Latest / PRISMA Audio Books / Book Two| Part I| Chapter II: Brahman, Purusha, Ishwara — Maya, Prakriti, Shakti| Sri Aurobindo's Life Divine – An Audiobook by Deepti Tewari

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Book Two| Part I| Chapter II: Brahman, Purusha, Ishwara — Maya, Prakriti, Shakti| Sri Aurobindo's Life Divine – An Audiobook by Deepti Tewari · PRISMA Audio Books

0:03
SPEAKER_00: The Life Divine Book Two Part One Chapter Two Brahman Purusha Ishwara Maya Rakriti Shakti It is there in beings indivisible and as if divided Gita Brahman the truth the knowledge the infinite upanishad know Purusha and Prakriti to be both eternal without beginning Gita One must know Maya as Prakriti and the master of Maya as the great lord of all Shvetasvataru Upanishad It is the might of the godhead in the world that turns the wheel of Brahman Him one must know the supreme Lord of all Lords the Supreme Godhead above all godheads Supreme too is his Shakti and manifold the natural working of her knowledge and her force One Godhead occult in all beings, the inner self of all beings, the all pervading, absolute, without qualities, the overseer of all actions, the witness, the knower Shvetaswatro Upanishad.
1:52
SPEAKER_00: There is then a supreme reality, eternal, absolute and infinite.
2:01
SPEAKER_00: Because it is absolute and infinite, it is in its essence indeterminable.
2:10
SPEAKER_00: It is indefinable and inconceivable by finite and defining mind.
2:17
SPEAKER_00: It is ineffable by a mind created speech.
2:23
SPEAKER_00: It is describable neither by our negations neti nethi, for we cannot limit it by saying it is not this, it is not that, nor by our affirmations, for we cannot fix it by saying it is this, it is that Iti ithi.
2:48
SPEAKER_00: And yet, though in this way unknowable to us, it is not altogether and in every way unknowable.
2:59
SPEAKER_00: It is self evident to itself, and although inexpressible, yet self evident to a knowledge by identity of which the spiritual being in us must be capable, for that spiritual being is in its essence and its original and intimate reality not other than this supreme existence.
3:31
SPEAKER_00: But although thus indeterminable to mind because of its absoluteness and infinity, we discover that this supreme and eternal infinite determines itself to our consciousness in the universe by real and fundamental truths of its being, which are beyond the universe, and in it are the very foundation of its existence.
4:03
SPEAKER_00: These truths present themselves to our conceptual cognition as the fundamental aspects in which we see and experience the omnipresent reality.
4:18
SPEAKER_00: In themselves they are seized directly not by intellectual understanding, but by a spiritual intuition, a spiritual experience in the very substance of our consciousness.
4:35
SPEAKER_00: But they can also be caught at in conception by a large and plastic idea, and can be expressed in some sort by a plastic speech which does not insist too much on rigid definition or limit the wideness and subtlety of the idea.
4:59
SPEAKER_00: In order to express this experience or this idea with any nearness, a language has to be created, which is at once intuitively metaphysical and revealingly poetic, admitting significant and living images as the vehicle of a close, suggestive and vivid indication.
5:25
SPEAKER_00: A language such as we find hammered out into a subtle and pregnant massiveness in the Veda and the Upanishads.
5:37
SPEAKER_00: In the ordinary tongue of metaphysical thought, we have to be content with a distant indication, an approximation by abstractions which may still be of some service to our intellect, for it is this kind of speech which suits our method of logical and rational understanding.
6:02
SPEAKER_00: But if it is to be of real service, the intellect must consent to pass out of the bounds of a finite logic and accustom itself to the logic of the infinite.
6:19
SPEAKER_00: On this condition alone, by this way of seeing and thinking, it ceases to be paradoxical or futile to speak of the ineffable.
6:33
SPEAKER_00: But if we insist on applying a finite logic to the infinite, the omnipresent reality will escape us, and we shall grasp instead an abstract shadow, a dead form petrified into speech or a hard or a hard, incisive graph which speaks of the reality but does not express it.
7:01
SPEAKER_00: Our way of knowing must be appropriate to that which is to be known.
7:08
SPEAKER_00: Otherwise we achieve only a distant speculation, a figure of knowledge and not veritable knowledge.
7:21
SPEAKER_00: The supreme truth aspect which thus manifests itself to us is an eternal and infinite and absolute self existence, self awareness, self delight of being.
7:37
SPEAKER_00: This founds all things and secretly supports and pervades all things.
7:45
SPEAKER_00: This self existence reveals itself again in three terms of its essential nature Self, Conscious Being or Spirit, and God or the divine being.
8:01
SPEAKER_00: The Indian terms are more satisfactory Brahman, the reality is Atman, Purusha, Ishwara, for these terms grew from a root of intuition, and while they have a comprehensive preciseness, are capable of a plastic application which avoids both vagueness in use and the rigid snare of a too limiting intellectual concept.
8:35
SPEAKER_00: The supreme Brahman is that which in Western metaphysics is called the absolute.
8:42
SPEAKER_00: But Brahman is at the same time the omnipresent reality in which all that is relative exists, as its forms or its movements.
8:55
SPEAKER_00: This is an absolute which takes all relativities in its embrace.
9:03
SPEAKER_00: The Upanishad affirm that all this is the Brahman, mind is Brahman, life is Brahman, matter is Brahman.
9:15
SPEAKER_00: Addressing Vayu, the Lord of air of life, it is said, O Vayu, thou art manifest Brahman.
9:26
SPEAKER_00: And pointing to man and beast and bird and insect, each separately is identified with the one.
9:37
SPEAKER_00: O Brahman, thou art this old man and boy and girl, this bird, this insect.
9:46
SPEAKER_00: Brahman is the consciousness that knows itself in all that exists.
9:52
SPEAKER_00: Brahman is the force that sustains the power of God and Titan and demon, the force that acts in man and animal and the forms and energies of nature.
10:06
SPEAKER_00: Brahman is the Ananda, the secret bliss of existence which is the ether of our being, and without which none could breathe or live.
10:20
SPEAKER_00: Brahman is the inner soul in all.
10:23
SPEAKER_00: It has taken a form in correspondence with each created form which it inhabits.
10:31
SPEAKER_00: The Lord of beings is that which is conscious in the conscious being, but he is also the conscious in inconscient things, the one who is master and in control of the many that are passive in the hands of false nature.
10:54
SPEAKER_00: He is the timeless and time.
10:58
SPEAKER_00: He is space and all that is in space.
11:02
SPEAKER_00: He is causality and the cause and the effect.
11:08
SPEAKER_00: He is the thinker and his thought, the warrior and his courage, the gambler and his dice throw.
11:18
SPEAKER_00: All realities and all aspects and all semblances are the Brahman.
11:26
SPEAKER_00: Brahman is the absolute, the transcendent and incommunicable, the supracosmic existence that sustains the cosmos, the cosmic self that upholds all beings.
11:43
SPEAKER_00: But it is too the self of each individual, the soul or psychic entity is an eternal portion of the Ishvara.
11:54
SPEAKER_00: It is his supreme nature or consciousness force that has become the living being in a world of living beings.
12:06
SPEAKER_00: The Brahman alone is and because of it all are, for all are the Brahman.
12:15
SPEAKER_00: This reality is the reality of everything that we see in self and nature.
12:23
SPEAKER_00: Brahman, the Ishwara, is all this by his yoga maya, by the power of his consciousness force put out in self manifestation.
12:37
SPEAKER_00: He is the conscious being, soul, spirit, Purusha, and it is by his nature, the force of his conscious self-existence that he is all things.
12:53
SPEAKER_00: He is the Ishwara, the omniscient and omnipotent all ruler, and it is by his Shakti, his conscious power that he manifests himself in time and governs the universe.
13:12
SPEAKER_00: These and similar statements taken together are all comprehensive.
13:18
SPEAKER_00: It is possible for the mind to cut and select, to build a closed system and explain away all that does not fit within it.
13:31
SPEAKER_00: But it is on the complete and many sided statement that we must take our stand if we have to acquire an integral knowledge.
13:43
SPEAKER_00: An absolute, eternal, and infinite self-existence, self-awareness, self-delight of being that secretly supports and pervades the universe even while it is also beyond it, is then the first truth of spiritual experience.
14:05
SPEAKER_00: But this truth of being has at once an impersonal and a personal aspect.
14:13
SPEAKER_00: It is not only existence, it is the one being, absolute, eternal and infinite.
14:23
SPEAKER_00: As there are three fundamental aspects in which we meet this reality self, conscious being, or spirit and God, the divine being, or to use the Indian terms, the absolute and omnipresent reality, Brahman, manifest to us as Atman, Purusha, Ishvara.
14:50
SPEAKER_00: So too its power of consciousness appears to us in three aspects.
14:57
SPEAKER_00: It is the self force of that consciousness conceptively creative of all things, Maya.
15:06
SPEAKER_00: It is prakriti, nature of force, made dynamically executive, working out all things under the witnessing eye of the conscious being, the self or spirit.
15:21
SPEAKER_00: It is the conscious power of the divine being, Shakti, which is both conceptively creative and dynamically executive of all the divine workings.
15:35
SPEAKER_00: These three aspects and their powers base and comprise the whole of existence and all nature, and, taken together as a single whole, they reconcile the apparent dispariteness and incompatibility of the supracosmic transcendence, the cosmic universality, and the separativeness of our individual existence.
16:07
SPEAKER_00: The absolute, cosmic nature and ourselves are linked in oneness by this triune aspect of the one reality.
16:20
SPEAKER_00: For taken by itself, the existence of the absolute, the supreme Brahman would be a contradiction of the relative universe, and our own real existence would be incompatible with its sole incommunicable reality.
16:41
SPEAKER_00: But the Brahman is at the same time omnipresent in all relativities.
16:47
SPEAKER_00: It is the absolute independent of all relatives, the absolute basing all relatives, the absolute governing, pervading, constituting all relatives.
17:03
SPEAKER_00: There is nothing that is not the omnipresent reality.
17:08
SPEAKER_00: In observing the triple aspect and the triple power, we come to see how this is possible.
17:20
SPEAKER_00: If we look at this picture of the self-existence and its works as a unitary, unlimited whole of vision, it stands together and imposes itself by its convincing totality.
17:38
SPEAKER_00: But to the analysis of the logical intellect, it offers an abundance of difficulties, such as all attempts to erect a logical system out of a perception of an illimitable existence must necessarily create.
17:59
SPEAKER_00: For any such endeavor must either effect consistency by an arbitrary sectioning of the complex truth of things, or else by its comprehensiveness become logically untenable.
18:17
SPEAKER_00: For we see that the indeterminable determines itself as infinite and finite.
18:26
SPEAKER_00: The immutable admits a constant mutability and endless differences.
18:33
SPEAKER_00: The one becomes an innumerable multitude.
18:38
SPEAKER_00: The impersonal creates or supports personality, is itself a person.
18:45
SPEAKER_00: The self has a nature and is yet other than its nature.
18:52
SPEAKER_00: Being turns into becoming, and yet it is always itself and other than its becomings.
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SPEAKER_00: The universal individualizes itself, and the individual universalizes himself.
19:09
SPEAKER_00: Brahman is at once void of qualities and capable of infinite qualities.
19:17
SPEAKER_00: The Lord and doer of works, yet a nondoer and a silent witness of the workings of nature.
19:27
SPEAKER_00: If we look carefully at these workings of nature, once we put aside the veil of familiarity and our unthinking acquiescence in the process of things as natural, because so they always happen, we discover that all she does in whole or in parts is a miracle, an act of some incomprehensible magic.
19:57
SPEAKER_00: The being of the self existence and the world that has appeared in it are each of them and both together a suprarational mystery.
20:11
SPEAKER_00: There seems to us to be a reason in things because the processes of the physical finite are consistent to our view and their law determinable.
20:24
SPEAKER_00: But this reason in things, when closely examined, seems to stumble at every moment against the irrational or infra rational and the suprarational.
20:38
SPEAKER_00: The consistency, the determinability of process seems to lessen rather than increase as we pass from matter to life, and from life to mentality.
20:53
SPEAKER_00: If the finite consents to some extent to look as if it were rational, the infinitismal refuses to be bound by the same laws, and the infinite is unceasable.
21:10
SPEAKER_00: As for the action of the universe and its significance, it escapes us altogether.
21:17
SPEAKER_00: If self, God or spirit there be, his dealings with the world and us are incomprehensible, offer no clue that we can follow.
