regard not only to the full Reality's two-sided nature but also to that nature's one side called essential: it is the spiritual perception of an aspect of this side. As all aspects of the Infinite are themselves infinite in their own way, the Shankarite experience and perception is tremendous and splendid; yet, however grand, even however inevitable in the course of spiritual realisation, it is far indeed from being the supreme truth and terminus of Yoga.

The nature of the essence which is the rationale of phenomenal existence is very illuminatingly indicated by Sri Aurobindo in the following passage. "Since the spirit and essence of things is one, we are obliged to admit that all these many must be that One, and it follows that the One is or has become many; but how can the limited or relative be the Absolute and how can man or beast or bird be the Divine Being? But in erecting this apparent contradiction the mind makes a double error. It is thinking in the terms of the mathematical finite unit which is sole in limitation, the one which is less than two and can become two only by division and fragmentation or by addition and multiplication; but this is an infinite Oneness, it is the essential and

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infinite Oneness which can contain the hundred and the thousand and the million and billion and trillion. Whatever astronomic or more than astronomic figures you heap and multiply, they cannot overpass or exceed that Oneness; for, in the language of the Upanishad, it moves not, yet is always far in front when you would pursue and seize it. It can be said of it that it would not be the infinite Oneness if it were not capable of an infinite multiplicity; but that does not mean that the One is plural or can be limited or described as the sum of the Many: on the contrary, it can be the infinite Many because it exceeds all limitation or description by multiplicity and exceeds at the same time all limitation by finite conceptual oneness. Pluralism is an error...."¹

The same point is made in Sri Aurobindo's commentary on the Isha Upanishad. "Brahman is one, not numerically, but in essence. Numerical oneness would either exclude multiplicity or would be a pluralistic and divisible oneness with the Many as its parts. That is not the unity of Brahman, which can neither be diminished nor increased, nor divided."² Sri Aurobindo goes on to say that Brahman is "identical, not single. It is identical always and everywhere in Time and Space, as well as identical beyond Time and Space. Numerical oneness and multiplicity are equally valid terms of its essential unity."³

The whole question of trying to explain away multiplicity can arise only if we confuse essential with numerical oneness. If the question did arise with Shankara, he must have made a confusion of the two. This is a hard dictum but there is no escaping it. Not that he never truly conceives the oneness which is essential. He evidently does so when he says that Brahman's unity is not affected by the multiplicity in which we find it; but to him the world of essence has only one-way traffic. Brahman, he holds, cannot actually be multiple although its essence is unaffected by being found in the many. To be many is, in his opinion, to be divided and, if Brahman is actually many. Brahman suffers real division and would be composed of parts. It is on this ground that he combats the doctrine passing by the name of one Vrittikara who propounded it. Vrittikara reduced the unity of

¹. The Life Divine. SABCL Vol. 18, pp. 335-36.

². Isha Upanishad, SABCL Vol. 12, p. 80.

³. Ibid.

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Brahman to a collection of finite objects in the universe and yet declared that that unity was as real as the multiplicity composing it. Shankara dubbed such unity a mere empty logical abstraction because it has no nature of its own. If anything is constituted only of its parts, then the parts alone are real. Here Shankara was irrefutable. Where he went wrong was in arguing that the existence of finites as a real expression of the essence must reduce the essence to a composite of parts. His basic axiom in this context runs: what has no parts cannot be multiple. The axiom is a tautology or a truism if both sections of it refer to essentiality: a tautology because it is tantammount to asserting that non-composite essence is non-composite and a truism because it boils down to postulating that essentiality, qua essentiality, is one and indivisible. If, however, the axiom bears upon the numerically multiple, as Shankara intended, the two sections are not genuine contradictories and Shankara, in passing to the second, has substituted in his mind numerical oneness for the essential unity which is not contradicted by even infinite multiplicity of number and in relation to which there is no need to regard the diverse phenomenal world of parts as irreconcilable with it and consequently unreal, insubstantial, illusory.

