Chapter IX
Equality and the Annihilation of Ego
AN ENTIRE self-consecration, a complete
equality, an unsparing effacement of the ego, a transforming
deliverance of the nature from its ignorant modes of action are the
steps by which the surrender of all the being and nature to the
Divine Will can be prepared and achieved, — a self-giving true,
total and without reserve. The first necessity is an entire spirit
of self-consecration in our works; it must become first the constant
will, then the ingrained need in all the being, finally its
automatic but living and conscious habit, the self-existent turn to
do all action as a sacrifice to the Supreme and to the veiled Power
present in us and in all beings and in all the workings of the
universe. Life is the altar of this sacrifice, works are our
offering; a transcendent and universal Power and Presence as yet
rather felt or glimpsed than known or seen by us is the Deity to
whom they are offered. This sacrifice, this self-consecration has
two sides to it; there is the work itself and there is the spirit in
which it is done, the spirit of worship to the Master of Works in
all that we see, think and experience.
The work itself is at first determined by the
best light we can command in our ignorance. It is that which we
conceive as the thing that should be done. And whether it be shaped
by our sense of duty, by our feeling for our fellow-creatures, by
our idea of what is for the good of others or the good of the world
or by the direction of one whom we accept as a human Master, wiser
than ourselves and for us the representative of that Lord of all
works in whom we believe but whom we do not yet know, the principle
is the same. The essential of the sacrifice of works must be there
and the essential is the surrender of all desire for the fruit of
our works, the renunciation of all attachment to the result for
which yet we labour. For so long as we work with attachment to the
result, the sacrifice is offered not to the Divine, but to our ego.
Page – 221
We may think otherwise, but we are deceiving ourselves; we are
making our idea of the Divine, our sense of duty, our feeling for
our fellow-creatures, our idea of what is good for the world or
others, even our obedience to the Master a mask for our egoistic
satisfactions and preferences and a specious shield against the
demand made on us to root all desire out of our nature.
At this stage of the Yoga and even throughout the Yoga this form of
desire, this figure of the ego is the enemy against whom we have to
be always on our guard with an unsleeping vigilance. We need not be
discouraged when we find him lurking within us and assuming all
sorts of disguises, but we should be vigilant to detect him in all
his masks and inexorable in expelling his influence. The illumining
Word of this movement is the decisive line of the Gita, "To action
thou hast a right but never under any circumstances to its fruit."
The fruit belongs solely to the Lord of all works; our only business
with it is to prepare success by a true and careful action and to
offer it, if it comes, to the divine Master. Afterwards even as we
have renounced attachment to the fruit, we must renounce attachment
to the work also; at any moment we must be prepared to change one
work, one course or one field of action for another or abandon all
works if that is the clear command of the Master. Otherwise we do
the act not for his sake but for our satisfaction and pleasure in
the work, from the kinetic nature's need of action or for the
fulfilment of our propensities; but these are all stations and
refuges of the ego. However necessary for our ordinary motion of
life, they have to be abandoned in the growth of the spiritual
consciousness and replaced by divine counterparts: an Ananda, an
impersonal and God-directed delight will cast out or supplant the
unillumined vital satisfaction and pleasure, a joyful driving of the
Divine Energy the kinetic need; the fulfilment of the propensities
will no longer be an object or a necessity, there will be instead
the fulfilment of the Divine Will through the natural dynamic truth
in action of a free soul and a luminous nature. In the end, as the
attachment to the fruit of the work and to the work itself has been
excised from the heart, so also the last clinging attachment to the
idea and sense of ourselves as the doer has to be
Page – 222
relinquished; the Divine Shakti must be known and felt above and
within us as the true and sole worker.
