Our intellect tends to mistake present law and form for the eternal law of our nature and existence

CHAPTER XVII Nature's Law in Our Progress - Unity in Diversity, Law and Liberty

FOR man alone of terrestrial creatures to live rightly involves the necessity of knowing rightly, whether, as rationalism pretends, by the sole or dominant instrumentation of his reason or, more largely and complexly, by the sum of his faculties; and what he has to know is the true nature of being and its constant self-effectuation in the values of life, in less abstract language the law of Nature and especially of his own nature, the forces within him and around him and their right utilisation for his own greater perfection and happiness or for that and the greater perfection and happiness of his fellow creatures. In the old phrase his business is to learn to live according to Nature. But Nature can no longer be imaged, as once it was, as an eternal right rule from which man has wandered, since it is rather a thing itself changing, progressing, evolving, ascending from height to more elevated height, widening from limit to broader limit of its own possibilities. Yet in all this changing there are certain eternal principles or truths of being which re- main the same and upon them as bed-rock, with them as a primary material and within them as a framework, our progress and perfection are compelled to take place. Otherwise there would be an infinite chaos and not a world ordered even in the clash of its forces.

The subhuman life of animal and plant is not subjected to this necessity of knowledge nor of that which is the necessary accompaniment of knowledge, a conscious will impelled always to execute what knowledge perceives. By this exemption it is saved from an immense amount of error, deformation and disease, for it lives spontaneously according to Nature, its knowledge and will are hers and incapable, whether conscient or subconscient, of variation from her laws and dictates. Man seems, on the contrary, to possess a power of turning his mind and will upon Nature and a possibility of governing her movement, even of varying from the course she dictates to him. But here there is really a deformative trick of language. For man's mentality is also a part of Nature; his mentality is even the most important, if not the largest part of his nature. It is, we may say, Nature become partly conscious of her own laws and forces, conscious of her struggle of progression and inspired with the conscious will to impose a higher and higher law on her own processes of life and being. In subhuman life there is a vital and physical struggle, but no mental conflict. Man is subjected to this mental conflict and is therefore at war not only with others but with himself; and because he is capable of this war with himself, he is also capable of that which is denied to the animal, of an inner evolution, a progression from higher to higher type, a constant self-transcending.

This evolution takes place at present by a conflict and progress of ideas applied to life. In their primary aspect human ideas of life are simply a mental translation of the forces and tendencies of life itself as they emerge in the form of needs, desires and interests. The human mind has a practical intelligence more or less clear and exact which takes these things into account and gives to one and another a greater or less value according to its own experience, preference and judgment. Some the man accepts and helps in their growth by his will and intelligence, others he rejects, discourages and even succeeds in eliminating. But from this elementary process there emerges a second and more advanced character of man's ideas about life; he passes beyond the mere mental translation and ready dynamic handling to a regulated valuation of the forces and tendencies that have emerged or are emerging in him and his environment. He studies them as fixed processes and rules of Nature and endeavours to understand their law and norm. He tries to determine the laws of his mind and life and body, the law and rule of the facts and forces about him that constitute his environment and determine the field and the mould of his action. Since we are imperfect and evolutionary beings, this study of the laws of life is bound to envisage two aspects: it perceives the rule of what is and the rule of what mayor ought to be, the law of our actualities and the law of our potentialities. The latter takes for the human intellect which tends always to an arbitrary and emphatic statement of things, the form of a fixed ideal standard or set of principles from which our actual life is a fall and deviation or towards which it is a progress and aspiration.

The evolutionary idea of Nature and life brings us to a pro- founder view. Both what is and what may be are expressions of the same constant facts of existence and forces or powers of our Nature from which we cannot and are not meant to escape, since all life is Nature fulfilling itself and not Nature destroying or denying itself; but we may raise and we are intended to raise, change and widen the forms, arrangements and values of these constant facts and forces of our nature and existence, and in the course of our progress the change and perfectioning may amount to what seems a radical transformation, although nothing essential is altered. Our actualities are the form and value or power of expression to which our nature and life have attained; their norm or law is the fixed arrangement and process proper to that stage of evolution. Our potentialities point us to a new form, value, power of expression with their new and appropriate arrangement and process which is their proper law and norm. Standing thus between the actual and the possible, our intellect tends to mistake present law and form for the eternal law of our nature and existence and regard any change as a deviation and fall or else, on the contrary, to mistake some future and potential law and form for our ideal rule of life and all actual deviation from that as an error or sin of our nature. In reality, only that is eternal which is constant through all changes and our ideal can be no more than a progressive expression of it. Only the utmost limit of height, wideness and fullness of self- expression possible to man, if any such limit there be, could be regarded, did we know of it, - and as yet we do not know our utmost possibilities, - as the eternal ideal.

Whatever the ideas or ideals which the human mind extracts from life or tries to apply to life, they can be nothing but the expression of that life itself as it attempts to find more and more and fix higher and higher its own law and realise its potentialities. Page-397 Location: Home > E-Library > Works Of Sri Aurobindo > English > Social And Political Thought Volume-15 > Nature's Law In Our Progress

The successes and difficulties of Auroville's seven Outreach Schools

Home > Journals & Media > Journals > Auroville Today > Archive copies Auroville Experience The current issue May 2008
The main topic of the May 2008 issue of Auroville Today deals with Auroville's Outreach schools – schools created for the benefit of the children from the surrounding villages.

“How can we prepare the children, children taken from anywhere, who have no way of learning at home, whose parents are ignorant, who have no possibility of having any means to learn, nothing, nothing, nothing but the raw material, like that – how can we teach them to live? That will be an interesting problem,” said The Mother in November, 1967.

In this issue we report on the successes and difficulties of three of Auroville's seven Outreach Schools. They are the Udavi Gentilesse School in the village of Edaiyanchavadi ; Auroville's one-year old New Era Secondary School in Aspiration known earlier as After School; and the New Creation Bilingual School nearby the village of Kuyilapalayam .
Other topics in this issue of Auroville Today are the two-day visit of Dr. Karan Singh; How to complete Bharat Nivas, the Pavilion of India; and the work of OutreachMedia in dealing with increasing numbers of media-persons visiting Auroville.
In the sections Culture and New Bbooks we review the performance of Sri Aurobindo's play Eric as well as the new compilation Sri Aurobindo: A Contemporary Reader by editor, Sachidananda Mohanty, and the anthology of poems Between Seasons by Lloyd Hofman .
Last there is an impression of the work done at Sadhana Forest . The issue is concluded with a small description of Auroville's Farewell project.
Here follow a few of the articles. We wish you happy reading. Please subscribe if you want to read more, or ask for a free copy. Details are elsewhere on this web page.

The riddle of the human being is he is the only animal that is both what he is and what he is yet to be

And the Weird Light Shines in the Dorks, but the Dorks Don't Comprehend it
from One Cosmos by Gagdad Bob
What is reality, anyway?

Our paradigmatic science, physics, reduces the world to a few beautiful equations, but the equations don't tell us how to generate a world with them. In fact, they provide no factual content whatsoever for the world we actually encounter. So which world is the "real" world? The inconceivable quantum world undescribed by physics, the ponderable world we encounter with our senses, or the eternal world known only to the illuminated intellect?