21:29
SPEAKER_00: God and nature and even ourselves move in a mysterious way which is only partially and at points intelligible, but as a whole escapes our comprehension.
21:47
SPEAKER_00: All the works of Maya look like the production of a suprational magical power which arranges things according to its wisdom or its fantasy.
22:00
SPEAKER_00: But a wisdom which is not ours, and a fantasy which baffles our imagination.
22:08
SPEAKER_00: The spirit that manifests things or manifests itself in them so obscurely looks to our reason like a magician, and his power or Maya a creative magic.
22:23
SPEAKER_00: But magic can create illusions or it can create astounding realities, and we find it difficult to decide which of these suprational processes faces us in this universe.
22:42
SPEAKER_00: But in fact the cause of this impression must necessarily be sought not in anything illusory or fantastic, in the supreme or the universal self existence, but in our own inability to seize the supreme clue to its manifold existence or discover the secret plan and pattern of its action.
23:09
SPEAKER_00: The self existent is the infinite, and its way of being and of action must be the way of the infinite.
23:20
SPEAKER_00: But our consciousness is limited, our reason built upon things finite.
23:27
SPEAKER_00: It is irrational to suppose that a finite consciousness and reason can be a measure of the infinite.
23:37
SPEAKER_00: This smallness cannot judge that immensity.
23:42
SPEAKER_00: This poverty bound to a limited use of its scanty means cannot conceive the opulent management of those riches.
23:53
SPEAKER_00: An ignorant half knowledge cannot follow the motions of an all knowledge.
24:01
SPEAKER_00: Our reasoning is based upon our experience of the finite operations of physical nature, on an incomplete observation and uncertain understanding of something that acts within limits.
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SPEAKER_00: It has organized on that basis certain conceptions which it seeks to make general and universal.
24:27
SPEAKER_00: And whatever contradicts or departs from these conceptions it regards as irrational, false or inexplicable.
24:38
SPEAKER_00: But there are different orders of the reality and the conceptions, measures, standards suitable to one need not be applicable to another.
24:52
SPEAKER_00: But there are different orders of the reality and the conceptions, measures, standards suitable to one need not be applicable to another order.
25:06
SPEAKER_00: Our physical being is built first upon an aggregate of infinitismals, electrons, atoms, molecules, cells.
25:17
SPEAKER_00: But the law of action of these infinitismals does not explain all the physical workings even of the human body.
25:27
SPEAKER_00: Much less can they cover all the law and process of action of man's supraphysical parts, his life movements and mind movements and soul movements.
25:40
SPEAKER_00: In the body, finites have been formed with their own habits, properties, characteristic way of action.
25:50
SPEAKER_00: The body itself is a finite, which is not a mere aggregate of these smaller finites which it uses as parts, organs, constituent instruments of its operations.
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SPEAKER_00: It has developed a being and has a general law which surpasses its dependence upon these elements or constituents.
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SPEAKER_00: The life and mind again are supraphysical finites with a different and more subtle mode of operation of their own.
26:25
SPEAKER_00: And no dependence on the physical parts for instrumentation can annull their intrinsic character.
26:34
SPEAKER_00: There is something more and other in our vital and mental being and vital and mental forces than the functioning of a physical body.
26:45
SPEAKER_00: But again, each finite is in its reality or has behind it an infinite which has built and supports and directs the finite it has made as its self figure.
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SPEAKER_00: So that even the being and law and process of the finite cannot be totally understood without a knowledge of that which is occult within or behind it.
27:16
SPEAKER_00: Our finite knowledge, conceptions, standards may be valid within their limits, but they are incomplete and relative.
27:28
SPEAKER_00: A law founded upon an observation of what is divided in space and time cannot be confidently applied to the being and action of the indivisible.
27:40
SPEAKER_00: Not only it cannot be applied to the spaceless and timeless infinite, but it cannot be applied even to a time infinite or a space infinite.
27:53
SPEAKER_00: A law and process binding for our superficial being need not be binding on what is occult within us.
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SPEAKER_00: Again, our intellect, founding itself on reason, finds it difficult to deal with what is infrarational.
28:14
SPEAKER_00: Life is infrarational and we find that our intellectual reason, applying itself to life, is constantly forcing upon it a control, a measure, an artificial procrastin rule that either succeeds in killing or petrifying life, or constrains it into rigid forms and conventions that lame and imprison its capacity, or ends by a bungle, a revolt of life, a decay or disruption of the systems and superstructures built upon it by our intelligence.
28:58
SPEAKER_00: An instinct, an intuition is needed, which the intellect has not at its command, and does not always listen to when it comes in of itself to help the mental workings.
29:14
SPEAKER_00: But still more difficult must it be for our reason to understand and deal with the suprarational.
29:21
SPEAKER_00: The suprarational is the realm of the spirit, and in the largeness, subtlety, profundity, complexity of its movement, the reason is lost.
29:34
SPEAKER_00: Here intuition and inner experience alone are the guide, or if there is any other, it is that of which intuition is only a sharp edge, an intense projected ray.
29:52
SPEAKER_00: The final enlightenment must come from the suprational truth consciousness, from a supramental vision and knowledge.
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SPEAKER_00: But the being and action of the infinite must not be therefore regarded as if it were a magic void of all reason.
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SPEAKER_00: There is, on the contrary, a greater reason in all the operations of the infinite.
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SPEAKER_00: But it is not a mental or intellectual, it is a spiritual and supramental reason.
30:32
SPEAKER_00: There is a logic in it, because there are relations and connections infallibly seen and executed.
30:41
SPEAKER_00: What is magic to our finite reason is the logic of the infinite.
30:47
SPEAKER_00: It is a greater reason, a greater logic because it is more vast, subtle, complex in its operations.
30:59
SPEAKER_00: It comprehends all the data which our observation fails to seize.
31:05
SPEAKER_00: It deduces from them results which neither our deduction nor our induction can anticipate, because our conclusions and inferences have a meager foundation and are fallible and brittle.
31:23
SPEAKER_00: If we observe a happening, we judge and explain it from the results and from a glimpse of its most external constituents, circumstances or causes.
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SPEAKER_00: But each happening is the outcome of a complex nexus of forces which we do not and cannot observe, because all forces are to us invisible.
31:51
SPEAKER_00: But they are not invisible to the spiritual vision of the infinite.
31:56
SPEAKER_00: Some of them are actualities working to produce or occasion a new actuality.
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SPEAKER_00: Some are possibles that are near to the preexistent actuals, and in a way included in their aggregate.
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SPEAKER_00: But there can intervene always new possibilities that suddenly become dynamic potentials and add themselves to the nexus, and behind all are imperatives, or an imperative which these possibilities are laboring to actualise.
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SPEAKER_00: Moreover, out of the same nexus of forces, different results are possible.
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SPEAKER_00: What will come out of them is determined by a sanction which was no doubt waiting and ready all the time, but seems to come in rapidly to intervene and alter everything, a decisive divine imperative.
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SPEAKER_00: All this our reason cannot grasp, because it is the instrument of an ignorance, with a very limited vision and a small stock of accumulated and not always very certain or reliable knowledge, and because too, it has no means of direct awareness, for this is the difference between intuition and intellect.
33:32
SPEAKER_00: That intuition is born of a direct awareness while intellect is an indirect action of a knowledge which constructs itself with difficulty out of the unknown from signs and indications and gathered data.
33:51
SPEAKER_00: But what is not evident to our reason and senses is self-evident to the infinite consciousness, and if there is a will of the infinite, it must be a will that acts in this full knowledge and is the perfect spontaneous result of a total self-evidence.
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SPEAKER_00: It is neither a hampered evolutionary force bound by what it has evolved, nor an imaginative will acting in the void upon a free caprice.
34:31
SPEAKER_00: It is the truth of the infinite affirming itself in the determinations of the finite.
34:39
SPEAKER_00: It is evident that such a consciousness and will need not act in harmony with the conclusions of our limited reason or according to a procedure familiar to it and approved of by our constructed notions, or in subjection to an ethical reason working for a limited and fragmentary good.
35:04
SPEAKER_00: It might and does admit things deemed by our reason irrational and unethical, because that was necessary for the final and total good and for the working out of a cosmic purpose.
35:21
SPEAKER_00: What seems to us irrational or reprehensible in relation to a partial set of facts, motives desiderata might be perfectly rational and approvable in relation to a much vaster motive and totality of data and desiderata.
35:44
SPEAKER_00: Reason with its partial vision sets up constructed conclusions which it strives to turn into general rules of knowledge and action, and it compels into its rule by some mental device or gets rid of what does not suit with it.
36:03
SPEAKER_00: An infinite consciousness would have no such rules.
36:07
SPEAKER_00: It would have instead large, intrinsic truths governing automatically conclusion and result, but adapting them differently and spontaneously to a different total of circumstances, so that by this pliability and free adaptation, it might seem to the narrower faculty to have no standards whatever.
36:36
SPEAKER_00: In the same way, we cannot judge of the principle and dynamic operation of infinite being by the standards of finite existence.
36:47
SPEAKER_00: What might be impossible for the one would be normal and self-evidently natural states and motives for the greater, freer reality.
37:00
SPEAKER_00: It is this that makes the difference between our fragmentary mind consciousness, constructing integers out of its fractions, and an essential and total consciousness, vision and knowledge.
37:17
SPEAKER_00: It is not indeed possible so long as we are compelled to use reason as our main support for it to abdicate altogether in favour of an undeveloped or half organized intuition.
37:34
SPEAKER_00: But it is imperative on us in a consideration of the infinite and its being an action to enforce on our reason an utmost plasticity and open it to an awareness of the larger states and possibilities of that which we are striving to consider.
37:57
SPEAKER_00: It will not do to apply our limited and limiting conclusions to that which is illimitable.
38:05
SPEAKER_00: If we concentrate only on one aspect and treat it as the whole, we illustrate the story of the blind man and the elephant.
38:16
SPEAKER_00: Each of the blind inquirers touched a different part and concluded that the whole animal was some object resembling the part of which he had had the touch.
38:32
SPEAKER_00: An experience of some one aspect of the infinite is valid in itself, but we cannot generalize from it that the infinite is that alone.
38:44
SPEAKER_00: Nor would it be safe to view the rest of the infinite in the terms of that aspect and exclude all other viewpoints of spiritual experience.
38:57
SPEAKER_00: The infinite is at once an essentiality, a boundless totality and a multitude.
39:06
SPEAKER_00: All these have to be known in order to know truly the infinite.
39:12
SPEAKER_00: To see the paths alone and the totality not at all, or only as a sum of the parts is a knowledge, but also at the same time an ignorance.
39:25
SPEAKER_00: To see the totality alone and ignore the parts is also a knowledge, and at the same time an ignorance, for a part may be greater than the whole because it belongs to the transcendence.
39:40
SPEAKER_00: To see the essence alone because it takes us back straight towards the transcendence and negate the totality and the paths is a penultimate knowledge.
39:51
SPEAKER_00: But here too there is a capital ignorance.
39:57
SPEAKER_00: A whole knowledge must be there, and the reason must become plastic enough to look at all sides, all aspects and seek through them for that in which they are one.
40:15
SPEAKER_00: Thus too, if we see only the aspect of self, we may concentrate on its static silence and miss the dynamic truth of the infinite.
40:28
SPEAKER_00: If we see only the Ishvara, we may seize the dynamic truth, but miss the eternal status and the infinite silence.
40:38
SPEAKER_00: Become aware of only dynamic being, dynamic consciousness, dynamic delight of being, but miss the pure existence, pure consciousness, pure bliss of being.
40:52
SPEAKER_00: If we concentrate on Purusha Prakriti alone, we may see only the dichotomy of soul and nature, spirit and matter, and miss their unity.
41:04
SPEAKER_00: In considering the action of the infinite, we have to avoid the error of the disciple, who thought of himself as the Brahman, refused to obey the warning of the elephant driver to budge from the narrow path, and was taken up by the elephant's trunk and removed out of the way.
41:28
SPEAKER_00: You are, no doubt, the Brahman, said the master to his bewildered disciple.
41:34
SPEAKER_00: But why did you not obey the driver Brahman and get out of the path of the elephant Brahman?
41:44
SPEAKER_00: We must not commit the mistake of emphasizing one side of the truth and concluding from it or acting upon it to the exclusion of all other sides and aspects of the infinite.
42:01
SPEAKER_00: The realization I am that is true, but we cannot safely proceed on it unless we realize also that all is that.