* *
The renunciation of attachment to the work and its fruit is the
beginning of a wide movement towards an absolute equality in the
mind and soul which must become all-enveloping if we are to be
perfect in the spirit. For the worship of the Master of works
demands a clear recognition and glad acknowledgment of him in
ourselves, in all things and in all happenings. Equality is the sign
of this adoration; it is the soul's ground on which true sacrifice
and worship can be done. The Lord is there equally in all beings, we
have to make no essential distinctions between ourselves and others,
the wise and the ignorant, friend and enemy, man and animal, the
saint and the sinner. We must hate none, despise none, be repelled
by none; for in all we have to see the One disguised or manifested
at his pleasure. He is a little revealed in one or more revealed in
another or concealed and wholly distorted in others according to his
will and his knowledge of what is best for that which he intends to
become in form in them and to do in works in their nature. All is
ourself, one self that has taken many shapes. Hatred and disliking
and scorn and repulsion, clinging and attachment and preference are
natural, necessary, inevitable at a certain stage: they attend upon
or they help to make and maintain Nature's choice in us. But to the
Karmayogin they are a survival, a stumbling-block, a process of the
Ignorance and, as he progresses, they fall away from his nature. The
child-soul needs them for its growth; but they drop from an adult in
the divine culture. In the God-nature to which we have to rise there
can be an adamantine, even a destructive severity but not hatred, a
divine irony but not scorn, a calm, clear-seeing and forceful
rejection but not repulsion and dislike. Even what we have to
destroy, we must not abhor or fail to recognise as a disguised and
temporary movement of the Eternal.
And since all things are the one Self in its
manifestation, we
Page – 223
shall have equality of soul towards the ugly and the
beautiful, the maimed and the perfect, the noble and the vulgar, the
pleasant and the unpleasant, the good and the evil. Here also there
will be no hatred, scorn and repulsion, but instead the equal eye
that sees all things in their real character and their appointed
place. For we shall know that all things express or disguise,
develop or distort, as best they can or with whatever defect they
must, under the circumstances intended for them, in the way possible
to the immediate status or function or evolution of their nature,
some truth or fact, some energy or potential of the Divine necessary
by its presence in the progressive manifestation both to the whole
of the present sum of things and for the perfection of the ultimate
result. That truth is what we must seek and discover behind the
transitory expression; undeterred by appearances, by the
deficiencies or the disfigurements of the expression, we can then
worship the Divine for ever unsullied, pure, beautiful and perfect
behind his masks. All indeed has to be changed, not ugliness
accepted but divine beauty, not imperfection taken as our
resting-place but perfection striven after, the supreme good made
the universal aim and not evil. But what we do has to be done with a
spiritual understanding and knowledge, and it is a divine good,
beauty, perfection, pleasure that has to be followed after, not the
human standards of these things. If we have not equality, it is a
sign that we are still pursued by the Ignorance, we shall truly
understand nothing and it is more than likely that we shall destroy
the old imperfection only to create another: for we are substituting
the appreciations of our human mind and desire-soul for the divine
values.
Equality does not mean a fresh ignorance or blindness; it does not
call for and need not initiate a greyness of vision and a blotting
out of all hues. Difference is there, variation of expression is
there and this variation we shall appreciate, — far more justly than
we could when the eye was clouded by a partial and erring love and
hate, admiration and scorn, sympathy and antipathy, attraction and
repulsion. But behind the variation we shall always see the Complete
and Immutable who dwells within it and we shall feel, know or at
least, if it is
Page – 224
hidden from us, trust in the wise purpose and divine necessity
of the particular manifestation, whether it appear to our human
standards harmonious and perfect or crude and unfinished or even
false and evil.
And so too we shall have the same equality of mind and soul towards
all happenings, painful or pleasurable, defeat and success, honour
and disgrace, good repute and ill-repute, good fortune and evil
fortune. For in all happenings we shall see the will of the Master
of all works and results and a step in the evolving expression of
the Divine. He manifests himself, to those who have the inner eye
that sees, in forces and their play and results as well as in things
and in creatures. All things move towards a divine event; each
experience, suffering and want no less than joy and satisfaction, is
a necessary link in the carrying out of a universal movement which
it is our business to understand and second. To revolt, to condemn,
to cry out is the impulse of our unchastened and ignorant instincts.