Science is obviously a wonderful tool, but when it is elevated to a metaphysic it is remarkably empty of content and meaning, especially as it pertains to the meaning of our human journey, the Adventure of Consciousness. One of the implications of Gödel's theorems is that any logical or mathematical system will generate questions that are not answerable within the system. Ironically -- or perhaps "cluelessly" is a better word -- many postmodernists use Gödel to try to prove that all knowledge is therefore relative, but this was not Gödel's point at all.

Rather, Gödel -- and Petey has discussed this with him in great detail -- thought he had proved that Plato was essentially correct -- that there are things that are patently true but which cannot be proven with logic. There is a realm of ideas and archetypes that can only be known directly with the intellect properly so-called -- i.e., the nous, buddhi, or psychic being (Aurobindo's term).

This, of course, is the entire basis of religious knowledge. Our souls prove the existence of the Divine for the simple reason that they are so adequately proportioned to the Divine nature. We were built, so to speak, to know God. If we weren't so built, then we could not know or even conceive of him (except in an illusory sense), any more than a dog can conceive of music or Ray can escape his genetic programming. Nothing can account for the beauty and wonder of the soul except something even more beautiful and wondrous...

The riddle of the human being is he is the only animal that is both what he is and what he is yet to be, not accidentally, but essentially. Only a human being can fail to become what and who he is, something proven to me every day in my work as a psychologist (and my becoming a freelance theologian has only heightened this awareness). We do not exist in the way that a star, a rock or an animal exists.

An animal is what it is. Its nature and essence are fixed. But a human who is not perpetually becoming human is not a proper human at all. In other words, only human beings exist as both being and becoming. Unlike other animals, we have within us an essence that is both present and yet unrealized, and which it is the purpose of life to actualize and fulfill: to bring it from eternity into time and then back to eternity.

One Cosmos Under God: The Unification of Matter, Life, Mind & Spirit by Robert W. Godwin (Author) "What was that all about, then?..." (more) Key Phrases: Sri Aurobindo, Book Four, Book One (more...) See all 11 customer reviews...

We have had first to discover the secret nature and full extent of the Ignorance

If we look at this Ignorance in which ordinarily we live by the very circumstance of our separative existence in a material, in a spatial and temporal universe, we see that on its obscurer side it reduces itself, from whatever direction we look at or approach it, into the fact of a many-sided self-ignorance.

1. We are ignorant of the Absolute which is the source of all being and becoming; we take partial facts of being, temporal relations of the becoming for the whole truth of existence,—that is the first, the original ignorance.
2. We are ignorant of the spaceless, timeless, immobile and immutable Self; we take the constant mobility and mutation of the cosmic becoming in Time and Space for the whole truth of existence,—that is the second, the cosmic ignorance.
3. We are ignorant of our universal self, the cosmic existence, the cosmic consciousness, our infinite unity with all being and becoming; we take our limited egoistic mentality, vitality, corporeality for our true self and regard everything other than that as not-self,—that is the third, the egoistic ignorance.
4. We are ignorant of our eternal becoming in Time; we take this little life in a small span of Time, in a petty field of Space, for our beginning, our middle and our end,—that is the fourth, the temporal ignorance.
5. Even within this brief temporal becoming we are ignorant of our large and complex being, of that in us which is superconscient, subconscient, intraconscient, circumconscient to our surface becoming; we take that surface becoming with its small selection of overtly mentalised experiences for our whole existence,—that is the fifth, the psychological ignorance.
6. We are ignorant of the true constitution of our becoming; we take the mind or life or body or any two of these or all three for our true principle or the whole account of what we are, losing sight of that which constitutes them and determines by its occult presence and is meant to determine sovereignly by its emergence their operations,—that is the sixth, the constitutional ignorance.
7. As a result of all these ignorances, we miss the true knowledge, government and enjoyment of our life in the world; we are ignorant in our thought, will, sensations, actions, return wrong or imperfect responses at every point to the questionings of the world, wander in a maze of errors and desires, strivings and failures, pain and pleasure, sin and stumbling, follow a crooked road, grope blindly for a changing goal,—that is the seventh, the practical ignorance.

Our conception of the Ignorance will necessarily determine our conception of the Knowledge and determine, therefore, since our life is the Ignorance at once denying and seeking after the Knowledge, the goal of human effort and the aim of the cosmic endeavour. Integral knowledge will then mean the cancelling of the sevenfold Ignorance by the discovery of what it misses and ignores, a sevenfold self-revelation within our consciousness: it will mean the knowledge of the Absolute as the origin of all things; the knowledge of the Self, the Spirit, the Being and of the cosmos as the Self's becoming, the becoming of the Being, a manifestation of the Spirit; the knowledge of the world as one with us in the consciousness of our true self, thus cancelling our division from it by the separative idea and life of ego; the knowledge of our psychic entity and its immortal persistence in Time beyond death and earth-existence; the knowledge of our greater and inner existence behind the surface; the knowledge of our mind, life and body in its true relation to the self within and the superconscient spiritual and supramental being above them; the knowledge, finally, of the true harmony and true use of our thought, will and action and a change of all our nature into a conscious expression of the truth of the Spirit, the Self, the Divinity, the integral spiritual Reality.

But this is not an intellectual knowledge which can be learned and completed in our present mould of consciousness; it must be an experience, a becoming, a change of consciousness, a change of being. This brings in the evolutionary character of the Becoming and the fact that our mental ignorance is only a stage in our evolution. The integral knowledge, then, can only come by an evolution of our being and our nature, and that would seem to signify a slow process in Time such as has accompanied the other evolutionary transformations. But as against that inference there is the fact that the evolution has now become conscious and its method and steps need not be altogether of the same character as when it was subconscious in its process. The integral knowledge, since it must result from a change of consciousness, can be gained by a process in which our will and endeavour have a part, in which they can discover and apply their own steps and method: its growth in us can proceed by a conscious self-transformation. It is necessary then to see what is likely to be the principle of this new process of evolution and what are the movements of the integral knowledge that must necessarily emerge in it,—or, in other words, what is the nature of the consciousness that must be the base of the life divine and how that life may be expected to be formed or to form itself, to materialise or, as one might say, to “realise”. Page-656 HOME Location: Home > E-Library > Works Of Sri Aurobindo > English > The Life Divine Volume-19 > Reality And The Integral Knowledge

“The Sun Temple at Konarak: Astrological and Cosmological Considerations” by Debashish Banerji

Debashish Banerji
5900 Canterbury Drive, A303
Culver City, CA. 90230
Phone: (310) 641-9467
Email: debbanerji@yahoo.com

Education:
1979 B.A. English Literature
Bombay University
Bombay, India

1989 M.S. Computer Science
University of Louisville
Louisville, KY.

2005 Ph.D. Art History
University of California, Los Angeles

Work:
1981-1985 Free lance journalist – literary and art critic
Bombay and Allahabad, India

1989-1993 Software Engineer
Los Angeles, CA.

1991-2005 President
East-West Cultural Center
Los Angeles, CA.

Teaching:
1986-1988 Teaching Assistant (LISP)
Department of Computer Science
Louisville, KY.

1997-present Instructor, Art History (South Asian, East Asian and Islamic)
Department of Visual Arts and Media Studies
Pasadena City College, Pasadena, CA.

1997-present Instructor, Consciousness Studies
Holmes Institute of Philosophical Research Society
Los Angeles, CA.