42:13
SPEAKER_00: Our self existence is a fact, but we must also be aware of other selves, of the same self in other beings, and of that which exceeds both own self and other self.
42:30
SPEAKER_00: The infinite is one in a multiplicity, and its action is only seizable by a supreme reason which regards all and acts as a one awareness that observes itself in difference and respects its own differences, so that each thing and each being has its form of essential being and its form of dynamic nature Swarupa, Swadharma, and all are respected in the total working.
43:06
SPEAKER_00: The knowledge and action of the infinite is one in an unbounded variability.
43:14
SPEAKER_00: It would be from the point of view of the infinite truth equally an error to insist either on a sameness of action in all circumstances or on a diversity of action without any unifying truth and harmony behind the diversity.
43:37
SPEAKER_00: In our own principle of conduct, if we sought to act in this greater truth, it would be equally an error to insist on ourselves alone or to insist on other selves alone.
43:54
SPEAKER_00: It is the self of all on which we have to found a unity of action.
44:00
SPEAKER_00: Action and a total, infinitely plastic, yet harmonious diversity of action, for that is the nature of the workings of the infinite.
44:16
SPEAKER_00: If we look from this viewpoint of a larger, more plastic reason, taking account of the logic of the infinite, at the difficulties which meet our intelligence when it tries to conceive the absolute and omnipresent reality, we shall see that the whole difficulty is verbal and conceptual and not real.
44:45
SPEAKER_00: Our intelligence looks at its concept of the absolute and sees that it must be indeterminable, and at the same time it sees a world of determinations which emanates from the absolute and exists in it, for it can emanate from nowhere else and can exist nowhere else.
45:10
SPEAKER_00: It is further baffled by the affirmation also hardly disputable on the premises that all these determinates are nothing else than this very indeterminable absolute.
45:28
SPEAKER_00: But the contradiction disappears when we understand that the indeterminability is not in its true sense negative, not an imposition of incapacity on the infinite, but positive, a freedom within itself from limitation by its own determinations and necessarily a freedom from all external determination by anything not itself, since there is no real possibility of such a not self coming into existence.
46:09
SPEAKER_00: The infinite is illimitably free, free to determine itself infinitely, free from all restraining effect of its own creation.
46:23
SPEAKER_00: In fact, the infinite does not create, it manifests what is in itself, in its own essence of reality.
46:33
SPEAKER_00: It is itself that essence of all reality, and all realities are powers of that one reality.
46:43
SPEAKER_00: The absolute neither creates nor is created.
46:48
SPEAKER_00: In the current sense of making or being made, we can speak of creation only in the sense of the being becoming in form and movement what it already is in substance and status.
47:05
SPEAKER_00: Yet we have to emphasize its indeterminability in that special and positive sense, not as a negation, but as an indispensable condition of its free, infinite self determination, because without that the reality would be a fixed eternal determinate, or else an indeterminate fixed and bound to a sum of possibilities of determination inherent within it.
47:41
SPEAKER_00: Its freedom from all limitation, from any binding by its own creation, cannot be itself turned into a limitation, an absolute incapacity, a denial of all freedom of self determination.
47:59
SPEAKER_00: It is this that would be a contradiction.
48:03
SPEAKER_00: It would be an attempt to define and limit by negation the infinite and illimitable.
48:13
SPEAKER_00: Into the central fact of the two sides of the nature of the absolute, the essential and the self-creative or dynamic, no real contradiction enters.
48:27
SPEAKER_00: It is only a pure infinite essence that can formulate itself in infinite ways.
48:35
SPEAKER_00: One statement is complementary to the other.
48:39
SPEAKER_00: There is no mutual cancellation, no incompatibility.
48:44
SPEAKER_00: It is only the dual statement of a single, inescapable fact by human reason in human language.
48:55
SPEAKER_00: The same conciliation occurs everywhere when we look with a straight and accurate look on the truth of the reality.
49:05
SPEAKER_00: In our experience of it, we become aware of an infinite essentially free from all limitations by qualities, properties, features.
49:17
SPEAKER_00: On the other hand, we are aware of an infinite teeming with innumerable qualities, properties, features.
49:26
SPEAKER_00: Here again the statement of illimitable freedom is positive, not negative.
49:33
SPEAKER_00: It does not negate what we see, but on the contrary provides the indispensable condition for it.
49:41
SPEAKER_00: It makes possible a free and infinite self-expression in quality and feature.
49:49
SPEAKER_00: A quality is the character of a power of conscious being.
49:54
SPEAKER_00: Or we may say that the consciousness of being expressing what is in it makes the power it brings out recognizable by a native stamp on it, which we call quality or character.
50:12
SPEAKER_00: Courage as a quality is such a power of being.
50:16
SPEAKER_00: It is a certain character of my consciousness expressing a formulated force of my being, bringing out or creating a definite kind of force of my nature in action.
50:32
SPEAKER_00: So too the power of a drug to cure is its property, a special force of being native to the herb or mineral from which it is produced.
50:44
SPEAKER_00: And this specialty is determined by the real idea concealed in the involved consciousness which dwells in the plant or mineral.
50:56
SPEAKER_00: The idea brings out in it what was there at the root of its manifestation, and has now come out thus empowered as the force of its being.
51:09
SPEAKER_00: All qualities, properties, features are such powers of conscious being, thus put forth from itself by the absolute.
51:22
SPEAKER_00: It has everything within it.
51:24
SPEAKER_00: It has the free power to put all forth.
51:28
SPEAKER_00: Yet we cannot define the absolute as a quality of courage or a power of healing.
51:36
SPEAKER_00: We cannot even say that these are a characteristic feature of the absolute, nor can we make up a sum of qualities and say that is the absolute.
51:49
SPEAKER_00: But neither can we speak of the absolute as a pure blank incapable of manifesting these things.
51:57
SPEAKER_00: On the contrary, all capacity is there.
52:01
SPEAKER_00: The powers of all qualities and characters are there, inherent within it.
52:08
SPEAKER_00: The mind is in a difficulty because it has to say the absolute or infinite is none of these things.
52:16
SPEAKER_00: These things are not the absolute or infinite.
52:20
SPEAKER_00: And at the same time it has to say the absolute is all these things.
52:26
SPEAKER_00: They are not something else than that, for that is the sole existence and all existence.
52:33
SPEAKER_00: Here it is evident that it is an undue finiteness of thought, conception, and verbal expression which creates the difficulty.
52:45
SPEAKER_00: But there is in reality none, for it would be evidently absurd to say that the absolute is courage or curing power, or to say that courage and curing power are the absolute.
53:00
SPEAKER_00: But it would be equally absurd to deny the capacity of the absolute to put forth courage or curing power as self-expressions in its manifestation.
53:15
SPEAKER_00: When the logic of the finite fails us, we have to see with a direct and unbound vision what is behind in the logic of the infinite.
53:28
SPEAKER_00: We can then realize that the infinite is infinite in quality, feature, power, but that no sum of qualities, features, powers can describe the infinite.
53:45
SPEAKER_00: We see that the absolute, the self, the divine, the spirit, the being is one.
53:54
SPEAKER_00: The transcendental is one, the cosmic is one.
53:59
SPEAKER_00: But we see also that beings are made, and each has a self, a spirit, a like yet different nature.
54:10
SPEAKER_00: And since the spirit and essence of things is one, we are obliged to admit that all these many must be that one, and it follows that the one is or has become many.
54:28
SPEAKER_00: But how can the limited or relative be the absolute?
54:33
SPEAKER_00: And how can man or beast or bird be the divine being?
54:39
SPEAKER_00: But in erecting this apparent contradiction, the mind makes a double error.
54:46
SPEAKER_00: It is thinking in the terms of the mathematical finite unit which is soul in limitation, the one which is less than two and can become two only by division and fragmentation or by addition and multiplication.
55:06
SPEAKER_00: But this is an infinite oneness.
55:09
SPEAKER_00: It is the essential and infinite oneness which can contain the hundred and the thousand and the million and billion and trillion.
55:22
SPEAKER_00: Whatever astronomic or more than astronomic figures you heap and multiply, they cannot overpass or exceed that oneness.
55:33
SPEAKER_00: For in the language of the Upanishad, it moves not, yet is always far in front when you would pursue and seize it.
55:45
SPEAKER_00: It can be said of it that it would not be the infinite oneness if it were not capable of an infinite multiplicity.
55:57
SPEAKER_00: But that does not mean that the one is plural, or can be limited or described as the sum of the many.
56:06
SPEAKER_00: On the contrary it can be the infinite many, because it exceeds all limitation or description by multiplicity, and exceeds at the same time all limitation by finite conceptual oneness.
56:26
SPEAKER_00: Pluralism is an error because though there is the spiritual plurality, the many souls are dependent and interdependent existences.
56:40
SPEAKER_00: Their sum also is not the one, nor is it the cosmic totality.
56:46
SPEAKER_00: They depend on the one and exist by its oneness.
56:50
SPEAKER_00: Yet the plurality is not unreal.
56:54
SPEAKER_00: It is the one soul that dwells as the individual in these many souls, and they are eternal in the one and by the one eternal.
57:07
SPEAKER_00: This is difficult for the mental reason which makes an opposition between the infinite and the finite, and associates finiteness with plurality and infinity with oneess.
57:22
SPEAKER_00: But in the logic of the infinite there is no such opposition, and the eternity of the many in the one is a thing that is perfectly natural and possible.
57:37
SPEAKER_00: Again we see that there is an infinite pure status, an immobile silence of the spirit.
57:46
SPEAKER_00: We see too that there is a boundless movement of the spirit, a power, a dynamic spiritual all-containing self-extension of the infinite.
57:59
SPEAKER_00: Our conceptions foist upon this perception, in itself valid and accurate, an opposition between the silence and status and the dynamis and movement.
58:13
SPEAKER_00: But to the reason and the logic of the infinite, there can be no such opposition.
58:19
SPEAKER_00: A solely silent and static infinite, an infinite without an infinite power and dynamis and energy is inadmissible except as the perception of an aspect.
58:34
SPEAKER_00: A powerless absolute, an important spirit is unthinkable.
58:41
SPEAKER_00: An infinite energy must be the dynamis of the infinite.
58:45
SPEAKER_00: An all power must be the potency of the absolute.
58:50
SPEAKER_00: An illimitable force must be the force of the spirit.
58:55
SPEAKER_00: But the silence, the status are the basis of the movement.
59:01
SPEAKER_00: An eternal immobility is the necessary condition, feel, essence even of the infinite mobility.
59:12
SPEAKER_00: A stable being is the condition and foundation of the vast action of the force of being.
59:20
SPEAKER_00: It is when we arrive at something of this silence, stability, immobility that we can base on it a force and energy which, in our superficial, restless state would be inconceivable.
59:37
SPEAKER_00: The opposition we make is mental and conceptual.
59:41
SPEAKER_00: In reality, the silence of the spirit and the dynamism of the spirit are complementary truths and inseparable.
59:52
SPEAKER_00: The immutable, silent spirit may hold its infinite energy silent and immobile within it, for it is not bound by its own forces, it is not their subject or instrument, but it does possess them, does release them, is capable of an eternal and infinite action, does not weary or need to stop, and yet all the time its silent immobility, inherent in its action and movement, is not for a moment shaken or disturbed or altered by its action and movement.
1:00:36
SPEAKER_00: The witness silence of the spirit is there in the very grain of all the voices and workings of nature.
1:00:45
SPEAKER_00: These things may be difficult for us to understand because our own surface finite capacity in either direction is limited, and our conceptions are based on our limitations.
1:01:00
SPEAKER_00: But it should be easy to see that these relative and finite conceptions do not apply to the absolute and infinite.
1:01:13
SPEAKER_00: Our conception of the infinite is formlessness, but everywhere we see form and forms surrounding us, and it can be and is affirmed of the divine being that He is at once form and the formless.
1:01:32
SPEAKER_00: For here too the apparent contradiction does not correspond to a real opposition.
1:01:39
SPEAKER_00: The formless is not a negation of the power of formation, but the condition for the infinite's free formation, for otherwise there would be a single form, or only a fixity or sum of possible forms in a finite universe.
1:02:01
SPEAKER_00: The formlessness is the character of the spiritual essence, the spirit substance of the reality.
1:02:09
SPEAKER_00: All finite realities are powers, forms, self shapings of that substance.
1:02:17
SPEAKER_00: The divine is formless and nameless, but by that very reason capable of manifesting all possible names and shapes of being.
1:02:30
SPEAKER_00: Forms are manifestations, not arbitrary inventions out of nothing.
