In the Mother's Light

The Life of Life

Man's Eternal Quest—the Absolute

WHAT do men seek in life ? In their desires and dreams, in their hopes and ambitions, as well as in their eagle flights of spiritual aspiration, what is it they have all been seeking since Time began ? Is it not an Absolute ? The scientist in his laboratory, the philosopher in his ivory tower of thought, the artist and the poet in their moments of creative inspiration, the mystic in his ecstatic contemplation, the politician on his plat- form, the farmer in his field, the soldier in the fury of battle, the grocer in his shop, the beggar in the street, do they not all —all, without exception,—seek an Absolute of Bliss or an Absolute of Power or an Absolute of Peace or an Absolute of Knowledge or an Absolute of Energy or an Absolute of life- satisfaction ? One might go farther and say that even lust and greed and cruelty seek in their own perverse way an Absolute of self-gratification. In fact, all creation, consciously or unconsciously, seeks an—or, more truly, the—Absolute. No success ever succeeds in giving us permanent satisfaction, no fulfilment ever quenches our heart's desire. In spite of all the power we acquire, all the conquest we achieve, all the glory we attain, all the wealth we amass, all the love and esteem we win and enjoy, a discontent pursues our steps, a feeling as if all these were not enough, as if there was something more, something else,—we know not what—that had to be discovered and possessed. This discontent is so universal, so patent and persistent, that even the most confirmed hedonist can hardly deny it. All life stirs, struggles, creates and destroys, falls and rises, crawls or rushes in quest of something which will give it eternal satisfaction and perfect fulfilment. Everywhere there is the thirst, the search for the Absolute in life, the Absolute of all life's values. Give it whatever name you like, it is for the Absolute that all life lives and labours, and to realise that Absolute and express it in its own terms is the ineradicable impulse of all

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life. Life would have long ceased if its quest had not been the Absolute, and its quest could not have been the Absolute if its origin and source were not the Absolute, releasing a perennial flow of force for a ceaseless advance and adventure. Whether we peer into the past, into the estuary of the temporal stream, or into the future, we descry the same silhouette of the Absolute shadowed forth against the dim background of an impalpable infinity.

The Absolute—the Life of Life

This Absolute is the Life of all life. It is life's ultimate Truth, its unity and harmony, its force, its beauty and its bliss. We call it God or the Divine, whom we seem to have lost in the wilderness of the sense-objects—the Divine whom we seek in all our obscure and groping endeavours, and aspire to realise and reveal here in our material life. Even the atheist seeks an absolute of atheism, the rationalist an absolute of reason, the hedonist an absolute of life-enjoyment. They too are, therefore, seekers of the Divine, whom they profess to deny. The divisions and conflicts in our being—parts warring with parts, desires with opposing desires—are evidence of the eventual harmony, which is the goal as well as the origin of all existence. They point to the Absolute in whom alone all the jarring discords will be harmonised; for, there can never be an ordered play of relativities, a law of Nature, a system of values, a rule of conduct or a rhythm of evolution in life without an Absolute embracing and leading them together in the steps of its own shadowless light. If the relativities are real—with an apology to Shankar and Berkeley—if the constituents of life are real and living, then the Absolute in whom they subsist and grow is also real and living. This real living Absolute is God, the Life of all life.

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The Absolute—the Transcendent Transfigurer