1998, Spring Instructor, Art History (South Asian)
2006, Spring Department of Art History
University of California, Los Angeles

Curating:
1998 Curator, “Divine Carriers: Recent Art from India and Nepal”
Laband Art Gallery, Loyola Marymount University
Los Angeles, CA.

2005 Curator, “Contours of Modernity: Contemporary Art of India”
Founder’s Hall, SOKA University
Aliso Viejo, CA.

Grants and Fellowships:
1997-2000 Graduate Division Fellowships
University of California, Los Angeles

2000-2001 Dickson Fellowship
University of California, Los Angeles

Honor:
2002-2004 Chosen as workshop participant
“Modernity and National Identity in Art”
Sussex and London, UK.

Presentations:
Banerji, Debashish (3/1999). “Homologies of Cultural Resistance in Turn-of-the-century Japan and India: A Comparative Study of Okakura Kakuzo and Abanindranath Tagore.” Paper presented at the The Association. of Asian Studies, Annual Conference, Boston as part of the panel Rethinking Okakura Tenshin.
Banerji, Debashish (4/1999). “The Hybridity of Colonial Indian Art and G. Tagore's 'Cubism." Paper presented at a conference on 'Race', Nation, Aesthetics, and the Fabrication of Modernities, at the Depatrment of Art History, University of California, Los Angeles.
Banerji, Debashish (7/2004). “Modernity, Nation and Community: Abanindranath Tagore’s Krishna Lila Paintings.” Paper presented at a conference on Modernity and National Identity in Art at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London.
Publications:
Banerji, Debashish (10/1997, 11/1997). “The Sun Temple at Konarak: Astrological and Cosmological Considerations.” Mother India, Pondicherry, October 1997, November 1997..
Banerji, Debashish (2/1999). “The Soul of a City: ‘Crystal Cathedral’ as Organizing Metaphor at the Bauhaus. Mother India, Pondicherry, February-March, 1999.
Banerji, Debashish (2002). “The Orientalism of E.B. Havell.” Third Text, Vol 16, Issue 1, 2002.
Banerji, Debashish (2003). “The Hybridity of Colonial Indian Art and Gaganendranath Tagore's 'Cubism".” Nandan, Shantiniketan, Volume XXIII, 2003.
Banerji, Debashish (2004). “Art – South Asia.” Berkshire Encyclopedia of World History. Berkshire Publishing Group, Great Barrington, Mass, Vol 1, 2004.
Banerji, Debashish (2005). “Modern and Contemporary Indian Art.” Encyclopedia of India. Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 3 vols, 2005.

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International Centre for Integral Studies (ICIS) ICIS offers postgraduate level Online Courses in: The Integral Way of Sri Aurobindo by Debashish Banerji, PhD

Debashish Banerji's articles

Life Divine Colloquia via Skype by Debashish Banerji

We shall preserve the truths of material Science and its real utilities in the final harmony

It is this revolt of Spirit against Matter that for two thousand years, since Buddhism disturbed the balance of the old Aryan world, has dominated increasingly the Indian mind. Not that the sense of the cosmic illusion is the whole of Indian thought; there are other philosophical statements, other religious aspirations. Nor has some attempt at an adjustment between the two terms been wanting even from the most extreme philosophies. But all have lived in the shadow of the great Refusal and the final end of life for all is the garb of the ascetic. The general conception of existence has been permeated with the Buddhistic theory of the chain of Karma and with the consequent antinomy of bondage and liberation, bondage by birth, liberation by cessation from birth. Therefore all voices are joined in one great consensus that not in this world of the dualities can there be our kingdom of heaven, but beyond, whether in the joys of the eternal Vrindavan¹ or the high beatitude of Brahmaloka,² beyond all manifestations in some ineffable Nirvana³ or where all separate experience is lost in the featureless unity of the indefinable Existence. And through many centuries a great army of shining witnesses, saints and teachers, names sacred to Indian memory and dominant in Indian imagination, have borne always the same witness and swelled always the same lofty and distant appeal,—renunciation the sole path of knowledge, acceptation of physical life the act of the ignorant, cessation from birth the right use of human birth, the call of the Spirit, the recoil from Matter.
¹ Goloka, the Vaishnava heaven of eternal Beauty and Bliss.
² The highest state of pure existence, consciousness and beatitude attainable by the soul without complete extinction in the Indefinable.
³ Extinction, not necessarily of all being, but of being as we know it; extinction of ego, desire and egoistic action and mentality.
Page 23

For an age out of sympathy with the ascetic spirit—and throughout all the rest of the world the hour of the Anchorite may seem to have passed or to be passing—it is easy to attribute this great trend to the failing of vital energy in an ancient race tired out by its burden, its once vast share in the common advance, exhausted by its many-sided contribution to the sum of human effort and human knowledge. But we have seen that it corresponds to a truth of existence, a state of conscious realisation which stands at the very summit of our possibility. In practice also the ascetic spirit is an indispensable element in human perfection and even its separate affirmation cannot be avoided so long as the race has not at the other end liberated its intellect and its vital habits from subjection to an always insistent animalism.

We seek indeed a larger and completer affirmation. We perceive that in the Indian ascetic ideal the great Vedantic formula, “One without a second”, has not been read sufficiently in the light of that other formula equally imperative, “All this is the Brahman”. The passionate aspiration of man upward to the Divine has not been sufficiently related to the descending movement of the Divine leaning downward to embrace eternally Its manifestation. Its meaning in Matter has not been so well understood as Its truth in the Spirit. The Reality which the Sannyasin seeks has been grasped in its full height, but not, as by the ancient Vedantins, in its full extent and comprehensiveness. But in our completer affirmation we must not minimise the part of the pure spiritual impulse.

As we have seen how greatly Materialism has served the ends of the Divine, so we must acknowledge the still greater service rendered by Asceticism to Life. We shall preserve the truths of material Science and its real utilities in the final harmony, even if many or even if all of its existing forms have to be broken or left aside. An even greater scruple of right preservation must guide us in our dealing with the legacy, however actually diminished or depreciated, of the Aryan past. Page-24 HOME Location: Home > E-Library > Works Of Sri Aurobindo > English > The Life Divine Volume-18 > The Two Negations Ch 03

We will benefit from foreign universities setting up shop here

Agriculture Culture Democracy Development is the Key Economic Freedom Education for Life Enterpreneurship Environment Freedom of Expression Freedom to Trade Globalization for the Good Health is Wealth Intellectual Property Rights International Relations Liberty is Security Limited Government Principles of Politics Privatisation Population - the ultimate resource Property Rights Regulatory Affairs Rule of Law Tax Freedom Competitions Facts & Figures Opportunities Liberty Events
Last Updated : Friday, June 20, 2008 Education for Life
Failure to provide education by failed state
Education World India Sauvik Chakraverti Thursday, June 05, 2008

Every activist in Indian education suffers from a ‘delusion of knowledge’ — the notion that the socialist State, i.e. government, is in possession of knowledge that the poor need to succeed in life. In reality, the State is itself based on failed knowledge, writes Sauvik Chakraverti in the Education World

Every activist in Indian education suffers from the 'delusion of knowledge' – the notion that the socialist State, i.e. government, is in possession of knowledge that the poor need in order to succeed in life.