1:02:37
SPEAKER_00: For line and colour, mass and design, which are the essentials of form, carry always in them a significance, are, it might be said, secret values and significances of an unseen reality made visible.
1:02:58
SPEAKER_00: It is for that reason that figure, line, hue, mass, composition can embody what would be otherwise unseen, can convey what would be otherwise occult to the sense.
1:03:15
SPEAKER_00: Form may be said to be the innate body, the inevitable self-revelation of the formless, and this is true not only of external shapes, but of the unseen formations of mind and life which we seize only by our thought, and those sensible forms of which only the subtle grasp of the inner consciousness can become aware.
1:03:45
SPEAKER_00: Name in its deeper sense is not the word by which we describe the object, but the total of power, quality, character of the reality which a form of things embodies, and which we try to sum up by a designated sound.
1:04:07
SPEAKER_00: A knowable name Nomen.
1:04:11
SPEAKER_00: Nomen in this sense we might say is Newman.
1:04:16
SPEAKER_00: The secret names of the gods are their power, quality, character of being caught up by the consciousness and made conceivable.
1:04:28
SPEAKER_00: The infinite is nameless, but in that namelessness all possible names, numens of the gods, the name and forms of all realities are already envisaged and prefigured, because they are there latent and inherent in the all existence.
1:04:50
SPEAKER_00: It becomes clear that these considerations, that the coexistence of the infinite and the finite, which is the very nature of universal being, is not a juxtaposition or mutual inclusion of two opposites, but as natural and inevitable as the relation of the principle of light and fire with the sons.
1:05:15
SPEAKER_00: The finite is a frontal aspect and a self-determination of the infinite.
1:05:22
SPEAKER_00: No finite can exist in itself and by itself.
1:05:27
SPEAKER_00: It exists by the infinite and because it is of one essence with the infinite.
1:05:35
SPEAKER_00: For by the infinite we do not mean solely an illimitable self extension in space and time, but something that is also spaceless and timeless, a self existent, indefinable and illimitable, which can express itself in the infinitismal as well as in the In the vast, in a second of time, in a point of space, in a passing circumstance.
1:06:08
SPEAKER_00: The finite is looked upon as a division of the indivisible, but there is no such thing, for this division is only apparent.
1:06:17
SPEAKER_00: There is a demarcation, but no real separation is possible.
1:06:23
SPEAKER_00: When we see with the inner vision and sense, and not with the physical eye, a tree or other object, what we become aware of is an infinite one reality constituting the tree or object, pervading its every atom and molecule, forming them out of itself, building the whole nature, process of becoming, operation of indwelling energy, all of these are itself, are these infinite, this reality.
1:07:02
SPEAKER_00: We see it extending indivisibly and uniting all objects so that none is really separate from it or quite separate from other objects.
1:07:15
SPEAKER_00: It stands, says the Gita, undivided in beings and yet as if divided.
1:07:23
SPEAKER_00: Thus each object is that infinite and one in essential being, with all other objects that are also forms and names, powers, numens of the infinite.
1:07:39
SPEAKER_00: This incoercible unity in all divisions and diversities is the mathematics of the infinite.
1:07:49
SPEAKER_00: Indicated in a verse of the Upanishads, this is the complete and that is the complete.
1:07:58
SPEAKER_00: Subtract the complete from the complete.
1:08:02
SPEAKER_00: The complete is the remainder.
1:08:06
SPEAKER_00: For so too it may be said of the infinite self-multiplication of the reality, that all things are that self-multiplication.
1:08:16
SPEAKER_00: The one becomes many, but all these many are that which was already, and is always itself, and in becoming the many remains the one.
1:08:29
SPEAKER_00: There is no division of the one by the appearance of the finite, for it is the one infinite that appears to us as the many finite.
1:08:39
SPEAKER_00: The creation adds nothing to the infinite.
1:08:43
SPEAKER_00: It remains after creation what it was before.
1:08:48
SPEAKER_00: The infinite is not a sum of things, it is that which is all things and more.
1:08:55
SPEAKER_00: If this logic of the infinite contradicts the conceptions of our finite reason, it is because it exceeds it and does not base itself on the data of the limited phenomenon, but embraces the reality and sees the truth of all phenomena in the truth of the reality.
1:09:19
SPEAKER_00: It does not see them as separate beings, movements, names, forms, things, for that they cannot be, since they could be that only if they were phenomena in the void, things without a common basis or essence, fundamentally unconnected, connected only by coexistence and pragmatic relation, not realities which exist by their root of unity, and so far as they can be considered independent, are secured in their independence of outer or inner figure and movement only by their perpetual dependence on their parent infinite, their secret identity with the one identical.
1:10:10
SPEAKER_00: The identical is their root, their cause of form, the one power of their varying powers, their constituting substance.
1:10:24
SPEAKER_00: The identical to our notion is the immutable.
1:10:28
SPEAKER_00: It is ever the same through eternity, for if it is or becomes subject to mutation, or if it admits of differences, it ceases to be identical.
1:10:42
SPEAKER_00: But what we see everywhere is an infinitely variable fundamental oneness which seems the very principle of nature.
1:10:51
SPEAKER_00: The basic force is one, but it manifests from itself innumerable forces.
1:10:58
SPEAKER_00: The basic substance is one, but it develops many different substances and millions of unlike objects.
1:11:06
SPEAKER_00: Mind is one, but differentiates itself into many mental states, mind formations, thoughts, perceptions, differing from each other and entering into harmony or into conflict.
1:11:21
SPEAKER_00: Life is one, but the forms of life are unlike and innumerable.
1:11:27
SPEAKER_00: Humanity is one in nature, but there are different race types, and every individual man is himself and in some way unlike others.
1:11:39
SPEAKER_00: Nature insists on tracing lines of difference on the leaves of one tree.
1:11:47
SPEAKER_00: She drives differentiation so far that it has been found that the lines on one man's thumb are different from the lines of every other man's thumb so that he can be identified by that differentiation alone.
1:12:06
SPEAKER_00: Yet fundamentally all men are alike, and there is no essential difference.
1:12:14
SPEAKER_00: Oneness or sameness is everywhere.
1:12:17
SPEAKER_00: Differentiation is everywhere.
1:12:20
SPEAKER_00: The indwelling reality has built the universe on the principle of the development of one seed into a million different fashions.
1:12:31
SPEAKER_00: But this again is the logic of the infinite.
1:12:35
SPEAKER_00: Because the essence of the reality is immutable.
1:12:40
SPEAKER_00: Because the essence of the reality is immutably the same, it can assume securely these innumerable differences of form and character and movement.
1:12:52
SPEAKER_00: For even if they were multiplied a trillion fold, that would not affect the underlying immutability of the eternal identical.
1:13:04
SPEAKER_00: Because the self and spirit in things and beings is one everywhere, therefore nature can afford this luxury of infinite differentiation.
1:13:16
SPEAKER_00: If there were not this secure basis which brings it about that nothing changes, yet all changes, all her workings and creations would in this play collapse into disintegration and chaos.
1:13:32
SPEAKER_00: There would be nothing to hold her disparate movements and creations together.
1:13:39
SPEAKER_00: The immutability of the identical does not consist in a monotone of changeless sameness, incapable of variation.
1:13:50
SPEAKER_00: It consists in an unchangeableness of being which is capable of endless formation of being, but which no differentiation can destroy or impair or minimize.
1:14:05
SPEAKER_00: The self becomes insect and bird and beast and man.
1:14:12
SPEAKER_00: But it is always the same self through these mutations, because it is the one who manifests himself infinitely in endless diversity.
1:14:23
SPEAKER_00: Our surface reason is prone to conclude that the diversity may be unreal, an appearance only.
1:14:31
SPEAKER_00: But if we look a little deeper we shall see that a real diversity brings out the real unity, shows it as it were in its utmost capacity, reveals all that it can be and is in itself, delivers from its whiteness of hue the many tones of colour that are fused together there.
1:14:59
SPEAKER_00: Oneness finds itself infinitely in what seems to us to be a falling away from its oneness, but is really an inexhaustible, diverse display of unity.
1:15:16
SPEAKER_00: This is the miracle, the maya of the universe, yet perfectly logical, natural, and a matter of course to the self-vision and self-experience of the infinite.
1:15:32
SPEAKER_00: For the Maya of Brahman is at once the magic and logic of an infinitely variable oneness.
1:15:41
SPEAKER_00: If indeed there were only a rigid monotone of limited oneness and sameness, there would be no place for reason and logic.
1:15:51
SPEAKER_00: For logic consists in the right perceptions of relations.
1:15:56
SPEAKER_00: The highest work of reason is to find the one substance, the one law, the cementing latent reality, connecting and unifying the many, the different, the discordant and disparate.
1:16:12
SPEAKER_00: All universal existence moves between these two terms, a diversification of the one, a unification of the many and diverse, and that must be because the one and the many are fundamental aspects of the infinite.
1:16:31
SPEAKER_00: For what the divine self-knowledge and all knowledge brings out in its manifestation must be a truth of its being, and the play of that truth is its Leela.
1:16:48
SPEAKER_00: This then is the logic of the way of universal being of Brahman and the basic working of the reason, the infinite intelligence of Maya.
1:17:00
SPEAKER_00: As with the being of Brahman, so with its consciousness, Maya.
1:17:06
SPEAKER_00: It is not bound to a finite restriction of itself or to one state or law of its action.
1:17:13
SPEAKER_00: It can be many things simultaneously, have many coordinated movements which to the finite reason may seem contradictory.
1:17:24
SPEAKER_00: It is one but innumerably manifold, infinitely plastic, inexhaustibly adaptable.
1:17:33
SPEAKER_00: Maya is the supreme and universal consciousness and force of the eternal and infinite.
1:17:41
SPEAKER_00: And, being by its very nature unbound and illimitable, it can put forth many states of consciousness at a time, many dispositions of its force, without ceasing to be the same consciousness force forever.
1:18:00
SPEAKER_00: It is at once transcendental, universal and individual.
1:18:07
SPEAKER_00: It is the supreme supracosmic being that is aware of itself as all being, as the cosmic self, as the consciousness force of cosmic nature, and at the same time experiences itself as the individual being and consciousness in all existences.
1:18:28
SPEAKER_00: The individual consciousness can see itself as limited and separate, but can also put off its limitations and know itself as universal and again as transcendent of the universe.
1:18:42
SPEAKER_00: This is because there is in all these states or positions or underlying them the same triune consciousness in a triple status.
1:18:54
SPEAKER_00: There is then no difficulty in the one thus seeing or experiencing itself triply, whether from above, in the transcendent existence, or from between in the cosmic self, or from below in the individual conscious being.
1:19:15
SPEAKER_00: All that is necessary for this to be accepted as natural and logical is to admit that there can be different real statuses of consciousness of the one being, and that cannot be impossible for an existence which is free and infinite and cannot be tied to a single condition, a free power of self-variation must be natural to a consciousness that is infinite.
1:19:45
SPEAKER_00: If the possibility of a manifold status of consciousness is admitted, no limit can be put to the ways of its variation of status, provided the one is aware of itself simultaneously in all of them.
1:20:03
SPEAKER_00: For the one and the infinite must be thus universally conscious.
1:20:08
SPEAKER_00: The only difficulty which a farther consideration may solve is to understand the connections between a status of limited or constructed consciousness like ours, a status of ignorance, and the infinite self-knowledge and all knowledge.
1:20:30
SPEAKER_00: A second possibility of the infinite consciousness that must be admitted is its power of self-limitation or secondary self-formation into a subordinate movement within the integral, illimitable consciousness and knowledge, for that is a necessary consequence of the power of self-determination of the infinite.
1:20:56
SPEAKER_00: Each self-determination of the self-being must have its own awareness of its self-truth and its self nature.
1:21:06
SPEAKER_00: Or if we prefer so to put it, the being in that determination must be so self-aware.
1:21:15
SPEAKER_00: Spiritual individuality means that each individual self or spirit is a center of self vision and all vision.
1:21:25
SPEAKER_00: The circumference, the boundless circumference, as we may say, of this vision may be the same for all.
1:21:34
SPEAKER_00: But the center may be different, not located as in a spatial point, in a spatial circle, but a psychological center related with others through a coexistence of the diversely conscious many in the universal being.
1:21:54
SPEAKER_00: Each being in a world will see the same world, but see it from its own self being, according to its own way of self-nature, for each will manifest its own truth of the infinite, its own way of self-determination and of meeting the cosmic determinations, its vision by the law of unity in variety will no doubt be fundamentally the same as that of others.