Once we grasp how the true essence transcends the opposition of one and many, we can proceed to grant that it need not be confined to the static, the formless and qualitiless, the immutable and infinite and eternal, to the exclusion of movement, forms and qualities, the mutable and finite and temporal. For, what is here excluded by Shankara is what he takes to be the equivalents of the many, and if the many are in no way opposed to the true essence all that is equivalent to them should become ipso facto reconcilable with it. This certainly does not mean that the true essence is not static, formless and qualitiless, an immutable infinity and eternity: it is indeed such and because it is such it is different from the terms of phenomenal being. But its difference does not constitute an inability to be the source of those terms: its difference only implies that the true essence is more than what Shankara signifies by his account of it.

Shankara's account should be reinterpreted by us to indicate the freedom of the essence from limitation by those terms: the essence does not depend on them, they depend on it and it is not bound to a single kind of movement, form, quality, mutableness,

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finiteness, temporality or to a sum of possible kinds. The essence can be independent of those terms and manifest them in all possible kinds and this freedom from limitation by them can come only if it is what Shankara describes it to be. Shankara's mistake lies in converting the freedom itself into a limitation and saying that the essence is devoid of the power of manifesting itself in those terms. The terms in question are, in Sri Aurobindo's vision, perennial possibilities of the essence and while the essence lasts they can always be manifested. They may disappear, but they only pass out of manifestation into non-manifestation.

As manifestation and non-manifestation are more vividly contrasted by Shankara in terms of unitary status and multiple movement, than in any other, it will suffice for all of them to quote a few passages from Sri Aurobindo on their being complementary and inseparable. He writes: "The Self that is quiescent, at rest, vacant of things and happenings is a support and background to existence, a silent channel or a hypostasis of something Supreme: it is not itself the one entirely real existence, not itself the Supreme. The Eternal, the Supreme is the Lord and the all-originating Spirit. Superior to all activities and not bound by any of them, it is the source, sanction, material, efficient power, master of all activities. All activities proceed from the supreme Self and are determined by it; all are its operations, processes of its own conscious force and not of something alien to Self, some power other than this Spirit."⁴

Sri Aurobindo tells us that it is such essence, Self, Spirit, one entirely real existence that the ancient Indian mind seized spiritually and philosophically. This mind declared: "Force is inherent in Existence. Shiva and Kali, Brahman and Shakti are one and not two who are separable. Force inherent in existence may be at rest or it may be in motion, but when it is at rest, it exists none the less and is not abolished, diminished or in any way essentially altered."⁵

To put the matter from the other side: "The immutable silent Spirit may hold its infinite energy silent and immobile within it, for it is not bound by its own forces, is not their subject or instrument, but it does possess them, does release them, is capable of an eternal and infinite action, does not weary or need

4. The Synthesis of Yoga, SABCL Vol. 20, p. 276.

5. The Life Divine, SABCL Vol. 18, p. 82.

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to stop, and yet all the time its silent immobility inherent in its action and movement is not for a moment shaken or disturbed or altered by its action and movement; the witness silence of the Spirit is there in the very grain of all the voices and workings of Nature."⁶

Sri Aurobindo renders plausible to our understanding the inseparableness of status and movement by a few striking suggestions. Thus he says: "A solely silent and static Infinite, an Infinite without an infinite power and dynamis and energy is inadmissible except as the perception of an aspect; a powerless Absolute, an impotent Spirit is unthinkable."⁷ Again, he says: "All energy, all kinetic action has to support itself on status or by status if it is to be effective or creative; otherwise there will be no solidity of anything created, only a constant whirl without any formation: status of being, form of being are necessary to kinesis of being. Even if energy be the primal reality, as it seems to be in the material world, still it has to create status of itself, lasting forms, duration of beings in order to have a support for its action: the status may be temporary, it may be only a balance or equilibrium of substance created and maintained by a constant kinesis, but while it endures it is real and, after it ceases, we still regard it as something that was real. The principle of a supporting status for action is a permanent principle, and its action is constant in Time-eternity."⁸ From spiritual experience too Sri Aurobindo gives us a hint. Apropos of the silent Self he says: "It is when we arrive at something of this silence, stability, immobility that we can base on it a force and energy which in our superficial restless state would be inconceivable."⁹