In reality, this State is itself based on failed knowledge. Economic liberalization was resorted to in 1991 after half a century of socialism precisely because of knowledge failure. And it is only because of 'liberty' that Indian society can now access various fragments of knowledge that were previously unavailable. We now have modern cars, mobile phones, plasma TVs, frost-free refrigerators and so on because we allowed knowledge developed abroad to flow into the country. The state-promoted IITs have been operational since the early 1960s but this knowledge wasn't available in India. The State-owned IIMs are of similar vintage – but there were hardly any business enterprises to manage then.

On the other hand, the poor are in possession of various fragments of knowledge – but they are denied entry into markets by repressive legislation. Poor girls can sing and dance, but the socialist State has outlawed nightlife. Tribals in the jungles of central India distil the stimulating mahua liquour from a jungle flower of the same name, but they cannot sell it. Tapping toddy and fermenting it is specialized knowledge. Last year Karnataka reported a bumper toddy season – but nowhere on Bangalore's swanky Brigade Road will you get a glass of toddy. And why toddy or mahua – even Goan feni is not available anywhere outside Goa. It takes considerable knowledge to make feni.

Several years ago former Indian Express editor Arun Shourie showcased many rock bands from the North-East in Delhi, inviting them to perform at the State-owned Ashoka Hotel. The North-East is poor and underdeveloped; but there are numerous great rock bands there. These bands cannot perform in heartland states because of State-imposed restrictions.

These are all examples of real, hard knowledge going waste. And ironically the State, which is responsible for this waste, wants to teach. Establishment educationists shout in concert and an education tax is immediately imposed. But the 'planned' flow of knowledge from State to the poor never happens. It never will. The minister in charge is a Nehru family "loyalist". He will teach socialist propaganda. And his loyal educrats will dictate what private institutes will teach, and meddle with what they want to teach.

Thus, for the immediate benefit of the poor, and for the immediate spread of real knowledge, Liberty is essential. Just as the public has benefited from foreign car companies entering India, so will we benefit from foreign universities setting up shop here. And just as the poor benefit from freedom, so will the national knowledge pool if anyone with a fragment of knowledge can set up shop and teach to whoever is willing to pay for it. The problem we have to solve is that of the transmission of knowledge from one who has it to another individual, who wants to acquire it. The market alone can solve this problem. The State has no 'collective pool of knowledge'. Indeed, the socialist Indian State is a naked propagandist, and all its attempts at securing a 'uniform standard' in education have only resulted in the uniform teaching of errors.

Anarchy – the complete absence of State control – is vital for knowledge. In an anarchic scenario there will be errors – but only of individual teachers and professors who will be exposed by other academics. And when knowledge is free from government control reputations will need to be earned. This is how errors will be gradually weeded out of teaching.

Thus, the Union ministry of human resource development – or is it the ministry of human resource destruction? — should be shut down; every educrat should be fired; and all schools and colleges freed from government control and supervision over curriculum as well as certification. Private edupreneurs can then compete for testing scholastic competence and issuing certification – as with SAT, IB or the ISC in my time.

What about poor kids in such a scenario? If they learn how to use a calculator, to read, write and speak English, to type on a keyboard and use a computer, to operate a mobile phone and send SMS, and how to drive a car – they will have all the 'basic knowledge' required for success in the contemporary world. I am positive that private for-profit as well as non-profit efforts can easily transmit these fragments of knowledge to them in a manner that is 'efficient' in terms of both money as well as time.

Poor kids need to enter the workforce early. For them, 12 years of schooling is a massive waste of time. The basic knowledge they need, as outlined above, can be transmitted to them by private edupreneurs cheap and quick. Thereafter, they can continuously acquire fragments of knowledge relevant to the specialized occupations they choose – best learnt through apprenticeship. Thus, there is no role for the State in education either for the rich or the poor, in primary, secondary or higher education.

I conclude with what the great French economist Frederic Bastiat, who was also in active politics, wrote in his election manifesto over 150 years ago: "Education is also bound up with the same fundamental question that precedes all others in politics: Is it part of the State's duties? Or does it belong to the sphere of private activity? I believe that government is not set up in order to bring our minds into subjection, or to absorb the rights of the family. To be sure, gentlemen, if it pleases you to hand over to it your noblest prerogatives, if you want to have theories, systems, methods, principles, textbooks and teachers forced on you by the government, that is up to you; but do not expect me to sign, in your name, such a shameful abdication of your rights."

Indeed, Bastiat stressed that an academic monopoly under the State can only work if the State is infallible. In a nation of widespread State failure, the very idea of government infallibility lies in tatters. I rest my case.

A version of this article was published in the Education World. This article was published in the Education World on Thursday, June 05, 2008. Please read the original article here. Author : Mr Sauvik Chakraverti is an author and journalist, closely involved with India’s liberal movement [The Delusion of Knowledgefrom ANTIDOTE by Sauvik]

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[Traditional drink 'Handia' sells like hotcakes in Orissa Economic Times - Friday, June 20, 2008 BHUBANESWAR: In the tribal areas of Orissa, the traditional drink 'Handia' is very much in demand in summer. The drink made by fermenting rice through a special procedure, is intoxicating, keeps the stomachs cool and is a source of high energy.]

[Pisani cites neither Landsburg nor Kremer so I believe her account is independent. Note that Pisani also credits Thailand's successful condom program. More Sex is Safer Sex
from Marginal Revolution by Alex Tabarrok]

The Mother of Sri Aurobindo Ashram has identified five principal components of education

Organiser Home Page: 11/33 Home > 2008 Issues > June 22, 2008
Document Promote the Indian model of education By L.K. Advani

Gurukul Kangri Vishwa-vidyalaya is situated in the holy town of Haridwar, on the banks of Maa Ganga. That itself is a source of uniqueness and pride. Equally proud is its association with Swami Shraddhananda, a great freedom fighter and social reformer in the pre-1947 era, and one who was inspired by Swami Dayananda Saraswati to promote the ideals of Swabhasha, Swadharma and Swadesh. Before he took sanyas, he was known as Mahatma Munshiram, about whom Gandhiji himself said, “If anybody called me Mahatma, I would think that it is a case of mistaken identity. The true Mahatma is Munshiramji.”

Indeed, there is no other university in India that received such strong blessings and regular personal attention from Gandhiji as the Gurukul Kangri Vishwavidyalaya. Recently, Prof. Swatantra Kumar sent me two books about your university. One of them, which is quite bulky, is devoted solely to Mahatma Gandhi’s association with your Gurukul.

Dr. Syama Prasad Mookerjee and Gurukul Kangri

The second book, titled Deekshalok, is a collection of the convocation addresses by eminent personalities who visited the Gurukul since its inception more than a hundred years ago. For amongst the eminent personalities who came here was Dr. Syama Prasad Mookerjee, who delivered the convocation address in 1943. He was the founder of the Bharatiya Jana Sangh in 1951. I started my political life as an activist of this party, which merged into the Janata Party in 1977 in the aftermath of the successful struggle against the Emergency Rule and was reborn, after the fall of the Janata Government, as the Bharatiya Janata Party in 1980.

Dr. Mookerjee, who was known as the “Lion of Bengal”, was an outstanding leader. A great freedom fighter, an able minister in Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru’s first government after Independence, a widely respected opposition leader after he resigned from the government, and by far the best parliamentarian of his time, he was all this and more. He was also one of the greatest educationists and vice chancellors of his time. Son of Ashutosh Mookerjee, himself a highly revered educationist in Bengal, he became the Vice Chancellor of the prestigious Calcutta University when he was only 33 years old. Let me quote a few lines from Dr. Syama Prasad Mookerjee’s convocation address at your university.

