Science and Spirituality: An Unnecessary Antimony and a Harmonious Reconciliation – 2

Volume VI, Issue 11-12
Author: Jugal Kishore Mukherji

Editor’s Note: In this second part of our ongoing series, author Jugal Kishore Mukherji describes an integral, all-embracing dynamic spiritual vision which does not make a formidable division between Spirit and Matter.

Continued from Part 1

Ironically enough, in India, it is not the religions but a widely pervasive variant of metaphysical mood, a mood of ascetic spiritual aberration, that is likely to oppose the efflorescence of Science and the successful exploration and utilisation of Matter and the material world-not of course actively and outwardly as in Europe but in a passively negative and all the more potent way of mortifying the very initiative to scientific research through the cultivation of a spirit of world-disgust.

For the last two thousand years India has lived in ‘the shadow of the great Refusal’ and laboured under the sense of the cosmic Illusion. A supposed metaphysical dualism between Spirit and Matter, Reality and Appearance, has created in the collective Indian mind a feeling of the vanity of earthly existence, of the unimportance of things in Time, of the essential illusoriness of human life and its terrestrial aims and the unreality of the phenomenal world. The garb of the ascetic has been considered to be the highest possible possession of a man, kaupīnavantaḥ khalu bhāgyavantaḥ! (Blest indeed is the wearer of the loin-cloth.)

And if this be the true sense of spirituality and this anti-life attitude its inevitable consequence, this sort of spirituality, however ennobling for some isolated individual men, can have no essential dynamic validity nor any fruitful message for human so­ciety in the field of social effort, hope and aspiration. And, of course, it is futile to expect any universal growth of Science in the stifling atmosphere and on the unpropi­tious soil provided by this dilapidating vairāgya mood.

From Renaissance Archives
New Dimensions in Spirituality

Fortunately, this anti-life mood and world-disgust, active or veiled, is not at all a necessary concomitant of true spirituality nor, for that matter, does it represent the robust catholicity of ancient Indian lore which admitted “both the claim of the pure spirit to manifest in us its absolute freedom and the claim of universal Matter to be the mould and condition of our manifestation” (Sri Aurobindo, CWSA, 21: 29), and heroically proceeded to embody here upon earth and not elsewhere, ihaiva, a higher consciousness and a spiritually moulded life.

What India wants today is not an obscurantist credal religionism nor the vita­listic occult and pseudo-spiritual practices, but the integral all-embracing dynamic spirituality of the Upanishads and the Vedas whose ancient wisdom, purāṇi prajñā, did not make this formidable division between Heaven and Earth, but accorded to both equal love and reverence. The Rishis went so far as to declare that “the Earth is the foundation and all the worlds are on the earth”.

What, then, characterises this dynamic spiritual vision? What is its programme of action for man?

An Integral and Dynamic Spiritual Vision

The present appearance of our terrestrial being is a veiled and partial figure, and to limit ourselves to that first figure of the moment, to the present formula of an imper­fect humanity, and base our world-conceptions on this appearance alone, as if that were an abiding truth for all times, is to exclude our divine possibilities.

We have to bring a wider meaning into our human life and manifest in it the much more that we secretly are. We have to recognise the purport of our whole complex human nature in its right place in the cosmic movement. And we have to give full legitimate value to each part of our complex being and many-sided aspiration. We have to find out the key of their unity as well as their phenomenal difference; and this finding must be by a synthesis and integration.