Revolt like everything else has its uses in the play and is even
necessary, helpful, decreed for the divine development in its own
time and stage; but the movement of an ignorant rebellion belongs to
the stage of the soul's childhood or to its raw adolescence. The
ripened soul does not condemn but seeks to understand and master,
does not cry out but accepts or toils to improve and perfect, does
not revolt inwardly but labours to obey and fulfil and transfigure.
Therefore we shall receive all things with an equal soul from the
hands of the Master. Failure we shall admit as a passage as calmly
as success until the hour of the divine victory arrives. Our souls
and minds and bodies will remain unshaken by acutest sorrow and
suffering and pain if in the divine dispensation they come to us,
unoverpowered by intensest joy and pleasure. Thus supremely balanced
we shall continue steadily on our way meeting all things with an
equal calm until we are ready for a more exalted status and can
enter into the supreme and universal Ananda.
* *
Page – 225
This equality cannot come except by a protracted ordeal and
patient self-discipline; so long as desire is strong, equality
cannot come at all except in periods of quiescence and the fatigue
of desire, and it is then more likely to be an inert indifference or
desire's recoil from itself than the true calm and the positive
spiritual oneness. Moreover, this discipline or this growth into
equality of spirit has its necessary epochs and stages. Ordinarily
we have to begin with a period of endurance; for we must learn to
confront, to suffer and to assimilate all contacts. Each fibre in us
must be taught not to wince away from that which pains and repels
and not to run eagerly towards that which pleases and attracts, but
rather to accept, to face, to bear and to conquer. All touches we
must be strong to bear, not only those that are proper and personal
to us but those born of our sympathy or our conflict with the worlds
around, above or below us and with their peoples. We shall endure
tranquilly the action and impact on us of men and things and forces,
the pressure of the Gods and the assaults of Titans; we shall face
and engulf in the unstirred seas of our spirit all that can possibly
come to us down the ways of the soul's infinite experience. This is
the stoical period of the preparation of equality, its most
elementary and yet its heroic age. But this steadfast endurance of
the flesh and heart and mind must be reinforced by a sustained sense
of spiritual submission to a divine Will: this living clay must
yield not only with a stern or courageous acquiescence, but with
knowledge or with resignation, even in suffering, to the touch of
the divine Hand that is preparing its perfection. A sage, a devout
or even a tender stoicism of the God-lover is possible, and these
are better than the merely pagan self-reliant endurance which may
lend itself to a too great hardening of the vessel of God: for this
kind prepares the strength that is capable of wisdom and of love;
its tranquillity is a deeply moved calm that passes easily into
bliss. The gain of this period of resignation and endurance is the
soul's strength equal to all shocks and contacts.
There is next a period of high-seated impartiality and indifference
in which the soul becomes free from exultation and depression and
escapes from the snare of the eagerness of joy as
Page – 226
from the dark net of the pangs of grief and suffering. All
things and persons and forces, all thoughts and feelings and
sensations and actions, one's own no less than those of others, are
regarded from above by a spirit that remains intact and immutable
and is not disturbed by these things. This is the philosophic period
of the preparation of equality, a wide and august movement. But
indifference must not settle into an inert turning away from action
and experience; it must not be an aversion born of weariness,
disgust and distaste, a recoil of disappointed or satiated desire,
the sullenness of a baffled and dissatisfied egoism forced back from
its passionate aims. These recoils come inevitably in the unripe
soul and may in some way help the progress by a discouragement of
the eager desire-driven vital nature, but they are not the
perfection towards which we labour. The indifference or the
impartiality that we must seek after is a calm superiority of the
high-seated soul above the contacts of things;¹
it regards and accepts or rejects them but is not moved in the
rejection and is not subjected by the acceptance. It begins to feel
itself near, kin to, one with a silent Self and Spirit self-existent
and separate from the workings of Nature which it supports and makes
possible, part of or merged in the motionless calm Reality that
transcends the motion and action of the universe. The gain of this
period of high transcendence is the soul's peace unrocked and
unshaken by the pleasant ripplings or by the tempestuous waves and
billows of the world's movement.