“We are not unhappy with the fact that (during the British rule) the doors of western education were opened for Indians. What distresses us is the fact that this education is being imparted to us by suppressing India’s rich heritage of culture and knowledge…We should cultivate in the hearts of young Indians such strong pride and such deep awareness about our national heritage that makes them rise above the barriers of caste and community.”

Dr. Mookerjee complimented the Gurukul “for demonstrating that in our country it is possible to create a proper balance between the fundamental aspects of the Indian civilization and the needs of the scientific and technological era.” Dr. Mookerjee’s words show that our great leaders were never against modernity and scientific and technological progress. However, what they stressed as an ideal was modernity with an Indian personality, and not imported and supplanted from outside.

Need to protect and promote Sanskrit, Hindi and Indian languages

Gurukul Kangri Vishwa-vidyalaya is one of the few universities in India that was not only founded to promote education through Hindi and Sanskrit, but has kept that tradition alive even today. I am not against English, and I do not think that any Indian should oppose English for the sake of it. After all, it is the repository of immense knowledge from the modern era. Over the years, it has become as much a language of Indians as it is a language of Britishers or Americans. Nevertheless, I believe that Angrezi and Angreziat are two different things. Angreziat connotes a sense of superiority complex, which, unfortunately, has survived in India long after the British rule ended in our country...

When we talk of India’s national heritage, we must remember that our linguistic diversity is a very rich part of this heritage. Each of the Indian languages has a precious treasure of knowledge, cultural and artistic wealth, folk memory and spiritual enlightenment. Unfortunately, one of the ill-effects of globalisation has been the neglect of Sanskrit, Hindi and other Indian languages. This is especially true about university and college education, but is now rapidly spreading in secondary and primary education, too. This neglect must be arrested and reversed.

I strongly believe that education is an important field where our nation’s ability to face present and future challenges is going to be tested.

The question that naturally arises is: What kind of educational development will enable India to successfully face the challenges of today and tomorrow? I believe that it has to be an Indian model, rooted strongly in the Indian soil, based on Indian’s needs, and guided by India’s integral view of life.

I am not an educationist. Indeed, I welcome ideals and suggestions from the teachers and administrators of institutions like yours on what kind of educational reforms we should implement, if the people give us a mandate to govern the country in the next parliamentary elections. Here I only wish to present a few broad thoughts on the subject.

The first and most important feature of this model is to develop a strong sense of patriotism among students of all backgrounds. Our students should have sufficient knowledge of such basic aspects of our national history, society, culture, way of life, our national heroes, our achievements in the past and present, and future goals as will make them proud to be Indians. National pride and awareness of national unity alone can help our people transcend the various diversities, which otherwise can become sources of divisiveness.

The Indian model of education should help students develop an all-round human personality. There is a need to provide high-quality education for all in diverse streams of academic knowledge and skills, combined with values, morals and sanskaras. Academic knowledge can help a person earn a livelihood. But it is the inner development of personality that alone can help him learn how to live life. That is what forms the basis of Indian education, and particularly the traditional Gurukul system.

We cannot perhaps revive and recreate the external aspects of the Gurukul system in today’s times, but its core is equally relevant even today. We should enhance the prestige and social status of a teacher to that of a “Guru”, because a teacher cannot merely be a purveyor of information or book-based knowledge. He or she should be in a position to impart wisdom, teaching students how to live life, inculcating in them a sense of right and wrong, and stimulating in them varied interests in the wonders of the world. It goes without saying that teachers’ own continuous training and retraining has to receive priority attention.

Far too often, we rely on alien methods of education in India. It is necessary to revive Indian systems of learning and teaching. As we know, many great minds have worked on this subject in ancient as well as modern times. For example, Mother of the Aurobindo Ashram has identified five principal components of education and also evolved appropriate ways of developing them among students:

• (1) Development of the power of concentration and the capacity of attention;
• (2) Development of the capacities of expansion, widening, complexity and richness;
• (3) Organisation of one’s ideas around a central idea, or a higher ideal that will serve as a guide in life;
• (4) Thought-control, rejection of undesirable thoughts, and the ability to think only what one wants and when one wants;
• (5) Development of mental silence, perfect calm and a more and more total receptivity to inspirations coming from the higher regions of the being.

It will be seen from this that Indian educationists have delved into the deeper potential of the human mind and how to actualise it through education. The present education system is aimed at developing a very small part of the mental potential of students. This is because of the one-sided emphasis on the fulfillment of the material needs of human beings. If this imbalance is removed, and more and more people are empowered through proper education to develop the hidden powers of their minds and hearts, we can indeed hope to see a qualitatively superior kind of social progress in the future. And this is what our seers like Swami Dayananda, Swami Shraddhananda, Swami Vivekananda, Mahatma Gandhi, Maharshi Aurobindo and others had attempted.

The Gurukul Kangri University was born out of this Indian vision of education—to support the all-round development of the nation as well as the individual. Students who have graduated this year, and who received their degree certificates today, should be proud that they studied in such a great institution. They must try to attain excellence in their future studies and professional life, for that is what will bring recognition, success and satisfaction to you. However, they should also strive to live by the ideals and sanskaras that they imbibed while learning and living in the Gurukul. (Excerpts from the speech at Gurukul Kangri Vishwavidyalaya Convocation in Haridwar on June 7, 2008. The author is Leader of the Opposition, Lok Sabha.)

The Governor of West Bengal has honoured me with the annual Sri Aurobindo Award

World Politics Indian Politics The Undercurrent Protecting India's history from a Distant land
NRI's living in distant lands are a heritage of India as they are doing their best to preserve the culture of the Nation. We present one such Indian from Paris, France Shri Prithwin Mukherjee, the grandson of one of the greatest revolutionaries of Indian Independence movement Shri Bagha Jatin or Jatindra Nath Mukherjee (1879-1915). Regards, The Undercurrent Team 18th May, 2008 6:18 AM

Shri Prithwin Mukherjee
As a patriot, I had never thought that I could stay abroad for such a length of time (more than forty years). But, had I remained home (or if I went elsewhere in the world), no university would grant me the facility of writing such a thesis. In France, too, in order to write the thesis, I had to live on expedient solutions such as part-time teaching jobs at two Paris faculties, part-time producer for Radio France for broadcasts on Indian culture, free-lance journalist, till I was admitted at the C.N.R.S., French National Centre of Scientific Research (in Human & Social Sciences: Department of Ethnomusicology). My study on the Scales of North & South Indian Music, published by the Indira Gandhi Centre of New Delhi, has been acclaimed as “monumental” by Pandit Ravi Shankar in the foreword.

Among my achievements as a poet, I feel proud of having been selected by the veteran composer Henri Dutilleux who set to music my French poem “Danse cosmique” (Homage to Shiva Nataraja) as the opening movement of his opus Correspondances for Voice (Dawn Upshaw) and orchestra (conducted by Sir Simon Rattle), the other movements having been penned by Solzhenitsyn, Rilke and Van Gogh; played regularly in major concert halls of the world, the poem has been already translated into more than twelve languages. I have another recent satisfaction to have been consulted assiduously by the French writer and politician Jaques Attali while writing his biography on Gandhiji, published in 2007.