Here we may note that the greatness and importance of Shankara's silent Self is never denied by Sri Aurobindo. He has even called this experience the realisation of essentiality, but we must appreciate the context in which he has done it. As against exclusive knowledge of totality and exclusive knowledge of parts he speaks of exclusive knowledge of essentiality and puts it above the others and, with regard to the integral or whole knowledge which looks at all sides and all aspects and realises them in that in which they are one, he labels it as "a penultimate knowledge."¹⁰

6. Ibid., p. 337.	7. Ibid.. p. 336
8. Ibid.. p. 458.	9. Ibid., p. 336.
10. Ibid., p. 331.

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However, he hastens to add that since this knowledge negates the totality and the parts "here too there is a capital ignorance" just as a capital ignorance is there when we see only the parts or only the totality. For, as he elsewhere remarks, there is not merely essence of being: there is also essence of nature.¹¹ The nature manifests the being and in the ultimate essence the being and the nature are one and though the totality and the parts in their phenomenal character are transcended they are not negated and the immobility of status holds all potentiality of movement packed in it so that no contradiction enters into our saying that "it is only a pure infinite essence that can formulate itself in infinite ways."¹² The Shankarite Self is essentiality by contrast to totality and parts: it is not the essentiality by which the totality and the parts are explicable: it does not carry their raison d'être. So we should refrain from making too much play with Sri Aurobindo's designating the knowledge of it as "a penultimate knowledge": the designation gives no prominence to the realisation of the Shankarite Self as compared with the various other realisations found in Indian spirituality down the ages.

Vis-à-vis those realisations Sri Aurobindo has written of it: "There can certainly be no doubt of the validity, - complete within itself, - of this experience; there can be no denial of the overwhelming decisive convincingness - ekātma-pratyaya-sāram, - with which this realisation seizes the consciousness of the spiritual seeker. But still all spiritual experience is experience of the Infinite and it takes a multitude of directions; some of them, - and not this alone, - are so close to the Divine and the Absolute, so penetrated with the reality of Its presence or with the ineffable peace and power of the liberation from all that is less than It, that they carry with them this overwhelming sense of finality complete and decisive. There are a hundred ways of approaching the Supreme Reality and, as is the nature of the way taken, so will be the nature of the ultimate experience by which one passes into That which is ineffable. That of which no report can be given to the mind or expressed by any utterance. All these definitive culminations may be regarded as penultimates

11. Ibid., p. 475.

12. Ibid., p. 334.

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of the one Ultimate; they are steps by which the soul crosses the limits of Mind into the Absolute."¹³

It would be well to observe the word "penultimates" here and take the epithet "penultimate" of the other context in the proper perspective supplied by the former. The Shankarite experience is put on a par with other experiences that come with a sense of complete and decisive finality, yet, like it, fall short of the integral or whole realisation. In this connection we may quote the following: "An overwhelming self-evident convincingness, an experience of absolute authenticity in the realisation or experience is not an unanswerable proof of sole reality or sole finality: for other spiritual experiences such as that of the omnipresent Divine Person, Lord of a real Universe, have the same convincing, authentic and final character."¹⁴

The integral or whole experience is clearly indicated by Sri Aurobindo. He speaks of the Supreme Reality as "an eternal and infinite and absolute self-existence, self-awareness, self-delight of being" and he adds: "this founds all things and secretly supports and pervades all things." He is careful not to identify the Supreme Reality with what Shankara describes as "Self" or "Atman". For, he says: "This Self-existence reveals itself again in three terms of its essential nature, - Self, Conscious Being or Spirit, and God or the Divine Being. The Indian terms are more satisfactory, - Brahman the Reality is Atman, Purusha, Ishwara." He also writes: "As there are three fundamental aspects in which we meet this Reality,... so too its power of Consciousness appears to us in three aspects: it is the self-force of that consciousness conceptively creative of all things, Maya; it is Prakriti, Nature or Force made dynamically executive, working out all things under the witnessing eye of the Conscious Being, the Self or Spirit; it is the conscious Power of the Divine Being, Shakti, which is both conceptively creative and dynamically executive of all the divine workings. These three aspects and their powers base and comprise the whole of existence and all Nature..."¹⁵

