Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol. 3

THE world is one, indissolubly and solidly one: no part can be separated from any other. Any action anywhere affects the whole and nothing can be moved even by a hair's breadth without changing the entire balance. Each element literally lives, moves and has its being in every other and the totality is a rigidly unified mass.

If it is so, then there arises a difficulty, a dilemma. For the world to progress at all, under the circumstances, it must progress as a whole, en masse; it cannot progress piecemeal. The totality must advance in order that each element may progress and each element must advance so that the totality may progress. Perhaps this is what is happening actually in the world: but the result, if nothing else, has been rather slow. It will take not only millenniums but aeons for humanity to make any progress worth the name.

It need not be so however. Man is solidly one with the universe, true; but he has a faculty in him by which he can separate, isolate himself from the rest of the world. It is the mind's power of self-division and dissociation Through this actually man can put the world aside and outside himself (for a time, at least), cut away from it and concentrate upon his own being, his inner truth, in other words, make the progress in himself, as quickly as possible, independently, without waiting for others or the world to progress in any degree. And then when once he has made the progress himself, achieved a new higher status, he can turn back upon the world and bring to bear up on it the force of his progress and establish the progress more generally.

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This power which in the inferior human consciousness appears as mind or mental discernment is the image or delegate here below of that very force of consciousness that originally separated the world from the Divine, created the ego and placed it as an objective reality against itself. It was a force of dividing consciousness, of exclusive concentration, that created the fission in the original unitary status of the Divine: it was that that precipitated the world of negation, of ignorance and inconscience out of the supreme Light and Reality.

It was a power of denial that severed the world from its pure source: the same power can now be utilised for the return back for the reintegration. The power that separated from the Divine is capable of separating from the world; the consciousness that moved away from the One Divine can move away also from the Multiple Ignorance. As the individualised element isolated itself from the unitary consciousness of the Divine, in the same way the individualised element in man can stand aloof from the unitary being of the world: as it came down the ladder of consciousness from the supreme light of the spirit into the lowest depth of unconscious dead matter, the same path it can take in the opposite way and from the unconsciousness rise into the fullness of the original light. The soul has freely chosen the bondage, he is free too to choose his freedom again. That is what the Upanishad meant when it said: avidyaya mrtuym tirtwa, by the Ignorance he shall cross death.

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