The Yoga of Sri Aurobindo - Part 7

And This Agile Reason

Reason is an agility gymnast. It can move in all varieties of ways, make infinite twists, the most impossible contortions with equal ease and skill. It does not seek the truth, although it may pretend to do so; for it cannot find the truth. The law of uncertainty or indeterminacy seems also to be the last word of modern Science. What Reason does and can do is to justify, find arguments for whatever position it is put in or called upon to support. Its business is to supply "proofs": it can do so as the spider brings out of itself the whole warp and woof of the cobweb. There is no truth, that is to say, no conclusion which it cannot demonstrate and all with equal cogency. That was indeed the great discovery of the great Kant who described it as the antinomies of Reason. Reason finds it infinitely exhilarating to pirouette ad infinitum, i.e., beating about the bush without caring to look for the fact or reality hidden in the bush.

Is it then to say that this faculty is a falsehood and that it can lead you only to falsehood? Not necessarily. It becomes a falsehood when you try to live according to it, according to an idea or ideas it has taken a fancy to; for then it is bound to land you in contradictions. Otherwise, if it is not a question of practical application, if it is merely a play or playfulness in the mental world, it is harmless acrobatics; and even in its own way it can be of

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some use in making your brain sharp, alert, strong and supple.

Reason is a bad master; a free-lance, it often goes amuck. But controlled and yoked, reined in and guided by the higher light, it is a help, even a necessity; for it gives the immediate form in which to hold and fix in the physical world the truth-movements of the higher consciousness.

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