The Destiny of the Body

Chapter VII

The Issue - Status or Dynamis

I have met Spirit with spirit, Self with self,

But I have loved too the body of my God.

(Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, Book X, Canto IV, p. 649)

Nature shall live to manifest secret God,

The Spirit shall take up the human play,

This earthly life become the life divine.

(Ibid., Book XI, Canto I, p. 711)

Eternal status and eternal dynamis are both true of the Reality which itself surpasses both status and dynamis; the immobile and the mobile Brahman are both the same Reality.

(Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, p. 459)

We have...to possess consciously the active Brahman without losing possession of the silent Self. We have to preserve the inner silence, tranquillity, passivity as a foundation; but in place of an aloof indifference to the works of the active Brahman we have to arrive at an equal and impartial delight in them; in place of a refusal to participate lest our freedom and peace be lost we have to arrive at a conscious possession of the active Brahman whose joy of existence does not abrogate His peace, nor His lordship of all workings impair His calm freedom in the midst of His works.

(Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis of Yoga, p. 389)

The discussion in the preceding chapter has made the point clear that since our Yoga aims at the realisation of the Divine in the outer consciousness and life as well as in the inner one, the Jivanmukta with his aloof indifference to or at the best a benevolent tolerance for the dynamic waking existence can never be our ideal.

But what are after all the essential difficulties of spiritual realisation on the gross physical plane? Why is the life of action and creation viewed with so much misgiving by most of the traditional

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spiritual seekers? What makes our present worldly existence apparently so incorrigible in its nature as to induce even Sri Krishna, the propounder of the gospel of divine action, to almost admit at the end that to shun this transient and unhappy world is perhaps after all the best possible solution?¹

And what about that wonderfully dynamic saint Swami Vivekananda? Did he not at the end give the simile of a dog's tail in order to represent the impossibility of transformation? Alas, straighten it as much as you like, but release it—and the moment after, the wretched thing becomes curled again! It looks almost an irony of situation that this dynamic personality who did not flinch to declare in the earlier part of his Yogic life:

"I have lost all wish for my salvation, may I be born again and again and suffer thousands of miseries so that I may worship the only God that exists, the only God I believe in, the sum-total of all souls, — and above all, my God the wicked, my God the miserable, my God the poor of all races, of all species is the special object of my worship."²

— should almost abdicate and confess just two years before his passing away:

"I have bundled my things and am waiting for the great deliverer.

"Shiva, O Shiva, carry my boat to the other shore.

"After all, I am only the boy who used to listen with rapt wonderment to the wonderful words of Ramakrishna under the Banyan at Dakshineswar. That is my true nature; works and activities, doing good and so forth are all superimpositions. Now I again hear his voice; the same old voice thrilling my soul. Bonds are breaking — love dying, work becoming tasteless — the glamour is off life. Only the voice of the Master is calling. — I come, Lord, I come'. 'Let the dead bury the dead, follow thou me.' — 'I come, my beloved Lord, I come.'

"Yes, I come. Nirvana is before me. I feel it at times — the same infinite ocean of peace, without a ripple, a breath...

"The sweetest moments of my life have been when I was drifting; I am drifting again — with the bright warm sun ahead and masses of vegetation around — and in the heat everything is so still, so still, so calm — and I am drifting languidly — in

¹ anityamasukhaṁ lokam imaṁ tyaktvā.

² Quoted by Sri Aurobindo in The Synthesis of Yoga, pp. 257-58.

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the warm heart of the river! I dare not make a splash with my hands or feet — for fear of breaking the marvellous stillness, still ness that makes you feel sure it is an illusion.

"Behind my work was ambition, behind my love was personality, behind my purity was fear, behind my guidance the thirst for power! Now they are vanishing, and I drift. I come! Mother, I come! In Thy warm bosom, floating wheresoever Thou takest me, in-the voiceless, in the strange, in the wonderland, I come — a spectator, no more an actor."¹

Are then actions and creations such great binding elements as to be obligatorily left out at the end? Did not Sri Ramakrishna give the image of a pregnant woman whose work-load diminishes day by day?

But the difficulty experienced by a spiritual seeker in guarding the peace of the silent Self while engaged in dynamic activity is more incidental than intrinsic. It arises out of the mental being's exclusive concentration on its "plane of pure existence in which consciousness is at rest in passivity and delight of existence at rest in peace of existence."² Because of this exclusiveness, when the Mind seeks at times to ally itself to action, in the absence of adequate preparation it plunges headlong into the old obscuring movement of force instead of exercising a conscious mastery over it.

It is because of this ignorant relapse brought about by the dynamic play that the mental Purusha is so ready to condemn all action and dynamism. To its judgment, all dynamism must be foreign to the supreme nature of the Absolute whose only true and whole being must be a status silent and immutable, featureless and quiescent. Thus cancelling the dynamis of Brahman, the Mind goes on to assert that this supreme Reality can at all be realised only through a consciousness that has itself fallen non-active and silent and, what is more, "liberation must destroy all possibility of mental or bodily living and annihilate the individual existence for ever in an impersonal infinity."³

But we shall presently see that none of the foregoing assumptions is absolutely valid. As a matter of fact, all the difficulty

¹ Swami Vivekananda, Complete Works, Vol. VI, pp. 432-34. (Italics ours)

² The Synthesis of Yoga, p. 389.

³ Ibid., p. 421.