The number of my book-form publications is more than 50, in addition to about 350 articles and papers that have appeared in encyclopaedias, symposiums and periodicals, a dozen LPs and CDs, a couple of documentary films (published by the C.N.R.S.-Audiovisual). Other than the C.N.R.S. medals for my professional efficiency, among recognitions I have been awarded a special medal at the Unesco by the Society Encouraging the Advancement of Knowledge (Paris). The Governor of West Bengal has honoured me with the annual Sri Aurobindo Award, recognising my contribution in the understanding of the Master’s vision of the Future. My French biography of Sri Aurobindo ordered by a famous publishing house, had been a much expected work in France.

2. Is India forgetting its history ?

The immediate and impertinent counter-question that comes to my mind is : Which history ? Fertile inventors of myths, we have deified, down the centuries, human types and their gestures in the name of history. Fortunately Indian literature has preserved enough documents rich with social, ethnological and philosophical details of our past, enabling us to utilise them according to the needs of contemporary scientific historiography. Very often it seems that kings and their exploits were the key preoccupation of our history. In addition to reminiscences, first-hand information and, at times, official papers, as practised by Muslim writers, we had also discovered non-Indian sources left by Greek, Latin, Chinese and Arabic observers before the recent Euro-centric officials wrote on the rise of the British power in India. On joining the Commonwealth Seminar, for example, Professor Tapan Raychaudhuri mentions the degree of his surprise with the welcoming inscription on a board : “It takes a great mind to appreciate a great empire.” Flabbergasted by the cult of the British Empire, he could not believe his ears when he heard people claiming the Raj to have been the peerless model of a benevolent Empire. He could not, however, forget the sleepless nights he had spent on viewing photos from a proscribed book showing the flogging of a band of school students, handcuffed, in the streets of Punjab, near the Jalianwalla Bagh. Some exponents of the Cambridge School of history hold that the Raj – even if it had been primarily concerned with the interests of the Empire – had the benevolent merit of injecting mobility in India’s political life. It tried to prove that the national struggle in India was no conflict between the people and the Empire; but, rather a clash between the elite (native or not) and the subaltern.

The greatest danger for future researchers on Indian history will be probably the phase representing the struggle for freedom and its interpretations. Trying to forget the genocide that accompanied India’s independence, we are still taught to glorify the Mahatma’s tactics of a bloodless non-violent action.

3. Are people who fought for the country recognized and rewarded? How do the western countries take care of their heroes ? What are lessons for India ?

Those who are recognized and rewarded had been supposedly by the side of Gandhiji, no matter whether they fought for the country or not. Others belonging to the pre-Gandhian phase (1893-1918) had known the message of ma phaleshu and sacrificed all they had – in certain cases, up to the last drop of their own blood – for the cause of the Motherland. Though they cared a two pence for recognition and reward, it was the Nation’s duty to protect their memory jealously.

The presence of the former Jugantar revolutionaries (brought up by the spirit of Sri Aurobindo and Bagha Jatin) as members of the Central Government after 1947, insisted on sparing a modest monthly allowance to the families of those martyrs and political sufferers; fond of spurious glory, too many impostors littered the list. Descendants of genuine heroes had expected recognition otherwise. While writing about Bagha Jatin after having met major personalities of the contemporary world, M.N. Roy mentioned that these were great men whereas his Jatin-da was a good man; good men are seldom given a niche in the galaxy of the great; Roy concluded that such will be the state of affairs till goodness is recognised as the very basis of greatness.The glorious contribution of the Harkis – Algerian soldiers who chose to fight on the French side in the 50s – received next to nothing as far as recognition is concerned. Their descendants are still expecting a remedy to this historical injustice.

As far as lessons are concerned, when I came to Paris in 1966, Indian students were fond of selecting for their doctorate theses certain themes palatable to the French ego, such as “Baudelaire’s influence on Tagore”, “Debt of Bengali literature to France” etc. My attitude disturbed them, when I held that as adults we were supposed to bring something from India as contribution, instead of flattery. Painter friends wasting their time on producing pseudo Picasso, were vexed when I asked them what they thought of the shadanga theory by Abanindranath Tagore. India has plenty of lessons in store for people who care for them. The only lesson I can think of is that sooner or later, Truth shall prevail, challenging the justification of a series of more or less adequate monuments and tons of printed trash.

4. What do you think are the threats facing the preservation of India's history ?

The question of preserving India’s history does not arise as long as the hush-hush concerning the pre-Gandhian period of our freedom struggle persists and leaves a truncated story which is far from convincing...

6. Tell us about your efforts in helping the next generation know about Shri Bagha Jatin

[...] In Bengali, French and English, as and when I have a chance to write on these findings, I keep on publishing; I have written at least ten books (including a PhD thesis) and more than one hundred papers and articles on the subject. Ideas keep on travelling. Unawares, tomorrow’s historians learn to cast a new glance on what is what.

7. Who in the government you think is working best to safeguard India's history?

Fortunately for India, every major political party has had a sense of duty towards the people, and a genuine – intuitive - esteem for pioneers like Sri Aurobindo, Jatin Mukherjee, Subhas Bose. Because, unquestionably, they loved India, they lived and died for India’s glory. No government has as yet had chances of offering to the public any concrete picture of the degree of sacrifice these people made so that Future India could lead a dignified life. Unfortunately in the list of freedom fighters supplied by the Congress via internet omits lamentably Jatin Mukherjee’s name (whereas several of his followers are cited). Whereas the Congress assisted the abolition of the privileges enjoyed by the princely states, certain vested interests seem to care more for fulfilling dreams of a dynasty than safeguarding any authentic history. The twist has begun with the deification of Mahatma Gandhi. I am not there to forecast other catastrophes.

9. What other case of neglect by the government comes to your mind?

It is easier to criticise than working out a remedy. Sri Aurobindo had found out the key to a new system of education for post-colonial India, based on original thinking, fed as much on India’s traditional wisdom as on various other traditions and Western progressive approach to a changing world. Our sudden but well-deserved success in Bangalore must compulsorily teach us to be convinced about our specific greatness as a Nation. Our system of education has to save us from the dangers of a hybrid superficial living.

10. What do you expect the government to do in response to your efforts?

Without any claim whatsoever for any glorious role, I have lived and worked humbly as a solitary researcher. What our forefathers believed to be the key to a decent work – act, without expecting remuneration – has guided my efforts all through. I should indeed be happy if in my life-time I saw the Government snatching Bagha Jatin out of the status of a regional hero, and duly considered him as an All-Indian revolutionary philosopher and leader, with a statue or a portrait at the Parliament, streets, townships and universities named after him in the Capital and in various States, authentic biographies in all the regional languages, feature and documentary films on his life.

11. What do you think are the most serious threats that India is facing now ?

A gradual ignorance of its own values, an increasing attachment to the synthetic standards and ways of material living, hushing the deeper aspirations of the human soul, losing sight of a destiny that is our own, in keeping with the becoming of other nations.