Here Sri Aurobindo mentions three terms of the Supreme Reality's "essential nature". Again, even with regard to "self" he writes in another place: the "realisation of Self as something intensely silent and purely static is not the whole truth of it, there

13. Ibid., pp. 469-70. 14. Ibid.. p. 467. 15. Ibid.. pp. 323-325.

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can also be a realisation of Self in its power. Self as the condition of world-activity and world-existence."¹⁶ The Self in its power is what Sri Aurobindo calls "the self-force" of the supreme Consciousness "conceptually creative of all things, Maya" - Maya in the old Vedic sense: no illusive inexplicable magic somehow superimposed on the Self but that Self's own marvellous energy of measurement and formulation, energy which is as much the ultimate essence as is status or silence, although in its essentiality it is not energy expressed but energy contained.

The Supreme Reality, according to Sri Aurobindo, is on the one side the essence that is status and silence holding all creativity potential, and on the other the actual creativity within which all status and silence is yet inherent. The truer way of putting the fact is that the two sides are never separate but coexistent, or rather one existence severable only in our thought or our partial spiritual experience. The ultimate essence not only carries all form and movement in potentiality in the depths of sheer Being: it is also never dissociated from a sovereign all-formative all-moving expansion of Becoming. It is the Self that is posited in the Gita as Purushottama with His Prakriti deployed in a higher Nature that is a divine phenomenon and in a lower Nature that is a phenomenon of mixed light-and-darkness progressively releasing the luminous from the obscure.

Compared to this Self, this essence, Shankara's selfhood and essentiality gives us but a certain spiritual abstraction from the truth, a partial glory of the Godhead's status and silence.

Of course, this self of Sri Aurobindo's which holds in substance and status what is released in form and movement by the self-creative or dynamic side of the Absolute is a reality whose concept the mind cannot entertain with an easy familiarity. A sense of fathomless mystery, if not of impossibility, accompanies the mind's attempt to figure it, but that is to be expected of all mental figurations of the Absolute. This or that figuration may be more congenial to a certain bent of the mind: what, however, is gained in one respect is offset by a loss in another. The advantage the Shankarite may feel he has won by making the Being of Brahman void of the world and irreconcilable with it is counterbalanced by making the world an illusion, an enigma

16. Had., p. 347.

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which cannot be and yet is or which can exist and yet is nothing. Anirvacanīya, meaning indescribable or inexplicable, is Shankara's characterisation of the mystery, the seeming impossibility, inevitable to his system and difficult for the mind to entertain in an easy or familiar concept. The mysteriousness involved by Sri Aurobindo's essence is therefore no disqualification: it is what all reasoning about the supra-rational involves. We have only to ask whether his mysteriousness is not more comprehensively reasonable than Shankara's in an ontological view of essentiality.

2

THE AXIOLOGICAL VIEW: ESSENCE AS VALUE

Essence, according to both Shankara and Sri Aurobindo, is not only the ultimate Reality but also the ultimate Value, for it is not only permanent being but also permanent consciousness and bliss. The supreme Self of all, it is our absolute perfection and fulfilment.

Shankara contends that essence cannot be our absolute perfection and fulfilment unless it is the one to the exclusion of the many, and the opposite of all the terms applicable to phenomenal existence. In Sri Aurobindo's view, we who pass from phenomenal terms to the essence can never be said to find our absolute perfection and fulfilment unless we reach what gives us the final divine truth of all these terms as well as release from them, a supreme transfiguration rather than an entire annullation of them in the midst of their transcendence.