Now this all-reconciling dynamic integral spirituality posits that¹:

1. There is a Permanent above the transience of this manifested world we live in. There exists a supreme consciousness beyond and above this limited conscious­ness in whose narrow borders we grope and struggle at present. And there is an Absolute beyond and behind every relative form and figure in this universe.
2. This omnipresent Reality is the truth of all life and existence, this Reality of a Being and Consciousness, one and eternal, is behind the appearances of the world. All beings are united in that One Self and Spirit but divided by a certain separativity of consciousness, an ignorance of their true self and Reality in the mind, life and body.
3. This absolute Reality is in its nature indefinable; it is beyond the grasp of the ineffectual probe of separative mental consciousness. But there is a spiritual consciousness, a knowledge by identity — attainable by a certain psycho-spiritual discipline otherwise called Yoga,– that can seize this Reality in its fundamental aspects and its manifold powers and forms and figures. Yoga can help us to remove the veil of separative consciousness and make us aware of the true self, the Divinity within us and all.
4. This primary, ultimate and eternal Existence, this Sat, is not merely bare existence, or a conscious existence whose consciousness is crude force or power; it is a conscious existence the very term of whose being, the very term of whose con­sciousness is bliss. In other words, that which has thrown itself out into forms is a triune Existence-Consciousness-Bliss, Sachchidananda.
5. This world is real because of the Reality that sustains it, because it is in its essence nothing else than the self-manifestation of the Supreme; but in its actual state strongly marked with inadequacy, imperfection, suffering and evil, it cannot be described as the perfect expression of Sachchidananda.
6. The supreme Reality, here in this manifested world, has taken upon itself the aspect of a Becoming in Time and this Becoming is essentially evolutionary in its character with Mind and Man as its highest products so far.
7. But Sachchidananda has yet to emerge fully in manifestation, therefore this evolution, this spiritual progression cannot stop short with Mind and with the imperfect mental being called Man; Mind is too imperfect an expression and Man too hampered and burdened a creature to be the last terms of evolution.
8. The former steps in evolution were taken by Nature in the plant and ani­mal life without a conscious will or participation; but in men the substitu­tion of a conscious for this subconscious evolution has become conceivable and practicable.
9. Indeed the object of man in the world is “to become, to be conscious, to in­crease continually in our realised being and awareness of self and things, in our actua­lised force and joy of being, and to express that becoming dynamically in such an action on the world and ourselves that we and it shall grow more and always yet more towards the highest possible reach, largest possible breadth of universality and infinity”. (CWSA, 22: 713-714)
10. Since earth-life is thus seen to be not merely a lapse into something undivine, vain and miserable, offered to the embodied soul as a thing to be suffered and then cast away from it, as soon as its own inner evolution or some hidden law of the spirit makes that possible, the motivation for sadhana and the goal of spirituality should not be the drawing away from the world and its activities and a disappearance into far-off heights of the Self or Spirit but rather the invocation and descent of the higher principles here in the bosom of the world itself so that it becomes possible for the human being to find himself dynamically as well as inwardly and grow out of his still animal humanity into a divine race.
11. For this to be effectively realisable, man must know that
    • although he lives mostly in his surface mind, life and body, there is an inner being within him with greater possibilities to which he has to awake and can awake through the process of the psychological discipline of Yoga;
    • he has to open the ranges of this inner being and to live from there outward, governing his outward life by an inner light and force;
    • there are states beyond the material, — supraphysical planes and worlds,­ which have laws of their own that can be investigated and utilised to the greater advantage of man if only he consents to undertake the study of them in a proper unbiased way;
    • there are several ranges of consciousness between the ordinary human mind and the supreme Truth-Consciousness and these intervening ranges have to be opened up and can be opened up in the subjective being of man, with all their potencies being actively available in the flowering of human life upon earth.

For the individual to arrive at the divine universality and supreme infinity, live in it, possess it, to be, know, feel and express that alone in all his being, consciousness, energy, delight of being is what the ancient seers of the Veda meant by the Knowledge, vidyā, and they recognised that avidyā ca vidyālingam.

To such a spiritual vision, positive and dynamic, “all man’s age-long effort, his action, society, art, ethics, science, religion, all the manifold activities by which he expresses and increases his mental, vital, physical, spiritual existence, are episodes in the vast drama of this endeavour… and have behind their limited apparent aims no other true sense or foundation”. (Sri Aurobindo, CWSA, 22: 714)

Notes

1. Adapted from Sri Aurobindo, mostly in his own words ↩︎

Read Part 1

To be continued in the next issue…

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