Starting a new series of posts to reflect upon in our silences-
sharing excerpts from chapters of The Life Divine, by Sri Aurobindo.
Book-2, Chapter XII – The Origin of Ignorance
How could this manifold ignorance of this narrowly self limiting and separative knowledge arise and come into action or maintain itself in action in an absolute Being who must be absolute consciousness and therefore cannot be subject to Ignorance?
How is even an apparent division effectively operated and kept in continuance in the Indivisible?
The Being, integrally one, cannot be ignorant of itself; and since all things are itself, conscious modifications, determinations of its being, it cannot be ignorant of things, of their true nature, of their true action.
But though we say that we are THAT, that the jivatman or the individual self is no other than Paramatman, no other than the Absolute, yet we are certainly ignorant both of ourselves and things, for which this contradiction results that what must be in its very grain incapable of ignorance is yet capable of it, and has plunged itself into it by some will or possibility of its nature.
…….Ignorance must be a part of the movement of the One, a development of its consciousness knowingly adopted, to which it is not forcibly subjected but which it uses for its cosmic purpose.
…..The Supreme must surely know himself and the cause of ignorance, and therefore the Jivatman (individual self) has no ground to despair of any knowledge or deny his capacity of knowing the integral Supreme and the original cause of his own present ignorance.
………All opinions about the origins of things become of an equal force, since all are equally valid or invalid; for all become equally possible where there is no sure starting-point and no ascertainable goal of the revolutions of becoming. All these opinions have been held by the human mind and in all there has been profit, even if we regard them as errors; for errors are permitted to the mind because they open doors upon truth, negatively by destroying opposite errors, positively by preparing an element in a new constructive hypothesis.
……… It is then this Something, an Absolute which can be so known that all truths can stand in it and by it and find there their reconciliation, that we must discover as our starting-point and keep as our constant base of thinking and seeing and by it find a solution of the problem; for it is That alone that can carry in it a key to the paradoxes of the universe.
This Something is, as Vedanta insists and as we have thoroughly insisted, in its manifest nature Sachchidananda, a trinity of absolute existence, consicousness and bliss. It is from this primal truth that we must start in approaching the problem and it is evident then that the solution must be found in an action of consciousness manifesting itself as knowledge and yet limiting that knowledge in such a way as to create the phenomenon of the Ignorance, – and since Ignorance is a phenomenon of the dynamic action of Force of Consciousness, not an essential fact but a creation, a consequence of that action, it is this Force aspect of Consciousness that it will be fruitful to consider.
Absolute consciousness is in its nature absolute power; the nature of Chit (Consciousness) is Shakti; Force or Shakti concentrated and energised for cognition or for action in a realising power effective or creative, the power of conscious being dwelling upon itself and bringing out, as it were, by the heat of its incubation (Tapas) the seed and development of all that is within it, or to use a language convenient to our minds, of all its truths and potentialities, has created the universe.
…………………..To be continued.
TheGiftOfCancer 