"All our experience of phenomenal terms," says Shankara in effect, "is an experience of limitation and imperfection: they bring no fulfilment." Sri Aurobindo agrees that phenomenal terms as at present experienced lack fulfilment, but he argues that this does not mean the absence of a fulfilling version of them in the ultimate essence nor the impossibility of a fulfilling version being realised even in phenomenal existence here and now. In fact, logic, in Sri Aurobindo's eyes, demands not merely a fulfilling version in what is the sole basic reality and therefore the sole basic origin of phenomena: it demands too that if there is such a version in the essence the possibility, nay even the certainty, is there of its realisation in phenomenal terms.

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The failure to realise it so far is no argument: the failure may be due, must be due, to our not having found the supreme divine dynamism by which the phenomenal terms can be made to manifest in human development what they are implicitly in the essence and what they must be explicitly in the superior Nature of which the Gita speaks and which must be a divine phenomenon as contrasted to the phenomenon of mixed light-and-darkness that is the inferior Nature of our common experience. The Gita even says that our souls are portions of this superior Nature but it does not follow up its own clue and points to no dynamism whereby the qualities of the inferior Nature - sattva, rajas, tamas - can cease to be mental, vital and physical limitations on the soul and Self and become free modes of a fully divine play on earth of the one who is the many and of the many who are the one. The dynamism which the Gita does not provide has to be discovered: that is all.

The question, however, of discovering this dynamism is not directly connected with the problem of Value in relation to the essence. Suppose the phenomenal terms are destined for ever to be limitations and imperfections. Then it does not help more to regard them as unreal, insubstantial, illusory than to regard them as real, substantial, actual. To regard them as the latter, says Shankara, is to impute lack of absolute goodness as well as of absolute manifesting power to the essence, for these terms remain at best with an irremovable element of evil and suffering in them. To regard them as the former, says Sri Aurobindo, is to deprive the essence of being the sole existent, for somehow what is not of its reality, substantiality, actuality is admitted, and if a limit of however inexplicable a kind is admitted to its existence a limit is set also to its consciousness and bliss which are co-essential with that existence, and thus its ultimate Value is abrogated and then it cannot be our absolute perfection and fulfilment.

When we do not grant the possibility and the certainty of discovering an all-transformative divine dynamism, we have to hobnob with a paradox whether we look on phenomena as an illusive magic unfounded in Brahman or as an actual strangeness founded in It. Of the two paradoxes the one that takes the world to be insubstantial Maya can be shown ontologically to have less reason on its side, and axiologically it amounts to sitting

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in judgment on the Divine Goodness and to foisting on the Divine Power an incapacity of manifestation instead of humbly accepting the non-manifestation as an act of Divine Will beyond our comprehension. The paradox that takes the world to be enigmatic Lila or Play is not only more reasonable: it is also more virtuous and hence more justifiable from the axiological standpoint no less than from the ontological.

Against all these ideas we may imagine Shankara as recommending the experience on which he bases his philosophy. His plea would run: "Silent static unity of infinite selfhood gives absolute fulfilment because in it alone are all problem-consciousness, all nisus and hazard overcome. Other realisations do not overcome them since they are not self-sustained but sustained only by a relationship, no matter if the relationship be to a divine Lord and Lover. In these realisations nisus and hazard are allayed, not lost. They are lost only when the Seer abides within himself. In the silent static unity of infinite selfhood there is no going into a realisation or coming out of it, just to be is to have the realisation. That is also why other realisations are 'got' and hence liable to fall away from us, whereas this is intrinsic, inherent."

The first reply Sri Aurobindo would make is: "Does the Shankarite realisation involve being absorbed in what is called nirvikalpa samādhi, featureless trance? If it does, we have no proof of nisus and hazard being lost, any more than we have it in other experiences by which one is rapt away from the problem-consciousness where nisus and hazard have place. Even dreamless sleep could then be considered freedom from nisus and hazard. A wakeful realisation is alone worth arguing about."

Shankara may be thought of as retorting: "I am not speaking of the nirvikalpa samādhi but of the sahaja avasthā, the wakeful condition in which there is nothing except the Self and all plurality is assimilated by being realised as only the Self."

