The Doctrine of Mystics - The Secret of Vedas - Aurobindo

[vgovindan]

I am giving hereunder a link for the said article by Shri Aurobindo. I would not like to elaborate more than to say that it demolishes the popular notion that these (Vedas) are mostly ritualistic- karma kANDa.

https://www.saccs.org.in/texts/sriaurob ... the%20mind.

[vgovindan]

Further to previous post. A review of 'The Secret Of Vedas' appeared in The Hindu In Aug 1914. Shri Aurobindo's response thereof was also published on 27 Aug 1914. (The review is not readily traceable).
That response of Shri Aurobindo titled 'Interpretation of the Veda', is given in the link below -

https://theveda.org.in/rigveda/sa/15/in ... f-the-veda

[vgovindan]

Shri Aurobindo refutes Illusionism aka mAyAvAda.

"The individual soul can only cut the knot of ego by a supreme act of egoism, an exclusive attachment to its own individual salvation which amounts to an absolute assertion of its separate existence in Maya. We are led to regard other souls as if they were figments of our mind and their salvation unimportant, our soul alone as if it were entirely real and its salvation the one thing that matters. I come to regard my personal escape from bondage as real while other souls who are equally myself remain behind in the bondage!"

The Life Divine - The Destiny of the Individual - Shri Aurobindo -
https://incarnateword.in/cwsa/21/the-de ... vidual#p19

[vgovindan]

Aurobindo explains origins of ethics and dvandva - pain - pleasure, good - evil.

https://incarnateword.in/cwsa/21/deligh ... he-problem

[vgovindan]

"Maya in its original sense meant a comprehending and containing consciousness capable of embracing, measuring and limiting and therefore formative; it is that which outlines, measures out, moulds forms in the formless, psychologises and seems to make knowable the Unknowable, geometrises and seems to make measurable the limitless. Later the word came from its original sense of knowledge, skill, intelligence to acquire a pejorative sense of cunning, fraud or illusion, and it is in the figure of an enchantment or illusion that it is used by the philosophical systems."

"These three generalisations of the play of existence in its relation to the eternal and stable, the immutable Sachchidananda, starting from the three conceptions of Maya, Prakriti and Lila and representing themselves in our philosophical systems as mutually contradictory philosophies, are in reality perfectly consistent with each other, complementary and necessary in their totality to an integral view of life and the world."

https://incarnateword.in/cwsa/21/deligh ... e-solution

[vgovindan]

"Thus by the very nature of the world-play as it has been realised by Sachchidananda in the vastness of His existence extended as Space and Time, we have to conceive first of an involution and a self-absorption of conscious being into the density and infinite divisibility of substance, for otherwise there can be no finite variation; next, an emergence of the self-imprisoned force into formal being, living being, thinking being; and finally a release of the formed thinking being into the free realisation of itself as the One and the Infinite at play in the world and by the release its recovery of the boundless existence-consciousness-bliss that even now it is secretly, really and eternally. This triple movement is the whole key of the world-enigma."

"Infinite consciousness in its infinite action can produce only infinite results; to settle upon a fixed Truth or order of truths and build a world in conformity with that which is fixed, demands a selective faculty of knowledge commissioned to shape finite appearance out of the infinite Reality.

This power was known to the Vedic seers by the name of Maya. Maya meant for them the power of infinite consciousness to comprehend, contain in itself and measure out, that is to say, to form—for form is delimitation—Name and Shape out of the vast illimitable Truth of infinite existence. It is by Maya that static truth of essential being becomes ordered truth of active being—or, to put it in more metaphysical language, out of the supreme being in which all is all without barrier of separative consciousness emerges the phenomenal being in which all is in each and each is in all for the play of existence with existence, consciousness with consciousness, force with force, delight with delight. This play of all in each and each in all is concealed at first from us by the mental play or the illusion of Maya which persuades each that he is in all but not all in him and that he is in all as a separated being not as a being always inseparably one with the rest of existence. Afterwards we have to emerge from this error into the supramental play or the truth of Maya where the “each” and the “all” coexist in the inseparable unity of the one truth and the multiple symbol. The lower, present and deluding mental Maya has first to be embraced, then to be overcome; for it is God’s play with division and darkness and limitation, desire and strife and suffering in which He subjects Himself to the Force that has come out of Himself and by her obscure suffers Himself to be obscured. That other Maya concealed by this mental has to be overpassed, then embraced; for it is God’s play of the infinities of existence, the splendours of knowledge, the glories of force mastered and the ecstasies of love illimitable where He emerges out of the hold of Force, holds her instead and fulfils in her illumined that for which she went out from Him at the first.