1:22:26
SPEAKER_00: But it will still develop its own differentiation.
1:22:30
SPEAKER_00: As we see all human beings conscious in the one human way of the same cosmic things, yet always with an individual difference.
1:22:42
SPEAKER_00: This self-limitation would be not fundamental, but an individual specialization of a common universality or totality.
1:22:53
SPEAKER_00: The spiritual individual would act from his own center of the one truth and according to his self nature, but on a common basis and not with any blindness to other self and other nature.
1:23:10
SPEAKER_00: It would be consciousness limiting its action with full knowledge, not a movement of ignorance, but apart from this individualizing self-limitation, they must also be in the consciousness of the infinite, a power of cosmic limitation.
1:23:28
SPEAKER_00: It must be able to limit its action so as to base a given world or universe and to keep it in its own order, harmony, self-building, for the creation of a universe necessitates a special determination of the infinite consciousness to preside over that world and a holding back of all that is not needed for that movement.
1:23:55
SPEAKER_00: In the same way, the putting forth of an independent action of some power like mind, life, or matter must have as its support a similar principle of self-limitation.
1:24:09
SPEAKER_00: It cannot be said that such a movement must be impossible for the infinite, because it is illimitable.
1:24:17
SPEAKER_00: On the contrary, this must be one of its many powers, for its powers too are illimitable.
1:24:24
SPEAKER_00: But this also, like other self-determinations, other finite buildings, would not be a separation or a real division, for all the infinite consciousness would be around and behind it and supporting it, and the special movement itself would be intrinsically aware not only of itself, but in essence of all that was behind it.
1:24:51
SPEAKER_00: This would be so inevitably in the integral consciousness of the infinite.
1:24:57
SPEAKER_00: But we can suppose also that an intrinsic, though not an active awareness of this kind, demarcating itself, yet indivisible, might be there too in the total self-consciousness of the movement of the finite.
1:25:15
SPEAKER_00: This much cosmic or individual conscious self-limitation would evidently be possible to the infinite and can be accepted by a larger reason as one of its spiritual possibilities.
1:25:29
SPEAKER_00: But so far on this basis, any division or ignorant separation or binding and blinding limitation such as is apparent in our own consciousness would be unaccountable.
1:25:47
SPEAKER_00: But a third power or possibility of the infinite consciousness can be admitted.
1:25:53
SPEAKER_00: Its power of self-absorption, of plunging into itself, into a state in which self-awareness exists, but not as knowledge and not as all knowledge.
1:26:07
SPEAKER_00: The all would then be involved in a pure self-awareness, and knowledge and the inner consciousness itself would be lost in pure being.
1:26:19
SPEAKER_00: This is luminously the state which we call the superconscience in an absolute sense, although most of what we call superconscient is in reality not that, but only a higher, conscient something that is conscious to itself and only superconscious to our own limited level of awareness.
1:26:43
SPEAKER_00: This self-absorption, this trance of infinity is again no longer luminously but darkly, the state which we call the inconscient.
1:26:55
SPEAKER_00: For the being of the infinite is there, though by its appearance of inconscience, it seems to us rather to be an infinite non-being.
1:27:06
SPEAKER_00: A self-oblivious, intrinsic consciousness and force are there in that apparent non-being.
1:27:14
SPEAKER_00: For by the energy of the inconscient, an ordered world is created.
1:27:21
SPEAKER_00: It is created in a trance of self-absorption, the force acting automatically and with an apparent blindness as in a trance, but still with the inevitability and power of truth of the infinite.
1:27:38
SPEAKER_00: If we take a step further and admit that a special or a restricted and partial action of self-absorption is possible to the infinite, an action not always of its infinity, concentrated limitlessly in itself, but confined to a special status or to an infinite Individual or cosmic self-determination, we have then the explanation of the concentrated condition or status by which it becomes aware separately of one aspect of its being.
1:28:16
SPEAKER_00: There can then be a fundamental double status such as that of the nirguna, standing back from the saguna, and absorbed in its own purity and immobility, while the rest is held back behind a veil and not admitted within the and not admitted within that special status.
1:28:41
SPEAKER_00: In the same way we could account for the status of consciousness aware of one field of being or one movement of it, while the awareness of all the rest would be held behind and veiled or, as it were, cut off by a waking trance of dynamic concentration from the specialized or limited awareness occupied only with its own field of movement.
1:29:13
SPEAKER_00: The totality of the infinite consciousness would be there not abolished, recoverable, but not evidently active, active only by implication, by inherence or by the instrumentality of the limited awareness, not in its own manifest power and presence.
1:29:38
SPEAKER_00: It will be evident that all these three powers can be accepted as possible to the dynamics of the infinite consciousness, and it is by considering the many ways in which they can work that we may get a clue to the operations of Maya.
1:29:56
SPEAKER_00: This throws light incidentally on the opposition made by our minds between pure consciousness, pure existence, pure bliss, and the abundant activity, the manifold application, the endless vicissitudes of being, consciousness, and delight of being that take place in the universe.
1:30:20
SPEAKER_00: In the state of pure consciousness and pure being, we are aware of that only, simple, immutable, self-existent, without form or object, and we feel that to be alone true and real.
1:30:39
SPEAKER_00: In the other or dynamic state, we feel its dynamism to be perfectly true and natural, and are even capable of thinking that no such experience as that of pure consciousness is possible.
1:30:57
SPEAKER_00: Yet it is now evident that to the infinite consciousness, both the static and the dynamic are possible.
1:31:06
SPEAKER_00: These are two of its statuses, and both can be present simultaneously in the universal awareness.
1:31:15
SPEAKER_00: The one witnessing the other and supporting it, or not looking at it and yet automatically supporting it.
1:31:24
SPEAKER_00: Or the silence and status may be there, penetrating the activity or throwing it up like an ocean immobile below, throwing up a mobility of waves on its surface.
1:31:39
SPEAKER_00: This is also the reason why it is possible for us in certain conditions of our being to be aware of several different states of consciousness at the same time.
1:31:53
SPEAKER_00: There is a state of being experienced in yoga in which we become a double consciousness, one on the surface, small, active, ignorant, swayed by thoughts and feelings, grief and joy, and all kinds of reactions, the other within, calm, vast, equal, observing the surface being with an immovable detachment or indulgence, or it may be acting upon its agitation to quiet, enlarge, transform it.
1:32:31
SPEAKER_00: So too we can rise to a consciousness above and observe the various parts of our being, inner and outer, mental, vital and physical, and the subconscient below all and act upon one or other or the whole from that higher status.
1:32:53
SPEAKER_00: It is possible also to go down from that height or from any height into any of these lower states and take its limited light or its obscurity as our place of working, while the rest that we are is either temporarily put away or put behind, or else kept as a field of reference from which we can get support, sanction or light, and influence, or as a status into which we can ascend or recede, and from it observe the inferior movements.
1:33:32
SPEAKER_00: Or we can plunge into trance, get within ourselves, and be conscious there while all outward things are excluded.
1:33:42
SPEAKER_00: Or we can go beyond even this inner awareness and lose ourselves in some deeper other consciousness or some high superconscience.
1:33:54
SPEAKER_00: There is also a pervading equal consciousness into which we can enter and see all ourselves with one enveloping glance or omnipresent awareness, one and indivisible.
1:34:11
SPEAKER_00: All this which looks strange and abnormal or may seem fantastic to the surface reason acquainted only with our normal status of limited ignorance and its movements, dividing from our inner, higher, and total reality, becomes easily intelligible and admissible in the light of the larger reason and logic of the infinite, or by the admission of the greater illimitable powers of the self, the spirit in us which is of one essence with the infinite.
1:34:52
SPEAKER_00: Brahman, the reality, is the self existent absolute and Maya is the consciousness and force of this self existence.
1:35:03
SPEAKER_00: But with regard to the universe, Brahman appears as the self of all existence, Atman, the cosmic self, but also as the supreme self transcendent of its own cosmicity and at the same time individual universal in each being.
1:35:26
SPEAKER_00: Maya can then be seen as the self power Atma Shakti of the Atman.
1:35:35
SPEAKER_00: It is true that when we first become aware of this aspect, it is usually in a silence of the whole being, or at the least in a silence within, which draws back or stands away from the surface action.
1:35:56
SPEAKER_00: This self is then felt as a status in silence, an immobile, immutable being, self-existent, pervading the whole universe, omnipresent in all, but not dynamic or active, aloof from the ever-mobile energy of Maya.
1:36:20
SPEAKER_00: In the same way, we can become aware of it as the Purusha, separate from Prakriti, the conscious being standing back from the activities of nature.
1:36:35
SPEAKER_00: But this is an exclusive concentration which limits itself to a spiritual status and puts away from it all activity in order to realize the freedom of Brahman, the self-existent reality, from all limitation by its own action and manifestation.
1:36:59
SPEAKER_00: It is an essential realization, but not the total realization.
1:37:06
SPEAKER_00: For we can see that the conscious power, the Shakti that acts and creates, is not other than the Maya or all knowledge of Brahman.
1:37:19
SPEAKER_00: It is the power of the self.
1:37:22
SPEAKER_00: Prakriti is the working of the Purusha, conscious being, active by its own nature.
1:37:30
SPEAKER_00: The duality then of soul and world energy, silent self and the creative power of the spirit is not really something dual and separate.
1:37:43
SPEAKER_00: It is bayun.
1:37:46
SPEAKER_00: As we cannot separate fire and the power of fire, it has been said, so we cannot separate the divine reality and its consciousness force, Chit Shakti.
1:38:00
SPEAKER_00: This first realization of self as something intensely silent and purely static is not the whole truth of it.
1:38:11
SPEAKER_00: There can also be a realization of self in its power.
1:38:17
SPEAKER_00: Self as the condition of world activity and world existence.
1:38:23
SPEAKER_00: However, the self is a fundamental aspect of Brahman, but with a certain stress on its impersonality.
1:38:32
SPEAKER_00: Therefore, the power of the self has the appearance of a force that acts automatically, with the self sustaining it.
1:38:42
SPEAKER_00: Witness and support an originator, an enjoyer of its activities, but not involved in them for a moment.
1:38:52
SPEAKER_00: As soon as we become aware of the self, we are conscious of it as eternal, unborn, unembodied, uninvolved in its workings.
1:39:04
SPEAKER_00: It can be felt within the form of being, but also as enveloping it, as above it, surveying its embodiment from above.
1:39:17
SPEAKER_00: It is omnipresent, the same in everything, infinite and pure and intangible forever.
1:39:27
SPEAKER_00: This self can be experienced as the self of the individual, the self of the thinker, doer, enjoyer, but even so it always has this greater character.
1:39:43
SPEAKER_00: Its individuality is at the same time a vast universality, or very readily passes into that, and the next step to that is a sheer transcendence or a complete and ineffable passing into the absolute.
1:40:04
SPEAKER_00: The self is that aspect of the Brahman in which it is intimately felt as at once individual, cosmic, transcendent of the universe.
1:40:18
SPEAKER_00: The realization of the self is the straight and swift way towards individual liberation, a static universality, a nature transcendence.
1:40:32
SPEAKER_00: At the same time, there is a realization of self in which it is felt not only sustaining and pervading and enveloping all things, but constituting everything and identified in a free identity with all its becomings in nature.
1:40:53
SPEAKER_00: Even so, freedom and impersonality are always the character of the self.
1:41:00
SPEAKER_00: There is no appearance of subjection to the workings of its own power in the universe, such as the apparent subjection of the Purusha to Prakriti.
1:41:15
SPEAKER_00: To realize the self is to realize the eternal freedom of the spirit.
1:41:24
SPEAKER_00: The conscious being, Purusha, is the self as originator, witness, support and lord and enjoyer of the forms and works of nature.
1:41:38
SPEAKER_00: As the aspect of self is in its essential character transcendental, even when involved and identified with its universal and individual becomings, so the Purusha aspect is characteristically universal individual and intimately connected with nature even when separated from her.
1:42:05
SPEAKER_00: For this conscious spirit, while retaining its impersonality and eternity, its universality, puts on at the same time a more personal aspect.
1:42:19
SPEAKER_00: It is the impersonal personal being in nature, from whom it is not altogether detached, for it is always coupled with her.
1:42:31
SPEAKER_00: Nature acts for the Purusha and by its sanction for its will and pleasure.