If we can pass through these two stages of the inner change without
being arrested or fixed in either, we are admitted to a greater
divine equality which is capable of a spiritual ardour and tranquil
passion of delight, a rapturous, all-understanding and
all-possessing equality of the perfected soul, an intense and even
wideness and fullness of its being embracing all things. This is the
supreme period and the passage to it is through the joy of a total
self-giving to the Divine and to the universal Mother. For strength
is then crowned by a happy mastery, peace deepens into bliss, the
possession of the divine calm is uplifted
¹
udasina.
Page – 227
and made the ground for the possession of the divine movement.
But if this greater perfection is to arrive, the soul's impartial
high-seatedness looking down from above on the flux of forms and
personalities and movements and forces must be modified and change
into a new sense of strong and calm submission and a powerful and
intense surrender. This submission will be no longer a resigned
acquiescence but a glad acceptance: for there will be no sense of
suffering or of the bearing of a burden or cross; love and delight
and the joy of self-giving will be its brilliant texture. And this
surrender will be not only to a divine Will which we perceive and
accept and obey, but to a divine Wisdom in the Will which we
recognise and a divine Love in it which we feel and rapturously
suffer, the wisdom and love of a supreme Spirit and Self of
ourselves and all with which we can achieve a happy and perfect
unity. A lonely power, peace and stillness is the last word of the
philosophic equality of the sage; but the soul in its integral
experience liberates itself from this self-created status and enters
into the sea of a supreme and allembracing ecstasy of the
beginningless and endless beatitude of the Eternal. Then we are at
last capable of receiving all contacts with a blissful equality,
because we feel in them the touch of the imperishable Love and
Delight, the happiness absolute that hides ever in the heart of
things. The gain of this culmination in a universal and equal
rapture is the soul's delight and the opening gates of the Bliss
that is infinite, the Joy that surpasses all understanding.
* *
Before this labour for the annihilation of desire and the conquest
of the soul's equality can come to its absolute perfection and
fruition, that turn of the spiritual movement must have been
completed which leads to the abolition of the sense of ego. But for
the worker the renunciation of the egoism of action is the most
important element in this change. For even when by giving up the
fruits and the desire of the fruits to the Master of the Sacrifice
we have parted with the egoism of rajasic desire, we
Page – 228
may still have kept the egoism of the worker. Still we are
subject to the sense that we are ourselves the doer of the act,
ourselves its source and ourselves the giver of the sanction. It is
still the "I" that chooses and determines, it is still the "I" that
undertakes the responsibility and feels the demerit or the merit.
An entire removal of this separative ego-sense is an essential aim
of our Yoga. If any ego is to remain in us for a while, it is only a
form of it which knows itself to be a form and is ready to disappear
as soon as a true centre of consciousness is manifested or built in
us. That true centre is a luminous formulation of the one
Consciousness and a pure channel and instrument of the one
Existence. A support for the individual manifestation and action of
the universal Force, it gradually reveals behind it the true Person
in us, the central eternal being, an everlasting being of the
Supreme, a power and portion of the transcendent Shakti.²
Here too, in this movement by which the soul
divests itself gradually of the obscure robe of the ego, there is a
progress by marked stages. For not only the fruit of works belongs
to the Lord alone, but our works also must be his; he is the true
lord of our actions no less than of our results. This we must not
see with the thinking mind only, it must become entirely true to our
entire consciousness and will. The sadhaka has not only to think and
know but to see and feel concretely and intensely even in the moment
of the working and in its initiation and whole process that his
works are not his at all, but are coming through him from the
Supreme Existence. He must be always aware of a Force, a Presence, a
Will that acts through his individual nature. But there is in taking
this turn the danger that he may confuse his own disguised or
sublimated ego or an inferior power with the Lord and substitute its
demands for the supreme dictates. He may fall into a common ambush
of this lower nature and distort his supposed surrender to a higher
Power into an excuse for a magnified and uncontrolled indulgence of
his own self-will and even of his desires and passions. A great
sincerity is asked for and has to be imposed not only on the
conscious mind but
²
amśah
sanātanah,
parā prakrtir
jīvabhūtā.