This distinction between the lower and the higher Maya is the link in thought and in cosmic Fact which the pessimistic and illusionist philosophies miss or neglect."

https://incarnateword.in/cwsa/21/the-divine-maya

[vgovindan]

"We regard thought as a thing separate from existence, abstract, unsubstantial, different from reality, something which appears one knows not whence and detaches itself from objective reality in order to observe, understand and judge it; for so it seems and therefore is to our all-dividing, all-analysing mentality. The first business of Mind is to render “discrete”, to make fissures much more than to discern, and so it has made this paralysing fissure between thought and reality. But in Supermind all being is consciousness, all consciousness is of being, and the idea, a pregnant vibration of consciousness, is equally a vibration of being pregnant of itself; it is an initial coming out, in creative self-knowledge, of that which lay concentrated in uncreative self-awareness. It comes out as Idea that is a reality, and it is that reality of the Idea which evolves itself, always by its own power and consciousness of itself, always self-conscious, always self-developing by the will inherent in the Idea, always self-realising by the knowledge ingrained in its every impulsion. This is the truth of all creation, of all evolution."

"In Supermind being, consciousness of knowledge and consciousness of will are not divided as they seem to be in our mental operations; they are a trinity, one movement with three effective aspects. Each has its own effect. Being gives the effect of substance, consciousness the effect of knowledge, of the self-guiding and shaping idea, of comprehension and apprehension; will gives the effect of self-fulfilling force. But the idea is only the light of the reality illumining itself; it is not mental thought nor imagination, but effective self-awareness. It is Real-Idea."

"This is the justification of the current religious notions of the omnipresence, omniscience and omnipotence of the Divine Being."

https://incarnateword.in/cwsa/21/the-su ... as-creator

[vgovindan]

"A tree evolves out of the seed in which it is already contained, the seed out of the tree; a fixed law, an invariable process reigns in the permanence of the form of manifestation which we call a tree. The mind regards this phenomenon, this birth, life and reproduction of a tree, as a thing in itself and on that basis studies, classes and explains it. It explains the tree by the seed, the seed by the tree; it declares a law of Nature. But it has explained nothing; it has only analysed and recorded the process of a mystery."

"The tree does not explain the seed, nor the seed the tree; cosmos explains both and God explains cosmos. The Supermind, pervading and inhabiting at once the seed and the tree and all objects, lives in this greater knowledge which is indivisible and one though with a modified and not an absolute indivisibility and unity. In this comprehensive knowledge there is no independent centre of existence, no individual separated ego such as we see in ourselves; the whole of existence is to its self-awareness an equable extension, one in oneness, one in multiplicity, one in all conditions and everywhere. Here the All and the One are the same existence; the individual being does not and cannot lose the consciousness of its identity with all beings and with the One Being; for that identity is inherent in supramental cognition, a part of the supramental self-evidence."

https://incarnateword.in/cwsa/21/the-su ... sciousness

[vgovindan]

"We, human beings, are phenomenally a particular form of consciousness, subject to Time and Space, and can only be, in our surface consciousness which is all we know of ourselves, one thing at a time, one formation, one poise of being, one aggregate of experience; and that one thing is for us the truth of ourselves which we acknowledge; all the rest is either not true or no longer true, because it has disappeared into the past out of our ken, or not yet true, because it is waiting in the future and not yet in our ken. But the Divine Consciousness is not so particularised, nor so limited; it can be many things at a time and take more than one enduring poise even for all time. We find that in the principle of Supermind itself it has three such general poises or sessions of its world-founding consciousness. The first founds the inalienable unity of things, the second modifies that unity so as to support the manifestation of the Many in One and One in Many; the third further modifies it so as to support the evolution of a diversified individuality which, by the action of Ignorance, becomes in us at a lower level the illusion of the separate ego."

"....the eternal recurrence of the manifestation in Time is a proof that the divine multiplicity is an eternal fact of the Supreme beyond Time no less than the divine unity; otherwise it could not have this characteristic of inevitable eternal recurrence in Time.

It is indeed only when our human mentality lays an exclusive emphasis on one side of spiritual experience, affirms that to be the sole eternal truth and states it in the terms of our all-dividing mental logic that the necessity for mutually destructive schools of philosophy arises. Thus, emphasising the sole truth of the unitarian consciousness, we observe the play of the divine unity, erroneously rendered by our mentality into the terms of real difference, but, not satisfied with correcting this error of the mind by the truth of a higher principle, we assert that the play itself is an illusion. Or, emphasising the play of the One in the Many, we declare a qualified unity and regard the individual soul as a soul-form of the Supreme, but would assert the eternity of this qualified existence and deny altogether the experience of a pure consciousness in an unqualified oneness. Or, again, emphasising the play of difference, we assert that the Supreme and the human soul are eternally different and reject the validity of an experience which exceeds and seems to abolish that difference. But the position that we have now firmly taken absolves us from the necessity of these negations and exclusions: we see that there is a truth behind all these affirmations, but at the same time an excess which leads to an ill-founded negation."

