Chapter IX
The Release from the Ego
THE formation of
a mental and vital ego tied to the body-sense was the first great labour of the
cosmic Life in its progressive evolution; for this was the means it found for
creating out of matter a conscious individual. The dissolution of this limiting
ego is the one condition, the necessary means for this very same Life to arrive
at its divine fruition: for only so can the conscious individual find either his
transcendent self or his true Person. This double movement is usually
represented as a fall and a redemption or a creation and a destruction, – the
kindling of a light and its extinction or the formation first of a smaller
temporary and unreal self and a release from it into our true self's eternal
largeness. For human thought falls apart towards two opposite extremes: one,
mundane and pragmatic, regards the fulfilment and satisfaction of the mental,
vital and physical ego-sense individual or collective as the object of life and
looks no farther, while the other, spiritual, philosophic or religious, regards
the conquest of the ego in the interests of the soul, spirit or whatever be the
ultimate entity, as the one thing supremely worth doing. Even in the camp of the
ego there are two divergent attitudes which divide the mundane or materialist
theory of the universe. One tendency of this thought regards the mental ego as a
creation of our mentality which will be dissolved with the dissolution of mind
by the death of the body; the one abiding truth is eternal Nature working in the
race – this or another – and her purpose should be followed, not ours, – the
fulfilment of the race, the collective ego, and not that of the individual
should be the rule of life. Another trend of thought, more vitalistic in its tendencies, fixes on the
conscious ego as the supreme achievement of Nature, no matter how transitory,
ennobles it into a human representative of the Will-to-be and holds up its
greatness and satisfaction as the highest
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aim of our existence. In
the more numerous systems that take their stand on some kind of religious
thought or spiritual discipline there is a corresponding divergence. The Buddhist
denies the existence of a real self or ego, admits no universal or transcendent
Being. The Adwaitin declares the apparently individual soul to be none other
than the supreme Self and Brahman, its individuality an illusion; the putting
off of individual existence is the only true release. Other systems assert, in
flat contradiction of this view, the eternal persistence of the human soul; a
basis of multiple consciousness in the One or else a dependent but still
separate entity, it is constant, real, imperishable.
Amidst these
various and conflicting opinions the seeker of the Truth has to decide for
himself which shall be for him the Knowledge. But if our aim is a spiritual
release or a spiritual fulfilment, then the exceeding of this little mould of
ego is imperative. In human egoism and its satisfaction there can be no divine
culmination and deliverance. A certain purification from egoism is the
condition even of ethical progress and elevation, for social good and
perfection; much more is it indispensable for inner peace, purity and joy. But
a much more radical deliverance, not only from egoism but from ego-idea and
ego-sense, is needed if our aim is to raise human into divine nature.
Experience shows that, in proportion as we deliver ourselves from the limiting
mental and vital ego, we command a wider life, a larger existence, a higher
consciousness, a happier soul-state, even a greater knowledge, power and scope.
Even the aim which the most mundane philosophy pursues, the fulfilment,
perfection, satisfaction of the individual, is best assured not by satisfying
the narrow ego but by finding freedom in a higher and larger self. There is no
happiness in smallness of the being, says the Scripture, it is with the large
being that happiness comes. The ego is by its nature a smallness of being; it
brings contraction of the consciousness and with the contraction limitation of
knowledge, disabling ignorance, – confinement and a diminution of power and by
that diminution incapacity and weakness, – scission of oneness and by that
scission disharmony and failure of sympathy and love and understanding, –
inhibition or fragmentation of delight of being and by that fragmentation pain
and sorrow. To recover what is
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lost we must break out
of the walls of ego. The ego must either disappear in impersonality or fuse
into a larger I: it must fuse into the wider cosmic “I” which comprehends all
these smaller selves or the transcendent of which even the cosmic self is a
diminished image.
But this
cosmic self is spiritual in essence and in experience; it must not be confused
with the collective existence, with any group soul or the life and body of a
human society or even of all mankind. The subordination of the ego to the
progress and happiness of the human race is now a governing idea in the world's
thought and ethics; but this is a mental and moral and not a spiritual ideal.