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disappears if along with the plane of pure existence one can embrace the plane of conscious force of existence, the Chit-Tapas, of Sachchidananda, in which "consciousness is active as power and will, and delight is active as joy of existence."¹

And this is possible. Because Brahman Itself is integral, It has an active aspect as well as a static one and both are equally real. The integral realisation demands the realisation of Sachchidananda in both His aspects, in the aspect in which He is "sovereign, free, lord of things, acting out of an inalienable calm pouring itself out in infinite action and quality out of an eternal self-concentration, the one supreme Person holding in himself all this play of personality in a vast equal impersonality, possessing the infinite phenomenon of the universe without attachment but without any inseparable aloofness, with a divine mastery and an innumerable radiation of his eternal luminous self-delight

—as a manifestation which he holds, but by which he is not held, which he governs freely and by which therefore he is not bound,"²

—as well as in that in which He is "silent passive quietistic, self-absorbed, self-sufficient,...one, impersonal, without play of qualities, turned away from the infinite phenomenon of the universe or viewing it with indifference and without participation."³

We have said that the eternal status of being as well as the eternal movement of being are both real of the supreme Reality. But the question arises: can these two statuses co-exist? Are these simultaneously realisable? Or, rather, one has to withdraw from one of the statuses in order to realise the other, so much so that, depending on the status on which one concentrates at the moment, one of these may appear to be the inertia of repose while the other the inertia of mechanical repetition of movement.

An integral spiritual realisation affirms that the eternal status and the eternal dynamis are not only both real but they are also simultaneous. 'The status admits of action of dynamis and the action does not abrogate the status.' Thus "all that is in the kinesis, the movement, the action, the creation, is the Brahman; the becoming is a movement of the being; Time is a manifestation of the Eternal. All is one Being, one Consciousness, one even in infinite multiplicity, and there is no need to bisect it into an

¹ The Synthesis of Yoga pp. 389-90.

² Ibid., p.375.

³ Ibid., p.375.

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opposition of transcendent Reality and unreal cosmic Maya."¹

But the difficulty is that it is often trenchantly asserted as a fact of spiritual experience that the Reality is indeed featureless and immutable and the universe of manifestation is brought about by the illusionary Maya-Power of the Supreme. Although this assertion that the only active Power the absolute Truth possesses is that of creating illusion and falsehood and 'dissolving and disowning' them in turn lacks in vraisimilitude, the rejoinder is made that this is not a question of vraisemblance or no, nor is it an issue that can be settled by means of logical validation or otherwise, for this is the ineffable mystery of Maya (anirvacanīyā) not to be comprehended by reason or mind.

And this position is sound indeed. For, whatever the merits or demerits, the strong or weak points, of a particular philosophical formulation, the spiritual experience that it seeks to represent remains in itself eternally valid and can only be integrated in the compass of another experience much more wide and much more lofty. For, as Sri Aurobindo has so forcefully pointed out, "a single decisive spiritual experience may undo a whole edifice of reasonings and conclusions erected by the logical intelligence."²

So, instead of engaging in sterile intellectual debates, in this matter of the reality or otherwise of the dynamis of the Absolute, let us listen to Sri Aurobindo describing his own personal spiritual realisation:

"The solution of the matter must rest not upon logic, but upon a growing, ever heightening, widening spiritual experience — an experience which must of course include or have passed through that of Nirvana and Maya, otherwise it would not be complete and would have no decisive value.

"Now to reach Nirvana was the first radical result of my own Yoga. 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, materialised shadows without true substance. There was no One or many even, only just absolutely That, featureless,

¹ The Life Divine, p. 461.

² Ibid., p. 469.

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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, 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....What it [the experience] brought was an inexpressible Peace, a stupendous Silence, an infinity of release and freedom. 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 illusionary world gave place to one in which illusion¹ 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.

"...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."²

The world is thus real, the Becoming is as real as the Being, the dynamis of Sachchidananda is as much a spiritual fact as His immobile status. Indeed, the Divine does not contain all only in 'a transcendent consciousness'. He is the one Self of all, sarvabhūtāntarātmā, He is the All, vāsudeva sarvam, not merely in the 'unique

¹ Sri Aurobindo's own note: "In fact it is not an illusion in the sense of an imposition of something baseless and unreal on the consciousness, but a misrepresentation by the conscious mind and sense and falsifying misuse of manifested existence."

² On Himself, pp. 101-02. (Italics ours)

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essence' but in the manifold names and forms. "All the soul-life, mental, vital, bodily existence of all that exists [is] one indivisible movement and activity of the Being who is the same for ever."¹ "All is one Being, one Consciousness, one even in infinite multiplicity."²

Thus action and creation cannot in the very nature of things be incompatible with the perfect and total realisation of the Supreme; a really dynamic living cannot go counter to the attainment of the supreme status of being; for "all that is in the kinesis, the movement, the action, the creation is Brahman."³

But still the doubting voice may not be altogether quieted. For there is a fundamental pragmatic misgiving that has first to be satisfactorily cleared before we can hope to establish the validity of our goal—the dynamic divinisation of our entire waking existence.

Granted that Brahman has two aspects equally real, equally true: an active one as well as a passive one. Granted that there is ample theoretical justification why the two aspects can be simultaneously embraced and realised. But still the question remains: Why is it that "in experience we find that...it is, normally, a quiescence that brings in the stable realisation of the eternal and the infinite: it is in silence or quietude that we feel most firmly the Something that is behind the world shown to us by our mind and senses. ?"⁴

It is thus reasoned that, in practice if not in theory, all action, all creation, all determining perception must in their very nature limit and obscure the stable realisation, and hence these have to diminish and disappear if we would seek to enter the indivisible consciousness of the Real.

Here too, as we shall presently see, the reasoning is fallacious. For it is not dynamism as such that binds and involves the soul of the seeker; it is the intrinsic incapacity of our mind-consciousness that is at the root of the trouble.

¹ The Synthesis of Yoga, p. 391.

^{2 3} The Life Divine, p. 461.

⁴ Ibid., p. 459.

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