https://incarnateword.in/cwsa/21/the-tr ... -supermind

[vgovindan]

"We begin to grasp intellectually what is the Divine, the eternal Reality, and to understand how out of it the world has come. We begin also to perceive how inevitably that which has come out of the Divine must return to the Divine. We may now ask with profit and a chance of clearer reply how we must change and what we must become in order to arrive there in our nature and our life and our relations with others and not only through a solitary and ecstatic realisation in the profundities of our being."

"Suffice it at present to observe that the absence or abolition of separatist egoism and of effective division in consciousness is the one essential condition of the divine Life, and therefore their presence in us is that which constitutes our mortality and our fall from the Divine. This is our “original sin”, or rather let us say in a more philosophical language, the deviation from the Truth and Right of the Spirit, from its oneness, integrality and harmony that was the necessary condition for the great plunge into the Ignorance which is the soul’s adventure in the world and from which was born our suffering and aspiring humanity."

https://incarnateword.in/cwsa/21/the-divine-soul

NOTE - Shri Aurobindo has not amplified further about Divine Soul, its characteristics and the method of attainment. IMHO it might somewhat correspond to Jeevan Mukta.

[kvchellappa]

Should this thread be in the lounge as it has no connection with music?

[vgovindan]

It all started as a quest to find the true meaning of the word 'mAya' - being routinely translated as 'illusion', in some of the recent 'spiritual' texts, which I had occasion to go through. As part of that quest, I came across the writings of Shri Aurobindo. At the outset, I must confess that his writings are extremely difficult to comprehend. His sentence formation is very complicated - almost each sentence running to many lines. But, I was highly impressed by his analytical approach to spirituality. The explanation offered by him in regard to the word 'mAya' were very convincing. Therefore, I ventured to go through some of his writings, and also convey to the viewers at Rasika forum, my understanding of his writings.
As I proceeded with the task, a point came - refer to topic 'Divine Soul' - where I was afraid that the topic was entering into speculative philosophy. Therefore, I wanted to read Aurobindo's entire take on the subject 'Life Divine', before I continue my posts. In this regard, I read a summary of his second part of the book. That summary confirmed my apprehension. Therefore, I dropped the idea of further postings.

I am giving hereunder two links - one about 'Mind and Super Mind' and the other which gives the Summary of his second part.
I hereby conclude this topic, as I do not want to enter into any discussion which is speculative in nature.
--------------------------------
"What Mind, Life and Body are in their supreme sources and what therefore they must be in the integral completeness of the divine manifestation when informed by the Truth and not cut off from it by the separation and the ignorance in which presently we live,—this then is the problem that we have next to consider."

"The fundamental error of the Mind is, then, this fall from self-knowledge by which the individual soul conceives of its individuality as a separate fact instead of as a form of Oneness and makes itself the centre of its own universe instead of knowing itself as one concentration of the universal. From that original error all its particular ignorances and limitations are contingent results."

https://incarnateword.in/cwsa/21/mind-and-supermind
------------------------
Summary of Part 2 - Life Divine

- Sisirkumar Ghose

An integral knowledge presupposes an integral Reality. But our idea and sense of Reality vary with our status and movement of consciousness. It is quite possible — and it is in its own field a valid movement for our thoughts and for a very high line of spiritual achievement — to affirm the existence and the sole Reality of the ineffable Absolute, and to negate the individual being and the cosmic creation. The absolute view of reality, consciousness and knowledge is founded on one side of the earliest Vedantic thought, but it is not the whole of that thinking. The Isha Upanishad insists on the unity and reality of all the manifestations of the Absolute. It is this whole consciousness with its complete knowledge that builds the foundation of the Life Divine and makes its attainment possible.