For that progress is a series of constant mental, vital and physical
vicissitudes, it has no firm spiritual content, and offers no sure standing-ground
to the soul of man. The consciousness of collective humanity is only a larger
comprehensive edition or a sum of individual egos. Made of the same substance,
in the same mould of nature, it has not in it any greater light, any more
eternal sense of itself, any purer source of peace, joy and deliverance. It is
rather even more tortured, troubled and obscured, certainly more vague,
confused and unprogressive. The individual is in this
respect greater than the mass and cannot be called on to subordinate his more
luminous possibilities to this darker entity. If light, peace, deliverance, a
better state of existence are to come, they must descend into the soul from
something wider than the individual, but also from something higher than the
collective ego. Altruism, philanthropy, the service of mankind are in
themselves mental or moral ideals, not laws of the spiritual life. If into the
spiritual aim there enters the impulse to deny the personal self or to serve
humanity or the world at large, it comes not from the ego nor from the
collective sense of the race, but from something more occult and profound
transcendent of both these things; for it is founded on a sense of the Divine
in all and it works not for the sake of the ego or the race but for the sake of
the Divine and its purpose in the person or group or collective. It is this
transcendent Source which we must seek and serve, this vaster being and
consciousness to which the race and the individual are minor terms of its
existence.
There is
indeed a truth behind the pragmatic impulse which
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an exclusive one-sided
spirituality is apt to ignore or deny or belittle. It is this that since the
individual and the universal are terms of that higher and vaster Being, their
fulfilment must have some real place in the supreme Existence. There must be
behind them some high purpose in the supreme Wisdom and Knowledge, some eternal
strain in the supreme Delight: they cannot have been, they were not created in
vain. But the perfection and satisfaction of humanity like the perfection and
satisfaction of the individual, can only be securely compassed and founded upon
a more eternal yet unseized truth and right of
things. Minor terms of some greater Existence, they can fulfil themselves only
when that of which they are the terms is known and possessed. The greatest
service to humanity, the surest foundation for its true progress, happiness and
perfection is to prepare or find the way by which the individual and the
collective man can transcend the ego and live in its true self, no longer bound
to ignorance, incapacity, disharmony and sorrow. It is by the pursuit of the
eternal and not by living bound in the slow collective evolution of Nature that
we can best assure even that evolutionary, collective, altruistic aim our
modern thought and idealism have set before us. But it is in itself a secondary
aim; to find, know and possess the Divine existence, consciousness and nature
and to live in it for the Divine is our true aim and the one perfection to
which we must aspire.
It is then in
the way of the spiritual philosophies and religions, not in that of any
earth-bound materialistic doctrine, that the seeker of the highest knowledge
has to walk, even if with enriched aims and a more comprehensive spiritual purpose.
But how far has he to proceed in the elimination of the ego? In the ancient way
of knowledge we arrive at the elimination of the ego-sense which attaches
itself to the body, to the life, to the mind and says of all or any of them,
“This is I”. Not only do we, as in the way of works, get rid of the “I” of the
worker and see the Lord alone as the true source of all works and sanction of
works and His executive Nature-power or else His supreme Shakti as the sole
agent and worker, – but we get rid also of the ego-sense which mistakes the
instruments or the expressions of our being for our true self and spirit. But
even if all this has been done,
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something remains still;
there remains a substratum of all these, a general sense of the separate I.
This substratum ego is something vague, indefinable, elusive; it does not or
need not attach itself to anything in particular as the self; it does not
identify itself with anything collective; it is a sort of fundamental form or
power of the mind which compels the mental being to feel himself as a perhaps
indefinable but still a limited being which is not mind, life or body, but
under which their activities proceed in Nature. The others were a qualified
ego-idea and ego-sense supporting themselves on the play of the Prakriti; but
this is the pure fundamental ego-power supporting itself on the consciousness
of the mental Purusha. And because it seems to be above or behind the play and
not in it, because it does not say “I am the mind, life or body,” but “I am a
being on whom the action of mind, life and body depends,” many think themselves
released and mistake this elusive Ego for the One, the Divine, the true Purusha
or at the very least for the true Person within them, – mistaking the
indefinable for the Infinite. But so long as this fundamental ego-sense
remains, there is no absolute release. The egoistic life, even if diminished in
force and intensity, can still continue well enough with this support. If there
is the error in identification, the ego life may under that pretext get rather
an exaggerated intensity and force. Even if there is no such error, the ego
life may be wider, purer, more flexible and release may be now much easier to
attain and nearer to accomplishment, but still there is as yet no definitive
release. It is imperative to go farther, to get rid of this indefinable but
fundamental ego-sense also and get back to the Purusha on whom it is supporting
itself, of whom it is a shadow; the shadow has to disappear and by its
disappearance reveal the spirit's unclouded substance.