1:42:40
SPEAKER_00: The conscious being imparts its consciousness to the energy we call nature, receives in that consciousness her workings as in a mirror, accepts the forms which she, the executive cosmic force, creates and imposes on it, gives or withdraws its sanction from her movements.
1:43:06
SPEAKER_00: The experience of Purusha Prakriti, the spirit or conscious being in its relations to nature, is of immense pragmatic importance, for on these relations the whole play of the consciousness depends in the embodied being.
1:43:30
SPEAKER_00: If the Purusha in us is passive and allows nature to act, accepting all she imposes on him, giving a constant automatic sanction, then the soul in mind, life, body, the mental, vital, physical being in us becomes subject to our nature, ruled by its formation, driven by its activities.
1:44:00
SPEAKER_00: That is the normal state of our ignorance.
1:44:05
SPEAKER_00: If the Purusha in us becomes aware of itself as the witness and stands back from nature, that is the first step to the soul's freedom, for it becomes detached, and it is possible then to know nature and her processes, and in all independence, since we are no longer involved in her works, to accept or not to accept, to make the sanction no longer automatic, but free and effective.
1:44:40
SPEAKER_00: We can choose what she shall do or not do in us, or we can stand back altogether from her works and withdraw into the self's spiritual silence.
1:44:55
SPEAKER_00: Or we can reject her present formations and rise to a spiritual level of existence and from there recreate our existence.
1:45:07
SPEAKER_00: The Purusha can cease to be subject anisha and become lord of its nature, Ishwara.
1:45:17
SPEAKER_00: In the philosophy of the Sankyas, we find develop most thoroughly the metaphysical idea of Purusha Prakriti.
1:45:29
SPEAKER_00: These two are eternally separate entities, but in relation to each other.
1:45:37
SPEAKER_00: Prakriti is nature power, an executive power.
1:45:41
SPEAKER_00: It is energy apart from consciousness, for consciousness belongs to the Purusha.
1:45:48
SPEAKER_00: Prakriti without Purusha is inert, mechanical, inconscient.
1:45:54
SPEAKER_00: Prakriti develops as its formal self and basis of action primal matter, and in it manifests life and sense and mind and intelligence.
1:46:10
SPEAKER_00: But intelligence too, since it is part of nature and its product in primal matter, is also inert, mechanical, inconscient, a conception which sheds a certain light on the order and perfectly related workings of the inconscient in the material universe.
1:46:35
SPEAKER_00: It is the light of the soul, the spirit that is imparted to the mechanical workings of sense, mind, and intelligence.
1:46:44
SPEAKER_00: They become conscious by its consciousness, even as they become active only by the ascent of the spirit.
1:46:55
SPEAKER_00: The Purusha becomes free by drawing back from Prakriti.
1:46:59
SPEAKER_00: It becomes master of her by refusing to be involved in matter.
1:47:06
SPEAKER_00: Nature acts by three principles, modes or qualities of its stuff and its action, which in us become the fundamental modes of our psychological and physical substance and its workings, the principle of inertia, the principle of kindnesses, and the principle of balance, light and harmony.
1:47:33
SPEAKER_00: When these are in unequal motion, her action takes place.
1:47:38
SPEAKER_00: When they fall into equilibrium, she passes into quiescence.
1:47:45
SPEAKER_00: Purusha, conscious being is plural, not one and single, while nature is one.
1:47:53
SPEAKER_00: It would seem to follow that whatever principle of oneness we find in existence belongs to nature, but each soul is independent and unique, soul to itself and separate, whether in its enjoyment of nature or its liberation from nature.
1:48:17
SPEAKER_00: All these positions of the Sankhya we find to be perfectly valid in experience when we come into direct inner contact with the realities of individual soul and universal nature.
1:48:33
SPEAKER_00: But they are pragmatic truths and we are not bound to accept them as the whole or the fundamental truth either of self or of nature.
1:48:47
SPEAKER_00: Prakriti presents itself as an inconscient energy in the material world, but as the scale of consciousness rises, she reveals herself more and more as a conscious force, and we perceive that even her inconscience concealed a secret consciousness.
1:49:11
SPEAKER_00: So too conscious being is many in its individual souls, but in itself we can experience it as one in all, and one in its own essential existence.
1:49:27
SPEAKER_00: Moreover, the experience of soul and nature as dual is true, but the experience of their unity has also its validity.
1:49:40
SPEAKER_00: If nature or energy is able to impose its forms and workings on being, it can only be because it is nature or energy of being, and so the being can accept them as its own.
1:49:57
SPEAKER_00: If the being can become lord, Of nature.
1:50:01
SPEAKER_00: It must be because it is its own nature, which it had passively watched doing its work, but can control and master.
1:50:13
SPEAKER_00: Even in its passivity, its consent is necessary to the action of prakriti.
1:50:20
SPEAKER_00: And this relation shows sufficiently that the two are not alien to each other.
1:50:26
SPEAKER_00: The duality is a position taken up, a double status accepted for the operations of the self-manifestation of the being.
1:50:38
SPEAKER_00: But there is no eternal and fundamental separateness and dualism of being and its consciousness force, of the soul and nature.
1:50:53
SPEAKER_00: It is the reality, the self, that takes the position of the conscious being, regarding and accepting or ruling the works of its own nature.
1:51:07
SPEAKER_00: An apparent duality is created in order that there may be a free action of nature, working itself out with the support of the spirit, and again a free and masterful action of the spirit controlling and working out nature.
1:51:30
SPEAKER_00: This duality is also necessary that the spirit may be at any time at liberty to draw back from any formation of its nature and dissolve all formation, or accept or enforce a new or a higher formation.
1:51:53
SPEAKER_00: These are very evident possibilities of the spirit in its dealings with its own force, and they can be observed and verified in our own experience.
1:52:07
SPEAKER_00: They are logical results of the powers of the infinite consciousness, powers which we have seen to be native to its infinity.
1:52:19
SPEAKER_00: The Purusha aspect and the Prakriti aspect go always together, and whatever status nature or consciousness force in action assumes, manifests or develops, there is a corresponding status of the spirit.
1:52:40
SPEAKER_00: In its supreme status the spirit is the supreme conscious being, Purushuttama, and the consciousness force is his supreme nature, Para Prakriti.
1:52:54
SPEAKER_00: In each status of the gradations of nature, the spirit takes a poise of its being proper to that gradation.
1:53:05
SPEAKER_00: In mind nature it becomes the mental being.
1:53:09
SPEAKER_00: In life nature it becomes the vital being.
1:53:14
SPEAKER_00: In nature of matter, it becomes the physical being.
1:53:18
SPEAKER_00: In supermind it becomes the being of knowledge.
1:53:23
SPEAKER_00: In the supreme spiritual status, it becomes the being of bliss and pure existence.
1:53:33
SPEAKER_00: In us, in the embodied individual, it stands behind all as the psychic entity, the inner self supporting the other formulations of our consciousness and spiritual existence.
1:53:50
SPEAKER_00: The Purusha individual in us is cosmic in the cosmos, transcendent in the transcendence.
1:54:00
SPEAKER_00: The identity with the self is apparent, but it is the self in its pure impersonal personal status of a spirit in things and beings.
1:54:14
SPEAKER_00: Impersonal because undifferentiated by personal quality, personal because it presides over the individualizations of self in each individual, which deals with the works of its consciousness force, its executive force of self nature, in whatever poise is necessary for that purpose.
1:54:41
SPEAKER_00: But it is evident that whatever the posture taken or relation formed in any individual nodus of Purusha Prakriti, the being is in a fundamental cosmic relation, lord or ruler of its nature.
1:55:00
SPEAKER_00: For even when it allows nature to have its own way with it, its consent is necessary to support her workings.
1:55:10
SPEAKER_00: This comes out in its fullest revelation in the third aspect of the reality, the divine being who is the master and creator of the universe.
1:55:24
SPEAKER_00: Here, the supreme person, the being in its transcendental and cosmic consciousness and force, comes to the front, omnipotent, omniscient, the controller of all energies, the conscious in all that is conscient or inconscient, the inhabitant of all souls and minds and hearts and bodies, the ruler or overruler of all works, the enjoyer of all delight, the creator who has built all things in his own being, the all person of whom all beings are personalities, the power from whom are all powers, the self, the spirit in all, by his being the father of all that is, in his consciousness force, the divine mother, the friend of all creatures, the all blissful and all beautiful, of whom beauty and joy are the revelation, the all beloved and all lover.
1:56:38
SPEAKER_00: In a certain sense, so seen and understood, this becomes the most comprehensive of the aspects of the reality, since here all are united in a single formulation, for the Ishwara is supracosmic as well as intracosmic.
1:56:59
SPEAKER_00: He is that which exceeds and inhabits and supports all individuality.
1:57:06
SPEAKER_00: He is the supreme and universal Brahman, the absolute, the supreme self, the supreme purusha.
1:57:16
SPEAKER_00: But very clearly this is not the personal god of popular religions, a being limited by his qualities, individual and separate from all others, for all such personal gods are only limited representations or names and divine personalities of the one Ishwara.
1:57:41
SPEAKER_00: Neither is this the Saguna Brahman, active and possessed of qualities, for that is only one side of the being of the Ishvara.
1:57:52
SPEAKER_00: The Nirguna, immobile and without qualities, is another aspect of his existence.
1:58:00
SPEAKER_00: Ishvara is Brahman, the reality, self spirit, revealed as possessor and enjoyer of his own self-existence, creator of the universe and one with it, pantheos, and yet superior to it, the eternal, the infinite, the ineffable, the divine transcendence.
1:58:28
SPEAKER_00: The sharp opposition made between personality and impersonality by our mental way of thinking is a creation of the mind based on the appearances of the material world.
1:58:42
SPEAKER_00: For here, interrestrial existence, the inconscient from which everything takes its origin, appears as something entirely impersonal.
1:58:55
SPEAKER_00: Nature, the inconscient energy, is entirely impersonal in her manifest essence and dealings.
1:59:04
SPEAKER_00: All forces wear this mask of impersonality.
1:59:08
SPEAKER_00: All qualities and powers, love and delight, and consciousness itself have this aspect.
1:59:17
SPEAKER_00: Personality makes its apparition as a creation of consciousness in an impersonal world.
1:59:25
SPEAKER_00: It is a limitation by a restricted formation of powers, qualities, habitual forces of the nature action, and imprisonment in a limited circle of self-experience which we have to transcend.
1:59:44
SPEAKER_00: To lose personality is necessary if we are to gain universality, still more necessary if we are to rise into the transcendence.
1:59:56
SPEAKER_00: But what we thus call personality is only a formation of superficial consciousness.
2:00:03
SPEAKER_00: Behind it is the person who takes on various personalities, who can have at the same time many personalities, but is himself one, real, eternal.
2:00:20
SPEAKER_00: If we look at things from a larger point of view, we might say that what is impersonal is only a power of the person.
2:00:31
SPEAKER_00: Existence itself has no meaning without an existent.
2:00:37
SPEAKER_00: Consciousness has no standing place if there is none who is conscious.
2:00:44
SPEAKER_00: Delight is useless and invalid without an enjoyer.
2:00:49
SPEAKER_00: Love can have no foundation or fulfillment if there is no lover.
2:00:55
SPEAKER_00: All power must be otios if there is not an almighty.
2:01:01
SPEAKER_00: For what we mean by person is conscious being.
2:01:06
SPEAKER_00: Even if this emerges here as a term or product of the inconscient, it is not that in reality, for it is the inconscient itself that is a term of the secret consciousness.
2:01:25
SPEAKER_00: What emerges is greater than that in which it emerges, as mind is greater than matter, soul than mind.
2:01:36
SPEAKER_00: Spirit, most secret of all, the supreme emergence, the last revelation, is the greatest of all, and spirit is the Purusha, the all person, the omnipresent conscious being.
2:01:54
SPEAKER_00: It is the mind's ignorance of this true person in us, its confusion of person with our experience of ego and limited personality, the misleading phenomenon of the emergence of limited consciousness and personality in an inconscient existence that have made us create an opposition between these two aspects of the reality.
2:02:22
SPEAKER_00: But in truth, there is no opposition.
2:02:26
SPEAKER_00: An eternal infinite self existence is the supreme reality.
2:02:33
SPEAKER_00: But the supreme transcendent eternal being, self and spirit, an infinite person, we may say, because his being is the essence and source of all personality, is the reality and meaning of self existence.
2:02:53
SPEAKER_00: So too the cosmic self, spirit, being, person, is the reality and meaning of cosmic existence.