The Absolute is not only the immanent substratum and link of all relativities, but also the Transcendent, as Pan-entheism rightly holds. An Absolute confined to and exhausted in the relativities cannot be the ultimate Unity and the inspirer and leader of the evolution of its own multiplicity. The Creator is superior to His creation, the Fount is anterior to its flow, the One is transcendent of the Many. Beyond life and in life, the Life of life is the sole reality, the sole object of human knowledge, and the solitary goal and abode of all creatures. If we exclude the aspect of God's transcendence, we condemn life to a horizontal circling, and shut out from its vision the golden altitudes from which Truth has often beamed down upon us and benign influences have sought to mould us. The Upanishadic image represents in the truest and most vivid light the eternal relation of the world with its Source. "This is the eternal Ashwattha tree whose roots are aloft, but its branches are downward. It is He that is called the Bright One and Brahman and Immortality, and in Him are all the worlds established; none goeth beyond Him. This is the thing thou seekest.” The roots are above and the branches are downwards, the roots nourish and sustain the branches, which grow and thrive and bear fruits and flowers. This is the true relation, and to forget it is to forget the basic truth of our existence. Besides, transcendence transfigures. The Hegelian Absolute can weave on endless webs of relativities out of the elements of the universe and within the limits of Time and Space, but it cannot bring down—from where will it ?—a new principle, introduce a revolutionary rhythm, initiate a radical departure. Its creations will be but permutations and combinations of the same existing elements, varying patterns, protean repetitions of the time-worn space-soiled principles and powers. It cannot transfigure or transform. It is only God and the Son of God, in whom lies the secret of the transfiguration of the son of man, it is only ii the Word that one has to seek the mystery of the transubstantiation of the flesh.

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Faith, the Leader

This transcendent-immanent Absolute is the Divine, the Life of our life whom we have to seek continuously and discover and embrace in love and joy. Does our sense-bound reason doubt His existence, or deny it ? Does culture mean unbelief, and enlightenment the lurid glow of agnosticism ? But our doubts and denials are not really categoric negatives, they are only a temporary revolt and resistance of a dominant and pampered part of our being, indirectly serving to stimulate and strengthen the faith in the other parts. Faith is the inalienable base of life's evolutionary progression, and without it nothing could move or advance. Our reason may cover it up in contempt, or spurn it as a relic of our primitive barbarism, but cannot kill it altogether, for to kill it would be to kill the soul itself. Much to the disgust and disappointment of the reason, the relic lives on and even threatens to consume the very doubts and misgivings of reason in its white flame. Faith is at once the prevision of the Truth and its foreshadowing—it always points to the sun, even though clouds may be gathering in the sky.

The Absolute, the Supreme Person

If we proceed with this faith, we discover that the Transcendent-Immanent Absolute, the Divine, is not only a living,' omnipresent Reality, but a Person, the supreme Person, self- figured in all the forms of the universe. We can love Him as He loves us, adore Him as He moulds us, and serve Him as He perfects and fulfils us. Merely to turn to Him is to banish the bleakness and sordidness of our desire-driven life and stand in the liberating light and animating warmth of the living Sun. As the Mother says, "To turn towards Thee, live in Thee and for Thee, is supreme happiness, unmixed joy, immutable peace; it is to breathe infinity, to soar in eternity, no longer feel one’s limits, escape from Time and Space.”¹ And she wonders : "Why do men flee from these boons, as though they feared them ? What a,

¹ Prayers and Meditations of the Mother.

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strange thing is ignorance, that source of all suffering ! How miserable that obscurity which keeps men away from the very thing which would bring them happiness, and subjects them to this painful school of ordinary existence fashioned entirely from struggle and suffering ”¹ Not one among those countless men who have turned to the Divine has ever had to complain that his life has been robbed of its joy and freedom. Can it be said of those who make material pursuits and the satisfaction of their desires the end of their life ? What a contrast the God-filled life presents to the harsh discords and gnawing cares of the ordinary human life ! What a poignant and illuminating contrast the life of a Buddha or a Christ or a Ramakrishna presents to the life of a Napoleon or a Bacon, a Voltaire or a Schopenhauer ? An untroubled peace and tranquillity, a calm and comprehensive vision of the Truth and its manifold working, and a steady, silent, impersonal will fulfilling itself in the movements of life, is an ideal deemed impracticable, if not inconceivable, by those who follow either the lure of desire or the rushlight of their reason; but it has been more or less realised through the ages by those who have sought the Life of their life and the Self of their self, and followed His guidance in simple faith and confidence. A deep personal relation of love with the super-personal Person, and an unreserved surrender to His Light is the secret of transmuting our life into something vast, luminous, blissful and inexhaustibly creative.