That
substance is the self of the man called in European thought the Monad, in
Indian philosophy, Jiva or Jivatman, the living entity, the self of the living
creature. This Jiva is not the mental ego-sense constructed by the workings of
Nature for her temporary purpose. It is not a thing bound, as the mental being,
the vital, the physical are bound, by her habits, laws or processes. The Jiva
is a spirit and self, superior to Nature. It is true that it consents to her acts,
reflects her moods and upholds the triple
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medium of mind, life and
body through which she casts them upon the soul's consciousness; but it is
itself a living reflection or a soul-form or a self-creation of the Spirit
universal and transcendent. The One Spirit who has mirrored some of His modes
of being in the world and in the soul, is multiple in the Jiva. That Spirit is
the very Self of our self, the One and the Highest, the Supreme we have to
realise, the infinite existence into which we have to enter. And so far the
teachers walk in company, all agreeing that this is the supreme object of
knowledge, of works and of devotion, all agreeing that if it is to be attained,
the Jiva must release himself from the ego-sense which belongs to the lower
Nature or Maya. But here they part company and each goes his own way. The
Monist fixes his feet on the path of an exclusive Knowledge and sets for us as
sole ideal an entire return, loss, immersion or extinction of the Jiva in the
Supreme. The Dualist or the partial Monist turns to the path of Devotion and
directs us to shed indeed the lower ego and material life, but to see as the
highest destiny of the spirit of man, not the self-annihilation of the
Buddhist, not the self-immersion of the Adwaitin, not a swallowing up of the
many by the One, but an eternal existence absorbed in the thought, love and
enjoyment of the Supreme, the One, the All-Lover.
For the
disciple of an integral Yoga there can be no hesitation; as a seeker of
knowledge it is the integral knowledge and not anything either half-way and
attractive or high-pinnacled and exclusive he must
seek. He must soar to the utmost height, but also circle and spread to the most
all-embracing wideness, not binding himself to any rigid structure of
metaphysical thought, but free to admit and combine all the soul's highest and
greatest and fullest and most numerous experiences. If the highest height of
spiritual experience, the sheer summit of all realisation is the absolute union
of the soul with the Transcendent who exceeds the individual and the universe,
the widest scope of that union is the discovery of that very Transcendent as
the source, support, continent, informing and constituent spirit and substance
of both these manifesting powers of the divine Essence and the divine Nature.
Whatever the path, this must be for him the goal. The Yoga of Action also is
not fulfilled, is not absolute, is not victo-
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riously complete
until the seeker has felt and lives in his essential and integral oneness with
the Supreme. One he must be with the Divine both in his highest and inmost and
in his widest being and consciousness, in his work, his will, his power of
action, his mind, body, life. Otherwise he is only released from the illusion of
individual works, but not released from the illusion of separate being and
instrumentality. As the servant and instrument of the Divine he works, but the
crown of his labour and its perfect base or motive is oneness with that which
he serves and fulfils. The Yoga of devotion too is complete only when the lover
and the Beloved are unified and difference is abolished in the ecstasy of a
divine oneness; and yet in the mystery of this unification there is the sole
existence of the Beloved but no extinction or absorption of the lover. It is
the highest unity which is the express direction of the path of knowledge, the
call to absolute oneness is its impulse, the experience of it its magnet, but
it is this very highest unity which takes as its field of manifestation in him
the largest possible cosmic wideness. Obeying the necessity to withdraw
successively from the practical egoism of our triple nature and its fundamental
ego-sense, we come to the realisation of the spirit, the self, lord of this
individual human manifestation, but our knowledge is not integral if we do not
make this self in the individual one with the cosmic spirit and find their
greater reality above in an inexpressible but not unknowable Transcendence. The
Jiva, possessed of himself, must give himself up into the being of the Divine.