But there are other conceptions of reality which demand consideration. There is the view that all that exists is a subjective creation of Mind, a structure of Consciousness, and that the idea of an objective reality self-existent, independent of Consciousness, is an illusion. This way of seeing may lead to the affirmation of the creative Consciousness or to the denial of all existence and the affirmation of Non-Existence, a nescient Zero as the sole Reality. For, in one view, the objects constructed by consciousness, have no intrinsic reality, they are merely structures; even the consciousness that constructs them is itself only a flux of perceptions that assume an appearance of connection and continuity and create a sense of continuous time, but in reality these things have no stable basis as they are only an appearance of reality. On the other hand, if the constructing Mind or Consciousness is real and the sole reality, then the universe of material beings and objects may have an existence, but it is purely subjective-structural, made by a Consciousness out of itself, maintained by it, dissolving into it in their disappearance. It is clear that a Mind of the nature of our surface intelligence can be only a secondary power of existence. This initial incapacity could not be there if these objects were the Mind’s own structures, creations of its self-Power. It may be that this is so because individual mind has only a frontal and derivative power and knowledge and there is a universal Mind that is whole, endowed with omniscience, capable of omnipotence. But the nature of Mind as we know it is an Ignorance seeking for Knowledge. A consciousness possessing the essential and integral Knowledge, proceeding from the essence to the whole, and from the whole to the parts, would be no longer Mind but a perfect Truth-Consciousness automatically possessed of self-knowledge and world-knowledge. It is from this basis that we have to look at the subjective view of reality. These structures constitute the mind’s subjective image or figure of the universe, but the universe and its figures are not a mere image or figure.

There is a precisely opposite view of reality and knowledge which affirms an objective Reality as the only truth and an objective knowledge as the sole reliable knowledge. This view starts from the idea of physical existence as the one fundamental existence and the relegation of consciousness, mind, soul or spirit to the position of a temporary outcome of the physical Energy in its cosmic action — if indeed soul or spirit has any existence. But it is evident that this solution cannot be accepted in its rigour. The subjective and objective are two necessary sides of the manifold Reality and of equal value, depending upon each other. Indeed, we have no means of knowing the objective universe except by our subjective consciousness of which the physical senses themselves are instruments; as the world appears not only to that but in that, so it is to us. If the inner or the supraphysical objects of consciousness are unreal, the objective physical universe has also every chance of being unreal. Subjective experience cannot be referred to the evidence of the external senses; it has its own standards of seeing and its inner method of verification.

There are different orders of reality; the objective and physical is only one order. Our subjective movements and inner experiences are a domain of happenings as real as any outward happenings; but if the individual mind can know something of its own phenomena by direct experience, it is ignorant of what happens in the consciousness of others except by analogy with its own or except in so far as it impinges on my own mind, life and senses.

This ego-centric attitude has in recent times been elevated into a valid standard of knowledge; it has been implicitly or explicitly held as an axiom that all truth must be referred to the judgment of the personal mind, reason and experience of every man or else must be verified by a common or universal experience in order to be valid. But the greatest inner discoveries, the experience of self-being, the cosmic consciousness, the inner calm of the liberated spirit, the direct effect of mind upon mind, the knowledge of things by consciousness in direct contact with other consciousness or with its objects, most spiritual experiences of any value, cannot be brought before the tribunal of the common mentality which has no experience of these things and takes its own absence or incapacity of experience as a proof of their invalidity or their non-existence. It is necessary to dwell for a moment on these elementary truths because the opposite ideas have been sovereign in a recent past and stood in the way of the development of a vast domain of possible knowledge.

An integral knowledge demands an exploration of all the possible domains of consciousness and experience. The supraphysical is as real as the physical; to know it is part of a complete knowledge. The knowledge of the supra-physical has been associated with mysticism and occultism, and occultism has been banned as a superstition and a fantastic error. But the occult is a part of existence; a true occultism means no more than an unveiling of the hidden laws of being and Nature, of all that is not obvious on the surface. To know these things and to bring their truths and forces into the life of humanity is a necessary part of evolution.

All insistence on the sole validity of the objectively real takes its stand on the sense of the basic reality of Matter. But it is now evident that Matter is by no means fundamentally real; it is a structure of Energy: it is becoming even a little doubtful whether the acts and creations of this Energy itself are explicable except as the motions of power of a secret Consciousness of which its processes and steps of structure are the formulas. It is no longer possible to take Matter as the sole reality. For the same reason those views of existence which arise from an exclusive or predominant preoccupation with Mind or with Life and regard Mind or Life as the sole fundamental reality, have not a sufficiently wide basis for acceptance. In our view the Spirit, the Self is the fundamental reality of existence. But an exclusive concentration on this fundamental reality to the exclusion of all reality of Mind, Life or Matter will not help to an integral and valid solution of cosmic and individual existence. An integral knowledge then must be a knowledge of the truth of all sides of existence both separately and in the relation of each to all and the relation of all to the truth of Spirit. But this is not an intellectual knowledge which can be learned and completed in our present mould of consciousness; it must be an experience, a becoming, a change of consciousness, a change of being. This brings in the evolutionary character of the Becoming and the fact that our mental ignorance is only a stage in our evolution. The integral knowledge, then, can only come by a slow process in Time such as has accompanied the other evolutionary transformations.

by -Sisirkumar Ghose

https://incarnateword.in/cwsa/22/realit ... -knowledge