The Yoga of Sri Aurobindo - Part 11

The Test of Truth

      The test of Truth is its impossibility. I believe because it is impossible; Credo quia impossibile. That is Saint Augustine.

      There is a grain, why a grain, quite a lump of truth in this well-known saying of a great seeker of Truth. "Truth shall prevail? Is this true? Can it be true? It is impossible." Therefore it must be true. "God exists: is it an impossibility?" Therefore God does exist. "Shall we ever come out of the present darkness? Impossible!" We shall, therefore, come out, surely.

      The possible, to our senses, is what is happening now: the present fact is the truth and what is in absolute agreement with the present is the possible or the probable truth. Anything going against or not consonant with the actual is a doubtful or even a negative quantity, but in fact at every moment everywhere there are upsettings of the apparently sure present: unnatural things do happen more often than not. But we do not pay or do not want to pay as much attention to these.

      Who believed that India would be free and Britain go out lock, stock and barrel? Who believed that the Czardom would disappear for ever? And the Hohenzollerns and the Hapsburgs, where are they now? And the great Hitler? Even a few years ago who would have believed that man would walk on the moon? And can you believe now that matter can

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exist and does exist as anti-matter? Not in vain has the mad, bad and sad poet sung: Mais où sont done les neiges d'antan?¹

      The physical mind has to be taught, it must learn its lesson, that at every step something new, something unforeseen unpredicted and unpredictable is waiting in front to confound it. And it must gain the perception, the discrimination to recognise it, never to say, "Oh, it is natural, inevitable what is happening, there is nothing to wonder and dismiss the novelty of the thing as an illusion."

      The spiritual realities are at your door: they are neither non-existent nor too distant. Freedom, Peace, Calm, Happiness, Delight, Joy, Health are all there as self-existent realities. You have only to turn—or tilt as the Mother says—your consciousness a little and you are in the very midst of the thing. Doubt, hesitation, merely casts a veil and blurs or blocks the view. God, Soul, Immortality, even these are equally available to the human consciousness in the same way. These are existences of daily use, so to say, of "common neighbourhood," in the words of the poet—home truth.

      A faith, necessarily a blind faith in these impossibles is its own authenticity, for it brings you immediately in direct contact with those apparently unseen intangible realities. It gives you automatically a sense of certainty, a radiant clarity in the consciousness, that no other approach to Truth or Reality can give you. You feel, you know it is the truth, there is no shadow of any questioning anywhere,

      ¹ French poet Villon: Where, O where the snows of yesteryear?

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it is self-luminous. "Is it not self-hypnotism?" a scoffer might allege. Self-hypnotism is a name: it is the power of consciousness to concentrate itself to such a degree that it can be changed into anything even into its opposite. Self-absorbed consciousness in one form at one extreme is the inconscient, at the other extreme it is the supra-conscient, Brahman. Consciousness is the power of being and it can give any form or name to the being—yo yatśraddha sa eva saḥ. One becomes whatever one's consciousness wants to become.

      The ultimate verities are there indeed existing in themselves and the mind's attempt to question them, discuss them, judge them, doubt them, deny them is ludicrous. Even the mind's attempt to affirm them, assert them or seize them is equally vain and ludicrous. The Upanishadic seer declares clearly and unequivocally: tato vācha nivartante aprāpya manasā saha—the word with all its effort cannot seize it, the mind cannot reach there, it turns back hopelessly. Therefore the seeker of the Truth is always advised from the very beginning and throughout to keep his mind quiet, vacate it, install there the simple faith, to wait and let the thing come of itself. These realities are not acquisitions or possessions or even achievements, they are living entities, personalities. At the right time they come to you, they enter into you and possess you. You do not reach out and possess them. Even so, it was said of Nachiketas that faith entered into him, and therefore he could meet Death and become his friend and confidant. The Upanishad finally says: it is when the

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Truth discloses its own body to the seeker, then only can the seeker see the Truth in its truth.

      Mind's conceptions of the ultimate realities are very far from the actual truth. The mind has a conception of freedom or delight or even of consciousness; it has a conception of God and immortality, of infinity and eternity. But they are all its own creations more or less. The highest summits of the mind may get a glimpse or a reflection of those supernals but even as such they come only as an echo, an image, a faint replica of the actual thing. Freedom as it is in the Divine or with the Divine, Delight or Consciousness as they are of the Divine have an altogether different quality, a different mode of vibration from that which is available to mind on its lower levels. What the mind receives is a re-formation, more often a deformation of the original as you go farther down the scale. Only if the mind itself is changed in its substance, regains a translucent passivity then only can it see and see something of the secret glory of the higher realities.

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