The self of the man must be made one with the Self of all; the self of the
finite individual must pour itself into the boundless finite and that cosmic
spirit too must be exceeded in the transcendent Infinite.
This cannot
be done without an uncompromising abolition of the ego-sense at its very basis
and source. In the path of Knowledge one attempts this abolition, negatively by
a denial of the reality of the ego, positively by a constant fixing of the
thought upon the idea of the One and the Infinite in itself or the One and
Infinite everywhere. This, if persistently done, changes in the end the mental
outlook on oneself and the whole world and there is a kind of mental
realisation; but afterwards by degrees or perhaps rapidly and imperatively and
almost at the beginning the
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mental realisation
deepens into spiritual experience – a realisation in the very substance of our
being. More and more frequent conditions come of something indefinable and
illimitable, a peace, a silence, a joy, a bliss beyond expression, a sense of
absolute impersonal Power, a pure existence, a pure consciousness, an
all-pervading Presence. The ego persists in itself or in its habitual
movements, but the place of the one becomes more and more loosened, the others
are broken, crushed, more and more rejected, becoming weak in their intensity,
limp or mechanical in their action. In the end there is a constant giving up of
the whole consciousness into the being of the Supreme. In the beginning when
the restless confusion and obscuring impurity of our outward nature is active,
when the mental, vital, physical ego-sense are still powerful, this new mental
outlook, these experiences may be found difficult in the extreme: but once that
triple egoism is discouraged or moribund and the instruments of the Spirit are
set right and purified, in an entirely pure, silent, clarified, widened
consciousness the purity, infinity, stillness of the One reflects itself like
the sky in a limpid lake. A meeting or a taking in of the reflected
Consciousness by that which reflects it becomes more and more pressing and
possible; the bridging or abolition of the atmospheric gulf between that
immutable ethereal impersonal vastness and this once mobile whirl or narrow
stream of personal existence is no longer an arduous improbability and may be
even a frequent experience, if not yet an entirely permanent state. For even
before complete purification, if the strings of the egoistic heart and mind are
already sufficiently frayed and loosened, the Jiva can by a sudden snapping of
the main cords escape, ascending like a bird freed into the spaces or widening
like a liberated flood into the One and Infinite. There is first a sudden sense
of a cosmic consciousness, a casting of oneself into the universal; from that
universality one can aspire more easily to the Transcendent. There is a pushing
back and rending or a rushing down of the walls that imprisoned our conscious
being; there is a loss of all sense of individuality and personality, of all
placement in Space or Time or action and law of Nature; there is no longer an
ego, a person definite and definable, but only consciousness, only existence,
only peace or
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bliss; one becomes
immortality, becomes eternity, becomes infinity. All that is left of the
personal soul is a hymn of peace and freedom and bliss vibrating somewhere in
the Eternal.
When there is
an insufficient purity in the mental being, the release appears at first to be
partial and temporary; the Jiva seems to descend again into the egoistic life
and the higher consciousness to be withdrawn from him. In reality, what happens
is that a cloud or veil intervenes between the lower nature and the higher
consciousness and the Prakriti resumes for a time its old habit of working
under the pressure but not always with a knowledge or present memory of that
high experience. What works in it then is a ghost of the old ego supporting a
mechanical repetition of the old habits upon the remnants of confusion and impurity
still left in the system. The cloud intervenes and disappears, the rhythm of
ascent and descent renews itself until the impurity has been worked out. This
period of alternations may easily be long in the integral Yoga; for there an
entire perfection of the system is required; it must be capable at all times
and in all conditions and all circumstances, whether of action or inaction, of
admitting and then living in the consciousness of the supreme Truth. Nor is it
enough for the sadhaka to have the utter realisation only in the trance of
Samadhi or in a motionless quietude, but he must in trance or in waking, in
passive reflection or energy of action be able to remain in the constant
Samadhi of the firmly founded Brahmic consciousness.¹
But if or when our conscious being has become sufficiently pure and clear, then
there is a firm station in the higher consciousness. The impersonalised Jiva,
one with the universal or possessed by the Transcendent, lives high-seated
above² and looks down undisturbed at whatever remnants of the old working of
Nature may revisit the system. He cannot be moved by the workings of the three
modes of Prakriti in his lower being, nor can he be shaken from his station by
the attacks even of grief and suffering. And finally, there being no veil
between, the higher peace overpowers the lower disturbance and mobility. There
is a settled silence in
¹
Gita.