The Approach of Love

The supreme Person is the eternal essence and archetype of our terrestrial personality, each fibre of which is not only created by Him, but also constituted by His own substance and energy. Our true self is made in His image and for His cosmic work of multiple self-expression. If we awake to this truth, if we learn to live in our essential identity and union with Him, the sombre nightmare of our separative existence vanishes for ever. This is the identity and fundamental oneness

¹Prayers and Meditations of the Mother.

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that our love fumbles for in the obscurity of ignorance and amidst the finite and fugitive objects of the senses. An illumined love discovers Him at a bound and carries us beyond the misery and mortality of our egoistic life into the rapturous heart of the Life of all life, where we enjoy "peace in strength, serenity in action and an unchanging happiness in the midst of all circumstances.” Because the supreme Person is our own highest Self, the approach of love is the best and most rapidly fruitful approach, for, love is at once the seed and the flower of identity.

The Supreme Person—the Pivot of

Individual Synthesis

The first business of human life, the Work of all work, is to find and realise the supreme Person in oneself and make Him the effective centre of one's whole life. Ordinarily, human nature is a shifting mishmash of diverse elements and unco-ordinated energies. Its parts do not agree with each other, but follow their exclusive individual likes and desires to the detriment of the whole. Reason may try—provided it is itself sufficiently developed and detached—to impose an order and synthesis on the other parts, but so long as it is not itself freed of its own likes and dislikes, its way cannot but be unsteady and partial. Even the most rational synthesis is found to be tainted with imperfection, and at least some amount of arbitrary constraint and coercion. It is only when the soul or the psychic being awakes and comes forward, that a centre is found round which a stable synthesis can be built. But even the discovery of the soul is not enough to form a complete and dynamic synthesis in the entire being; the synthesis achieved may well turn out to be partial or static. What is essential for a dynamic synthesis is the discovery and establishment of the Divine, the Absolute Being, the supreme Person at the very centre of human life and consciousness, assuring a perfect condition for the self-accomplishment of His Will. The Life of life has to be installed as the Guide of life, if man is to attain his highest

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destiny. The glib prating of the rule of reason and free will cannot carry him anywhere, so long as the ego is the effective centre of his nature and desire the motive of his actions. Unless a higher light dawns and begins to lead his nature, his reason can never be perfectly rational, nor his will a free will. It is the will of the ego that he mistakes for the will of his real self and the blinkered, interested reason of the ego for pure reason. That is why the Mother says, "The most useful work to be done is, for each individually, to be conscious. ¹

"The final aim is to be in constant union with the Divine, not only in meditation, but in all circumstances and in all the active life. ”² This constant dynamic union is the sole basis of a perfect individual synthesis.

The Supreme Person—the Centre of Human Unity

"The realisation of human unity through the awakening in all and the manifestation by all of the inner Divinity which is One.”³ The unity and harmony of mankind is one of the goals modern man has been steadily pursuing in his conscious thought and subconscious aspiration. The disruptive differences and discords, the aggressive cupidity and power-lust, the savage self-seeking and brutal conflicts which disfigure the present dealings between man and man and between nation and nation, however hideous and inhuman they may be, prove that they are only a last, desperate resistance of the beast in man to the advent of Love for uniting, harmonising, perfecting and completing humanity in the being of the Supreme. However dark the modern world may be, however dismal the present state of civilisation, mankind is undeniably proceeding towards a life of harmony, unity, peace and creative freedom. But the real unity can never come by political, economical, cultural or ethical means, for these have their origin in the mind and the life-parts of man, where there is no dynamic principle of unity

¹ Words of the Mother.

² ibid.

³ibid.