Here Sri Aurobindo's reply would be: "In what way is plurality assimilated? Are the many not seen at all? If so, how can the condition be called wakefulness? On the other hand, if the many are seen as merely the one multiplied or multi-present then plurality is assimilated in the sense that the many are not seen as independent of the one or as other than the one, but is it assimilated so far as the manyness of the many is concerned? No

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ground in the one is experienced for the undeniable perception that while the many are seen as the one the one also is seen as the many. And it is precisely because no ground is experienced for the manyness of the many that the many are felt to be unreal, insubstantial, illusory. Otherwise they would be felt as real, substantial, actual. If plurality were completely and satisfyingly assimilated, the theory of an illusive magic unfounded in Brahman would never be conceived."

Of course, the oneness remains unaffected by the plurality, even as the status by the many's movement, the formlessness by the forms, the immutable infinity and eternity by the mutable finites and transiences. And because it remains unaffected there comes what Sri Aurobindo calls the "overwhelming decisive convincingness", the impression of "authentic and final character" of the experience, "the sense of finality complete and decisive"; but Sri Aurobindo points out, as we have already noted in the first essay, that "other spiritual experiences such as that of the omnipresent Divine Person, Lord of a real Universe" have the same convincingness, authenticity and finality. The completeness the Shankarite feels is genuine, but it is of one son and along one line and we have to see it from an independent standpoint and not take his feeling of loss of nisus and hazard as evidence of no lack in his realisation. Other realisations can claim the same loss: the Shankarite realisation is not unique here.

And this leaves little room for saying that other experiences are liable to fall away while the Shankarite experience cannot. One can have glimpses and snatches of the silent Self, brief attainments from which one drops back, just as one can have temporary reachings of other aspects of the Supreme Reality. Nor is this realisation the only one deserving to be called "self-sustained". All realisations are attained through identity with something. Identity occurs when oneself becomes something or, rather, when something is found as oneself. In the Shankarite experience there is identity with the Atman. In the others there is identity with some other aspect of the self-existence, self-awareness, self-delight of the Supreme Reality. The identity is always founded in one's own being. One may keep losing the identity for a time, but the moment the permanent abiding within any aspect of the Supreme Reality is gained, that aspect is something intrinsic, inherent in the experiencer and there is no

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going into a realisation or coming out of it, for it is with one's own being that one gains it and the realisation is therefore self-sustained.

Merely because in this case we are found aspiring towards a God who is figured as other than ourselves we must not make a mistake about what is attained and how it is attained. The Shankarite too moves at the start towards a Self that is other than his usual selfhood: he has no initial experience of identity with it. The only difference is that he seeks an other by deepening his sense of his own selfhood, while the non-Shankarite does so by deepening his sense of an other. Still, they both reach a greater realisation of their own being and the reaching also is done by means of their own being. The fact that in some realisations, unlike in the Shankarite, there is a relationship does not alter the self-sustained foundation of them all: the relationship introduces no insecurity or extraneousness, since it is a permanent relationship rooted in our own automatically possessed greater depth of existence. The Shankarite realisation is "self-sustained" by excluding relationship, the rest are "self-sustained" by including relationship: that is the only point of dissimilarity.

There is nothing to mark out Shankara's selfhood as the sole freedom from nisus and hazard and the problem-consciousness. Whatever freedom it affords is due, as with non-Shankarite spiritual attainments, to the exceeding in it of the human and mortal mind. But so long as the manyness of the many as well as their activity remains such as to necessitate a theory of illusion the true losing of nisus and hazard and of the problem-consciousness is wanting: the seed of them all is present, and it sprouts in the metaphysical system which, as Sri Aurobindo says, "gets rid of an original contradiction, a problem and mystery which may be otherwise soluble, by erecting another contradiction, a new problem and mystery which is irreconcilable in its terms and insoluble."¹ Sri Aurobindo also remarks: "In the philosophy of Shankara one feels the presence of a conflict, an opposition which this powerful intellect has stated with full force and masterfully arranged rather than solved with any finality."² This conflict and this contradiction derive from and reflect a spiritual experience that is partial and one of several "penultimates" in

¹. Ibid., p. 453.

