Apropos of Two Vast Negations — 2
The Denial of the Materialist and the Refusal of the Ascetic
In the monthly periodical The Arya started on 15 August by Sri Aurobindo and the Mother in 1914, after their first meeting on 29 March 1914, the September and October issues carried two articles of The Life Divine, entitled as the Materialist Denial and the Refusal of the Ascetic:
These open with this: “The affirmation of a divine life upon earth and an immortal sense in mortal existence can have no base unless we recognise not only eternal Spirit as the inhabitant of this bodily mansion, the wearer of this mutable robe, but accept Matter of which it is made, as a fit and noble material out of which He weaves constantly His garbs, builds recurrently the unending series of His mansions.”
The ancient revelations tell that “Matter also is Brahman” and gives its full value to the vigorous figure by which the physical universe is described as the external body of the Divine Being. Its most powerful element is the “Agnosticism which, admitting the Unknowable behind all manifestation, extends the limits of the unknowable until it comprehends all that is merely unknown.” If physical senses are our sole means of Knowledge then Reason must deal always and solely with the facts; we cannot go beyond. That would persuade us that the supra-sensible is the unreal. It is the pure Self of the Adwaitins, the inactive Brahman, the transcendent Silence. The mind then receives a sense of the unreality of the world and the sole reality of the Silence.
This would mean the “aspiration of man upward to the Divine” has not been sufficiently related to the movement of the Divine leaning downward to embrace eternally Its manifestation.
There is the other side. The Scripture holds that “All this is the Brahman; this Self is the Brahman and the Self is fourfold.” It is beyond relation, featureless, unthinkable, in which all is still. And still there is a beyond. “On the other side of the cosmic consciousness there is, attainable to us, a consciousness yet more transcendent” — transcendent to the Cosmos itself. “That supports the universal activity,—or perhaps only tolerates it; It embraces Life with Its vastness,—or else rejects it from Its infinitude.” Enamoured of that Beyond, the insistence is of pure Spirit as the sole reality, free from change, birth, death.
If the materialist has the worldly pragmatism in only to live his life, to work and enjoy under the impulsion of material energy, for the ascetic there is too much of stress on the unreality of the material world, taking him to the utter Non-Being. Revolt of the Spirit against Matter upsets the balance of nobler and more beautiful things ever appearing in manifestation.
In the face of such an aggressively irreconcilable dichotomy, if true and enduring, it will become meaningless, if not absurd, to look for a new and marvellous creation on earth governed by Truth-Consciousness-Bliss. But there has been worked out a way to get out of the disturbing conflict. Sri Aurobindo wrote those two chapters about the Refusal and the Denial in 1914. But while recognising the partial truths of those negations he and his spiritual collaborator the Mother actively engaged themselves occult-yogically that the thing is done. The next twenty-five years saw that it had started happening. The first most reassuring sign was the dynamic all-creative transcendental golden light, the Supermind, descending in the physical body of Sri Aurobindo. He records the event in his sonnet The Golden Light dated 8 August 1938. The next step was to make it stable and universal, meaningful for the evolutionary Cause. This is evident when we see that after twenty-five years he added relevant chapters during final drafting of The Life Divine in 1940.
The knowledge, at least the convincing intuition, was there with the Rishis of the Rig Veda, even as was claimed by Parucchepa: “I purify earth and heaven by the Truth.” उ॒भे पु॑नामि॒ रोद॑सी ऋ॒तेन॒” (I. 133. 1) That purification was the dissolution of the conflicting dichotomy between earth and heaven, between this worldly and other-worldly, between the material and the spiritual. But the occult of it needed long and arduous yoga-tapasya in the will and the sanction of the Supreme Decider. This has now happened and the evolution is on futureward march. On February 1956 occurred the worked-out miracle. About it the Mother revealed:
“This evening the Divine Presence, concrete and material, was there present amongst you. I had a form of living gold, bigger than the universe, and I was facing a huge and massive golden door which separated the world from the Divine.
As I looked at the door, I knew and willed, in a single movement of consciousness, that “the time has come,” and lifting with both hands a mighty golden hammer I struck one blow, one single blow on the door and the door was shattered to pieces.
Then the supramental Light and Force and Consciousness rushed down upon earth in an uninterrupted flow.” [Written in 1956]
In the last chapter of The Life Divine there is already the materialising vision of this, in 1940 itself. Triumphantly it concludes thus:
“If there is an evolution in material Nature and if it is an evolution of being with consciousness and life as its two key-terms and powers, this fullness of being, fullness of consciousness, fullness of life must be the goal of development towards which we are tending and which will manifest at an early or later stage of our destiny. The Self, the Spirit, the Reality that is disclosing itself out of the first inconscience of life and matter, would evolve its complete truth of being and consciousness in that life and matter. It would return to itself,—or, if its end as an individual is to return into its Absolute, it could make that return also,—not through a frustration of life but through a spiritual completeness of itself in life. Our evolution in the Ignorance with its chequered joy and pain of self-discovery and world-discovery, its half-fulfilments, its constant finding and missing, is only our first state. It must lead inevitably towards an evolution in the Knowledge, a self-finding and self-unfolding of the Spirit, a self-revelation of the Divinity in things in that true power of itself in Nature which is to us still a Supernature.”
For an individual there is an option to go back into the Absolute, should he desire so. But for the collective there is a hierarchy of ascending and descending possibilities, and these will continue to be there, these having been opened out in the supramantal manifestation.
The featured image is a painting by Huta
The Winds of Wonder 
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