Page – 229
still more on the subliminal part of us which is full of
hidden movements. For there is there, especially in our subliminal
vital nature, an incorrigible charlatan and actor. The sadhaka must
first have advanced far in the elimination of desire and in the firm
equality of his soul towards all workings and all happenings before
he can utterly lay down the burden of his works on the Divine. At
every moment he must proceed with a vigilant eye upon the deceits of
the ego and the ambushes of the misleading Powers of Darkness who
ever represent themselves as the one Source of Light and Truth and
take on them a simulacrum of divine forms in order to capture the
soul of the seeker.
Immediately he must take the further step of relegating himself to
the position of the Witness. Aloof from the Prakriti, impersonal and
dispassionate, he must watch the executive Nature-Force at work
within him and understand its action; he must learn by this
separation to recognise the play of her universal forces,
distinguish her interweaving of light and night, the divine and the
undivine, and detect her formidable Powers and Beings that use the
ignorant human creature. Nature works in us, says the Gita, through
the triple quality of Prakriti, the quality of light and good, the
quality of passion and desire and the quality of obscurity and
inertia. The seeker must learn to distinguish, as an impartial and
discerning witness of all that proceeds within this kingdom of his
nature, the separate and the combined action of these qualities; he
must pursue the workings of the cosmic forces in him through all the
labyrinth of their subtle unseen processes and disguises and know
every intricacy of the maze. As he proceeds in this knowledge, he
will be able to become the giver of the sanction and no longer
remain an ignorant tool of Nature. At first he must induce the
Nature-Force in its action on his instruments to subdue the working
of its two lower qualities and bring them into subjection to the
quality of light and good and, afterwards, he must persuade that
again to offer itself so that all three may be transformed by a
higher Power into their divine equivalents, supreme repose and calm,
divine illumination and bliss, the eternal divine dynamis, Tapas.
The first part of this discipline and change can be firmly
Page – 230
done in principle by the will of the mental being in us; but
its full execution and the subsequent transformation can be done
only when the deeper psychic soul increases its hold on the nature
and replaces the mental being as its ruler. When this happens, he
will be ready to make, not only with an aspiration and intention and
an initial and progressive self-abandonment but with the most
intense actuality of dynamic self-giving, the complete renunciation
of his works to the Supreme Will. By degrees his mind of an
imperfect human intelligence will be replaced by a spiritual and
illumined mind and that can in the end enter into the supramental
Truth-Light; he will then no longer act from his nature of the
Ignorance with its three modes of confused and imperfect activity,
but from a diviner nature of spiritual calm, light, power and bliss.
He will act not from an amalgam of an ignorant mind and will with
the drive of a still more ignorant heart of emotion and the desire
of the life-being and the urge and instinct of the flesh, but first
from a spiritualised self and nature and, last, from a supramental
Truth-consciousness and its divine force of supernature.
Thus are made possible the final steps when the veil of Nature is
withdrawn and the seeker is face to face with the Master of all
existence and his activities are merged in the action of a supreme
Energy which is pure, true, perfect and blissful for ever. Thus can
he utterly renounce to the supramental Shakti his works as well as
the fruits of his works and act only as the conscious instrument of
the eternal Worker. No longer giving the sanction, he will rather
receive in his instruments and follow in her hands a divine mandate.
No longer doing works, he will accept their execution through him by
her unsleeping Force. No longer willing the fulfilment of his own
mental constructions and the satisfaction of his own emotional
desires, he will obey and participate in an omnipotent Will that is
also an omniscient Knowledge and a mysterious, magical and
unfathomable Love and a vast bottomless sea of the eternal Bliss of
Existence.
Page – 231