². Ibid., p. 461.

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which the problematic, the hazardous, the nisus-natural is ever latent.

The experience, in its general character and at its common pitch, is well summed up by Sri Aurobindo: "It is aware of names and forms, it is aware of movement; but this movement does not seem to proceed from the Self, but to go on by some inherent power of its own and only to be reflected in the Self. In other words, the mental being has put away from himself by exclusive concentration the dynamic aspect of consciousness, has taken refuge in the static and built a wall of non-communication between the two; between the passive and the active Brahman a gulf has been created and they stand on either side of it, the one visible to the other but with no contact, no touch of sympathy, no sense of unity between them."³

At its higher pitch the experience .is described in some letters by Sri Aurobindo. In one he speaks of his seeing "with a stupendous intensity the world as a cinematographic play of vacant forms in the impersonal universality of the Absolute Brahman."⁴ In remarks about himself dictated apropos of a phrase of Aldous Huxley's, he says: "There was an entire silence of thought and feeling and all the ordinary movements of consciousness except the perception and recognition of things around without any accompanying concept or other reaction. The sense of ego disappeared and the movements of the ordinary life as well as speech and action were carried on by some habitual activity of Prakriti alone which was not felt as belonging to oneself. But the perception which remained saw all things as utterly unreal; this sense of unreality was overwhelming and universal. Only some undefinable Reality was perceived as true which was beyond space and time and unconnected with any cosmic activity, but yet was met wherever one turned."⁵

Another description, calling the experience Nirvana and formulating it in its extreme terms, runs; "It threw me suddenly into a condition above and without thought, unstained by any mental or vital movement; there was no ego, no real world - only when one looked through the immobile senses, something perceived or bore upon its sheer silence a world of empty forms,

3. The Synthesis of Yoga, SABCL Vol. 20, p. 386.

4. Sri Aurobindo on Himself and on the Mother, SABCL Vol. 26, p. 79.

5. Ibid., pp. 85-86.

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materialised shadows without true substance. There was no One or many even, only just absolutely That, featureless, relationless, sheer, indescribable, unthinkable, absolute, yet supremely real and solely real. This was no mental realisation nor something glimpsed somewhere above, - no abstraction, - it was positive, the only positive reality, - although not a spatial physical world, [yet] pervading, occupying or rather flooding and drowning this semblance of a physical world, leaving no room or space for any reality but itself, allowing nothing else to seem at all actual, positive or substantial."⁶

Here we have an account of what Shankara meant by Para-brahman, the indeterminate transcendence where the numerical categories of both one and many are inapplicable and an essential soleness is all. But when it is said that what is real is nothing save That, an indescribable Absolute, the sense of an unreality within it or borne upon it is still there, for though the many have disappeared as a reality they persist as "a world of empty forms, materialised shadows without substance." The many are left as an unreality - and that is exactly the stamp of latent nisus and hazard, the seed of the problem-consciousness, the proof of the partial, showing that plurality and activity have not been completely assimilated. And as long as the complete assimilation is absent, the experience, judged from an independent standpoint, is not final and falls short of fulfilment, does not carry the supreme Value.

This lack of ultimateness was found by Sri Aurobindo himself, for in the autobiographical though "third-person" letter in relation to Huxley he says: "This condition remained unimpaired for several months and even when the sense of unreality disappeared and there was a return to participation in the world-consciousness, the inner peace and freedom which resulted from this realisation remained permanently behind all surface movements and the essence of the realisation itself was not lost. At the same time an experience intervened: something else than himself took up his dynamic activity and spoke and acted through him but without any personal thought or initiative. What this was remained unknown until Sri Aurobindo came to realise the dynamic side of the Brahman, the Ishwara and felt

6. Ibid.. p. 101.

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himself moved by that in all his sadhana and action."⁷