2:03:03
SPEAKER_00: The same self, spirit, being or person manifesting its multiplicity is the reality and meaning of individual existence.
2:03:18
SPEAKER_00: If we admit the divine being, the supreme person and all person as the Ishwara, a difficulty arises in understanding his rule or government of world existence, because we immediately transfer to him our mental conceptions of a human ruler.
2:03:40
SPEAKER_00: We picture him as acting by the mind and mental will in an omnipotent arbitrary fashion upon a world on which he imposes his mental conceptions as laws, and we conceive of his will as a free caprice of his personality.
2:04:01
SPEAKER_00: But there is no need for the divine being to act by an arbitrary will or idea as an omnipotent yet ignorant human being.
2:04:13
SPEAKER_00: If such an omnipotence were possible, might do, for he is not limited by mind.
2:04:21
SPEAKER_00: He has an all consciousness in which he is aware of the truth of all things, and aware of his own all wisdom, working them out according to the truth that is in them, their significance, their possibility or necessity, the imperative selfness of their nature.
2:04:46
SPEAKER_00: The divine is free and not bound by laws of any making, but still he acts by laws and processes, because they are the expression of the truth of things, not their mechanical, mathematical or other outward truth alone, but the spiritual reality of what they are, what they have become and have yet to become, what they have it within themselves to realize.
2:05:18
SPEAKER_00: He is himself present in the working, but he also exceeds and can overrule it, for on one side nature works according to her limited complex of formulas, and is informed and supported in their execution by the divine presence.
2:05:39
SPEAKER_00: But on the other side there is an overseeing, a higher working and determination, even an intervention, free but not arbitrary, often appearing to us magical and miraculous because it proceeds and acts upon nature from a divine supernature.
2:06:04
SPEAKER_00: Nature here is a limited expression of that supernature and open to intervention or mutation by its light, its force, its influence.
2:06:19
SPEAKER_00: The mechanical, mathematical, automatic law of things is a fact, but within it there is a spiritual law of consciousness at work which gives to the mechanical steps of nature's forces an inner turn and value, a significant rightness, and a secretly conscious necessity, and above it, there is a spiritual freedom that knows and acts in the supreme and universal truth of the spirit.
2:06:55
SPEAKER_00: Our view of the divine government of the world or of the secret of its action is either incurably anthropomorphic or else incurably mechanical.
2:07:10
SPEAKER_00: Both the anthropomorphism and mechanism have their elements of truth, but they are only aside and aspect.
2:07:20
SPEAKER_00: And the real truth is that the world is governed by the one in all, and over all who is infinite in his consciousness, and it is according to the law and logic of an infinite consciousness that we ought to understand the significance and building and movement of the universe.
2:07:44
SPEAKER_00: If we regard this aspect of the one reality and put it in close connection with the other aspects, we can get a complete view of the relation between the eternal self-existence and the dynamics of the consciousness force by which it manifests the universe.
2:08:08
SPEAKER_00: If we place ourselves in a silent self-existence, immobile, static, inactive, it will appear that a conceptive consciousness force, Maya, able to effectuate all its conceptions, a dynamic consort of the self of silence, is doing everything.
2:08:31
SPEAKER_00: It takes its stand on the fixed, unmoving eternal status and casts the spiritual substance of being into all manner of forms and movements to which its passivity consents, or in which it takes its impartial pleasure, its immobile delight of creative and mobile existence.
2:08:59
SPEAKER_00: Whether this be a real or an illusory existence, that must be its substance and significance.
2:09:09
SPEAKER_00: Consciousness is at play with being, force of nature, does what it wills with existence and makes it the stuff of her creations.
2:09:21
SPEAKER_00: But secretly, the consent of the being must be there at every step to make this possible.
2:09:30
SPEAKER_00: There is an evident truth in this perception of things.
2:09:35
SPEAKER_00: It is what we see happening everywhere in us and around us.
2:09:41
SPEAKER_00: It is a truth of the universe and must answer to a fundamental truth aspect of the absolute.
2:09:50
SPEAKER_00: But when we step back from the outer dynamic appearances of things, not into a witness silence, but into an inner dynamic participating experience of the spirit, we find that this consciousness force Maya Shakti is itself the power of the being, the self existent, the Ishvara.
2:10:18
SPEAKER_00: The being is Lord of her and of all things.
2:10:22
SPEAKER_00: We see him doing everything in his own sovereignty as the creator and ruler of his own manifestation.
2:10:32
SPEAKER_00: Or if he stands back and allows freedom of action to the forces of nature and her creatures, his sovereignty is still innate in the permission.
2:10:45
SPEAKER_00: At every step his tacit sanction, let it be so, the thastu is there, implicit, for otherwise nothing could be done or happen.
2:10:58
SPEAKER_00: Being and its consciousness force, spirit and nature cannot be fundamentally dual.
2:11:06
SPEAKER_00: What nature does is really done by the spirit.
2:11:11
SPEAKER_00: This too is a truth that becomes evident when we go behind the veil and feel the presence of a living reality which is everything and determines everything, is the all powerful and the all ruler.
2:11:29
SPEAKER_00: This too is a fundamental truth aspect of the absolute.
2:11:36
SPEAKER_00: Again, if we remain absorbed in the silence, the creative consciousness and her works disappear into the silence.
2:11:48
SPEAKER_00: Nature and the creation for us cease to exist or be real.
2:11:55
SPEAKER_00: On the other hand, if we look exclusively at the being, In its aspect of the sole existent person and ruler.
2:12:06
SPEAKER_00: The power or Shakti by which he does all things disappears into his uniqueness or becomes an attribute of his cosmic personality.
2:12:19
SPEAKER_00: The absolute monarchy of the one being becomes our perception of the universe.
2:12:26
SPEAKER_00: Both these experiences create many difficulties for the mind due to its non-perception of the reality of the self power, whether in quiescence or in action, or to a too exclusively negative experience of the self or to the too anthropomorphic character of our conceptions attached to the supreme being as ruler.
2:12:58
SPEAKER_00: It is evident that we are looking at an infinite of which the self-power is capable of many movements, all of them valid.
2:13:10
SPEAKER_00: If we look again more largely and take account of both the impersonal and the personal truth of things as one truth, if in that light, the light of personality in impersonality, we see the bayun aspect of self and self power.
2:13:31
SPEAKER_00: Then in the person aspect a dual person emerges.
2:13:37
SPEAKER_00: We see the bayun aspect of self and self power.
2:13:42
SPEAKER_00: Then in the person aspect a dual person emerges.
2:13:48
SPEAKER_00: Ishwara Shakti, the divine self and creator, and the divine mother and creatrix of the universe.
2:13:59
SPEAKER_00: There becomes apparent to us the mystery of the masculine and feminine cosmic principles whose play and interaction are necessary for all creation.
2:14:12
SPEAKER_00: In the superconscient truth of the self-existence, these two are fused and implied in each other, one and indistinguishable.
2:14:24
SPEAKER_00: But in the spiritual pragmatic truth of the dynamism of the universe, they emerge and become active.
2:14:33
SPEAKER_00: The divine mother energy as the universal creatrix, Maya, Paraprakriti, Chit Shakti, manifests the cosmic self and Ishvara and her own self-power as a dual principle.
2:14:51
SPEAKER_00: It is through her that the being, the self, the Ishwara, acts, and he does nothing except by her.
2:15:01
SPEAKER_00: Though his will is implicit in her, it is she who works out all as the supreme consciousness force who holds all souls and beings within her and as executive nature.
2:15:17
SPEAKER_00: All exists and acts according to nature.
2:15:21
SPEAKER_00: All is the consciousness force manifesting and playing with the being in millions of forms and movements into which she casts his existence.
2:15:34
SPEAKER_00: If we draw back from her workings, then all can fall into quiesence, and we can enter into the silence, because she consents to cease from her dynamic activity.
2:15:50
SPEAKER_00: But it is in her quiesence and silence that we are quiesent and cease.
2:15:57
SPEAKER_00: If we would affirm our independence of nature, she reveals to us the supreme and omnipresent power of the Ishwara and ourselves as beings of his being.
2:16:12
SPEAKER_00: But that power is herself, and we are that in her supernature.
2:16:19
SPEAKER_00: If we would realize a higher formation or status of being, then it is still through her, through the divine Shakti, the consciousness force of the spirit, that it has to be done.
2:16:35
SPEAKER_00: Our surrender must be to the divine being through the divine mother, for it is towards or into the supreme nature that our ascension has to take place, and it can only be done by the supramental Shakti taking up our mentality and transforming it into her supramentality.
2:17:01
SPEAKER_00: Thus we see that there is no contradiction or incompatibility between these three aspects of existence, or between them in their eternal status and the three modes of its dynamis working in the universe.
2:17:22
SPEAKER_00: One being, one reality as self bases, supports, informs as Purusha or conscious being experiences, as Ishvara wills, governs, and possesses its world of manifestation, created and kept in motion and action by its own consciousness force or self power.
2:17:48
SPEAKER_00: Maya, prakriti, shakti.
2:17:55
SPEAKER_00: A certain difficulty arises for our mind in reconciling these different faces or fronts of the one self and spirit, because we are obliged to use abstract conceptions and defining words and ideas for something that is not abstract, something that is spiritually living and intensely real.
2:18:21
SPEAKER_00: Our abstractions get fixed into differentiating concepts with sharp lines between them, but the reality is not of that nature.
2:18:33
SPEAKER_00: Its aspects are many, but shade off into each other.
2:18:39
SPEAKER_00: Its truths could only be rendered by ideas and images metaphysical, and yet living in concrete, images which might be taken by the pure reason as figures and symbols, but are more than that and mean more to the intuitive vision and feeling, for they are realities of a dynamic spiritual experience.
2:19:09
SPEAKER_00: The impersonal truth of things can be rendered into the abstract formulas of the pure reason.
2:19:18
SPEAKER_00: But there is another side of truth which belongs to the spiritual or mystic vision, and without that inner vision of realities, the abstract formulation of them is insufficiently alive, incomplete.
2:19:36
SPEAKER_00: The mystery of things is the true truth of things.
2:19:41
SPEAKER_00: The intellectual presentation is only truth in representation, in abstract symbols, as if in a cubist art of thought speech, in geometric figure.
2:19:55
SPEAKER_00: It is necessary in a philosophic inquiry to confine oneself mostly to this intellectual presentation, but it is as well to remember that this is only the abstraction of the truth, and to seize it completely or express it completely, there is needed a concrete experience and a more living and full bodied language.
2:20:25
SPEAKER_00: Here it becomes opportune to see how in this aspect of the reality we must regard the relation we have discovered between the one and the many.
2:20:39
SPEAKER_00: This amounts to a determination of the true connection between the individual and the divine being, between the soul and the ishvara.
2:20:50
SPEAKER_00: In the normal theistic conception, the many are created by God, made by him as a potter might make a vessel, they are dependent on him as are creatures on their creator.
2:21:05
SPEAKER_00: But in this larger view of the Ishwara, the many are themselves the divine one in their inmost reality, individual selves of the supreme and universal self-existence, eternal as he is eternal, but eternal in his being.
2:21:26
SPEAKER_00: Our material existence is indeed a creation of nature, but the soul is an immortal portion of the divinity, and behind it is the divine self in the natural creature.
2:21:42
SPEAKER_00: Still, the one is the fundamental truth of existence.
2:21:47
SPEAKER_00: The many exist by the one, and there is therefore an entire dependence of the manifested being on the Ishvara.
2:21:59
SPEAKER_00: This dependence is concealed by the separative ignorance of the ego, which strives to exist in its own right.
2:22:10
SPEAKER_00: Although at every step it is evidently dependent on the cosmic power that created it, moved by it, a part of its cosmic being in action.
2:22:23
SPEAKER_00: This effort of the ego is clearly a misprision, an erroneous reflection of the truth of the self-existence that is within us.
2:22:35
SPEAKER_00: It is true that there is something in us, not in the ego, but in the self and inmost being that surpasses cosmic nature and belongs to the transcendence.
2:22:49
SPEAKER_00: But this too finds itself independent of nature only by dependence on a higher reality.
2:22:58
SPEAKER_00: It is through self-giving or surrender of soul and nature to the divine being that we can attain to our highest self and supreme reality.
2:23:10
SPEAKER_00: For it is the divine being who is that highest self and that supreme reality, and we are self-existent and eternal only in his eternity and by his self-existence.
2:23:25
SPEAKER_00: This dependence is not contradictory of the identity, but is itself the door to the realization of the identity.