² Udāsīna, the word for the spiritual
“indifference”, that is to say the unattached freedom of the soul touched by
the supreme knowledge.
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which the soul can take
sovereign possession of itself above and below and altogether.
Such
possession is not indeed the aim of the traditional Yoga of knowledge whose object
is rather to get away from the above and the below and the all into the
indefinable Absolute. But whatever the aim, the path of knowledge must lead to
one first result, an absolute quietude; for unless the old action of Nature in
us be entirely quieted, it is difficult if not impossible to found either any
true soul-status or any divine activity. Our nature acts on a basis of
confusion and restless compulsion to action, the Divine acts freely out of a
fathomless calm. Into that abyss of tranquillity we must plunge and become
that, if we are to annul the hold of this lower nature upon the soul. Therefore
the universalised Jiva first ascends into the Silence; it becomes vast,
tranquil, actionless. What action takes place,
whether of body and these organs or any working whatever, the Jiva sees but
does not take part in, authorise or in any way associate itself with it. There
is action, but no personal actor, no bondage, no responsibility. If personal
action is needed, then the Jiva has to keep or recover what has been called the
form of the ego, a sort of mental image of an “I” that is the knower, devotee,
servant or instrument, but an image only and not a reality. If even that is not
there, still action can continue by the mere continued force of Prakriti,
without any personal actor, without indeed there being any sense of an actor at
all; for the Self into which the Jiva has cast its being is the actionless, the fathomlessly still. The path of works leads
to the realisation of the Lord, but here even the Lord is not known; there is
only the silent Self and Prakriti doing her works, even, as it seems at first,
not with truly living entities but with names and forms existing in the Self
but which the Self does not admit as real. The soul may go even beyond this
realisation; it may either rise to the Brahman on the other side of all idea of
Self as a Void of everything that is here, a Void of unnameable peace and
extinction of all, even of the Sat, even of that Existent which is the
impersonal basis of individual or universal personality; or else it may unite
with it as an ineffable “That” of which nothing can be said; for the universe
and all that is does not even exist in That, but appears to the mind as a dream
more unsubs-
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tantial than any dream
ever seen or imagined, so that even the word dream seems too positive a thing
to express its entire unreality. These experiences are the foundation of that
lofty Illusionism which takes such firm hold of the human mind in its highest overleapings of itself.
These ideas
of dream and illusion are simply results in our still existent mentality of the
new poise of the Jiva and its denial of the claim made upon it by its old
mental associations and view of life and existence. In reality, the Prakriti
does not act for itself or by its own motion, but with the Self as lord; for
out of that Silence wells all this action, that apparent Void looses out as if
into movement all these infinite riches of experience. To this realisation the
sadhaka of the integral Yoga must arrive by the process that we shall hereafter
describe. What then, when he so resumes his hold upon the universe and views no
longer himself in the world but the cosmos in himself, will be the position of
the Jiva or what will fill in his new consciousness the part of the ego-sense?
There will be no ego-sense even if there is a sort of individualisation for the
purposes of the play of universal consciousness in an individual mind and
frame; and for this reason that all will be unforgettably the One and every
Person or Purusha will be to him the One in many forms or rather in many
aspects and poises, Brahman acting upon Brahman, one Nara-Narayana¹ everywhere.
In that larger play of the Divine the joy of the relations of divine love also
is possible without the lapse into the ego-sense, – just as the supreme state
of human love likewise is described as the unity of one soul in two bodies. The
ego-sense is not indispensable to the world-play in which it is so active and
so falsifies the truth of things; the truth is always the One at work on
itself, at play with itself, infinite in unity, infinite in multiplicity. When
the individualised consciousness rises to and lives in that truth of the cosmic
play, then even in full action, even in possession of the lower being the Jiva
remains still one with the Lord, and there is no bondage and no delusion. He is
in possession of Self and released from the ego.
¹ The
Divine, Narayana, making itself one with humanity even as the human, Nara
becomes one with the Divine.
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