To download the compilation by shri Prithwin Mukherjee on the life and times of one of the great revolutionaries of India Shri BAGHA JATIN QILLA click here. Contact us

Luminosity not broken by re-fractions, not breaking out into colour and form

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THIRD MOVEMENT I. THE LORD Verse 8 TRANSITIONAL THOUGHT
THE DIVINE PERSONALITY
The-Vedantic idea of God, "He", Deva or Ishwara, must not be confused with the ordinary notions attached to the conception of a Personal God. Personality is generally conceived as identical with individuality and the vulgar idea of a Personal God is a magnified individual like man in His nature but yet different, greater, more vast and all-overpowering. Vedanta admits the human manifestation of Brahman in man and to man, but does not admit that this is the real nature of the Ishwara.
God is Sachchidananda. He manifests Himself as infinite existence of which the essentiality is consciousness, of which again the essentiality is bliss, is self-delight. Delight cognising variety of itself, seeking its own variety, as it were, becomes the universe. But these are abstract terms; abstract ideas in themselves cannot produce concrete realities. They are impersonal states; impersonal states cannot in themselves produce personal activities.
This becomes still clearer if we consider the manifestation of Sachchidananda. In that manifestation Delight translates itself into Love; Consciousness translates itself into double terms, conceptive Knowledge, executive Force; Existence translates itself into Being, that is to say, into Person and Substance. But Love is incomplete without a Lover and an object of Love, Knowledge without a Knower and an object of Knowledge, Force without a Worker and a Work, Substance without a Person cognising and constituting it.
This is because the original terms also are not really impersonal abstractions. In delight of Brahman there is an Enjoyer of delight in consciousness of Brahman a Conscient, in existence of Brahman an Existent; but the object of Brahman's delight and consciousness and the term and stuff of Its existence are Itself. In the divine Being Knowledge, the Knower and the Known and, therefore, necessarily also Delight, the Enjoyer and the Enjoyed are one.
This Self-Awareness and Self-Delight of Brahman has two modes of its Force of consciousness, its Prakriti or Maya, intensive in self-absorption, diffusive in self-extension. The intensive mode is proper to the pure and silent Brahman; the diffusive to the active Brahman. It is the diffusion of the Self-existent in the term and stuff of His own existence that we call the world, the becoming or the perpetual movement (bhuvanam, jagat). It is Brahman that becomes; what He becomes is also the Brahman. The object of Love is the self of the Lover; the work is the self-figuration of the Worker; Universe is body and action of the Lord.
When, therefore, we consider the abstract and impersonal aspect of the infinite existence, we say, That"; when we consider the Existent self-aware and self-blissful, we say, "He". Neither conception is entirely complete. Brahman itself is the Unknowable beyond all conceptions of Personality and Impersonality. We may call it "That" to show that we exile from our affirmation all term and definition. We may equally call it "He", provided we speak with the same intention of rigorous exclusion. Tat and saḥ are always the same. One that escapes definition.
In the universe there is a constant relation of Oneness and Multiplicity. This expresses itself as the universal Personality and the many Persons, and both between the One and the Many and among the Many themselves there is the possibility of an infinite variety of relations. These relations are determined by The play of the divine existence, the Lord, entering into His manifested habitations. They exist at first as conscious relations between individual souls; they are then taken up by them and used as a means of entering into conscious relation with the One. It is this entering into various relations with the One which is the object and function of Religion. All religions are justified by this essential necessity; all express one Truth in various ways and move by various paths to one goal.
The Divine Personality reveals Himself in various forms and names to the individual soul. These forms and names are in a sense created in the human consciousness; in another they are eternal symbols revealed by the Divine who thus concretises Himself in mind-form to the multiple consciousness and aids it in its return to its own Unity.¹

HE THAT WENT ABROAD
It is He that has extended Himself in the relative consciousness whose totality of finite and changeable circumstances dependent on an equal immutable and eternal Infinity is what we call the Universe. Sa paryagāt. In this extension we have, therefore, two aspects, one of pure infinite relationless immutability, another of a totality of objects in Time and Space working out their relations through causality. Both are different and mutually complementary expressions of the same unknowable "He".
To express the infinite Immutability the Upanishad uses a series of neuter adjectives, "Bright, bodiless, without scar, without sinews, pure, unpierced by evil." To express the same Absolute as cause, continent and governing Inhabitant of the totality of objects and of each object in the totality (jagatyām jagat) it uses four masculine epithets, "The Seer, the Thinker, the One who becomes everywhere, the Self-existent" or "the Self-Becoming".
The Immutable is the still and secret foundation of the play and the movement, extended equally, impartially in all things, samam brahma,² lending its support to all without choice or active participation. Secure and free in His eternal immutability the Lord projects Himself into the play and the movement, becoming there in His self-existence all that the Seer in Him visualises and the Thinker in Him conceives. Kavir manīṣī paribhūḥ svayambhūḥ.
¹It would be an error to suppose that these conceptions are in their essence later developments of philosophical Hinduism. The conception of the many forms and names of the One is as old as the Rig-veda.
² "The equal Brahman". — Gita.

THE PURE IMMUTABLE
The pure immutability of the Lord is "bright". It is luminosity of pure concentrated Self-awareness, not broken by re-fractions, not breaking out into colour and form. It is the pure self-knowledge of the Purusha, the conscious Soul, with his Power, his executive Force contained and inactive.
It is "bodiless", — without form, indivisible and without appearance of division. It is one equal Purusha in all things, not divided by the divisions of Space and Time, — a pure self-conscious Absolute.
It is without scar, that is, without defect, break or imperfection. It is untouched and unaffected by the mutabilities. It supports their clash of relations, their play of more and less, of increase and diminution, of irruption and interpenetration. For Itself is without action, acalaḥ sanātanaḥ,¹ "motionless, sempiternal."
It is without sinews. The reason for Its being without scar is that It does not put out Power, does not dispense Force in multiple channels, does not lose it here, increase it there, replenish its loss or seek by love or by violence its complementary or its food. It is without nerves of force; It does not pour itself out in the energies of the Pranic dynamism, of Life, of Matarishwan.
It is pure, unpierced by evil. What we call sin or evil, is merely excess and defect, wrong placement, inharmonious action and reaction. By its equality, by its inaction even while it supports all action, the conscious Soul retains its eternal freedom and eternal purity. For it is unmodified; It watches as the Sakshi, the witness, the modifications effected by Prakriti, but does not partake of them, does not get clogged with them, receives not their impression. Na lipyate. ¹Gita II. 24.

THE SOUL INALIENABLY FREE
What is the relation of the active Brahman and of the human soul to this pure Inactive? They too are That, Action does not change the nature of the Self, but only the nature of the diverse forms, The Self is always pure, blissful perfect, whether inactive or participating in action.
The Self is all things and exceeds them. It exceeds always that in which the mind is engrossed, that which it takes in a particular time and space as a figure of itself. The boundless whole is always perfect. The totality of things is a complete harmony without wound or flaw. The viewpoint of the part taken for a whole, in other words the Ignorance, is the broken reflection which creates the consciousness of limitation, incompleteness and discord. We shall see that this Ignorance has a use in the play of the Brahman; but in itself it appears at first to be only a parent of evil.
Ignorance is a veil that separates the mind, body and life from their source and reality, Sachchidananda. Thus obscured the mind feels itself pierced by the evil that Ignorance creates. But the Active Brahman is always Sachchidananda using for its self-becoming the forms of mind, body and life. All their experiences are therefore seen by It in the terms of Sachchidananda. It is not pierced by the evil. For It also is the One and sees everywhere Oneness. It is not mastered by the Ignorance that It uses as a minor term of its conception.
The human soul is one with the Lord; it also is in its completeness Sachchidananda using Ignorance as the minor term of its being. But it has projected its conceptions into this minor term and established there in limited mind its centre of vision, its viewpoint. It assumes to itself the incompleteness and the resultant sense of want, discord, desire, suffering. The Real Man behind is not affected by all this confusion; but the apparent or exterior Man is affected. To recover its freedom it must recover its completeness; it must identify itself with the divine Inhabitant within, its true and complete self. It can then, like the Lord, conduct the action of Prakriti without undergoing the false impression of identification with the results of its action. It is this idea on which the Upanishad bases the assertion, "Action cleaveth not to a man."