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and solidarity, but only egoistic exclusions and restrictions, or at best, a self-regarding self-sacrifice vainly seeking a reconciliation of contrary elements. Unity inheres, not in ,the mutable, phenomenal parts of man which make for multiplicity and diversity, but in that which is eternal in him and common to all mankind. "When you are one with the Divinity within, you are one with all things in their depths.”¹ The Divine dwells in the heart of every being and everything, and it is through Him and by Him that we must enter into relation with them. There is no other way to a real and abiding unity. The modern man, led by his reason or vital instincts, will no doubt try, as he has indeed been trying, all avenues of human unity, but a day will surely arrive when, wearied and foiled, he will turn to the Life of his life and receive his first initiation into the mystery of universal unity and harmony, which is the bed-rock truth of all existence. His illuminated consciousness will then perceive that the surface dissonances of life prelude and not preclude the victorious emergence of the final harmony, even as the jarring notes of a musical instrument, which is being tuned, herald and prepare the coming music, and not preclude it. In the Life of life is the secret of the conquest and transformation of life and the evolution of the divine unity and harmony in the midst of multitudinous diversity.

The Liberating Knowledge

"Without the Divine, life is a painful illusion, with the Divine, all is bliss.”² Because modern humanity, in its pride of intellectual advancement, has exiled the Divine from its life, it is labouring under a painful illusion and tottering on the verge of a complete collapse, its culture sinking into savagery and its hypertrophied mental powers dragging it into a blind destruction. If human life embodied no divinity, the present crisis might well end in a total ruin, but the indwelling Divinity is indestructible, and its Will to self-evolution invincibly powerful,

¹ Words of the Mother.

² ibid,

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When the cup of a godless life of exclusive material pursuits has been drained to its bitter dregs, man, defeated and disillusioned, with grim death gaping wide to devour him, and chill darkness closing in upon him, will hear the rousing admonition : "All things betray thee, who betrayest Me.” That will be his salvation, that will save him from death and damnation. "All difficulties are solved by taking rest in the Divine’ s arms, for, these arms are always opened with love to shelter us.”¹ "Turn towards the Divine, all your sufferings will disappear.”²

But the safety from death and damnation is not enough; man has to offer all himself to the Master of his life, so that the Master may offer all Himself to him, and the drop and the sea meet in an ineffable embrace of unending ecstasy. "The whole of our life should be a prayer offered to the Divine.”³ Therefore, after the decisive turning, the self-offering, the self-consecration to the Life of life, leading to the integral, dynamic union. "One who has given himself to the Divine has no longer any other duty than to make that consecration more and more perfect. The world and those who live in it have always wanted to put human—social and domestic—duty before duty to the Divine, which they have stigmatised as egoism. How indeed could they judge otherwise, they who have no experience of the reality of the Divine ? But for the divine regard their opinion has no value, their will has no force. These are movements of ignorance, nothing more...Besides, has not mankind proved its utter incompetence in the organisation of its own existence? Governments succeed governments, regimes follow regimes, centuries pass after centuries, but human misery remains lamentably d same. It will always be so, as long as man remains what he is blind and ignorant, closed to all spiritual reality. A transformation ,an illumination of the human consciousness alone can bring about real amelioration in the condition of humanity. Thus even from the standpoint of human life, it follows logically that the first duty of man is to seek and possess the divine consciousness.”4

¹ Words of the Mother.

² ibid.

³ ibid.

4 ibid.

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This aspiration, this faith, this loving surrender to the Life of life will not mean a renunciation or denial of reason, but its sublimation into a higher intelligence, which does not gloat over the surface of things, but looks deep into their truth and essence, and visions the one Reality everywhere and its self-fulfilling creative Will. The next step on the ladder of evolution will carry man from reason to suprarational Light. "Turn from the dead past and look straight towards the future. Your religion, country, family lie there: it is the Divine.”¹

¹ Words of the Mother.

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