The same thing is stated in more detail in the letter about Nirvana: "I lived in that Nirvana day and night before it began to admit other things into itself or modify itself at all, and the inner heart of experience, a constant memory of it and its power to return remained until in the end it began to disappear into a greater Superconsciousness from above. But meanwhile realisation added itself to realisation and fused itself with this original experience. At an early stage the aspect of an illusory world gave place to one in which illusion⁸ is only a small surface phenomenon with an immense Divine Reality behind it and a supreme Divine Reality above it and an intense Divine Reality in the heart of everything that had seemed at first only a cinematic shape or shadow. And this was no reimprisonment in the senses, no diminution or fall from supreme experience, it came rather as a constant heightening and widening of the Truth; it was the spirit that saw objects, not the senses, and the Peace, the Silence, the freedom in Infinity remained always with the world or all worlds only as a continuous incident in the timeless eternity of the Divine."⁹

Sri Aurobindo goes on to say: "Now, that is the whole trouble in my approach to Mayavada. Nirvana in my liberated consciousness turned out to be the beginning of my realisation, a first step towards the complete thing, not the sole true attainment possible or even a culminating finale.... It slowly grew into something not less but greater than its first self. How then could I accept Mayavada or persuade myself to pit against the Truth imposed on me from above the logic of Shankara?"¹⁰

Sri Aurobindo refuses to accept Shankara's philosophy as "the sole possible, satisfying and all-comprehensive explanation of things." He observes: "It is not that at all. There are many other possible explanations; it is not at all satisfactory, for in the end it explains nothing; and it is - and must be unless it departs from its own logic ― all-exclusive, not in the least all-comprehensive."¹¹

7. Ibid., p. 86.

8. In fact it is not an illusion in the sense of an imposition of something baseless and unreal on the consciousness, but a misinterpretation by the conscious mind and sense and a falsifying misuse of manifested existence. (Sri Aurobindo's footnote)

9. Ibid.. pp. 101-02. 10. Ibid.. p. 102. 11. Ibid.. p. 103.

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Elsewhere he has said: "The Brahman, the supreme Reality, is That which being known all is known; but in the illusionist solution it is That, which being known, all becomes unreal and an incomprehensible mystery."¹² And about the fulfilment offered by Shankara he writes: "The theory of Illusion cuts the knot of the world-problem, it does not disentangle it; it is an escape, not a solution: a flight of the spirit is not a sufficient victory for the being embodied in this world of the becoming; it effects a separation from Nature, not a liberation and fulfilment of our nature. This eventual outcome satisfies only one element, sublimates only one impulse of our being; it leaves the rest out in the cold to perish in the twilight of the unreal reality of Maya."¹³

Not that the Shankarite experience is negligible or can be bypassed by the seeker. If Sri Aurobindo criticises it, he does so on behalf of other experiences equally grand or from a coign of spiritual vantage far beyond it. But, however great, clearly the essence it claims to give us cannot provide the ultimate Value. We move towards the truly fulfilling essence when we seek what, in Sri Aurobindo's words, "includes and accounts for all so that each truth of experience takes its place in the whole."¹⁴. "It is only if you approach the Supreme through his double aspect of Sat and Chit-Shakti, double but inseparable, that the total truth of things can become manifest to the inner experience. This other side was developed by the Shakta Tantriks. The two together, the Vedantic and the Tantric truth unified, can arrive at the integral knowledge.... It is already indicated in the Gita's teaching of the Purushottama and the Parashakti (Adya Shakti) who becomes the Jiva and upholds the universe."¹⁵

Essence as all-fulfilling Value can only be the substance and status which yet holds as potential truth whatever is brought out in form and movement by the other side of the two-natured Absolute - the side that is self-creative or dynamic and that constitutes with the side of the essential a unity of existence severable only in our thought or in partial spiritual experience and that in Sri Aurobindo's realisation and philosophy carries a luminous harmony of divinely dynamic manifested truth called by him Supermind whose evolving expression in phenomenal terms here is the entire meaning and justification of our cosmos.

12. SABCL Vol. 18, p. 470.		13. Ibid... p. 468.
14. Ibid., p. 468.	15. Letters, SABCLVol. 22, p. 39.

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