To this end it must recover the silent Brahman within. The Lord possesses always His double term and conducts the action of the universe, extended in it, but not attached to or limited by His works. The human soul, entangled in mind, is obscured in vision by the rushing stream of Prakriti's works and fancies itself to be a part of that stream and swept in its currents and in its eddies. It has to go back in its self-existence to the silent Purusha even while participating in its self-becoming in the movement of Prakriti. It becomes then, not only like the silent Purusha, the witness and upholder, but also the Lord and the free enjoyer of Prakriti and her works. An absolute calm and passivity, purity and equality within, a sovereign and inexhaustible activity without is the nature of Brahman as we see it manifested in the universe.
There is therefore no farther objection to works. On the contrary, works are justified by the participation or self-identification of the soul with the Lord in His double aspect of passivity and activity. Tranquillity for the Soul, activity for theenergy, is the balance of the divine rhythm in man.

THE LAW OF THINGS
The totality of objects (arthān) is the becoming of the Lord in the extension of His own being. Its principle is double. There is consciousness; there is Being. Consciousness dwells in energy (tapas) upon its self-being to produce Idea of itself {vijñana) and form and action inevitably corresponding to the Idea. This is the original Indian conception of creation, self-production or projection into form (sṛṣṭi, prasava). Being uses its self-awareness to evolve infinite forms of itself governed by the expansion of the innate Idea in the form. This is the original Indian conception of evolution, prominent in certain philosophies such as the Sankhya (pariṇāma, vikāra, vivarta). It is the same phenomenon diversely stated.
In the idea of some thinkers the world is a purely subjective evolution {vivarta), not real as objective facts; in the idea of others it is an objective fact, a real modification (pariṇāma), but one which makes no difference to the essence of Being. Both notions claim to derive from the Upanishads as their authority, and their opposition comes in fact by the separation of what in the ancient Vedanta was viewed as one, — as we see in this passage.
Brahman is His own subject and His own object, whether in His pure self-existence or in His varied self-becoming. He is the object of His own self-awareness; He is the Knower of His own self-being. The two aspects are inseparable, even though they seem to disappear into each other and emerge again from each other. All appearance of pure subjectivity holds itself as an object implicit in its very subjectivity; all appearance of pure objectivity holds itself as subject implicit in its very objectivity.
All objective existence is the Self-existent, the Self-becoming, svayambhū, becoming by the force of the Idea within it. The Idea is, self-contained, the Fact that it becomes. For svayambhū sees or comprehends Himself in the essence of the Fact as kavi thinks Himself out in the evolution of its possibilities as manīṣī, becomes form of Himself in the movement in Space and Time as paribhū. These three are one operation appearing as successive in the relative, temporal and spatial Consciousness.
It follows that every object holds in itself the law of its own being eternally, śāśvatībhyaḥ samābhyaḥ, from years sempiternal, in perpetual Time. All relations in the totality of objects are thus determined by their Inhabitant, the Self-existent, the Self-becoming, and stand contained in the nature of things by the omnipresence of the One, the Lord, by His self-vision which is their inherent subjective Truth, by His self-becoming which, against a background of boundless possibilities, is the Law of their inevitable evolution in the objective Fact.
Therefore all things are arranged by Him perfectly, yāthā-tathyataḥ as they should be in their nature. There is an imperative harmony in the All, which governs the apparent discords of individualisation. That discord would be real and operate in eternal chaos, if there were only a mass of individual forms and forces, if each form and force did not contain in itself and were not in its reality the self-existent All, the Lord.

THE PROCESS OF THINGS
The Lord appears to us in the relative notion of the process of things first as Kavi, the Wise, the Seer. The Kavi sees the Truth in itself the truth in its becoming, in its essence, possibilities, actuality. He contains all that in the Idea, the Vijnana, called the Truth and Law, satyam ṛtam. He contains it comprehensively, not piecemeal; the Truth and Law of things is the bṛhat, the Large. Viewed by itself, the realm of Vijnana would seem a realm of predetermination, of concentration, of compelling seed-state. But it is a determination not in previous Time, but in perpetual Time; a Fate compelled by the Soul, not compelling it, compelling rather the action and result, present in the expansion of the movement as well as in the concentration of the Idea. Therefore the truth of the Soul is freedom and mastery, not subjection and bondage. Purusha commands Prakriti, Prakriti does not compel Purusha. Na karma lipyate nare.
The Manishi takes his stand in the possibilities. He has behind him the freedom of the Infinite and brings it in as a background for the determination of the finite. Therefore every action in the world seems to emerge from a balancing and clashing of various possibilities. None of these, however, are effective in the determination except by their secret consonance with the Law of that which has to become. The Kavi is in the Manishi and upholds him in his working. But viewed by itself the realm of the Manishi would seem to be a state of plasticity, of free-will, of the interaction of forces, but of a free-will in thought which is met by a fate in things.
For the action of the Manishi is meant to eventuate in the becoming of the Paribhu. The Paribhu, called also Virat, extends Himself in the realm of eventualities. He fulfils what is contained in the Truth, what works out in the possibilities reflected by the mind, what appears to us as the fact objectively realised. The realm of Virat would seem, if taken separately, to be that of a Law and Predetermination which compels all things that evolve in that realm, — the iron chain of Karma, the rule of mechanical necessity, the despotism of an inexplicable Law.
But the becoming of Virat is always the becoming of the self-existent Lord, — paribhūḥ svayambhūḥ. Therefore to realise the truth of that becoming we have to go back and re-embrace all that stands behind: — we have to return to the full truth of the free and infinite Sachchidananda.
This is the truth of things as seen from above and from the Unity. It is the divine standpoint; but we have to take account of the human standpoint which starts from below, proceeds from the Ignorance, and perceives these principles successively, not comprehensively, as separate states of consciousness. Humanity is that which returns in experience to Sachchidananda, and it must begin from below, in Avidya, with the mind embodied in matter, the Thinker imprisoned and emerging from the objective Fact. This imprisoned Thinker is Man, the "Manu".
He has to start from death and division and arrive at unity and immortality. He has to realise the universal in the individual and the Absolute in the relative. He is Brahman growing self-conscious in the objective multiplicity. He is the ego in the cosmos vindicating himself as the All and the Transcendent. Location: Home > E-Library > Works Of Sri Aurobindo > English > The Upanishad Volume-12 > Analysis The Lord

F.H. Bradley and Sri Aurobindo by H.M. Joshi

H.M. Joshi A Study in Comparative Metaphysics: F.H. Bradley and Sri Aurobindo Delhi, India; New Bharatiya Book Corporation ; 2004 ; 81-87418-97-4 / 9788187418979; First Edition ; Hardcover ; New , New 15 x 23 Cm Printed Pages: 375. Price: 15.00 USD

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