2:23:37
SPEAKER_00: So that here again we meet that phenomenon of duality, expressing unity, proceeding from unity, and opening back into unity, which is the constant secret and fundamental operation of the universe.
2:23:56
SPEAKER_00: It is this truth of the consciousness of the infinite that creates the possibility of all relations between the many and the one, among which the realization of oneness by the mind, the presence of oneness in the heart, the existence of oneness in all the members, is a highest peak.
2:24:21
SPEAKER_00: And yet it does not annul but confirms all the other personal relations and gives them their fullness, their complete delight, their entire significance.
2:24:35
SPEAKER_00: This too is the magic, but also the logic of the infinite.
2:24:41
SPEAKER_00: One problem still remains to be solved, and it can be solved on the same basis.
2:24:48
SPEAKER_00: It is the problem of the opposition between the non-manifest and the manifestation.
2:24:56
SPEAKER_00: For it might be said that all that has been advanced hitherto may be true of the manifestation.
2:25:05
SPEAKER_00: But the manifestation is a reality of an inferior order, a partial movement derived from the non-manifest reality, and when we enter into that which is supremely real, these truths of the universe cease to have any validity.
2:25:26
SPEAKER_00: The non-manifest is the timeless, the utterly eternal, an irreducible absolute self-existence to which the manifestation and its limitations can give no clue or only a clue that by its insufficiency is illusory and deceptive.
2:25:50
SPEAKER_00: This raises the problem of the relation of time to the timeless spirit, for we have supposed on the contrary that what is in unmanifestation, in the timeless eternal, is manifested in time eternity.
2:26:09
SPEAKER_00: If that is so, if the temporal is an expression of the eternal, then however different the conditions, however partial the expression, yet what is fundamental in the time expression must be in some way pre existent in the transcendence and drawn from the timeless reality.
2:26:35
SPEAKER_00: For if not, these fundamentals must come into it direct from an absolute which is other than time or timelessness, and the timeless spirit must be a supreme spiritual negation, an indeterminable basing the absolute freedom from limitation by what is formulated in time.
2:27:01
SPEAKER_00: It must be the negative to the time positive, in the same relation to it as the nirguna to the saguna.
2:27:10
SPEAKER_00: But in fact, what we mean by the timeless is a spiritual status of existence not subject to the time movement or to the successive or the relative time experience of a past, present and future.
2:27:30
SPEAKER_00: The timeless spirit is not necessarily a blank.
2:27:35
SPEAKER_00: It may hold all in itself, but in essence, without reference to time or form or relation or circumstance, perhaps in an eternal unity.
2:27:50
SPEAKER_00: Eternity is the common term between time and the timeless spirit.
2:27:55
SPEAKER_00: What is in the timeless unmanifested, implied, essential, appears in time in movement, or at least in design and relation, in result and circumstance.
2:28:10
SPEAKER_00: These two then are the same eternity or the same eternal in a double status.
2:28:18
SPEAKER_00: They are a twofold status of being and consciousness, one an eternity of immobile status, the other an eternity of motion in status.
2:28:34
SPEAKER_00: The original status is that of the reality timeless and spaceless.
2:28:41
SPEAKER_00: Space and time would be the same reality self-extended to contain the deployment of what was within it.
2:28:51
SPEAKER_00: The difference would be, as in all the other oppositions, the spirit looking at itself in essence and principle of being, and the same spirit looking at itself in the dynamism of its essence and principle.
2:29:12
SPEAKER_00: Space and time are our names for this self-extension of the one reality.
2:29:19
SPEAKER_00: We are apt to see space as a static extension in which all things stand or move together in a fixed order.
2:29:30
SPEAKER_00: We see time as a mobile extension which is measured by movement and event.
2:29:38
SPEAKER_00: Space then would be Brahman in self extended status.
2:29:43
SPEAKER_00: Time would be Brahman in self extended movement.
2:29:49
SPEAKER_00: But this may be only a first view and inaccurate.
2:29:55
SPEAKER_00: Space may be really a constant mobile.
2:30:00
SPEAKER_00: The constancy and the persistent time relation of things in it creating the sense of stability of space, the mobility creating the sense of time movement in stable space.
2:30:16
SPEAKER_00: Or again, space would be Brahman extended for the holding together of forms and objects.
2:30:25
SPEAKER_00: Time would be Brahman self extended for the deployment of the movement of self power, carrying forms and objects.
2:30:36
SPEAKER_00: The two would then be a dual aspect of one and the same self extension of the cosmic eternal.
2:30:47
SPEAKER_00: A purely physical space might be regarded as in itself a property of matter.
2:30:56
SPEAKER_00: But matter is a creation of energy in movement.
2:31:00
SPEAKER_00: Space, therefore, in the material world, could be either a fundamental self-extension of material energy or its self-formed existence field, its representation of the inconscient infinity in which it is acting, a figure in which it accommodates the formulas and movements of its own action and self-creation.
2:31:31
SPEAKER_00: Time would be itself the course of that movement, or else an impression created by it, an impression of something that presents itself to us as regularly successive in its appearance.
2:31:48
SPEAKER_00: A division or a continuum upholding the continuity of movement and yet marking off its successions.
2:31:58
SPEAKER_00: Because the movement itself is regularly successive.
2:32:03
SPEAKER_00: Or else time could be a dimension of space necessary for the complete action of the energy, but not understood by us as such because it is seen by our conscious subjectivity as something itself subjective, felt by our mind, not perceived by our senses, and therefore not recognized as a dimension of space which has to us the appearance of a sense created or sense perceived, objective extension.
2:32:41
SPEAKER_00: In any case, if spirit is the fundamental reality, time and space must either be conceptive conditions under which the spirit sees its own movement of energy, or else they must be fundamental conditions of the spirit itself, which assumes a different appearance or status according to the status of consciousness in which they manifest.
2:33:10
SPEAKER_00: In other words, there is a different time and space for each status of our consciousness and even different movements of time and space within each status.
2:33:24
SPEAKER_00: But all would be renderings of a fundamental spiritual reality of time space.
2:33:31
SPEAKER_00: In fact, when we go behind physical space, we become aware of an extension on which all this movement is based, and this extension is spiritual and not material.
2:33:46
SPEAKER_00: It is self or spirit containing all action of its own energy.
2:33:54
SPEAKER_00: This origin or basic reality of space begins to become apparent.
2:34:00
SPEAKER_00: apparent when we draw back from the physical.
2:34:04
SPEAKER_00: For then we become aware of a subjective space extension in which mind itself lives and moves and which is other than physical space time.
2:34:17
SPEAKER_00: And yet there is an interpenetration, for our mind can move in its own space in such a way as to effectuate a movement also in space of matter or act upon something distant in space of matter.
2:34:37
SPEAKER_00: In a still deeper condition of consciousness we are aware of a pure spiritual space.
2:34:46
SPEAKER_00: In this awareness time may no longer seem to exist because all movement ceases or if there is a movement or happening it can take place independent of any observable time sequence.
2:35:06
SPEAKER_00: If we go behind time by a similar inward motion, drawing back from the physical and seeing it without being involved in it, we discover that time observation and time movement are relative.
2:35:23
SPEAKER_00: But time itself is real and eternal.
2:35:27
SPEAKER_00: Time observation depends not only on the measures used, but on the consciousness and the position of the observer.
2:35:37
SPEAKER_00: Moreover, each state of consciousness has a different time relation.
2:35:44
SPEAKER_00: Time in mind consciousness and mind space has not the same sense and measure of its movements as in physical space.
2:35:55
SPEAKER_00: It moves there quickly or slowly according to the state of the consciousness.
2:36:01
SPEAKER_00: Each state of consciousness has its own time and yet there can be relations of time between them.
2:36:11
SPEAKER_00: And when we go behind the physical surface we find several different time statuses and time movements coexistent in the same consciousness.
2:36:23
SPEAKER_00: This is evident in dream time where a long sequence of happenings can occur in a period which corresponds to a second or a few seconds of physical time.
2:36:38
SPEAKER_00: There is then a certain relation between different time statuses but no ascertainable correspondence of measure.
2:36:51
SPEAKER_00: It would seem as if time has no objective reality, but depends on whatever conditions may be established by action of consciousness in its relation to status and motion of being time would seem to be purely subjective but in fact space also would appear by the mutual relation of mind space and matter space to be subjective.
2:37:19
SPEAKER_00: In other words, both are the original spiritual extension but it is rendered by mind in its purity into a subjective mind field and by sense mind into an objective field of sense perception.
2:37:36
SPEAKER_00: Subjectivity and objectivity are only two sides of one consciousness and the cardinal fact is that any given time or space or any given time space as a whole is a status of being in which there is a movement of the consciousness and force of the being, a movement that creates or manifests events and happenings.
2:38:03
SPEAKER_00: It is the relation of the consciousness that sees and the force that formulates the happenings a relation inherent in the status which determines the sense of time and creates our awareness of time movement, time relation, time measure in its fundamental truth the original status of time behind all its variations is nothing else than the eternity of the eternal just as the fundamental truth of space the original sense of its reality is the infinity of the infinite the being can have three different states of its consciousness with regard to its own eternity the first is that in which there is the immobile status of the self in its essential existence, self absorbed or self-conscious, but in either case without development of consciousness in movement or happening.
2:39:15
SPEAKER_00: This is what we distinguish as its timeless eternity.
2:39:21
SPEAKER_00: The second is its whole consciousness of the successive relations of all things belonging to a destined or an actually proceeding manifestation in which what we call past, present and future stand together as if in a map or settled design or very much as an artist or painter or architect might hold all the details of his work viewed as a whole, intended or reviewed in his mind or arranged in a plan for execution.
2:40:01
SPEAKER_00: This is the stable status or simultaneous integrality of time.
2:40:08
SPEAKER_00: This seeing of time is not at all part of our normal awareness of events as they happen, though our view of the past, because it is already known and can be regarded in the whole, may put on something of this character.
2:40:26
SPEAKER_00: But we know that this consciousness exists because it is possible in an exceptional state to enter into it and see things from the viewpoint of this simultaneity of time vision.
2:40:42
SPEAKER_00: The third status is that of a processive movement of consciousness force and its successive working out of what has been seen by it in the static vision of the eternal this is the time movement.
2:41:01
SPEAKER_00: But it is in one and the same eternity that this triple status exists and the movement takes place.
2:41:11
SPEAKER_00: There are not really two eternities one an eternity of status another an eternity of movement but there are different statuses or positions taken by consciousness with regard to the one eternity for it can see the whole time development from outside or from above the movement.
2:41:37
SPEAKER_00: It can take a stable position within the movement and see the before and the after in a fixed, determined or destined succession or it can take instead a mobile position in the movement, itself move with it from moment to moment and see all that has happened receding back into the past and all that has to happen coming towards it from the future or else it may concentrate on the moment it occupies and see nothing but what is in that moment and immediately around or behind it.
2:42:28
SPEAKER_00: All these positions can be taken by the being of the infinite in a simultaneous vision or experience.
2:42:37
SPEAKER_00: It can see time from above and inside time, exceeding it and not within it.
2:42:44
SPEAKER_00: It can see the timeless develop the time movement without ceasing to be timeless.
2:42:51
SPEAKER_00: It can embrace the whole movement in a static and a dynamic vision and put out at the same time something of itself into the moment vision.
2:43:05
SPEAKER_00: This simultaneity may seem to the finite consciousness tied to the moment vision a magic of the infinite a magic of Maya to its own way of perception which needs to limit, to envisage one status only at a time in order to harmonize it would give a sense of confused and inconsistent unreality but to an infinite consciousness such an integral simultaneity of vision and experience would be perfectly logical and consistent.
2:43:48
SPEAKER_00: All could be elements of a whole vision capable of being closely related together in a harmonious arrangement, a multiplicity of view bringing out the unity of the thing seen, a diverse presentation of concomitant aspects of the one reality If there can be this simultaneous multiplicity of self presentation of one reality we see that there is no impossibility in the coexistence of a timeless eternal and a time eternity it would be the same eternity viewed by a dual self awareness and there could be no opposition between them it would be a correlation of two powers of the self awareness of the infinite and eternal reality a power of status and non manifestation a power of self effecting action and movement and manifestation.
2:44:58
SPEAKER_00: Their simultaneity however contradictory and difficult to reconcile it might seem to our finite surface seeing would be intrinsic and normal to the Maya or eternal self knowledge and all knowledge of Brahman, the eternal and infinite knowledge and wisdom power of the Ishwara, the consciousness force of the self existent Sachidananda